Welcome to The Accelerated Investor Podcast with Josh Cantwell, if you love entrepreneurship and investing in real estate then you are in the right place. Josh is the CEO of Freeland Ventures Real Estate Private Equity and has personally invested in well over 500 properties all across the country. He’s also made hundreds of private lender loans and owns over 1,000 units of apartments. Josh is an expert at raising private money for deals and he prides himself on never having had a boss in his entire adult life. Josh and his team also mentor investors and entrepreneurs from all over the world. He doesn’t dream about doing deals, he actually does them and so do his listeners and students. Now sit back, listen, learn, and accelerate your business, your life, and you’re investing with The Accelerated Investor Podcast.

Hey, welcome back. Welcome back to Accelerated Investor. This is Josh Cantwell. I’m super excited to be your host. And listen I’m just so grateful to all of you who have enjoyed the interviews that we’ve done so far, the podcast that we’ve been sharing, some of our strategies around peak performance and you know, just ways to be a better investor, a more wise investor a better entrepreneur, a better leader, and really just enjoying sharing, you know my journey with you to help you along your journey. To help you achieve more, invest more wisely and have just a bigger, better, more fun and exciting life.

And so today I want to start a new conversation with you around a peak performance. Doesn’t matter what you do? I don’t care if you run a business, you run an Amazon company, a marketing agency, whether you’re in health and wellness, ECOM or real estate, real estate investing, maybe you’re a realtor. We’d all like to perform at a much higher level. We would all love to be able to perform faster, achieve more with less time, have more focus, be more clear about what we’re trying to do and where we’re going.

And by having a more defined, more clear plan that is going to allow us to achieve more, get rid of the distractions, allow us to focus on exactly what we want to accomplish in our personal and business lives our careers. And so for the past five years or so at my live training events, I’ve delivered something called the peak performance success formula. It’s a process, it’s a step by step process that I’ve used and my students and my team, my internal staff is used to perform at a really high level building multiple seven and eight figure businesses, managing over $30 million of private capital.

Having over $100 million real estate portfolio, is all really happened and it’s all, you know, come to fruition because my team and I are performing at a really high level. So if you’re looking to perform for yourself at a much higher level, this next series of trainings, this next series in this podcast series is really going to be dynamic for you. So we’re going to break this up into a couple of episodes. I’m going to start with this first one. You’re going to really like it. This might be, you know, six episodes, it might be 8, might be 10. Not sure how we’re going to break it down yet. But this peak performance success formula, I’ve heard from a lot of our students, a lot of our audience, a lot of people that I coach and mentor, that this has had a huge impact on their success because they’re absolutely clear on what they want to accomplish.

And so the first step, we call it the ACER the ACER exercise A, C, E, R, which stands for absolute clarity of the end result. And for many of us today, we’re not really sure when we wake up in the morning or we’re on our way to the office, we’re on our way to our business, or we’re looking at a real estate deal or we’re waking up on a weekend, on a Saturday, on a Sunday, we have free time. A lot of us I would say are pretty guilty of kind of winging it. Like, what are we going to do today? What are we going to do tomorrow? What kind of schedule do we have? Where are we going to go? And at the end of the week we look back and say, well shit, you know, I didn’t really accomplish anything important.

And so for all of us, what’s important is different. What’s important to you, what’s important to me is going to be different. And all that matters is that your clear on what you want to accomplish. And at the end of the day we’re all going to be taken away from this earth and you’re going to leave a legacy behind and what you’ve accomplished and what your life has meant to the world. And the question is are you’re going to leave behind a legacy that was purposeful, that was meaningful, that was exactly what you wanted or are going to wing it and leave behind a legacy that you’re not really sure exactly what that means or who you’ve impacted?

And so I usually typically walk my audience through three questions that allows them to get really, really clear on what they want to accomplish. And the questions go like this. So we’re in step number one of the peak performance success formula, and this is part of what I call the ACER exercise. Absolute clarity of the end result. And this really comes from, this stems from my diagnosis and survival from pancreatic cancer. You know, back in 2011 when I was diagnosed, it was September 12th and I remember being at the Cleveland Clinic at the hospital, me talking to my doctor who originally diagnosed me and then my oncologist who confirmed the diagnosis and thinking, oh my God, like I’m 35 years old and if God decides to take me from this earth today, I’m going to have a of regrets, a lot of things that I meant to do that I didn’t get to a lot of time that I wanted to spend with family and friends that I never did. A lot of risks that I should have taken that I never took.

A lot of businesses or different things that I really wanted to accomplish that just, you know, it just didn’t happen. I wanted to make time for it and I never made time for it. So it stems from there because I realized, you know, at 35 years old. Wow like this is real this is totally possible. That next week or next month or next year I could be gone and what would I have left behind? What would be different, what would be important and would I have accomplished really anything that I really wanted? And that led me to this next question.

The next question is listen, let’s say you woke up this morning and you know, I’m recording this on May 15th, 2019. I’m not sure when you’ll catch this in the future when we’re going to release it, but it’s May 15th. And let’s assume today you went to the doctor and you found, you know, something in your body that didn’t seem right. You went to the doctor and your doctor ran a bunch of tests and he comes back later this afternoon and says, listen, this is all the things that are wrong with you and I can tell you that exactly, 10 years from now, exactly, 10 years from now, you’re going to die and pass away.

So on May 15th, 2029 you’re going to be ripped away from the world. You’re going to be gone. You’re going to be dead. You’re going to leave behind some sort of legacy, some sort of, whether it’s cash, whether it’s income, whether it’s retirement assets, whether it’s a business, whether it’s real estate assets, but also the impact that you had on other people on their emotional state, their mental state, where you there for them when they needed you? What are people going to say 10 years from now when you’re gone? So imagine you get the diagnosis, you get the doctor, he’s got a crystal ball, and he tells you exactly 10 years from now, today you’re going to be gone.

You’re going to be dead and you’re not going to have another opportunity. And the doctor also said, oh, by the way, when you go home, you cannot tell anybody you cannot tell anyone what you’ve just learned. So you’re not allowed to tell you’re loved ones, you’re not allowed to tell your friends, you’re not allowed to tell your family, you and only you know that 10 years from now you’re going to be gone. So I’d encourage you to do right now is take out a piece of paper and a pen. If you’re driving and hearing this in your car, literally pull off to the side of the road right now. Pull off to the side of the road, pull into a parking lot, grab a pen, grab a piece of paper, grab your notes on your iPhone or your phone that you’re on and start to write down right now.

10 years from now, gone. What are all the things that you want to get done in the next 10 years? What relationships do you want to repair? What new relationships do you want to make? What events do you want to attend? What places do you want to go? What experiences do you want to have with your family, with your friends? You know, what are, you know, extra, ordinary, unusual experiences that you want to have? Foods that you want to try, people that you want to be around. You know, maybe it’s, you know, traveling to some distant land, skiing on some crazy mountain, whether it’s maybe a helicopter ride over the Grand Canyon. What are all the things that 10 years from now you want to check off that list? Think about it, write it down, think about what’s important to you and when you think about these things, you know, I think about them in a couple of different buckets.

First of all, I think about, like most of us do about relationships. So one of the buckets is what kind of relationships do you want to have with your spouse, your partner, your kids, your parents, your great grandparents, your kids and your grandkids? What does that relationship look like? Think about those relationships because at the end of the day, that’s really the only thing that matters is the people that you come around and the people that you talk to. So relationships, that’s the first category that I think about is what kind of impact do I want to have on the other people that are important to me?

The second thing I think about is experiences. What experiences do I want to have? Work places? Do I want to go? What foods do I want to try? What ball games, you know, sporting events, you know, trips, you know, what kind of places do you want to visit? Maybe you’re into art, maybe you’re into hiking, maybe you’re into the ocean, maybe you’re into the water. Maybe it’s a river cruise. Maybe it’s a cruise to Alaska, maybe it’s skiing, maybe it’s hang gliding. Maybe it’s jumping out of a plane.

You know, what exactly are the kind of experiences do you want to have, you know, and who do you want to share those with? The third category, I think of is legacy, which a lot of it is down to, you know, finances. It’s about money it’s about building a business. It’s about building your assets and your real estate portfolio. What kind of legacy financial legacy do you want to leave behind? You know, do you want to make sure that maybe all of your kids, grandkids, and their kids all go to college and it’s all paid for by the assets that you pass on to them?

And how much money specifically is it? The cost of college today is $50,000 per year times four years, let’s maybe say, you know, maybe say five years. Some kids go five years or more. If you’re like my brother and mark, he went nine years to undergraduate school, you know, but what does that look like for you? Do you want to pass along, right? And so what kind of financial legacy is it that you want to leave behind to other people? So for a lot of people, it’s those kind of three buckets. It’s, you know, your relationships, your experiences, and then your financial legacy. And through those three things, relationships, experiences, and financial legacy, you know, we can have a massive impact on the people that you’re around today and over the next 10 years and then the people that you’re going to leave a legacy behind for them in the future.

So think about that. What does that look like? What do you want to get done in the next 10 years? Now let me ask you the same question and let me ask you that question slightly differently. Let’s say you’re at that same doctor appointment this afternoon, and the doctor tells you, you know, you have a terminal illness. The good news is you’ve got exactly, instead of 10 years, you’ve got exactly one year, one year, one year, 365 days, and on this 365th day you’re gone. You know the day, you know the time, you know you’re not going to wake up again. You know that your time on this earth is over. And so in the next year, all of a sudden you’re probably feeling a slightly larger sense of urgency. Because in 10 years, it still feels way off in the distance. But one year from now, wow, that’s, that’s fast.

I mean, I can’t, like my daughter Juliana is 10 and you know, when she was 9, it just seemed like yesterday. But at the same time it seems really far away. Like I can’t remember all the things she was doing when she was nine, when she was in fourth grade now she’s in fifth grade, but I do remember a lot of things that we accomplished. I remember taking three weeks off this summer and going down to Florida and just having a great time at the parks and Disney and, you know, being at the beach and just being three weeks away from everything and everyone and basically unplugging. I remember a lot of their sports games and you know, volleyball and football and basketball. I remember spending time with my dad who has advanced Parkinson’s, you know, all these things. But in one year, all of a sudden that timeframe being compressed down to one year, what are all the things that you want to get done in one year, one year, one year.

Imagine one year from now you’re gone no longer on this earth. Think about again in those three categories, relationships, think about the category of exactly experiences. What experiences is it that you want to accomplish? Where do you want to go in the next 12 months? Because now you don’t have 10 years to do everything. You got to be really, really purposeful. You got to be really, really intent driven to make sure that in one year you get, you know, you can’t just vacation right for, you know, every month for the next year. You know, just have experiences. The third piece of that is financial legacy. You see in one year, if you really put your down, you can have a tremendous financial legacy that you can leave behind. You know, one year of buying and accumulating real estate assets, one year of growing your business, one year of growing your ECOM company, one year of being an entrepreneur and growing your business.

Knowing that one year from now it’s all over. I bet you’d have a whole new sense of urgency, a whole new sense of purpose, a whole new sense of accomplishment because you only have one year to go. You’d also, with one year, you’d also probably sleep a lot less. You’d probably party a lot less, you know, like party goofing around. Like if you’re going to party, you’re going to have purposeful, meaningful time with those people that you care for. Those family, those friends, those relationships in one year, that’s all you’ve got. You can’t just have like one or two or three nights that you’re like, oh, you know, I just went to sleep early, I watched too much television. I ate too many Cheetos, I drank too many, you know, diet cokes and I ate too much ice cream. Like you wouldn’t have those days any more if you knew that you only had 365 days to go.

Like if I had 365 days, I would put up on my wall 1,2,3 all the way through 365 and I would start crossing them off because then you knew that you only had, let’s say 360 days left. 340 days left, 298 days left, 256 days left. And it’s counting backwards, right? And you’re not going to take that extra time. You’re not going to, you know, you’re not going to take that extra time to do things that are not meaningful. You’re going to be purposeful with every single day, every single night, and you’re going to make sure that you accomplish those things. So in one year, what relationships would you want to create, cultivate, and repair? What relationships would you want to nurture? What have you learned on this earth that you’d want to pass along to your kids or grandkids or your nieces and nephews to the rest of the world?

Would you create, you know, YouTube videos that you can keep forever and archive that you can pass along with all the lessons that you’ve learned? So think about it. If you’re driving right now, pull your car over to the side. Do it do it right now while you’re listening to me. Go ahead, pull your car over to the side. Turn your car off, you know, pull into the local gas station, the local Bob Evans, the local, you know, Applebee’s, whatever. Just pull into the parking lot wherever you’re at and get out a piece of paper and write that down. So in one year from now, what exactly would you want to have accomplished, right? Again, without being able to tell your friends, without being able to tell your family that you’re going to be gone in one year, what would you want to have? Relationships, experiences, and financial legacy.

Now let me ask the same question one more time, slightly different. Let’s assume you went to the doctor’s office again this morning and this afternoon they came back with a diagnosis and you said, hey doc, what’s wrong? He said, well, I can’t really tell what’s wrong, but you’ve got one week to live. You’ve got one week left in one week from now, you’re going to be gone. You’re going to be healthy for the next week. You’re not going to have pains, are not going to have suffering, but one week from now you’re gone, disappeared off the face of the earth. And you have one week, you’ve got 24 hours times the next 7 days, and that’s all you’ve got now. What would you want to accomplish in the next week? You see, in a week’s time, you don’t really have a lot of opportunity to create financial legacy, do you? You don’t have a lot of time to create, you know, buying assets and building businesses, you know, and buying real estate assets and building a portfolio.

It’s impossible in a week to build any kind of meaningful portfolio or to have big change in a business inside of a week and then leave that behind to your family. It’s nearly impossible. So what it really comes down to is the relationships and the experiences, because that’s what’s going to live on forever. So imagine this afternoon, you’ve got this news. What are you going to do for the next 7 days and 7 nights? You see, if you only had 24 hours a day for the next 7 days, would you even bother to sleep at all? Could you just make it for the next 7 days, staying up 24 hours a day, doing everything that you’d want to do, talking with the people that you want to talk to, having coffee, breakfast, lunch, dinner with the people that you want. Having experiences going on a trip, doing what you can, squeezing in as many things as you possibly can for the next 7 days.

You know, if you have elderly parents who are aging, how much more time would you spend with them if you have kids or grandkids that you’re not spending enough time with, would you, you know, just keep them up all night watching movies and having experiences and going places and when they finally crashed out, because again, they didn’t know that you were going to be gone in a week because you had to keep it to yourself one week from now when they did sleep, would you sleep or would you just stay up? Watch them, pray over them, think about them. Write them love letters and notes. Create videos for them. Pass along all your wisdom to them.

You see, when I was diagnosed with cancer on September 12th, 2011, all of this became not just an exercise, not just theory, not just something, it became reality that this was all absolutely positively could be something that I was about to go through. And so I had to be really clear about what the things that I wanted. And so think about the things that you dream of having when you do this exercise. What are some of the things that you dream of having in your life?

Meaning like material things, you know, if you’ve got 10 years, what are some things that you dream of having in 10 years? New House, new car, exotic, you know, exotic Porsche, exotic Lamborghini, house on the beach. Don’t limit yourself to what you think is possible today because if it’s possible for somebody else, it’s possible for you. So what are the things you dream of having maybe you dream of having your college education and some sort of trust that you leave behind for your kids and your grandkids?

So what are some of the things that you dream of having? Also, what are some things that you dream of being like, who do you want to be for other people? Do you want to be a mentor? Do you want to be inspirational to other people? Do you want to help people who have, you know, live in, you know a third world country that have, you know, not a lot of resources, not a lot of money? Do you want to go travel to be on missions and help those kinds of people? Do you want to be a more loving parent? Do you want to be a better dancer? You know, maybe you’ve always wanted to take up dancing lessons. Maybe you’ve always wanted to be amazing at computer programming. Maybe you’ve always wanted to be a world-class real estate entrepreneur, real estate investor.

What do you dream of being, you know, what is the bigger, better version of you? What does that look like, okay? And then finally, again, the question is, is what do you dream of being? What do you dream of having? And lastly is what do you dream of doing? We talked about experiences, right? So these are just three different ways. When we talk about relationships, what do you dream about relationships? Another way to ask that question is, you know, what do you dream about being for other people? When we talk about experiences, it’s another way to ask that is what do you dream about doing that you haven’t done yet? And then third is what are all the things that you want to leave behind as a financial legacy for the people that you care about? And that’s, you know, what do you dream of having?

Do you dream of having X amount of dollars in your bank account? X size of a business, X amount of legacy left behind, right? Having, being and doing relationships, experiences and financial legacy. You see, for me it’s amazing. You know, you know, I’ve spoken in front of thousands and thousands of people. We’ve held, you know, well over 15, 20, 30, I can’t even remember large, large conferences in the last 10 years, you know, about two or three per year for the last 10 years.

And it’s amazing to me when I talk to crowds, when I ask people the question like, what do you really want? Like what’s a bigger, better version of yourself? Oftentimes there’s just this blank stare on their face. And so for as much bitching and complaining and moaning that I hear from people about their businesses or their relationships, you know, about all, you know, all the bitching and complaining about this current state of their life.

When I asked them what do they really want, they almost never know the answer. And so the world is just sort of pushing them down this current of life or pushing them like the wind in different directions and they’re not, like a statute, they’re not planting themselves in the ground and saying, this is my statue. This is my flag, this is who I am, this is where I want to go and I’m not going to let the current of life or the winds of life pushed me in one direction or another. I’m going to be very, very purposeful about where I want to go and so if you’ve had trouble sort of concocting what this looks like in your mind and concocting this in your life, go through this exercise. Think about again, what are the things that you want to have relationship wise? What are you things that you dream of experiencing?

What are the things you dream of having and the financial legacy that you want to live? What are the things that you think you can get done in the next 10 years? Do it then that exercise, then redo it on a new piece of paper. What are the things that you dream of experiencing and the relationships that you have and the financial legacy that you think you can leave behind in one year and then what does that look like in the next 7 days? What does that look like in the next week?

Because ultimately wherever you arrive, to me, when I had run this exercise, when I do this in my own mind, the things that I think about that are going to happen to me in the next week, that truly is what’s most important. It’s the extra time that I would spend with my wife, Lisa. It’s extra time I would spend with my kids. It’s the extra time I would spend with my aging parents. It’s the extra time I would spend with my brothers and their families and my uncle Ben and my aunt Karen and my aunt Diane on my aunt Franc my 92 year old grandmother, gigi Fran, gigi Fran 92 years old. It’s the extra time I would spend with them. That was what I would focus on in the next week.

But, you know, in a year I could have some, I could do some serious damage when it comes to creating some financial legacy for my wife and I could have more and leave more to them in a year, 10 years from now, forget it. The amount of things that we can accomplish in 10 years is amazing. I was at unleash the power within and Tony Robbins talked about in, you know, we give ourselves a little bit too much expectation of what we think we can accomplish in the next year or two. Like the amount of things that we think we want to accomplish in the next year or two is often like way too much, we’ll never get it all done. But the amount of things we can accomplish and maybe the next 10 or 20 years is massive. It’s massive how much we can accomplish in the next 10 or 20 years.

And I firmly believe that we over commit and like I want to be a multibillionaire and the next two years, okay, great good for you. If you create the next Facebook or you create the next Uber or you can create the next Google, then you hit that absolute unicorn business. You can be a billionaire in the next two to five years. Good for you. For 99.99% of the world population that won’t happen. But what you can accomplish over the next 5 or 10 years is amazing. The amount of things that I’ve accomplished in the last 7 or 8 years since I got diagnosed is amazing. But if you add that up and just say like, what have I accomplished this year? Maybe it didn’t move the needle as much, but when you added up this year, next year and the year after, the year after and year after, and you compile that over the next 5 or 10 years, what we’ve gotten done in the last 10 years is truly, truly remarkable.

And so go through that exercise today. Don’t waste time like, don’t think, well I’ll come back to this or I’m listening to this in my car. I’m listening to this at the gym, right. Do it right now, right. Right now, do it right now. Take some time aside. Do it now while it’s on the top of your mind and make that a priority and then share it with the people that you love the most. Share it with them because when you speak it into the world, it becomes real. When you speak it into the world, it becomes a reality when you speak it into the world you’re not accountable to what you’ve said, okay. So start with that. That’s step number one of the peak performance success formula. And I’m really excited to deliver this all to you.

You know, I’ve been around for the last 40 years. Really the last 25 years I became basically an entrepreneur watching my father when I was 17, 18 years old. I’ve been to dozens if not hundreds and hundreds of conferences. I’ve heard amazing speakers talk about all the different things they do to form up there, you know, success formula, whatever that is. This is what’s worked for me and I hope it’s, you know, has a big impact on your life. Now I look forward to jumping in with you to the next episode and in the next episode we’re going to talk specifically about having strong enough reasons. So come back to the next episode of Accelerated Investor and let’s talk a little bit more about that. Thanks for being here.

You’ve been listening to Josh Cantwell and the Accelerated Investor Podcast. Leave a comment on our iTunes channel and let us know what you want to learn next, or who you’d like Josh to interview. While you’re there, give us some five star rating and make sure to subscribe so you can be the first to hear new episodes. Follow Josh Cantwell and his companies, the Strategic Real Estate Coach and Freeland Ventures on all social media platforms now and stay up to date on new training and investment opportunities to start your journey toward the lifestyle you’ve always dreamed of. Apply for coaching at JoshCantwellCoaching.com.