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 Accelerate Investor. Super excited that you’re here with me and thanks so much for all the people who are sharing this on their social media platforms. If you’ve enjoyed all of the Accelerated Investor episodes and this has had an impact on your life, you know, tell your friends, tell your family, you know, tell the people in your social networks to come back and join us and listen and subscribe to Accelerate Investor.

I’m just really enjoying, just kind of pouring my heart out and my mind out to you and sharing all the things that have worked for me, the things that have worked, the things that have not worked, the total dumpster fires in my life. It’s very therapeutic for me to just jump on and talk to you like we’re doing today. And today what we’re going to jump into is step number two of our peak performance success formula.

And in step number one, we talked about the ACER exercise of getting absolute clarity of the end result and going through the exercise of telling yourself, look, if I only had 10 years left on this earth, what do I want to get done? If I had one year left, what would I want to get done? And if I had one week, what would I want to get done? So if you missed step one, go back and listen to that.

Moving on to step number two is in order for us to have success and knowing what we want to accomplish and knowing exactly what our end result is that we’re really shooting for. Step number two is we’ve got to have strong enough reasons, strong enough reasons on why we want to accomplish that, okay. Strong enough reasons. So when you think about it, if you go back to step number one, the ACER exercise, absolute clarity of the end result.

And we go through what are the things we want to accomplish with our relationships? What are the things we want to accomplish with life experiences? What are the things we want to accomplish leaving a financial legacy? The next question becomes is, well, what are the reasons that you want to leave that behind? What are the reasons why you want to have those relationships? You want to have those experiences and you want to leave behind that financial legacy. And you see, when I think about this in my own life, my reasons, the thing that always sticks out to me every time I think about it and every single time I think about it is when my father said to me, you know, son, you were spared for a reason, son, you were spared for a reason.

You know, pancreatic cancer has just a 6% to 8% survival rate. That’s it 6% to 8% and that’s after five years. I was diagnosed in 2011 so when I hit my five year anniversary, I had my surgery on November 21st, 2011. So November 21st, 2016 I was a five year cancer survivor and a hundred people that were diagnosed around the same time that I was 92 to 94 of them were gone. Think about that. Out of a hundred people that walked into hospitals around the same time that I was, and I walked into the Cleveland Clinic. The people that walked into your local hospitals, the people that walked into the Cleveland Clinic that day, the people that walked into university hospitals or whatever hospital system that’s near you. Think about this, every person that walks in and out of a hospital has something wrong. Think about that. When I think and walk into a hospital, I have so much respect for every single person that’s in there.

The patients, the doctors, the nurses, the caregivers, even the valet guy that’s, you know, parking cars. Because every single person in that hospital has a story. Something is either going on good or really, really bad for them to walk into that hospital. And on the day that I walked in and the day that I was diagnosed, there was a hundred other people who walked in or diagnosed with the same exact disease that I was that day all over the country. And five years later, 92 to 94 of those hundred are now gone, they’re not here anymore. They’re families are left they’re spouses, their partners, their parents, their kids and grandkids. They’re here but the patient is gone.

And so a couple of months after my surgery and recovery, my father pulled me aside. He said, son, you were spared for a reason. And he said, you know, God has a plan for you and then the second half of your life, the only thing that you need to figure out is why and you need to make the most of that, that opportunity. So what are your reasons now, Josh, for living in the second half of your life? What do you want to leave behind? What do you want to accomplish?

And so I had to think real hard about that. You know, and when I think about the things that I want to accomplish, I think about really two things. I think about the pain that I’m avoiding. Like, so if I create a massive financial legacy and leave behind X amount of dollars in businesses and real estate assets and cash flowing, performing apartment buildings and single family rental properties, and may be a stock portfolio or a business portfolio, I’m only building that because of the pain that I’ve experienced of being broke.

The pain that I’ve experienced as a teenager of having a father that filed for bankruptcy, the pain of not being able to go to the mall and buy stuff. The pain of having four or five, six shirts hanging in my closet and two pairs of shorts and one pair of tennis shoes when my other friends had dozens and dozens of t-shirts and button down shirts and golf shirts. You know, I remember my freshman year at Baldwin Wallace College, you know I was, I played college football at a small division three school called Baldwin Wallace University. And I remember my roommate at the time was, his name was Phil. And Phil Evans, when he showed up for camp, he was a big senior, you know, 6’4, 245 pounds. And he was a captain on the team and he was 23 years old.

And here I came in as an 18 year old freshmen. And I thought, I was like, you know, I thought I was awesome. And here I am looking up to this guy, he’s unbelievable. But I remember I’ll never forget looking in his closet and seeing like Polo, Nautica, Polo, Nautica, like all these like name brand shirts. And then he opened up his drawer and he had, you know, Lucky jeans and Polo jeans and Nautica jeans and dude had like, you know, 27 pairs of loafer shoes and like 17 belts and all these cool hats.

And then I unpacked my suitcase and I had my half of the closet, which he quickly took over most of that closet because he was, you know, a senior captain and I was just the new kid. And I had like, you know, five, six shirts, you know, all from like, you know, Kmart and Wal-Mart. And I had a couple extra pairs of shorts and like two pair of beat up shoes in the bottom of my college dorm closet.

And so I thought to myself then, and I still think about that like, you know, it’s often the pain of our childhood, the pain of what we’ve experienced, the pain of bankruptcy, the pain of divorce, the pain of loss that often fuels us to say like, I’m never going to go back to that again, okay. So sometimes hurt, pain, loss is the ultimate driver. It’s the ultimate driver, you know, fear of going backwards, fear of not being able to provide for our families. That becomes our reasons for success.

And so what pain are you running from, right? Write it down right now. What pain from your childhood, what pain from your maybe what pain are you experiencing now? Maybe you have a tremendous amount of debt. Maybe you have college loans that your kids have and it’s crippling your ability to invest or build your company. What pain are you trying to avoid? What pain do you never, never want to experience again? That will become the fuel for you accomplishing your goals and performing at a really high level.

The other question is, is what pleasure? What great experiences, what happiness are you going to get when you go back to your ACER exercise, your absolute clarity of your end result? If you were to accomplish that end result and you were to go along that journey to pursue that business and ultimately achieve that goal, what kind of excitement and happiness and fun and pleasure are you going to have from that?

I mean, imagine close your eyes and imagine the excitement of selling your business for $1 million or $10 million or $50 million and celebrating at the closing table and taking your entire family out for the most expensive, you know, dinner and drinks and party that you’ve ever had in your life. Imagine, make it real, push down into your system. Imagine the pleasure and the fun of that experience right. Now imagine the pain of staying where you’re at. Imagine the pain of just having enough money to pay your bills, just having enough money to pay your business expenses. Just having enough money to pay off your credit cards every month, just having enough money to pay off the loans that you have. And what kind of pain is that? How does that make you feel?

And it’s simply coming to grips with the fact that I’m never going to allow myself the pain that I’m experiencing now or I’ve experienced in the past. Imagine if you accomplish that goal, what is it going to do for you? How is it going to make you feel right? This is really where it becomes important because if the reasons for success are more powerful and more important, right? The reasons for success are more important than staying where you’re at now and the pain that you’re experiencing now, right. Or not having what you want now, if the expectation and the future is so much more powerful and the fun and the excitement and the happiness and the pleasure that comes from it, it overwhelms the negative it overwhelms the pain, you will quickly move towards action.

So think about it. Imagine yourself experiencing and having the ACER exercise from step one, the end result that you’re pursuing. How do you feel? What does that look like? Sink it deep inside your soul. What do you do now every day and who do you do it with? That’s really the reasons why you’re either pursuing it comes down to happiness, fun, excitement, pleasure, or avoiding pain loss, terrible experiences, and it’s good to have both.

I have found that the reason why I take action on my health and go to the gym and eat healthy is because the pain for me of losing 50 pounds in three weeks. The pain for me of relearning how to eat the pain of having a massive staples and stitches and having my stomach and my gallbladder and my spleen and part of my liver and part of my pancreas removed and having veins taken out of my leg and put back into the back of my liver that having the staples once my stomach was healed, ripped out of my stomach, having the drains that were input, you know, through my stomach, through my abs, into my liver, the drains to get the infection, the puss and that yuck out of my insides.

And I’ll never forget the doctor pulling the drain out of my stomach, yanking it out. And the pain of the having that this plastic thing yanked out this cord pulled out of my stomach. And the fact that I felt like I was going to puke and throw up all over the doctor’s office because of the excruciating pain that I experienced that day. That drives me now to having a life of balance and health and eating well and working out. Because I never want to go back to that experience ever again.

Sometimes it’s the pain of loss it’s the fear of loss that drives us. You know, during that same time, my businesses were falling apart. You know, I had, you know, my investing strategy of wholesaling and investing in pre-foreclosures and short sales was no longer working. I realized that I had made a massive mistake that I had built a business that was, you know, built around my effort, my time, my showing up at the office, making offers on properties, flipping properties, wholesaling properties, and all of a sudden when I was not there, that whole business and all the income that came with it just stopped. Bam it was over. It no longer made money.

And so it’s the pain of that experience that now I’m focused exclusively on building cash flowing assets, right. Why do you think all the companies that are out there right now are selling things on subscription with monthly payments, it’s because Wall Street in the corporate world views subscription income to be the most valuable income in the world. The income that is repeatable, the income that comes in every month or every quarter or every year, right? That’s why everybody’s moved to monthly payment plans on Hulu and Netflix and your iPhone. That’s why they’ve moved to subscription, to even pay for iPhones instead of you paying $800 to buy the new iPhone 10 or whatever, you know, the next latest Samsung, instead of that, why do you think you’re paying monthly to basically rent the phone?

So it’s the pain of loss of me working in a transactional business that I never want to go back to having a transactional business again. And so I’m focused exclusively on making private lender loans, recruiting capital, making residential and commercial loans that pay me and pay my companies every single month in perpetuity forever. So that’s the business that I want to have now, right? It’s all about passive income. It’s all about consistent forever passive income. And it’s the pain of loss from 2011 that drives me today. And so what are your reasons, right?

They have to be strong enough reasons to get you over the hump, okay? You know, Eazy-E the great rap artists from NWA, you know, once said it was a quote that was something along the lines of fear is a powerful thing and if you can get that fear to push you from behind, instead of having that fear stand in front of you, that becomes a very, very powerful motivator. So for many of us, it’s pain, it’s fear. So don’t run away from the fear, don’t run away from your painful experiences, use them as fuel. That’s what I’ve done and I hope that helps you along your journey. So thanks for being here for step number two of my peak performance success formula. We’ll be back with step number three in the next episode.

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.