Pick Your Bone: Wishbone, Jawbone or Backbone

To succeed at real estate investing, or business, or life, requires bone – the right kind of bone.

Because real estate investing is pretty easy to understand – you buy a house and then either sell it or keep it as a rental – lots of folks are interested in becoming investors. Want proof? Look at all the traveling dog-and-pony shows coming through town offering their “free” seminars to a “select few.”

We get lots of calls from would-be investors who’ve attended one of these get-rich-quick-snake-oil events. Most actually believe that real estate millions can be acquired by working only thirty minutes a week and without meeting face-to-face with sellers. That’s like a doctor trying to build a successful practice having office hours from 9:00 to 9:30 a.m. and without seeing any patients. Crazy, right?

Truth be told, most of the people we meet with have the ability to be incredibly successful. After all, real estate investing is pretty simple, but it’s not easy. There’s no way around one critical fact: You’ve got to get face-to-face with a lot of sellers on a regular basis and make a lot of written offers!

Said another way, the number one reason real estate investors quit is because they don’t meet with enough sellers. For example, this past Tuesday, I took two people out door-knocking. They’d been trying to invest for the past year and were frustrated because they’d yet to do their first deal. When I asked how many sellers they’d met with during this time, they said about thirty. Thirty people, that’s it…and they were upset they hadn’t done five or six deals.

Folks, on average, Kim and I must meet with 85 sellers to find just one acceptable deal! The two people I took out door-knocking hadn’t met with half that many…and they seriously expected to have done six deals and were ready to quit because they hadn’t.

Succeeding at anything is tough. It requires a mountain of persistence and a canyon full of determination. You need the willpower to say that you will not quit. Sure, you’ll fail – a bunch of times – but you must not quit, no matter what!

Sadly, though most folks possess the needed willpower, they choose not to exercise it, and instead take the easy road. This is why only 5% of Americans achieve financial freedom before the age of sixty. The other 95% are forced to rely on either the government or their family for life’s basic necessities. How very sad!

I’ve come to realize that many folks who are trying to achieve financial freedom rely on their wishbone way too much. Want proof? Next time you’re in line paying for gas, look at the number of people who play the lottery. Playing the lottery is a poor man’s retirement plan that 99.99% of the time doesn’t work out. So why waste time and money playing the lottery?

And we all know the guys with jawbones. Talk, talk, talk, that’s all they do. People like this wear me out; I can’t chew off my arm fast enough to get away from them! You know someone like this – we all do! It’s the person that can ramble on for hours at a time without asking a single question. It’s all about them. And when they finish, they usually say something like, “Ok, that’s enough about me. Let’s talk about you. What do you think about me?” Good lord!

And that brings us to rarefied air: People with backbone. I love being around these kinds of people. They inspire, motivate, energize, and are just plain fun to be around. They push us to do more… and to be more!

For those who crave financial freedom, forget the wishbone and stay away from the jawbone. Instead, surround yourself with people who possess one heck of a backbone!

Now get out and meet with some sellers, and be sure to ask Pete Fortunato’s famous question: Why are you selling such a nice house like this?