What is the real estate success secret of the truly great investors?
Frankly, I struggle with this question about real estate success regularly. I see that most coaches are always trying to pinpoint this elusive trait in all their successful real estate mentor students or clients. It’s easy to say that if you do “ X ” you’ll get the “ Y ” result consistently, but people are very different emotionally and are not always easily predictable.
While we have what has been called America’s Most Successful Real Estate Mentoring Program, I am always striving for a 100% success rate for our Students. This may not be achievable but I am drawing closer and closer to it all the time. What I have been doing differently each new class is to look back on the previous classes and our daily experiences to find solutions to problems that the new Students will encounter – before these slap them in the face.
This past weekend we had our latest class. One thing we did was ask every Student, either new or retakes, what was their greatest fear. Each one took his/her time to talk about what has been holding them back or completely stopping them . Most of the fears they expressed are covered by the step-by-step processes of the mentoring materials. The fears that are most difficult to resolve and seriously debilitating are the emotional blocks of “ What if something happens?” Often the student is not even sure of “what the specific what really is!”
Every day each and every student goes about his daily life facing problems that are often nearly insurmountable, yet these problems get resolved. I used an example of driving a car and never reading the Owner’s Manual. Driving a car requires many more decisions that are all different than does real estate investing. Am I saying that driving is harder than investing? Figuratively speaking, the simple answer is “ yes.”
How then do people get into a car and make hundreds of life-changing decisions every day, but they are not afraid to drive? It’s because they started out taking charge and learning to drive – without reading the Owner’s Manual which has nothing to do with how to drive! Anyone who drives has had to learn the single most important trait that successful real estate mentoring students have had to develop. This trait has been honed by practice and failing forward because the driver (student) had to make driving (investing) work for them.
The one consistent trait that our most successful mentoring students seem to all have in common is resourcefulness. This simply means that when confronted with a dilemma, the student takes action to resolve the situation. Whether his solution is good, bad or plain ugly, it is a learning experience. The less successful students seem to get stuck. They are afraid of trying to do anything themselves for fear of failure – or as one student expressed it in the last class, his fear of success in real estate.
We have to accept failure as a natural part of our life cycle and, frankly, embrace it as usual and normal. This doesn’t mean that you’ll be happy because it happens. In fact you should learn from it and do better in the future. Whatever you decide to do in life, you’ ll need to attack adversity and to be truly successful, you’ ll have to make decisions (be resourceful) to survive.
If you want to achieve real estate success and fulfill all your dreams, you’ ll eventually have to become resourceful enough to solve problems – even if the solutions aren’t perfect or what you want or expect at any given time. We are all blessed with the same amount of time and using that appropriately is the key to ultimate happiness. Learn from your failures, always move forward and practice being resourceful so you can achieve your personal greatness – we all have it in us!
To your limitless success,
Dave Dinkel
Real Estate Mentor Program Founder
