Rental Mindset

Helping you reach financial freedom through rental property investing

Surround Yourself with People Who Are Where You Want to Be

Surround Yourself with People Who Are Where You Want to Be

Busted!

High school you skipped out on class with a few friends to avoid the drudgery. They found you behind the portables playing hacky sack. Chuck was smoking a cigarette and Wayne was decorating a no parking sign with a sharpie.

Hauled into the office, the vice principle pulls you aside. They always do this because you have “potential”. She once again says:

“You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.”

Well you happen to like your friends and don’t want to stop hanging out with them just because they don’t have “potential”. That would be lame. So you obviously don’t act on her advice.

The problem with that advice is that it is often taken as removing the people from your life who drag you down. A Negative Nancy who is always upset about something and you rarely have fun with any more. A Pulldown Paul who attacks rather than supports your wacky ideas and ambitions.

Good advice, certainly. But on the positive side, I prefer the advice:

Surround Yourself with People Who are Where You Want to Be

No matter what goal you have, someone has accomplished it before. To 99.99% of the population, your goal sounds ridiculously impossible. They might not say it to your face, but you can tell they think failure is inevitable.

To the 0.01% of the population who has reached your goal, they know it is possible. They can see a path where is works out, although it takes a lot of work and some luck.

The good news is you don’t have to spend a ton of time with these people to get an uplifting benefit. They don’t have to be one of the top five people you spend the most time with, they just have to be one of the top five people you spend time discussing your goal with.

If it helps, think about it in terms of social media. If you follow hundreds of bloggers, you’re likely to get good ideas from them. They may even follow you back, and eventually, opportunities can arise from it. You might collaborate on a post together, which allows you to piggyback off their following to reach your own goals. In fact, it can be useful to know how to buy Instagram followers to expand your following further, which may open even more doors for you.

Talk About Different Things with Different People

When I think about some of my hobbies and goals, I realize for each one there are one to three friends who share the same interest. Rental property investing, working out, fantasy baseball, running a business, coding, reading, blogging, etc.

It is foolish to try to talk about fantasy sports with someone who doesn’t play. They just don’t care that your running back was injured and didn’t get any points. Don’t be that guy.

But if you have two friends who are also interested in rental property investing, ask yourself “are they where I want to be?” Most likely you are in the same position and not learning a lot from each other.

Find someone who is just a few years ahead of you – maybe has attained your five year goal of having 10 properties. Buy them a beer. In a couple months hang out again. It is a mistake to find someone 20 years ahead of your goal. Shockingly, there isn’t as much you can learn from them. They will be working on huge deals and their day to day will look nothing like yours. You can’t skip the in between stage.

I’m Heading to FinCon

I’m going through this process by going to FinCon next weekend in San Diego. It is basically a financial blogger conference.

I’m going to hang out with people in person who I can learn from in two categories: blogging and real estate investing. There are people who are way ahead, right at my level, and even behind me in one or both of them.

I am excited to learn a lot and make some new friends.

If you will be there, leave a comment so we can hang out!

Are You Interested in Hearing About Blogging and My Personal Attempts at Self Improvement?

I know you are interested in rental property investing, but I don’t know if you are interested in these other areas.

There are a lot of blogs that write articles about their experience blogging. They often encourage you to start your own blog and use their link to sign up. Are you interested in learning how to a blog can be beneficial for solidifying your thoughts and tracking your experience in rental property investing? Do you already have a website and are you interested in hearing my experience?

Same goes for more general self-improvement. Are you interested in hearing about financial matters outside of rental property investing? How about other things I am working on like becoming more disciplined in carving out time for different goals?

Let me know your thoughts so I can shape this website into whatever you guys and gals are most interested in!

Photo: Ron Lute

Reader Interactions

Comments

  2. OB @ Out of State Investor says

    Hear hear! See you over at FinCon buddy 🙂

    I like your advice on surrounding yourself with people who are where you want to be. One twist to that I’ve try to practice is spending time with 3 sets of friends who are all at different stages in life. One is where you want to be, which is important for the reasons you expressed in this post. Another friend is at the same level as you which can be helpful to struggle with a buddy on similar issues who can relate. Last group is your former self a couple years back where you can give some helpful guidance and pay it forward.

    • Brian - Rental Mindset says

      I read that as a “struggle buddy”, I think I’ll start calling it that from now on.

      There is also a benefit to hanging out with people a couple years behind you – to quote the famous Steve Jobs commencement speech, “stay hungry, stay foolish”. Less experienced people aren’t as beaten down on how hard and pointless things can sometimes be!