And I thought it would be fun to start off to sort of tease out some of these ideas,

is to tell a story that you probably heard, and a lot of my listeners have heard, but a story

from my life. And I want to let myself be a little bit of a guinea pig in this episode,

because the idea

here, let me let me start with the story and we'll get into it. So when I first started real estate

investing, I was 23 years old and I was going to classes. I was going to seminars. I was talking to

more experienced investors. And basically I wanted to figure out like what success mean for a real

estate investor because I was very motivated to get into this. I was excited about this idea of freedom. And I just had this kind of vague idea that if I just do this, I'm going to be a lot happier. If I just go down this path and that was it. It was just like this vague idea. But so I basically borrowed goals from a lot of these people I was going to classes with. And one particular goal, my business partner and I heard that really kind of lit a fire under us was there's this lady who was very successful flipping houses, 50 houses per year. And we went to our seminar. We took notes. We're like, okay, we can do this. Like this. Here's the systems. Here's the processes. And so we got this idea in our head that we're going to go big. And we're going to start. We kind of got that 50 a year number in our head that we're going to scale up and do a bunch of real estate deals. We're going to go big. And fast forward, that was 2003 when I was 23 years old. 2007 when I was 27 years old, the same year I get married, like the busiest year of my life,

we ended up buying over 50 units in one year.

It was 30 something closings.

But some multifamily properties, flipping houses.

A lot of those we made a lot of cash on, made some cash flow, putting money in the bank.

But at the end of that year, and I credit my business partner to this, we were so, we were so hectic, so busy as a lot of new businesses are that my business partner, and we had like the clouds of the great recession on the horizon. We started reading the headlines, like, okay, what's going on here in fall of of 2007, my business partner is like, we need to slow down and just like figure out what we're doing. Why are we doing this? What are we doing? So I'll give him credit for that. And we did this little exercise, which is kind of reconnected back to the book here because this is part of what I think so awesome about the book is getting us to think about these kind of things. My business partner and I decided to do an exercise where we wrote down a list of activities

that if we were to have our ideal day, if we were to have an ideal situation, what would each

of us do in that ideal day? Like if money were not an issue, if we had all the money in the

world, what we spend

our time doing? And I personally wrote down things like I was, it just got married. I wanted to

travel abroad with my wife who was a Spanish teacher and we both loved traveling abroad. I wanted

to play pickup basketball in the middle of the day. I wanted to go hiking in the woods because

we live in a beautiful part of the country. I wanted to spend everyday learning and teaching. Teaching

was a kind of budding idea that I was kind of interested in. And all of these things, kind of

the big aha for me, I'm going to tell you some of my a haas, but I want to get your feedback on this,

...