Do you leave a trail of success?
My old man is moving. He is remarrying and selling his house because he and his future wife just bought a new place. And since he is moving out, a few weeks ago I had to go to the house and clean all my stuff in there. And I had a lot of shit. It had a base full of boxes, stuff in the attic, and a room closer to it filled to the brim.
I had all these things in the house because first it was my childhood home, and second, after my divorce, I ended up storing a lot of boxes there. It took me a whole Saturday to clean the place up and I had a van packed to the brim with garbage bags.
As you can imagine, clearing out all the items was a trip down memory lane. But the best part was all the real estate material I found. I had dozens of courses from all the “gurus”. I had courses and notes from my various mentors. I found several different documents with various “plans” in them: like my 2005 marketing plan, my 2006 business plan, etc.
Also, I found a bunch of old bandit signs. When I started, I didn’t know what to put on a sign to get the best results, so I had multiple signs because I was always testing. I found a bunch of yellow letters from about 5 years ago.
It’s amazing that I ever got a deal back then because the yellow letters were horribly written. They were basically saying, “Hello, my name is Jason, sell me your house, thanks.” Maybe they were a little longer than that, but they didn’t offer a special report and they didn’t offer many benefits to sellers.
So what’s the big lesson I learned from cleaning my dad’s house? No wonder I became a successful investor. He had so much learning material…so many marketing pieces…and so many written plans that showed he was always improving and moving in the right direction. Picture this: Let’s say you died and someone had to go clean your house. What would they find? Would they find educational material, would they find business cards, signs and letters?
If someone checked your house and found no evidence that you were a real estate investor, then obviously you need to change that because it means you probably won’t be as successful as you could be. So get out there and learn more, trade more, and plan more. And make your home look like a place where a successful investor lives.