Can You Succeed in this Business?
You Are the Answer to that Question: It Is within You
Nobody should ever tell you that becoming a successful real estate investor is easy. If it were easy, there would be no financial rewards: easy jobs pay minimum wage.
However, the fact that it is not easy does not mean that it cannot be done. It just takes work. You have probably done a fair amount of work in your life. To succeed in business, your best bet is to treat your duties as though you have a job: the difference is that you act as your own boss. Just take the attitude that you have simple tasks to perform, and that you owe it to yourself to do them on a near-daily basis.
You may actually run into an occasional obstacle as you do this business. So be it. It will help to remember this thought from and 18th century writer, Hannah Moore::
"Obstacles are those frightful things you see
when you take your eyes off your goal."
Stay focused on what it is you want. If your focus is strong enough, the obstacles are out in the periphery, where they don't get in the way. What you focus on tends to increase and grow because your focus supplies nourishment to it.
Your primary focus should also be your motivating factor. You want to have a strong motivation because that will fuel your actions to do whatever success requires. At the same time, you need to believe that you can do whatever it takes. This is not rocket science; you already know enough to get things going. In fact, it will possibly help to remember that you don't even need to get it right, you just have to get it going.
We hope this little story will inspire you to believe that you already have inside you what it takes to make this business work.
A Story About Opportunity
An unemployed man is desperate to support his family of a wife and three kids. He applies for a janitor's job at a large firm and easily passes an aptitude test. The human resources manager tells him, "You will be hired at minimum wage of $5.15 an hour. Let me have your e-mail address so that we can get you in the loop. Our system will automatically e-mail you all the forms and advise you when to start and where to report on your first day."
Taken back, the man protests that he is poor and has neither a computer nor an e-mail address. To this the manager replies, "You must understand that to a company like ours that means that you virtually do not exist. Without an e-mail address you can hardly expect to be employed by a high-tech firm. Good day." Stunned, the man leaves.
Not knowing where to turn and having $10 in his wallet, he walks past a farmers' market and sees a stand selling 25 lb crates of beautiful red tomatoes. He buys a crate, carries it to a busy corner and displays the tomatoes. In less than 2 hours he sells all the tomatoes and makes 100% profit. Repeating the process several times more that day, he ends up with almost $100 and arrives home that night with several bags of groceries for his family. During the night he decides to repeat the tomato business the next day. By the end of the week he is getting up early every day and working into the night.
He multiplies his profits quickly.
Early in the second week he acquires a cart to transport several boxes of tomatoes at a time, but before a month is up he sells the cart to buy a broken-down pickup truck.
At the end of a year he owns three old trucks. His two sons have left their neighborhood gangs to help him with the tomato business, his wife is buying the tomatoes, and his daughter is taking night courses at the community college so she can keep books for him.
By the end of the second year he has a dozen very nice used trucks and employs fifteen previously unemployed people, all selling tomatoes. He continues to work hard.
Time passes and at the end of the fifth year he owns a fleet of nice trucks and a warehouse that his wife supervises, plus two tomato farms that the boys manage. The tomato company's payroll has put hundreds of homeless and jobless people to work. His daughter reports that the business grossed a million dollars.
Planning for the future, he decides to buy some life insurance. Consulting with an insurance adviser, he picks an insurance plan to fit his new circumstances.
Then the adviser asks him for his e-mail address in order to send the final documents electronically. When the man replies that he doesn't have time to mess with a computer and has no e-mail address, the insurance man is stunned.
"What, you don't have e-mail? No computer? No Internet? Just think where you would be today if you'd had all of that five years ago!"
"Ha!" snorts the man. "If I'd had e-mail five years ago I would be sweeping floors at Microsoft and making $5.15 an hour."
Which brings us to the moral: Since you got this story on the Internet, you may be closer to being a janitor than a millionaire. Either that, or you understand that the current state of your high tech competence has nothing to do with your eventual success. That is up to you, not your computer.
