We are all on a hunt for fulfillment and satisfaction, and that can be derived from financial freedom. Today you will hear how you can be financially free in a very short amount of time, and of course it’s all about real estate!
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Joe Fairless: Best Ever listeners, how are you doing? Welcome to the best real estate investing advice ever show. I’m Joe Fairless, and this is the world’s longest-running daily real estate investing podcast. We only talk about the best advice ever, we don’t get into any of that fluffy stuff.
With us today for Follow Along Friday, as usual, Mr. Theo Hicks.
Theo Hicks: How’s it going, Joe?
Joe Fairless: It’s going well, good to talk to you, good to have you here hanging out, and looking forward to diving in. We’ve got a lot going on… I’m about to interview Emmit Smith.
Theo Hicks: I know, that’s awesome. Congratulations! I’m looking forward to the interview, it’s super exciting!
Joe Fairless: Yeah. If you are watching this via Facebook live, then you’ve got some time to put in some questions that you would like me to consider asking him. I’m interviewing him in a couple hours. If you’re listening to it via the podcast, well, then you will enjoy the episode, and then next time perhaps follow us via Facebook live. We do it once a week, usually on Wednesdays, and you can interact with us while the show is going on.
Theo Hicks: I was telling you (I think) last week, I met a guy randomly who had worked with Emmitt Smith before. He used to sell software, and he was selling software to Emmitt Smith’s company, and I was asking him, I was like… It’s interesting that he’s doing so well in business, because it’s kind of a cliché that people that become professional athletes lose all their money, so I think that’d be a good question – what separates the athletes or the business people that have all that money [unintelligible [00:03:32].05], what do they do that enables them to keep all that money or at least grow that money, versus completely losing it all? It’s probably pretty straightforward, like “Don’t buy new houses and new cars”, but I’d just be curious to see what his take on that would be, because that’s something that I think is well known, like “Oh yeah, professional athletes make a bunch of money, they get super famous, and then once they go away they lose all their money.”
Joe Fairless: I like that question… I had a couple along those lines that I was gonna ask him… “What is the most ridiculous investment you’ve seen an NFL player make?” [laughter]
Theo Hicks: That’d be a good question.
Joe Fairless: Yeah, but I’ll ask that more macro-level question too, and I’ll get that response. I believe my first question is gonna be — I bought an Emmitt Smith jersey for this occasion…
Theo Hicks: That’s awesome.
Joe Fairless: …so I’m gonna ask him right out of the gate, “Has anyone ever interviewed you, Emmitt Smith, while wearing an Emmitt Smith jersey?” [laughs] We’ll start out that way.
Theo Hicks: Awesome, congrats. When is that interview gonna be released?
Joe Fairless: I have no clue. Probably in the next week or two, I’m not sure.
Theo Hicks: Secondly, I do wanna announce the winners of the basketball…
Joe Fairless: Oh, do I have to!? [laughter]
Theo Hicks: You’re gonna have to… I can do it, if you want me to.
Joe Fairless: [laughs] Alright… Well, yes, from last week, Theo and I did a giveaway for the Best Ever listener who correctly selected the winner of our one-on-one basketball game, and then the tie-breaker was total points scored. Let me just say that we rode bikes from my house to the park, and I haven’t even set up my bike yet to put it down to walk on the basketball court and Theo is already jumping and touching the rim, so I’m like… [laughs] I’ve never even been able to touch the rim, and he’s just warming up touching the rim, like “I am in trouble…”
My first three shots were blocked… [laughter] I got smoked in the first game. 13 to 4, Theo was the winner, 17 points scored total, and we have a tie between Parker and Mike. So Mike and Parker, you shall be getting the volume 1 & 2 signed copies. Samantha, our team member, will be reaching out to you to get each of your mailing addresses. But I think it’s important to note what happened afterwards…
Theo Hicks: I was gonna say the exact same thing. Afterwards we played horse, and Joe smoked me in horse. I think you might have only got an H or an HO, and I had obviously all of them. Then at the end we shot three throws in order to see if I could lose some of my letters, and I missed all three. And then the last game it was 13 to 11.
Joe Fairless: 13 to 11?
Theo Hicks: Yes, it was a very close game. It was actually tied up, 11 to 11 at the end.
Joe Fairless: [unintelligible [00:06:14].08] the two-pointer. So we’re gonna do the same thing this week, we’re gonna go play some basketball, and knowing that he smoked me on the first game 13 to 4, I beat him in the horse and I lost the second game — but it was a lot closer, 13 to 11… I think I picked up some of your tendencies, I think I know how to play you a little bit… So this week again we’re gonna pick one winner. Everyone has one entry. We had someone blast me with 27 e-mail with every single winning combination; it kills me, I hate e-mail, so please, only one entry per person, and just pick the winner and the total points for our first game this go around, and we’ll mail you out a signed copy of the volume one and volume two, so there’s that.
Theo Hicks: Yeah, it sounds like you’ve been doing some scouting on me.
Joe Fairless: I think I know how to play you know, and what not to do. But we’ll see…
Theo Hicks: Alright. So let’s get into some real estate stuff… You said you had a couple of observations from your past, so we could kind of dive into those…
Joe Fairless: Yeah, I was working out at a gym here in Cincinnati, and Colleen, my fiancée, is my personal trainer. And we were working out at the gym she works at. To my left I see just a brick house of a man. This guy is seemingly like seven feet forever, super buff guy, and I’m like “Wow, that’s the largest man I’ve ever seen in my life in person”, and he’s got a Kansas state shirt on while he’s working out, so I’m thinking “Man, if he’s not an athlete, then I wanna recruit him for our softball team for sure.” He’s just like pumping iron and doing his stuff with his trainer, the head of the training studio that Colleen works at.
The next day when I go in, I ask the guy who heads up the facility “Who is that guy?” and he said he was the 3rd round draft pick of the Cincinnati Bengals, defensive end, out of Kansas state. I think he led the Big 12 in sacks last year — I forget his name, something Willis… I think Jerod Willis, or — I can’t remember his name. Well, as a trainer, if I’m a trainer, that would be a feather in my cap. If I trained a third-round draft pick of the Cincinnati Bengals (or any NFL team), and I got to say “He was a rookie and now we’re working together — certainly he has talent already, but I was a contributing force to him becoming a starter, or getting a lot of reps, or whatever it is…”, and that’s something you can leverage as a business person. I imagine it would be incredibly useful to have that as a talking point about your company.
So knowing that it’s obviously a desirable thing to train a third-round draft pick in the NFL, then the question becomes “How do you get to that point where you can be in a position to train those types of elite athletes?” and what happened next blew my mind. The owner of the facility – his name is Scott – he said “Yeah, this gentleman called ten different trainers in Cincinnati, and I was the only one that called him back.”
Theo Hicks: What?
Joe Fairless: So now Scott’s training this NFL player… And it has such relevant parallels to what we do, because at the end of the day, the Best Ever listeners and you and I – we’re already showing up in some capacity, because they’re listening to the show, we’re participating in the show, so I’m preaching to the choir to a certain extent, but I also think in some aspects we can all heed this advice, and that is… Wow, sometimes to get access to incredible, career-changing opportunities, we just have to show up and call people back, and do it immediately and do it in a timely manner.
It’s not a groundbreaking insight, but it’s a groundbreaking event for a business that just happened, and all he did was he called someone back. So this lesson goes out to the wholesalers, returning calls quickly and immediately, if you’re unable to do that, having a system so that someone can do that on your behalf… It goes out to the multifamily syndicators who get e-mails from potential investors and don’t reply immediately… We delayed the start of this show by five minutes because an investor e-mailed me and I immediately replied. That’s the type of customer service that sadly stands out… But that’s okay, as long as we know that it stands out, because then we can simply capitalize on stuff we should be doing already.
Theo Hicks: Yeah, it reminds me of when I was trying to create a document [unintelligible [00:11:08].26] Find Tenants For Your Apartment Complexes, and I was asking Bigger Pockets “What is a creative and effective way to find tenants?” and there was posting online, do fliers at church, and all these different creative ideas, and then our friend Jered Sturm comments and he said “You said creative, but it should also be effective, and for me the most effective way is just responding timely to people’s calls.” When they call you, call them back as soon as you possibly can, and provide good customer service, and that’s all you really need to do in order to get high-quality tenants, so that’s one thing I had thought about.
The second thing I thought about – and I can’t remember who… It was on one of your podcasts – and obviously there were so many, so it’s hard to remember which one it was; it was a while ago, maybe even over a year ago – and he was talking about social media. He was a social media advertiser, and he was talking about how the conversion rate drops significantly after – was it a minute or five minutes? – a lead is actually captured. If you don’t respond within one to five minutes, the conversion percentage just plummets straight down to almost zero, and after like 30 minutes to an hour, the conversion rate flatlines really low. It’s kind of the same concept… We live in this instant gratification world where it’s got its pros and its cons, but one of them is people want to get responded to so quickly, and if you don’t, they’ll completely forget they had even reached out to you.
I guess there’s a third thing too – that little tiny step of just calling them back [unintelligible [00:12:31].00] coach Trevor, and he was talking about the real estate ladder of success, and how the higher up you go up the ladder, the smaller the difference is between the two. At the top it’s like a one-millimeter difference, of just responding to someone’s phone call, so I think that’s really relevant all around real estate investing.
Joe Fairless: Yeah, we constantly seek out the unique angles or something secret about the process, like your ways to retain residents and what are some things that we haven’t heard, but the reality is there’s core principles that if we maintain and hold true to those core principles – like in your example, just calling residents back because maintenance is the number one issue people move out… They don’t get responded to in a timely manner, or the issues that they have don’t get addressed, especially with class C apartments. So if we address the main stuff that is at the cause of everything, then we don’t have to be concerned as much about the creative tactics.
It’s important to know those creative tactics once you have the foundation established, but if you don’t have the foundation, then you’re building on a house of sticks, basically… You’re trying to put a big old roof on a house of sticks.
Theo Hicks: Yes, I remember when I first started in real estate a year ago, I was kind of doing the exact opposite of doing what you were saying, building on a foundation of sticks… And I was kind of doing all the things that weren’t the foundation and weren’t gonna set me up for long-term success. When I reflected on it, I realized that I was doing that because I was avoiding foundational stuff, and I was doing it to make excuses to why I wasn’t taking action that was actually translating into results, but going like “Well, I have to study the market first, I have to know everything about the market before I send out letters.” It can be the case sometimes, but the level of research I was doing was very salient, and I was thinking “Why did I do that? Why did I spend so much time doing that?” Because I was ignoring the foundation and kind of going straight for this stuff that I wouldn’t have to for way down the line, and I was doing it to avoid that foundational stuff, so I think that’s good advice.
Joe Fairless: I think just to summarize for an action item for the Best Ever listeners – in whatever type of niche you’re in within real estate, identify the three or four key things that you must do that everyone in your particular area of real estate who’s having success is doing, and make sure you’re doing those things, and then build on that.
Theo Hicks: Yeah, good advice.
Joe Fairless: Cool. And then the only other thing I wanna mention, and this is another observation that I’ve had over the last week or so, and that is I am now only eating before 8 PM, I’m not eating after 8 PM… Because I feel like I need to lose about 10 pounds or so, therefore what I’ve realized is that similar to real estate stuff too – and that’s why I’m bringing it up – when it’s hard for me to resist a fudge pop at [8:30] PM, that’s when I get really excited because that’s when I know that I’m getting the most growth in my willpower. Because when it’s hard, then I’m actually glad it’s hard, because I know that it’s helping me grow as a person, and that will make it easier in future days not to have a fudge pop at [8:30].
It reminded me of a story that Tony Robbins tells in his seminars, and he always asks the audience “Okay, if you do ten reps, which rep leads to the largest amount of growth in your muscle?” and the audience undoubtedly says “Ten!” and he’s like, “Wrong! The 11th rep leads to the largest growth.” The way to apply that in real estate and in personal development is when you identify something that is really challenging, then get excited, because that’s when the growth happens, and I have a poster to our left, on my wall, that says “We don’t grow when things are easy, we grow when we face challenges”, and that’s true. We grow when we face the challenges, and that produces the results and expands us indefinitely, as long as we continue to challenge ourselves.
Theo Hicks: We were talking about that yesterday and I was thinking about it… For me, when I first started doing — [unintelligible [00:16:52].13] personal development realm, but when I first started doing it, I was always thinking that cultivating of your willpower and fighting that resistance would occur at big, massive events… I had a deal and I had to make a quick decision, or maybe I have an issue at a property and I have to make a decision on whether I’m gonna go to this property or that property, or something that’s like some big, major event… I was thinking about it, and I think the best way to actually cultivate that willpower is to look at it less on huge events and wait once a month to do that, and do it for a really small, silly thing, like what you were saying, resisting that fudge pop.
Obviously, resisting a fudge pop in the grand scheme of things is not that big of a deal, but if you overcome that small little hurdle, things kind of build up over time into a larger one, and I thought that was interesting, because it’s kind of like a way to reframe your mind and you can look at every single situation of an opportunity to cultivate that willpower, not matter how silly the situation is, and eventually it will grow up so that you’re prepared when these big, massive events happen, instead of having to work on your willpower during those events, when you’re not necessarily prepared. So that was one thing I thought about.
The second thing – and I mentioned this before – was the Muhammad Ali anecdote about the same concept. He said something along the lines of – and I’m paraphrasing here – that whenever he would work out and he would do his push-ups, he wouldn’t even count until he could barely do any more reps; that’s when he started counting his reps. When he was at muscle fatigue is when he started counting the reps. This rings really true to me, because this past week I did this crossfit workout called Murph on Memorial Day; I’m not sure if anyone’s heard of it, or…
Joe Fairless: I’ve seen the crossfit things on ESPN once or twice, I’ve heard of the Murph.
Theo Hicks: Okay. The Murph is every Memorial Day and it’s based off of a guy named something-Murphy… He’s in the movie Lone Survivor with Mark Wahlberg – have you heard of that movie?
Joe Fairless: I have not…
Theo Hicks: Well, if anyone’s seen that movie, the character Murphy is in that movie, and the workout is a one-mile run, then 100 pull-ups, 200 push-ups, three hundred air squats and then a one-mile run. Talking about a test of willpower…
Joe Fairless: You did it?
Theo Hicks: I did it on Monday, and I was just sort of working out for the week, and…
Joe Fairless: You should have done it today before the basketball game… [laughter]
Theo Hicks: And the entire time you’re doing these workouts you’re thinking “Man, I wanna just complete quit” and you’re having muscle fatigue the entire time. All those reps that you’re doing [unintelligible [00:19:08].25] when you’re still exhausted and you have to keep pushing… There’s so many parallels between crossfit and working out and real estate investing, and eating fudge pops or not having fudge pops, so that was an interesting point you brought up.
Joe Fairless: So I’m choosing not to eat fudge pops and you’re doing 100 push-ups and sit-ups and running two miles. Okay… [laughter] But I like how you mentioned the daily thing, too. Clearly, aim to small, daily decisions, because… Clearly, with the daily podcast – it’s been going on for over 1,000 days straight… I believe in that. I believe that the daily actions we take lead to large results, and I’ve mentioned this many times on this show – instant gratification culture, we want things to happen now, we want the shiny object… If it doesn’t happen in a relatively short amount of time, then we move on to something else and by the end of ten years you’ve dabbled in a bunch of stuff but you’re not really great at anything. That’s just the cycle that a lot of people have. Whereas if you find what you are interested in and then just go all in on a daily basis doing that, you might not end up doing the same thing, but I guarantee you if you’re doing daily things towards that first thing, you’re going to end up in something that you do enjoy and you’re gonna be successful at it. Alright, let’s roll into something else.
Theo Hicks: Okay, so we’ve got a couple of questions from one Best Ever listener… We have a very interesting question I never even thought about before. He reached out to you with an interest in being an investor, and he asked “What is the best way to go about reaching that accredited investor requirement?” So you’re not an accredited investor – what’s the requirement? Like a million dollar net worth and $250,000/year in income, 300k for couples?
Joe Fairless: Yes.
Theo Hicks: So right now he’s not at that. I think he said he makes six figures, but he’s not at that income level yet, and he wants to know what can he do in order to reach that level, and the two options that he laid out was “Do I passively invest in a deal that I don’t have to be an accredited investor in? (maybe invest with a fix and flipper) Or do I invest in real estate myself?”
Joe Fairless: Accreditation aside, the question is how do I make the most money in the shortest amount of time, that’s really the question… And the answer is you do your own deals. You make more money doing your own deals, assuming that you have the risk mitigated, than you would investing in any of my deals or any other syndicators, because there’s not another level of people who are being paid involved. So if you’re looking to get the most money the fastest – and granted, the risk, I suspect, would be great if you do your own deals. So there’s that. These are probably risk-adjusted returns, because you’re not plugging into a system with a syndicator who has a model and has the team, has everything in place. You’re creating your own, so there’s more risk there… Welcome to the real world, right? More risk, more return; less risk, less return. That’s basically your option.
As far as what I would recommend for you, I don’t know. The reason why I don’t know is it depends on your skill sets, it depends on the amount of time that you have to dedicate, and it depends on your priority – is this a primary priority? Is it a priority over your full-time job? If not, is it a priority over spending time with your kids? Don’t have kids? What about your wife, your girlfriend, your boyfriend, your husband?
So once you identify in your life what are your priorities, then determine how much time you have to allocate towards doing this, then determine your skill sets that you are really good at right now, and you might not know as it pertains to what you’re about to do, but you can talk to people who are doing what you wanna do, and you can ask them “What are some of the skillsets that you’ve used that have helped you be as successful as you have within this industry?” and if they align or are similar to yours, then you’ve got a good shot at being successful. Now you’ve got to surround yourself with the right team members, make sure you have the right capital and make things happen.
So any type of real estate — usually people gravitate towards wholesaling, fix and flipping, house-hacking, buying apartment communities, but there’s also parking lots, there’s also retail strip centers, there’s triple-net stuff, there’s industrial buildings, there’s buying distressed notes, buying performing notes… There’s all sorts of stuff you could do, but from a macro level, if you want to make more money the fastest, assuming that you mitigate the risks as much as possible, then do your own deals.
The people who invest passively in deals like mine or other syndicators’ deals are people who are not able to spend the time that they either want to spend or just don’t wanna spend, they’re just not willing to spend the time on multifamily deals. They’re too busy doing software engineering or programming, or helping people remove their kidneys, or taking X-rays of them, or removing tonsils or whatever, and they just don’t have the time or don’t wanna have the time to focus on real estate and the amount of time that’s needed to put deals together.
Theo Hicks: An added advantage that you have [unintelligible [00:24:43].22] you are making six figures, so you will be able to qualify… It seems he’ll have no problem qualifying for multiple loans most likely, but I’m not sure if him making six figures means he’s working so much that he’s not gonna be able to actually do it himself, so… Most of these answers, it depends on what your goals are, what your priorities are and where you’re at in your life right now.
Joe Fairless: I can tell you that probably based on the books I’ve read and the people I’ve interviewed, probably the fastest way to do it with your own money is to buy a property that’s distressed, fix it up, get a cash-out refinance and take that cash and reinvest it into another deal, and just keep on going until you reach that (in your case) accreditation status that you’re seeking.
Theo Hicks: Yeah. There was a really good article that I read way back on Bigger Pockets, and it’s something along the lines of “How to make a million dollars in real estate in seven years”, and it talks about that — exactly what you were talking about… You buy some houses, and then you either sell them or refinance and pull that cash out and buy a larger apartment, then you do the same thing and you buy multiple [unintelligible [00:25:47].05] and then you kind of keep building up until you have one large five million dollar apartment complex with 20% equity, so you are worth a million dollars.
Joe Fairless: Tried and true approach.
Theo Hicks: Okay. I didn’t mention this guy’s name – his name is Jeff. The second question was about syndications, and he wanted to know what kind of skills does someone need to have in order to be a syndicator?
Joe Fairless: Well, first people already need to recognize that you’re a trustworthy person. If you can’t look yourself in the mirror and say “Everyone around me will say I’m a good/trustworthy person”, then forget about getting into the business. So that’s a prequalifier.
Assuming that you say, “Yeah, of course, people find me trustworthy. I am a trustworthy person and people around me would say that, and they’d say I’m a good person”, assuming that’s the case, then you’ll need to either have a track record in real estate, or have a track record within your professional career. Ideally both – you’ll set yourself up for success if you have both, but either/or, for sure.
If you just graduated college and you don’t have a track record and you’ve never bought a house, and you have been at your job for a couple years, you’re not set up for success. But if you have had entrepreneurial experiences in college, and you’ve maybe bought and sold a company, or if you’ve just started your own companies and you were investing on the side while in college, that’s pretty compelling – you have some of the foundation that would be needed. So that’s kind of the qualifications.
Other skillsets would be being incredibly resourceful. I believe I’m the most resourceful person on the face of this earth. I will find a way to make things happen, I just believe it. I will talk to enough people, I will do whatever it takes – that’s a core belief, a guiding belief of mine. I believe we have to be resourceful as multifamily syndicators, because challenges come up, and there’s not necessarily a roadmap for how to do it from start to finish, so you need to surround yourself with the right people.
Another skillset would be being able to inspire and gather a talented group of people to have an alignment of interest with you. Then you’ve got to know your numbers and you’ve gotta be able to have the skillset of analyzing deals. You don’t need to have 10+ years of analyzing deals, you can partner with someone, like I did, who has that experience, but you do need to know how to run the numbers and analyze the deals so that you can qualify opportunities and then partner up with people who have the 10+ years of experience in order to do it. So those are some of the skills that come to mind.
Theo Hicks: Yeah. It’s kind of the same thing – knowing the numbers, but know the terms, too. [unintelligible [00:28:42].10] mistake with an investor who might know more about investing than you and he starts asking about IRR, and you’re like “IRR… What does that mean?” It’s probably not gonna look to well. That’s good advice.
He had a third question, which we’ve answered multiple times. I wanna put a little spin on this – [unintelligible [00:28:57].15] He wanted to know how you found your first group of investors… But my question is “Who’s the first person that you approached to be an investor, and how did that conversation go?”
Joe Fairless: I will answer that. One other thing that comes to mind as far as the skillsets go is you’ve got to be good at marketing. You must be good at marketing – marketing your deals, marketing yourself, marketing other people’s needs so that you can help them solve their challenges, their problems… If you’re not good with having conversations — people apply to be in the consulting program that I’ve got, and I’ll jump on a call with a couple people, and… Incredibly awkward. They don’t have the conversational skills that would be required to actually bring investors into deals. They could partner with someone who does, but there’s probably too steep of a learning curve for them, and that’s probably not their love of the business, to have those investor conversations, so they’re gonna need to partner.
So identify what you are good at and not good at, and if it’s not any of those things, then find people who are good at it.
Now to answer that question of “How do I find the very first investor?”, well I found that investor because I was teaching a class in New York City on how to buy single-family homes in other markets that cashflow while living in New York City. I had four homes, and a bunch of my advertising friends – I was working at an advertising agency – were like “How are you buying these homes? I thought you were in advertising.” I was like, “I am… I’m also buying these homes on the side because I’m living like a college kid in this small apartment, with Craigslist roommates.” They were like, “Well, how do you do it?”, so I taught a class.
After teaching the class for like a year, a year-and-a-half, my oldest brother’s friend, who I knew, e-mailed me. He was like, “I heard you were teaching a class on real estate investing. I know it’s in person in New York. Can you just send me the PowerPoint? I’d like to take a look at it.” I was like, “Yeah, sure.” I sent him the PowerPoint, he looked at it and he was like “This looks great, but I’m looking to go larger”, because he owns multiple fitness centers in Dallas-Fort Worth… Incredible entrepreneur, started from scratch. He’s like “I wanna go a little bit larger. If you do something larger let me know, I’d like to partner up with you.” I was like, “Oh, what? Really?” So that was the first investor.
Theo Hicks: That’s awesome. It kind of circles back to what we were talking about before – that was a big event that happened when he e-mailed you and you finally got that first investor, but the only reason it happened is because you had properties and you were like “You know what? I’m gonna start coaching people”, and did it for a year, a year-and-a-half. I’m not saying that’s the only reason why it happened, but every single week, every single month teaching that course and continuing to do it — I’m sure there were times when you were like “You know what? Why am I doing this?”
Joe Fairless: The first class I taught in New York, it was about four people, and that wasn’t even the least amount that showed up. In the next month I had one person show up… And I think I had zero people show up one time.
The first time I taught it was my buddy GCP, Jean-Carlo, another friend Alexis… Just co-workers, and I think it was one stranger, so I was kind of pumped up about that. But I was so freaking nervous… And it was upstairs in like a church community center on the West Side of Manhattan, like 80th or 90th Street on the far West Side. No air conditioning, it was in the summer, so I was miserable, and I was so nervous that I had to stop at the beginning, get up and go walking to the sink and get some water and come back. I was publically frightened about doing the presentation.
Now I have a completely different mindset. It’s not about me, it’s about them and helping them get what they want, and that’s why — I’m not gonna say I don’t get nervous, but it doesn’t paralyze me, because I get excited whenever I feel these bubbly feelings before I present, because I know I’m about to serve. So a lot of lessons learned on that, but it wouldn’t ever have happened if I didn’t just stick through it when I was doing these monthly in-person classes to a handful of people… And the most I ever had was probably about 13 people. It’s not like they were large classes, but I just kept at it and then it turned into some bigger stuff.
Theo Hicks: Yeah, it’s something that Trevor told me before I interviewed him on one of my earlier, way in the beginning podcasts — Coach Trevor. I’m not even sitting with him in person, I’m just sitting at my house with a microphone and I’m feeling nervous, and he gave me an analogy I’ll never forget… He’s from Canada, so they’re all about hockey up there, and he says “When you see a hockey the hockey [unintelligible [00:33:37].28] all lined up before the national anthem, you see [unintelligible [00:33:39].09] their skate, and that’s because they feel that same — anxiety, we’ll call it, because that’s kind of what we’re feeling when we’re nervous to talk. But for them, they don’t look at it as anxiety; it’s them getting excited, and their bodies are preparing for battle.
If you saw this person just sitting there, kind of slouched down, just laying there lethargic, then he’s not in that right mindset, he’s not physically prepared to do what he’s about to do. So when you feel that anxiety before you’re talking or before you’re having a conversation with someone or before you do anything, I try my best to interpret that now as being excited for doing something that’s new [unintelligible [00:34:14].02] I’m gonna have fun, I’m gonna grow. I try to interpret it that way, instead of looking at it from the lens of “Oh, I’m scared… What if I messed up?” I just thought I’d put that in there for the Best Ever listeners for when they prep up.
Joe Fairless: Yeah, I like it.
Theo Hicks: Jeff, thank you for your questions. I will put the questions and all that stuff in the show notes, and on the YouTube channel as well.
Joe Fairless: Oh, sweet. Alright. Is that good for today?
Theo Hicks: Yeah, that wraps it up…
Joe Fairless: Alright. Well, we’re gonna go play some basketball. E-mail info@JoeFairless.com if you want to take a guess at who’s gonna win. We’re playing to 13 by ones and twos, you have to win by two. Only one entry per person, please. I’m talking to you, person who e-mailed me like 35 times… One entry per person, and also the first person who responds and answers it correctly will be the winner, and total points in the game as well as a tie breaker.
Let’s wrap it up, go and play some basketball, and then we’re gonna talk to Emmitt Smith [unintelligible [00:35:14].13]. Alright, talk to you later, Best Ever listeners.
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