The Predictable Path To Get (Really, Really) Rich By Age 50 w/ David Osborn #TheOnePercent

You know, do what you say and say what you mean, right? The whole what I found is being a procrastinator and a confused over, you know, over committing and under delivering guy when I was younger is if you'll just keep your word, you'll start making stuff happen. If you say, I'm gonna do this, you do it. And what happens is you're not doing that to get like a boy scout attaboy on the back of your head or to be encouraged by others. You're doing it so you take yourself seriously. All I'm really trying to say is if you can wire your implicit system, your unconscious mind, to believe in yourself, to believe that you're going to do what you say you're going to do, then there's almost, well, there's still things you can't do, but there's a lot more you can get done, right? You'll be able to get stuff done and people will be attracted to you. People want to come work in your world because you'll be the kind of person that says, hey, when I say I'm going to start a private equity firm, which I started a year and a half ago, we're going to get to 5 billion under management.

Yeah, it's a lofty goal, but I keep my word and I walk towards the things I say I'm going to do every day, every month, every week, every year.

It takes one free person to create change. This is the show for them. We are the creators of the free world. This is capitalism.com and we are the 1%.

Hey, capitalists. Before we jump into today's episode, I actually want to brag on myself for a second. I've got a podcast episode that I think got overlooked. I think is one of the best ones I ever did. For those of you who sell on Amazon or those of you who run e commerce businesses and it's called only invest in multipliers, I would highly encourage you to go look that up if you haven't heard it before. In it, I argue why you should not focus fund your own inventory. Because if you're funding your own inventory, you are tying up all of your money into a place that you could be otherwise using for advertising and people and growth. And I explained how to use other people's money in that episode. What I wish I had back then was access to more resources for capital back then. When I recorded that episode, there are only a few sources that lended to Internet business owners. But one of my backroom members just launched a business that exists only to fund inventory orders for physical products, brands, and it's called sellers Funding. This is something that I wanted to do for a long time. In fact, when I used to cast my vision for capitalism.com it included a lending source for physical product owners. But one of my backroom members beat me to the punch and he actually did it better than I could have ever done. So that business is called sellers Funding and they loan to e commerce sellers to allow them to free up the rest of their capital to invest in things like advertising so you can actually grow your business. I would highly encourage you to listen to that episode called Only Invest in multipliers and then to look at other funding sources, especially sellers funding, because they're in my network and I know what they're up to and they're doing cool things in the world. You can check them out@capitalism.com funding and I think this is a game changer for your growth as a business.

David is one of the largest real estate investors in the country. For those of you who know, my whole shtick in building wealth is building businesses and investing the profits. And I've always been fascinated by taking the profits of a business and putting it into something that creates real wealth. And David has done that. And he's done that by building a real empire in real estate, both as a business and as an investor. He runs. You can fact check me on this, David, but I believe he runs the largest Keller Williams franchise in the world. In the world.

I believe they're headquartered here in Dallas. So David also is just committed to investing in entrepreneurs and in sharing the 20 year playbook that has created success for himself. And he's very open about that. If you meet him on the street or if you have breakfast with him at Snooze, which is the last time we saw each other in Austin, you would never know that he was one of the most successful people that you ever would meet in your life. So his humility and his openness to sharing and his just breadth of knowledge of what he brings to other entrepreneurs.

Is unmatched, maybe unmatched with anyone that you will meet over the next three days. So it's a privilege to welcome to the stage Mr. David Osborne.

Sup, brother? How are you?

Thanks for being here.

Well, I usually try to keep the jet under the radar, but I guess that's off the table now. Who in here would like to be a nine figure investor in this lifetime? Raise your hand. Would you like to have nine figures in net worth? Cool. Who in Here, raise your hand if you work about 50 hours a week. Okay, that's not enough. Raise your hand if you work about 60 hours a week. Okay, that's not enough. Raise your hand if you work 80 hours a week. Okay, not enough. 100 hours a week. Yeah, not enough. There's no amount of hours you can work that will get you to nine figures.

You can only scale who. You can't scale what. A multi millionaire comes to you, says, what do I have to do to get to the next level? A billionaire says, who? Who do we got to hire to get to the next level? You can't scale what. So I'm going to talk to you today about how to get to nine figures. I didn't know that was the term of the speech, but it's a good challenge. And I can tell you the first lesson I had going from 8 to 9, going from 10 million net worth to where I'm at today is that it's not about you. The only way you scale large is working through other people, through the who's. So then the question becomes, who do I have to hire right now that would take my business to the next level? So just pause for a second and write in your notes, like, what's a key hire.

You could make right now that would take your business to the next level? Think of it. The title could be a person you already have in mind. It could be a description.

See, it's all about the who. There's no way you scale without the who.

Right?

I'm lucky enough to have about 70 businesses that run and generate income, about 150 lines of income on my balance sheet. Every single one of those businesses is run by an amazing who. My number one goal is to be the most insignificant person in my organization, the least talented person in my organization.

For me, it's easy. For you guys, it may be hard. You may have more talent than I have, but my goal is to be the least talented guy in every organization I run and then go find the who's. So I'll give you a silly analogy. I hope one day that I'm going to meet.

Warren Buffett, because if I ever get like five minutes with him, I'll say, warren, I want to offer you a job, and I'm going to pay you $1 billion per year. $1 billion per year. Hopefully he'll say, doing what? He might just say, buzz off, son. But if he says, doing what? I'll say, your number one goal is to make me $2 billion. You're starting right away.

Right? That's how you think. Like, it's the whole. So every single person that I meet, I'm always asking myself, how could this person fit in this world that I'm trying to create, this empire that I'm trying to build? So then you ask yourself, okay, so if I want to attract the who, and I know it's all about the who, then your question becomes, so who do I have to be to attract that who, right? Who do I have to be to attract the next who into my life? Because the who's don't work for just anybody. Like I said, Warren Buffet would just blow me off. He would just laugh at me. Go away, little boy. Come back another day, right? So who do you have to be to attract the who's into your life to build your business to the next level? And that's a question I've been trying to answer for myself for the past 10 to 15 years. As soon as I realized it wasn't about me, but it was about other people.

So what do you think they look for? What do these who's look for? Well, number one, they look for purposeful people. Like, every single person that is successful is massively purposeful. And I'm not just talking a little bit purposeful. I'm talking about amazingly massively purposeful. And so my life, my journey has been one of learning how to goal set, learning how to hold myself accountable to those goals, learning, learning how to be ruthlessly driven towards getting what I want. And when I say driven, what I mean is never forgetting my agenda, right? If you don't have an agenda for your life, the first person you meet every day gives you an agenda, right? Hey, man, go get me a coffee. Okay? My agenda is now to get you coffee. All right? So in one of the movies that I love that guys my age all love young guys may not know what it is, but there's this movie called the Matrix, right? And in the movie the Matrix, Morpheus is standing there in this ultimate moment in the movie, and he says, what do you want, the red pill or the blue pill? You take the red pill or the blue pill, and all of us think, oh, we're going to take the red pill, we're going to wake up from the Matrix. So my belief is there is a Matrix, but I don't know how to wake up from it. All I know how to do is create my own reality within it.

So write this down. The implicit system is my friend. The implicit system is my friend. And if you'll Give me permission today. I'm just gonna go a little bit deep with you, right? Cause I don't know any other way to do it. The only way I've done it is the way I'm gonna share it with you. Okay? I do not deserve the success I have. I shouldn't have it. The way I've got here is the following. And I'm gonna list it out for you in kind of a deep manner. So when you take the red pill, what does that mean? Well, in the movie, he wakes up and he's got, like, hoses in his back. Doesn't look very attractive. But the way we all take it is like, yeah, I'm going to be wide awake, baby. I'm going to, like, take life as it comes. I'm not going to be anybody else's vessel. I'm not going to be anyone else's slave. I'm not going to be anyone else's servant. I'm not going to run their agenda. I'm going to run my agenda. Right? That's what it means. But my understanding of it and my experience of it is we fall back to sleep all the time. We're mostly asleep, right? So the question is, can you choose to be the playwright of your own play? Can you be the architect of your own house? So all I know how to do is wake up long enough to choose my destiny and then fall asleep back into my unconscious. Patterns that get me where I'm going, right? So I'm hiking in Bhutan and the tour guide says. She says, man, I have this PowerPoint I got from this French marketing company, and they spent $5 million putting it together. And it's amazing, but they made me promise not to give it to anyone. So what do you think? My number? I'm an entrepreneur. What's my number one goal for the rest of the trip? Just to get that PowerPoint presentation. I had to have it. It was the secret. It was the Holy grail. So I was kind sucked up, gave big tips, everything else, and I got the PowerPoint. So I'm going through it. It's like 50, 70 slides, way too many. But I get to this one slide, and it talks about the implicit system and the explicit system.

The explicit system is the part of your system that you think you are. It's the talking voice in your head, the one that gives you advice. The one that's like, what's this guy talking about? Why didn't we have a potty break? I really got to go potty, man. I shouldn't have drunk too much last night. Whatever it is, that's your explicit system. It's constantly chattering. It's the part of you that you actually think you are. And then behind that is the implicit system. And the implicit system is the subconscious mind. It's everything that really flows through your life, really defines you as who you are, how your mom and dad raised you, your family of origin, the country you were born into. All these different things wrap into the implicit system, the subconscious mind. To give it in perspective, this one slide said that the conscious mind works at the speed of a snail compared to the subconscious mind working at the power of a Boeing 777. That's how much processing power your subconscious, your implicit system has versus your explicit system.

So how do we use this to make money? I'm going to get into that. All right, so how do you be the who that attracts people to you? And I'm going to share it with you right here. This is my flight plan. One thing I learned about flying private is you would think they were saying, hey, I'm going to New York, and they would just fly there, but they don't. If you ever ride up front and you listen, they're constantly making micro adjustments. They're going off path, they're going around weather, they're going around other planes, right? Pilots know this. I didn't know this, right. But they have a flight plan. They log and then they moderate and change it the whole way. So this is my flight plan for 2019. So whenever 2019 or 18 or any year rolls out, I'm stoked. I've got it all right here. This is my flight plan for 2019. It's locked and loaded. It's epic. It's amazing. It's my agenda. I can't wait to live it. I can't wait to live this agenda. All right, last year, every year, I do an epic trip with my family. And the origin of this, by the way, in my 20s, all I did was work. Just to be clear, I think you have to have a work ethic. So when I said. I teased you guys about the number of hours I think you've got to work the 20 years and 10 years. Like I did that in my 20s, I would try to figure it out. Did a lot of stupid stuff, a lot of unnecessary work. But I worked really hard. In a way, you just prove to yourself you can. And then in my 30s, I sort of started setting up my businesses, like, learning, organizing them, building on what I had figured out. Worked and kind of shedding all the chaff, the stuff that doesn't work. And then in my 40s, I'm 51 now. I'm starting to be the oldest guy in the room. It's not any fun. I'd rather be much younger, but I am 50. In my 40s, I took advantage of what I'd learned. I just kind of pounded and compounded my empire, built on it and started making a ton of money. So what I'm sharing with you is like just refined over 20 plus years. When I started, all my goals were business and money. My wife, then my girlfriend said, you know, dating you is like being in the backseat of your car. And I said, that sounds awful. Why would you put up with that? And she said, every now and then you put me in the front seat and it's so nice. And so when I married her, I endeavored to put her always in the front seat, which is why my goals always start with family. Always start with a family. What I realized is in my 20s, I sort of stole the decade of my life from the juicy fun stuff. Now I had a blast working. I got significance from working. So I'm not going to say it wasn't fun for me, but I didn't do anything. I just worked 25, you know, 27 to 35 ish. So now I put all the family stuff first. I put all the epic stuff first. And I'll come back to this why in a minute. So last year I took my family to see the northern lights. It was epic, it was incredible and I loved it. And that's what I've got locked in for 2019. Like, it's just epic. I got three kids, two of them still at home. And my daughter's goal this year, nine year old, is to see the Grand Canyon. So I haven't figured out yet how, but we're going to do a wicked Grand Canyon trip. I don't know if we'll helicopter, whitewater raft or whatever. I got to figure out all the details. So I always start on this locked in life with the fun stuff, the family stuff, the purposeful stuff, the contribution stuff. Why? Let's go back to the why.

Who do you need to build your business to the next level? You've got to attract the who. How do you attract the who? By being somebody that other people look up to. My mentor, billionaire Gary Keller, who I've been around my entire life, taught us life balance from the beginning. Fitness, health, relationships, spirituality, contribution. I can tell you that that's the kind of person I want to be. So I'm attracted to. If I'd been in a company in my twenties that said your goal is to work 100 hours a week until you die. And by the way, if you need to take coke and drink and do whatever to get yourself there, you should do it, I might have done that. I was impressionable. I was ambitious. I was 20 years old. If I'd been on Wall street, maybe that's the life I'd have lived. But instead, I was with a guy that said, you got to have balance. You, you gotta have a way of living your life. So I build this in. This is locked and loaded. That's 2019. But I want to share with you 2018. This is a journal that's almost ending. And I want to share with you that I have my every quarter, I review it. So if I go back to the beginning of 2018, right, that's cool. That's like, that was the backtrack. So there's 2018, first quarter, and then if I flip it forward, there's the next quarter. What I want you to see, if you can see that maybe I hold it down there is this. This is a dynamic, living, breathing document. This is like my constitution with myself. And when I put on here, work out 240 times, I check off a Roman numeral every time I work out. I know that last year I worked out 216 times. I didn't hit my goal of 240, so I put it on here. I check it all the time, read 30 books, be on 10 podcasts, listen to 40 podcasts, take my family on an epic vacation, have three daddy daughter dates with my nine year old, watch 10 shark tanks with her. So all of this stuff is in here like it's an epic life. But when I started, I didn't follow through. Like when I started in 25 years ago, I just would write stuff down and I'd get 30, 40% of it done. And that was my style, that was my life. But I just rededicated. Rededicated, rededicated. So I think the number one thing is to be massively, massively purposeful and have goals in all areas of your life. We do have this template somewhere. If you go to the goaltemplate.com you can download it for free. That's how I build my list. That's what young people do. I don't really know why I'm doing it, but I'm doing it all right. So that's number one. So personal goals, super Fired up, giving away a bunch of money, reading some spiritual books, meditating, praying, lifestyle adventure. All right, so who wants to come work for you? Why would they want to come work for you? That's what you got to ask yourself. Who do I have to be to get Warren Buffett to want to work for me for a 1 billion a year paycheck? Because if he does, all my problems are solved. So that's the first question you gotta ask yourself.

So how do you then go back into this matrix? Right, so you're in the matrix. You know, we're driven by like unconscious drives and things from our childhood. How do you wake up and then relay down the tracks for you to reach any level of success? Success. So what I found worked was first off, be goal setting, be goal driven, be massively purposeful in every aspect of my life, every aspect. Secondly, set a vision, like a vision for yourself, like where you want to go. Okay, so to do this again, it's cliche, it's trite. I'm a cliche guy. Look at me like in my black shirt. I look better now than I did in high school. That's what happens when you make money. You can like work out more and wear nice clothes.

That's the cliche. But the cliches work, right? Be purposeful, have a vision. Have a very clear vision. So how do I live into my vision? Well, I do a five year vision sheet every year. I write my five year vision. I always start with my wife, my kids, what their ages are, what their health is, what they're up to. I write it down like it's a living, breathing document. And I read it and I write it and I make sure it inspires me. And then I take that through every area of my life. Business comes last, but I take it through every area of my life. I'm 55 years old. I'm in incredible shape. I just climbed a mountain. My daughter is now 14. She's loving the sports activity she's in now. I realize when I create all this future that my kids may or may not cooperate. My wife may or may not cooperate. And if they don't, that's fine. It's a constitution. It's a flight plan. It's a living, breathing document. You get to change it all you want. In fact, in my goals, I have two rules. The only way you don't get your goals done is one, you die. If you die, you're forgiven everything. And number two is if you change your mind, people are like, that's a Trick. It's too easy. No, it's not. Because most people write stuff down. They never look at it again. The whole year goes by and they haven't done anything. And when you do that, you know what you're telling your subconscious. What I say doesn't matter. If you just write stuff down and you don't do it, all you're telling yourself is you're not a person of your word. You're not a person that's gonna walk through it with power and strength towards your goals. If you change your mind, you're actually just changing your word. You're saying, my goal was to run a marathon. And then I ran 12 miles twice and it sucked so bad, I said, I'm not going to run a marathon. That seems like it's unhealthy for me. So I changed my mind. I went a different direction. I went and did Pilates instead. That's being engaged with the constitution for your life. The other thing I often say is, do what you say and say what you mean. What I found is being a procrastinator and a confused over, you know, over committing and under delivering guy when I was younger is if you'll just keep your word, you'll start making stuff happen. If you say, I'm gonna do this, you do it. And what happens is you're not doing that to get like a Boy Scout attaboy on the back of your head or to be encouraged by others. You're doing it so you take yourself seriously. All I'm really trying to say is if you can wire your implicit system, your unconscious mind, to believe in yourself, to believe that you're going to do what you say you're going to do, then there's almost. Well, there's still things you can't do, but there's a lot more you can get done, right? You'll be able to get stuff done and people will be attracted to you. People want to come work in your world because you'll be the kind of person that says, hey, when I say, I'm going to start a private equity firm, which I started a year and a half ago, we're going to get to 5 billion under management.

It's a lofty goal, but I keep my word and I walk towards the things I say I'm going to do every day, every month, every week, every year. And I know this about myself, and people that are around me know this about me, and they get attracted to me because of that. I still haven't got Warren Buffett making The call. But you understand where I'm going with this. You gotta be the least significant person in your organization. You gotta be a person of your word, that keeps your word, moves towards your goals. You gotta create a massive vision continuously of where you want to go and what your life's gonna look like. And then you've gotta take it to the day to day goals. The things, what do I have to do this year to get to that five year vision in all these areas? And again, as I got older, I added in family and fitness. And it used to be just about money, just about money. It was like, here's my business goals. I'm gonna go crush this. I gotta make my calls. I was a real estate agent at first, so I just had to make my phone calls.

But all of that is empty. If you don't have the fullness of life, right? Having a bunch of money and not having a fullness of life is empty.

So you build it by putting all these priorities in your life, and then you live it and you breathe life into it, right? And then you attract the who. So let me tell you, my number one lifetime business goal. My number one lifetime business goal is to have five guys report to me that make a million bucks a year. Five guys reporting to me that make a million dollars a year. See, I understand it's a covenant relationship. If I work with you and you work with me and you're one of my key people, you better get rich working in my world. If you're not getting rich, then I'm failing you. It's not my goal to take and reap everything for me. I want to share the bounty of what we create. That's why I was willing to pay Warren Buffet 1 billion of the 2 billion he made me. So it's a shared relationship. It's my covenant agreement to help the people that work for me to build as much wealth as is humanly possible. I'm not attracting them into my life to take advantage of them, to exploit them, to sit on top of them. Five guys a year making a million a year. Right now I have two. I've been as high as three, but now I got two. Guys like that are hard to hold onto. They come and go. They're super driven, super motivated, super successful. So the two I have run two businesses for me. One of them I make a million four from, and the other one I make probably 4 million from. So two businesses, two guys, one of them makes, you know, he has other assets in the same space. So he makes a Couple million. Another guy makes about 3 million. So they're not just getting paid by me. They get a piece of everything they create. They're making their own money the same way. How hard do you think it is to manage those people? Like, I have become a disciple of hiring great people. I took a class in my 20s, I was just lucky enough to stumble into a class right alongside Gary Keller. And they said, take everyone in your organization. So let's just do this. You guys write your name like a circle and then put whoever your key employees are, not your entire organization, just put a circle down and then put the initials of your people.

So I got SG, PM, TP.

MS, I got MK over here. So just write down those people. Now put a 1 to 10 beside their name. A 1 to 10, how talented they are for you. What are they doing to change your life? 1 to 10. By the way, anyone 5 or below you should be firing right now. You should be texting, fire this person.

Six, maybe. Maybe makes it. Seven is solid and working for me. And eight, nine and ten change. I don't have tens. I never give a ten. Eight and nine change your life. Give myself an eight, by the way. I've got better people than me working in many areas of life. So 8 and 9, right? 8 and nines change your life. What does an 8 look like? You show up every day and you talk to them maybe once every three weeks. And your business is a up 20%. What does a 9 look like? Same thing. Your business is up 30, 40%. You just have to have high level conversations. Hey, what's going on with our business? How are we doing? What's happening? Right? You know what a conversation with a 5 is? Oh, I see you're still here. What half of your job did you do this week? You know what a four is like? We're out of business. They just destroyed the business. They ran it right into the ground. So write that down. You've got one through, you've got your key employees. I don't know if you have 3, 4, 5 and give them a rating 1 through 10, where do they sit? And then ask yourself, okay, what would it take to get that 7 to an 8? It's really hard to move more than a point. It's really hard to change who you are. You're only going to do it if you're really going to embrace the implicit system, your subconscious system. You know how you do that? Go to Ayahuasca, maybe in Costa Rica, or have a significant spiritual moment in your life. That changes you. Or work hard on yourself for five plus years. Like that's what I did. I worked hard on myself for a lot of years. C student, very mediocre, liked working, always liked working. I was a great bagger. Anyone bagged groceries before. Then I hired a lawn mowing company. I was really good at cutting yards, but never really like a good student. Like I had to learn. Like my dad was a soldier, my mom was a realtor. I had to learn. But I apply myself every day and it gets easier and easier to keep my word and keep my commitments still not perfect. Every day because I focus on what I want. I focus on getting things done.

I've done more in the last five years than in the previous 30 years put together because of this philosophy. So you wake up from the Matrix, right? And you're like, I ate the red pill. So now I know this, I gotta choose my life, choose my destiny, and then I'm gonna fall back to sleep. So what is money? Effectively give me a what is money? What is money? What's the economic version of money? What do they say it is.

A unit of exchange. Great, that's one. What else?

I can't. He said stored value. And then this person over here said, really? It's energy, right? I just rushed it along. You see how I did that? So it's energy. Like money is just stored energy, right? So money is energy, you can use it to do stuff. Like I can use money to go back and forth from Breckenridge to meet you guys. Provided that storm that's rolling in doesn't shut me out. So I can do that. That's just money. It's just a time machine. It just changes your ability to get stuff done, right? So if money's energy, how do we earn money? What do we need to earn money? Energy. Thank you. The same thing. We have to have energy. So if you need energy and you're working 100 hours a week and you're not going to the gym and you're not working out, you're not eating right, you're not looking after your body, what are you doing to your long term income producing possibilities? You're robbing yourself.

If you're just. If you're married and you're working all the time and you're not looking after that precious relationship, the most important relationship you have your wife or your husband or whatever. You know, your husband, if you're a guy, whatever it is today, if you're not looking after that relationship, what are you doing? You're Jeff Bezosing yourself, you're gonna lose $75 billion. It's not relevant, right? And then he'll marry someone else, and in 10 years, he'll be just annoyed at her, right? That's life. You got to work on that relationship. You got to work on your health. You got to work on the relationship. What about if you're a guy that builds a billion dollar business and your kids can't stand you? What good is that? You got to work on all these pieces, right? You got to put them all in your goals. You got to focus on them and just make them part of your agenda. All right? So energy. Life is energy. So do you work out, you get more energy or less energy? More. If you have a beautiful relationship with your wife, you get more energy. Or husband, you get more or less energy. And if you have great relationship with your kids, you have more or less energy. See, it's all a selfish, selfless, reinforcing way of nurturing your implicit system to give you everything you want. Because the more you get, the more you can get, right? Okay, so let's go back to the how. Cause you're like, okay, I get it. You got a great life. That's nice. So let's go back to the how. The how is simple, you know, you gotta manage your energy, right? You know, you gotta be ruthlessly honest with yourself. We talked about that a little bit. Like, slap yourself in the face. Be real. What's working, what's not? Am I earning the money I need or not? Am I spending the time with my family or not? Am I working out like I need to or not? You get to sit down and just take a journal and just write down all your thoughts, like, where am I at? What would improve my life physically? What would improve my life mentally? What would improve my relationship? You just write all that stuff down and that becomes your goals. Got your vision, by the way. I just worked on a vision to get to 250 million in net worth, 25 million year in income. Why? Because I got to have a vision. I don't need the money. I always said to my wife, I'm working for you, honey. I'm working to put food on the table. She said to me about three years ago, we don't need any more food on the table. So you keep telling yourself that, little man, but that is bullshit. Am I allowed to swear in here? Anyway.

She'S right. It was bullshit. All right, so what do I do? Why do I do it? Because I want to stay engaged. I Want to stay in the game? I went on a vacation with my wife and my daughter and my son. We took like a 12 day vacation. It was awesome. But about day seven, you know what happened? I woke up, my wife's like, hey, can you go get me breakfast? I went and got her breakfast. I brought it back. Then my daughter woke up, she's like, hey dad, can you go get me something to eat? I'm hungry. So I went and got her something to eat. I thought, this is retired life. I just sit around and everybody tells me what to do. I don't want that. I want to keep building businesses. So I immediately got motivated, went back to my life and said, how do I get to 250 million in net worth and 25 million a year? Not because the money makes a difference, it doesn't. It makes no difference. But it's the game, it's the engagement. And then I threw in a little twist on my goals. Could I give away $100 million while making it to 250? So that's interesting. So now I've recreated the game and I'm keeping myself engaged while having fitness, health, relationship, nurture, contribution, all of this stuff, right? And I'm adding all of that in. Okay, so now you got your goals and you've got your energy. I cannot overemphasize to you how important energy is. Like, you gotta manage your energy. You gotta have a lot of energy. If you're pitching people, you gotta have that energy to pitch. If you're leading people, you gotta have that energy to lead. Right? So you gotta nurture that. Okay, all right, so how do you then contain it? Like, so I've got this pyramid image that I put out in my book, Wealth Can't Wait. There's another shameless plug. I don't do it very well though. But there's my pyramid, right? And you got two things you gotta add to your life to really drive yourself where you want to go. One is your peers. You have to hang out with winners. Winning is contagious. Winning is contagious. Tom Brady keeps winning. All that guy does is win. I'm glad you're happy. I was rooting for Kansas City. I don't care that much. I'll care a lot more the day they write me a letter congratulating me on doing a deal I was waiting for. Like any of the football teams I supported as a younger man. I was wait one day that quarterback going to say, hey, David, I heard you did that killer real estate deal. Awesome, dude, Congratulations. Can I have your autograph? It's never happened. I've been waiting my entire career. So I kind of put football down a level of importance in my life because I'm choosing my life, right? I'm making my life my agenda, the thing that I'm living fullest I can possibly be. Because that way I have more for my wife, more for my kids, more for the charities I support. All right, so then it's your peers who you hang out with really, really matters. Why did Ryan and I hit it off? Because we both care a lot about making an impact on the world around us. I know everyone in this room cares about making an impact on the world around you. Otherwise, you wouldn't be here. But what I want you to know is the biggest impact you can have on the world around you is by having an impact on yourself. And go back to what I said. This is not. It's not complicated. Is it easy?

No.

But the way you win is get your unconscious system, get that aircraft carrier, that 777, aligned with your mission and your outcome and where you want to go. That's how you win. It's not the little voices. It's not the talking. It's not the little stuff. You gotta align the core of your being in where you want to go, and you do that by writing down the things that inspire you. Every single thing you hear that inspires you, that you think you want to do, you write it down and you make it a goal. And you fill your life with things that inspire you. And you cut out all the chaff, the stuff that doesn't. And the same goes true of running a business. When I started off, I did everything. I was assembling the cubicles, putting together the computers, doing the recruiting, hiring the managers. And I had, like a mini nervous breakdown. Like, one day I just, like, my body broke. I couldn't work any more hours. I couldn't do more stuff. And I broke. And I got shingles from stress. I was like, 31 years old. And in the healing process, I went to a bunch of seminars, read some books, chose my mentors, my coaches. And a guy said to me, look, here's the secret of life. He's the richest guy I know at the time. Yeah, Gary was broke back then, so he said, look, you write down the seven most important things you gotta do every day, and you do the top three. You write down the seven most important things you gotta do each day, and you do the top three. That's it Guy. I think he was a Student housing guy, I think his net worth was 50 to 80 million, I'm not sure. But richest guy I knew at the time came back because I'd had this breakdown, like in the past. I did everything equally, like, I only did everything that came along in order of arrival. Then I started prioritizing. Boom. Like just doing the most important stuff. Things got so much better. I started having more fun and getting better results. I had some problems because, like, washing my cleaning, my kitchen was a low priority for me. So it started stinking in there. It was like really hard to walk in my own house because it smelled so bad. The electricity got shut off because I thought paying the bills wasn't a high priority for me. I should just recruit, look after, look for talent, build my business. So one day I was at home and the power went off. I was like, oh, what do I do now? And then I learned another thing. It becomes all about the who, right? And in order for you to maximize your who, you have to have a lot of who's in the world. The beautiful thing about a society, especially a capitalist society, I can say that here is everyone has their task that they do, and they're supposed to do it better than you. So you can do what you do better than anyone else. And there are people that will clean your house for a really relatively modest sum. There are people that will, you know, look after your bills. You know, I hired a bookkeeper, 35 bucks a week originally, just to pay my bills. Gave me that time back. What could I do with that time? Devote it to my agenda, right? Devote it to the things I wanted to do. You'll be surprised to hear this, I know, but I wasn't a great athlete in high school. You probably were all thinking, I bet he was the quarterback of the football team or something like that. Funny enough, I was at a bar in Dallas with one the of one of my agents. Really good looking black guy, very athletic. And some girl wrote him a note like, hey, will you go with me? Or something like that. And he goes, david, I'm so sick and tired of being stereotyped of being a Dallas Cowboy. And I said, ben, I wish just once in my life, once somebody would stereotype me for being a Dallas Cowboy. I played Dungeons and Dragons. It was really cool.

But what I learned is I gotta be healthy. I need energy. I need a lot of energy. I can't have nervous breakdowns. I can't crack. So I hired a personal fitness coach. Fitness coach. I wasn't a workout guy. Now I am Because I know I need the energy. I'm greedy for my agenda in life. I'm greedy to commit to the things I'm trying to achieve. In order to do that, I gotta look after this. And because I didn't like to work out that much, I've got it down now. I don't need it anymore. Now I got, again, I'm a cliche. I got the peloton. I like the peloton. But I had to hire a coach to come shape me up and push me and make me do the things I didn't want to to do. And then I learned, like, I got to eat better. So what did I hire there? I hired a chef to cook food for me, right? And again, you're thinking, oh, that must cost a lot of money. Not really. This lady will come to my house, and for 300 bucks, plus the cost of food, brings me about 20 meals for my family. Puts it in the refrigerator. When we were on keto diet, she was bringing me keto. That's like the most impossible diet ever. So we flipped just to normal diet, but it's all organic, healthy food, and it's just popped in my house. Because what I found was when I was hungry, if I hadn't thought about food, I would eat whatever was there. If it was my dad, it would be a whole bowl of blue bell ice cream. So I don't have any blue bell ice cream in my house. I contain my environment. We have some weird, sugarless ice cream that tastes okay. Chips. I would eat all the chips. So we just minimize that. And then we have the chef coming in and cooking us the good food, right? So for 300 bucks a week, I get 12 to 15 meals. So divided out is about 15 bucks a meal. It's really not that expensive. Maybe 17 bucks a meal. Why am I doing that? Trying to manage my energy, trying to win through my implicit system, and trying to really make it easy for me. I don't know about you guys. I do what's easy. Like, I do the easy stuff. I'm like, trying to make life easy, to be successful by eliminating all the chaff, all the paying of my bills, cleaning my house, everything. By eliminating all the junk, I have more energy just to focus like a laser beam on the outcomes I'm trying to make. And then I boiled my life down to three things. And those three things are hiring talent, looking for opportunities, and creating vision. Hiring talent, looking for opportunities, and creating vision. So I look at deals. Massive amount of deal flows. That's why I have 70 businesses. I'm looking for talent all the time. I'm looking for deals. Guy shows up.

He'S like, hey man, I'm really good at oil and gas and I can bring you a great oil and gas deal. And I'm like, okay, great, bring me a deal. We'll look at it with you. And then we analyze the guy, the human being. It's called the opportunity matrix. We put it in wealth can't wait. You say, okay, you look at the human being. Can I trust this human being? Do they keep their word? Do they have a background and a track record? There are a few people that vouch for them. And then I look at the opportunity. Can I understand it? Can I think I can make money at it? And if the answer is yes and yes, then I go for it. I take some money and I throw it at it. It either wins or it fails. If it wins, we have a business. It might be a great success, a medium success, or low success. And if it fails, it's easy, you just shut it down. All right, so how do you become a nine figure investor? Let me get back to that.

There's no way you can get to be a nine figure investor unless you build businesses. Real estate's a great investment. I love real estate. You can invest in real estate all day long and you can be a 10, 15, 20 million a year guy when you're done. But if you want to actually, you know, manifest giant wealth, you have to build a business. You have to roll out a business that has a multiple exit. Most of you guys probably already know this. So that's the game we're playing to get to nine figures. When you're young, you can take massive amount of risk. And when you don't have kids, you should just be all in all the time. Nothing I like better than seeing a 20 something year old that quit their job to go all in for their business. Because what you're really getting, whether you win or lose, is the knowledge.

And then as you get bigger, then you've got to like, nurture the dollars. It's all about the dollars. The dollars, you know, have to have to earn a fair rate of return, right? So you have to take those dollars and invest them wisely. Warren Buffett's rule number one is don't lose any capital. Rule number two is, see rule number one, okay? That's with your investment dollars, but on the other side, on your aggression dollars, you go all in when you see something that wins. I was sitting with Richard Branson on Necker Island. Not because he's my friend. I'm not name dropping because he's my buddy. I paid 50 grand to go to his island for a week. It was nice. And I was sitting with him and he said, people said to me, I got lucky. He said, I got out of the record business right when it was dying, and I got into the airline business. He said, and they're right. I did get lucky. He said, but you've got to put yourself in a position to get lucky. And that's what I would say to you. If you're all entrepreneurs, you got to get out there and pivot, pivot, pivot until something works and then just go all in for it. And I got lucky early. I got at Keller Williams early. I had no idea who it was. There's less than a thousand people in the company now there's 190,000. I had a mentor that was a billionaire. You know, at that time, he was worth negative net worth because he hadn't built, you know, Keller Williams yet, Gary Keller. But today he's arguably a billionaire. And I just went all in. I was 20 something years old. I had nothing to lose. My mom was a realtor at his company. She was a legend, an amazing woman. And I just went all in because I didn't have any other option. And then it struggled, struggled, struggled. Back then, a lot of them were failing, but we started having a breakthrough, and I just kept going all in and all in. And so I ended up the largest franchisee more by default than anything else, just because I went all in. But I could see it was working. So I just read Blitzscale. Anyone read Blitzscale? It's a pretty interesting book. And he says, what the new companies do is they come in and they pivot, pivot, pivot until they find something that works and then they go all in, right? So pivot, pivot, pivot. When something works, go all in.

All right.

What else do I want to tell you guys?

So then the other thing I was telling you is where your peers, right? So dump losers, man. And I'm not saying that like, I know it sounds harsh. I'm not trying to be harsh, but charity belongs in charity, right? You don't have to have friends that are a charity case. Sometimes you got family, you don't have any choice in that matter. Maybe some people would say, dump family. I can't go that far. But I will say that if you have a friend that's just sucking your energy from you, you gotta move on, man. No one obligated you to your high school buddy that never gets their stuff together. I judge a person by the energy I get when I'm around them. Like, if I'm sitting with a person, their energy is sucking me a little bit. I'm okay with that a little bit, but I'll keep observing it. If I meet with them three times and every time I feel depleted, I'm out. Go find somebody else. By the way, when my managers that are sevens are not rising to the level they work under, the other managers that are eights and nines, we kind of move people around so that the eight, now, they have the opportunity to get there, but they got to choose the path.

So your peers and then the other side is your coaches. Like, I've been through so many coaches. Like, Tony Robbins was a coach for me, right? He didn't know it, but I went to all his stuff when I was young. When I needed motivation, I don't need motivation anymore. But when I needed motivation, I found Tony amazing. To this day, Jim Rohn has been my favorite of all time. Any Jim Rohn fans in here? What an incredibly beautiful and amazing human being. I got to meet him once, and it was an honor. So coaches, they don't have to be living. They can be dead. You know, there's coaching all over the place.

And then massive action, which you already know, and then really just ruthlessly honest feedback with yourself.

But all I've done, really, in my business world is just keep crafting on what works and what doesn't work, shed what doesn't work and add what works. Be around leaders, be around teachers, be around amazing human beings. My goal last year was to meet Peter Thiel. I failed at it, but it was my goal.

Why?

Because he's so contrarian. Like, what's this guy thinking? He's a gay man from San Francisco that votes Republican and is a Trump fan. Like, how different is that, right? So I was very curious to meet that. I try to meet a billionaire every year or so because not because they're a billionaire, but because sometimes I'm like, e, that guy's horrible. I wouldn't want to be like that guy. And other times it's like, wow, I can pick something up. When I was with Richard Branson, he was sitting on his couch with his assistant, and they were working. And I came over and I said, do you mind if I sit beside you? And the assistant shot daggers at me, like, go away. And he was like, just don't talk. So I sat down, I Was so glad I brought my journal, because for 40 minutes, I just sat there eavesdropping on Richard Branson working with his assistant. And I figured I'd spend 50 grand, right? So I have the right to be rude. I was like, yeah, I'm gonna. Can I sit here?

And what he was doing was because he's dyslexic, I guess he was dictating everything. He was like. She was reading all his emails, and he would say, okay. And one of them was to Sheryl Sandberg, which was cool. He's like, well, tell Sheryl I'd like her to be a part of this group, and we'll do all the work, and she could just be a part of it. And I listened from that, and I was like, man, I'm holding onto too much. Then he'd get home, and when I got back, I let go of all my emails. I let go of all of them. So my team now read all my emails, and then they send me the ones they think that I need to look. It's the most liberating thing anyone else done that. Let go of all your emails. Cool.

Nice.

So that was picked up from Richard Branson. So you just like picking up nuances from people, Little bits and pieces you can add. But the basic one, the most basic one, is to get your implicit system on your side. You can say, I want to be a billionaire all day long. And if your internal system, if your subconscious mind doesn't agree with you, you won't get there. It will not happen. Athletes can get given $100 million and end up bankrupt. Why? Because their implicit system was not in alignment with it. So how do you coach and nurture that implicit system is through all these things I talked about, just like the framing of it. So your goals, managing your energy, having the vision at the top, your peers, and then your coaches on either side. And then the foundation is your relentless and ruthless honesty with yourself about what's working and what's not working.

Yeah. So.

Yeah, I don't know. I don't know what else. I could throw this out for questions. I could keep going. I'm going to open it up for questions about five minutes. I'll tell you one thing where everything I've ever learned had to change again, and that was to have a great relationship with my wife. So we have two kids now, and she said, being with me is like being in the back seat of the car. I said, I'd put you in the front seat. And then I realized there was a part of her that likes being in the back seat. Because when I make a wrong turn, she loves to slap me upside the head from behind and let me know about it. But what I've really done is I've devoted myself to being the best husband I possibly can. And in my devotion to my wife, what I found is that everything that I know in business doesn't work in relationship, right? So in business, I'm like, hey, let's climb the hill. We're going to 5 billion. Let's go. Let's get the right people. Let's attract the right talent. Let's share equity with them. Let's hold them accountable. Let's get stuff done in relationship. It's like, hey, love, what would you like to do? What would you like to do this year? Just stay at home in our pajamas all day? Okay, Just whatever. What can I do to be of service to you? How can I devote myself to you? And everything I know that I was trying early on was leading to friction and pain and conflict almost to the point where I wasn't sure we were going to make it. I kept thinking, why can't you be more like me? That's what I kept thinking. I kept thinking, tracy, why can't you just be more like me? If you'd just be like me, we'd have everything we ever wanted. We would have it all. And then one day, I just realized.

I realized everything I'm doing isn't working. Because she doesn't have to be anyone other than her. No one put her on this earth saying, be just like David. No one put her on this earth saying, go to Tony Robbins seminars. No one put her on the earth with that deal, right? And so what I realized is I had to change the way I was or we were gonna get divorced. And so I changed, and I turned myself into her number one fan and her number one servant. And it changed. Like, our relationship changed, and it's so much better now. It's, like, the best it's ever been. And I'm telling you that because I'm trying to get to you on the ruthless honesty. It's easy to see if you're, like, spending 110 cents of every dollar, you're going to go bankrupt. It's easy to see if you never work out and you're only going to Blue Bell ice cream, you're probably going to not have the longest longevity. But the relationship was hard because I felt so right. I felt so right. I knew I was right. Everything I'm doing is working but it wasn't working. And, and then taking that a step further, I've learned with my kids it's exactly the same thing. It's just presence. It's time, put the phone down. Be fully present. A book I read recently said that with my daughter, with daughters especially, you should do everything they ask you to do. Because your goal number one goal is to build their self esteem. Not in a spoiled way, like not buy me this or buy me that. But hey dad, I'm a little nervous, can you go upstairs with me while I get dressed? Or hey dad, can you come out and play with me? Or hey dad, let's dress up all the stuffies and have a. That's why I got to go to the office sometime. But anyway, so everything my daughter asked me to do is my new thing. I try to do it so that I can build her self esteem so that later on in life she doesn't find losers to help her fill her self esteem, if that makes any sense. These are all just like the lessons of life. But how do I make it happen? Because I'll forget these lessons are transitory. I put it in my flight plan. So I got my flight plan for life and that's how I build it continuously back to the implicit system. I know that I personally am weak and I personally will choose the easiest path that I can take. But what I found is if I have an agreement with myself to follow the constitution of my life, which is my flight plan, and I keep putting in all the good stuff, everything that I want to have happen and then I hold myself accountable to that as much as possible. Not in five years, not in 10 years, not in 15 years, but in 20 years. The creation of following that philosophy has created this opportunity that I'm with today where people invite me to come speak. And by the way, a perfect example of that is I keep my word. I forgot I booked this trip. I said yes to Ryan. I was excited to speak to you guys. I'm a huge fan of capitalism. I'm a massive fan. I was raised in Germany and England. I know friends from all over the world. I've traveled in 70 countries. There's no solution other than capitalism that I know of and I'd be the first to sign up if the government did anything. Well, I'd be a socialist. I'd be hardcore. I agree that everyone should have a fair shake, but capitalism is really your opportunity to change the world because capitalism gives you the opportunity to find a niche, find a way to serve your fellow humans. In a way they've never been served before and get paid to do it. And I'm sorry, there's no government official that thinks that way. They're not wrong. They're not bad. They're just different. They don't think that way. We think that way. We're entrepreneurs. We're specialists. And so when I said I'd speak for Ryan and I just realized it was right on top of my event that my team had booked, that I'm just clueless. I don't pay attention. I was like, well, I gave my word. So I'm popping back and popping back up, and that's what I did. Why? Because. And it's not for Ryan. It's not to be a good boy. It's because when I keep my word, everything else gets easier, if that makes any sense. Because my implicit system now believes what I say. And I can tell you, when I was 25, my implicit system didn't believe me at all. I'd say, I'm gonna get up tomorrow, go to the gym, and then I'd sleep till 11 because I was smoking weed half the time in high school. Right? So you're. So I have trained my internal consciousness, my internal implicit system to believe in me, and then what I choose to go after gets that much easier. Now, that's probably not what you expected to hear. You were probably hoping to hear, like, a silver bullet or some way to make money. I don't know. The silver bullet. I don't know. The easy way. Maybe it's cryptocurrency. I don't know. So far, I'm negative 200,000 on my $250,000 investment I made with a guy I trust. The guy, I don't think he's screwing me. I just. Maybe you guys are doing better, but I don't know a way other than it's not you, it's the inner you. It's not your ego. It's not who you think you are. It's, can you get your alignment with your most powerful force, the tree trunk of your life, and slowly nurture and train that person, that inner being, to be the winner that you want to be. And if you can do that, the process is simple. It's just going into the matrix, waking up for a minute, setting your own matrix, and then fall. Falling asleep, into what you've created? I know, it's kind of weird. That's what's worked for me. So I got time for a few questions.

Anybody got any?

Yes, right back there. I think they want you to go up to the microphone. But I also got good ears, so you can holler at me.

Hi.

Hi.

So I've been working on trying to.

Reprogram the sub for six years now.

Going to all the seminars, you know, Tony and all these different things, books, everything. And I'm finally starting to feel it lifting.

Yeah, nice. After six years, I think it takes about that long.

But then how do you cut out family that refuses to work on reprogramming, the poverty mindset and negativity and, you know, still.

Well, there's family and there's family, right? There's brother, sister versus husband, wife, whatever. I've always been of the belief your wife or husband doesn't have to go with you as long as they don't resist you. Like, if they're willing to not resist you, and they have somewhat of a growth mindset versus a fixed mindset, a little, little teeny bit of growth, then that's the deal. No one said they have to do what you do. No one said your wife, husband has to be you. But if they resist you and they fight you, I don't know how that would work for me. I don't think I would have made it. But my wife is open and my wife listens. Just, you know, she understands me, loves me, wants to be my fan, and she'll go with me. Now, other family members I've just stopped hanging out with, you know, I just. If they invite me over at Christmas, I might pop over at Christmas.

Do you recommend getting vibrationally strong? Strong enough to where they don't affect you, then going around them, I would.

Just slowly dampen them out. I would take the volume from 10 to 9 to 8 to 7 to 6, so you don't have the disruption. And by the way, I love your vibrational thing, but just remember, the more passionate about your goals, your agenda for your life, it just kind of fades away. Like, I used to think.

My family members that weren't rolling with me would, like, miss me, but they really didn't. When I just turned the volume down, they, like found somebody else to go do Whatever they were going to do with the drama was still there, but it was somewhere else.

Right.

And I was out. That makes sense. All right, my pleasure. Yes, sir. Hey, David, I'm a big self love advocate as well, so hearing your stance on that is awesome. When it comes to mentor and mentee relationships, what do you look for to mentee? And how does someone put. How does someone find themselves in a situation where they're in a room with someone like you, or is it luck? Is it through connections? Is it happenstance? Like, what's meant? Well, you know what I mean. To create that relationship between mentors.

Yeah.

Okay, so I still seek out mentors, and I'll answer that for you. I email them, and I'll say, I've got two private equity guys in Texas now that are my mentors. One manages a $3 billion fund. One manages a billion dollar fund. And I just emailed them and I said, hey, Jeff, what would I have to do to earn the right to have lunch with you? And he ignored me. So I emailed him again, and he ignored me. And then the third time I emailed me, he said, I'll have lunch with you in, like, you know, April of 2019. I'm like, okay, what day? What time? And how about, you know, I gave him two options of locations, and then I showed up. And when I showed up, I had a list of questions. I asked questions. I let him talk. I just got to know him, you know, like, I'm in sales, so I know how to ask questions. And then when he was done just socializing, I whipped out my questions. And they were good questions, like, what do you have to do to build a private equity firm? What are the key impliers? What are the biggest expenses? And when you do that, you earn respect. Right? So now these two guys have probably become peers. They would probably consider me a friend. I still look up to them until my fund's at 5 billion and they're at 1 and 3, then they can look up to me. Does that make sense? But they are great friends. They're great leaders. They contribute and shine a lot on my life, and I'm grateful for it. And I always treat them that way. When I'm done, I send them a book. Or in both these cases, one guy was into Habitat. The other guy was Dell Children's Hospital. I made a donation in their name, had lunch with them. Thank you. I know there's nothing I could do. Move your economic needle. But I donated 1,000 bucks to the Dell Children's Hospital because I listened. And I know you cared a lot about that. And I sent them a card with that in the follow up. And then when I asked for the second meeting, guess what? They were willing to meet with me. But I don't waste the meetings either. Like, I make sure if they teach me something, I go apply it. And when people seek me out to be a mentor or whatever, I usually just the first thing I'll tell them is go read three books as a man thinketh the cash flow quadrant, and depending on where they want to go, think and grow rich or something like that. Like, those, I think are the foundational pieces of winning this life that I talked about. This, like, implicit system life, which is managing your own being. And if they do that, 99% of people never come back. If they do that, I'll mentor people forever. If they do what they say they're going to do 80 to 90%. So come from a point of service, come from a point of respect, add value to that person and be prepared when you get the opportunity would be my answer. Awesome. Thank you. My pleasure.

Hi. Two parts. One, did you grow to the size you did using mostly organic growth or acquisitions or a combination? It was all organic, but I was part of an incredible organization. I think somebody asked the luck question. I had massive amount of luck. I didn't know when I joined Keller Williams, it was about to be the number one real estate company in the world. Gary Keller is a visionary and a genius, and he put systems in place, by the way. I didn't really touch that, but SOPs are super important standard operating procedures. So if you want to build big, you hire the who and then you build a standard operating procedure around them so they keep following it so that they can move up and they can put someone in their place. The good news about this is you don't have to create the sop. Someone else can do that for you. One of Gary's quotes is, you don't have a systems person. You have a people problem. Go hire a person to put the systems in place for you. So one of my early hires was a lady that had a master's degree in administration and had run a hospital for A lot of times. They get underpaid in that business. She was barely like 50 grand a year or 60 grand a year, I can't remember. And she came in and just wrote this operating manual for one of my businesses that we use to this day. We built on it, but we still use it to this day. So it was all organic. It was all recruiting from the ground up, building these franchises with training, with mentoring. We had no money, but my mom also backed me. So between us, we were a sub millionaire. But we had, you know, a couple hundred grand that we put together and we were able to open some offices. The only thing I really did was went all in. I saw other guys around me, but I was young, but I saw other guys get one good franchise and Stop or get two good franchises. And stop. I just went all in. I was like, I wanted to get up to 100 franchises. And also back then, we weren't the company we were today, but I had that organic growth with me. The second fortune I built was in the last crash. And they say preparation is meeting luck is preparation, meeting opportunity. When the economy crashed in 08, I was sitting on an amount of cash just because I was working so hard. I didn't really have time to deploy it. I was only putting it into franchises. And then the economy crashed, and all my revenue went down by 60%. So I'm like, holy crap, I'm going to lose money. And then it stabilized, and I was still making money. So I got past the panic and the fear, and then I looked around and like, 9 and 10, I was like, wow, everything is mispriced. It's clear to me that everything is terribly mispriced. So I just went all in for real estate and I bought a bunch of real estate. And then I also. A guy said, you know, if you buy distressed debt on real estate, it's an even better deal. Like I said, a guy came to me. He was working for Beal Bank. You guys know Andy Beal. He's worth 12 billion here in Dallas. And he said, you should buy distressed debt. And I said, well, I don't know how to do that. How do we do it? He goes, well, you do this. This. I'm like, you want a job? He's like, sure. So I hired him. We built a distressed debt business, and we bought about $100 million worth of debt for about 50 million that we'll probably end up making 25 million on. And that was, again, preparation, meeting, opportunity. That's what led me to private equity. And now I have a private equity fund because I ran out of my own money and we were making too much money on the money to stop doing it. Right. So that was the second fortune, because then I didn't expect it to come back. But when it did, all my old assets and my new assets came. Came back very aggressively. So the one thing I would say from all of that is be aggressive. Like, pivot, pivot, pivot. When you find something that works. I've been lucky because I was aggressive and I was lucky. Cool. And the second part you comment about, like, wanting me some billionaires. I have a client that has a. That can help set that up, so that'd be awesome. Email me@DavidAvidosborne.com if you don't mind. What's your name, sir? Alex. Alex. Thanks, Alex. Davidavidosborne.com yes, sir. Thanks, David. That was an amazing talk. So my questions are on, like, hiring. So you kind of mentioned how important your team is. So I'm curious if you can share a little bit more of kind of like your hiring criteria when you're bringing in somebody and like that process. Most important process I've ever learned. I was taught it originally with Gary Keller by a guy called Bane Henion. This guy, this shirt is provided by a company called Bergflo. I didn't really intend to advertise for him, but they help with hiring. The thing I would tell you about that is like, we were taught to spend 10 hours with every new hire, 10 hours with every new hire. And we do a personality assessment and a behavioral assessment and three sets of interviews, the screening interview, the comprehensive interview, and then the hiring interview. And all I can tell you is that winning is a habit and so is losing. And people will show you the clues to their winning. And so if you'll slow your life down and really get deep on the interview process, you're like a therapist, priest, marriage counselor, hirer, and really shut up and ask really good questions. I think it's a gift that I have. You're surprised because I've been talking the whole time for an hour, but I'm good at asking questions. And you'll just be about to hire a guy and then they'll say, I'm like, so tell me what else? Like anything else that people would say you need to improve. Like this guy almost hired. He goes, yeah, I was playing intramural soccer last week and two of my buddies had to hold me off because I wanted to kick the ref's ass. I'm like, you just lost your job. I don't want you in my office kicking my client's ass, or worse, mine. I'm only a small guy here, so, you know, but. But that was like about the seventh, you know, that was probably at the stage seven of a 10 stage process we have. But I was taught it originally by corporate consulting. Keller Williams teaches it amazingly. So if you can ever go to the recruit select training they teach.

Once you realize your whole life revolves around your who, you will slow down and pay attention. And then when I'm hiring, people always fall into this love affair. Like, they're gonna kill it for me. They're gonna be amazing. I'm always asked, what am I gonna hate about this person in two years? What is gonna annoy the crap out of me. That's the question I have to ask myself. Because I fall into optimism also I fall into like exuberance. I want the next hire to be the next great savior. So I'm always like, well, what's gonna annoy me about this person in two years? Just to keep myself balanced. And then only don't, you know, if you have any doubt, you gotta listen that intuition and just. And then hire fast. Fire, fire, fire fast, hire slow. Does that help? Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much. You bet. And I don't. My thing's flashing red here, but last three people I guess and then we'll call. Yeah, I'll be quick.

So I've built my team to a point to where they pretty much do all the day to day stuff and talking about back end systems. I loved your talk about that. So my job primarily now is to be a visionary and pretty much a full time thinker. And I've come to the conclusion just like what you were talking about. My conscious part of my brain has come to the conclusion that my subconscious is the 746. Right. It's the one that's really in control.

Right.

So my question is, what are some specific things that you've done to take your conscious brain and influence your subconscious? I just stopped listening to the conscious brain. Brain. I'm very clear that my conscious brain is like the weakling in my family internally here. So I think the mind makes a wonderful servant and a terrible master. And it's a servant. When you say, hey, how do I be a better husband? The mind will give you all kinds of answers. How can I be a better father? It'll give you all kinds. How can I build this business better? The mind is an awesome servant. But when it's a master is when it's like, oh, you're such a loser. You didn't do. I can't believe you did that. You looked like such a dork when you went up on stage to say, why are you doing that? Why are you doing this? And if you let your mind just rattle on at you, you, it'll be a master that will make you the most miserable human being on the planet. So I just don't listen to it. I direct my. I know it sounds weird. You guys are like, this is the weirdest talk I've ever had. But this is what I do. I direct my mind in the directions I want it to go to. So I read my goals. If I'm starting to get chattery and I still have nights where I don't sleep. I get anxiety. I get those things, but way less than I used to. And I know even when I'm going through it, that it's not real. I know it's just the mind. You're owning me right now. You've won this battle this night. So I'll stick earbuds in and I'll listen to Daring Greatly by Renee Brown. I'm trying to raise my kids without the shame that we were all raised with. And so that's a. So I'll listen to that. And usually I can fall back to sleep. So to me, the conscious mind is the weakling in my arsenal. It's useful, it has a role, but its role is to never be in charge. And the only time I'm miserable is when my conscious mind is in charge and telling me everything I'm doing wrong. Which it's really, really good at, by the way. Does that help? Yep, it does. Thank you. I'll give you one other thing. In the movie the Beautiful Minds, you see that movie? I did. Okay, so you remember he's a schizophrenic, right? So he sees people that aren't really there, and he goes on all these wild goose change chases. And then at the end of the movie, you see those people are still there. He just ignores them. That's what I do with doubt, fear, negativity, criticism, anger, ugliness. They're all still there. I haven't expunged them, but I just don't give them any. Feed.

Feed.

I try not to feed that one. I just ignore it. Does that make sense?

Yeah.

All right, thank you. Good luck with that. Yes, ma'.

Am.

Hi, David. Thank you for your conference and your talk. And it really resonated with myself and also my business partner, who's my husband as well. Nice. So I think everything that you've been talking about is aligning with what we're currently doing. We're trying to find fit our life into different buckets and sectors. The issue that we're running into is with time. So as soon as we move towards segmenting one section. So for spirituality or mission or hiring, it seems as though we're subtracting from the time that we should be spending on the business. So I think my question to you would be, how do we not only move towards that, but dominate these different sectors in our life and make it successful? How much? It's way easier with cash flow because you can hire out a bunch of stuff if you don't have the cash flow. It's really way harder. And so I'm not going to minimize that.

You just have to. For me, it's reading my goals every day. I do the miracle morning. I wrote Miracle Morning Millionaires with Hal Elrod. I do the short version, not the whole hour. Wake up beside my wife. Usually she's still asleep. I'll do silence affirmations and visualizations in bed, laying beside her. I don't do affirmations like I'm a smart guy or I'm a cool guy, although I think that works and has a place. I usually affirm. Like today I'm speaking@Capitalasm.com, i'm gonna be present. I'm gonna deliver value. I'm gonna be of service to the people there. I try to see my day with my affirmations. I try to affirm my day so you can win the morning. To win the day that you can do in bed in the morning. I sometimes do that for 20 minutes, and I feel like I got my spiritual practice done while half asleep.

It's just discipline. And if you just never quit on it and then finding little techniques, little tricks, like find a healthy restaurant, go eat it. Go drink juice at your favorite juice place. That's a health piece. Work out together and discuss business at the same time. I don't know what it would be like to work with my wife. Fortunately, we don't have a husband wife business. I think that would be incredibly hard. I did work with my mother for a while. It was really hard. Most people thought we were fighting and we were just talking.

But all I can tell you is if you write it down and you keep applying yourself, even if you fall by the wayside for six months or nine months, if you just keep trying, you'll get back in. And then as the revenue grows, you can outsource almost anything. I get more done now than I ever, ever did in the history of my life because I have such discipline to my agenda, and I'm able to get more done in a shorter period of time. And I hire all the who's. Like, I got, you know, I've hired the people people, so it's easier with the money. But I don't know that you get to the money without having the discipline earlier and applying yourself over and over again to the six gardens of life. Seven gardens of life. Sorry I can't give you a silver bullet. No, that's good enough. Thank you so much. My pleasure. Last question. Great talk, by the way. Thank you so much. Can you go over your flight Plan. Exactly. What's in the flight plan? How long did it take to develop that flight plan? Because life, I'm having a really difficult time finding a system like that to consistently work for me. Well, and we created a tribe called Gobundance for entrepreneurs that also. The accountability is almost more important than the flight plan, in my opinion. You gotta have the peers. We have a pod system where you have entrepreneurs you talk to every couple of weeks that hold you accountable. And then you have to have the coaches like you hire the coaches. But I have what I call the eight gardens of life. Okay, but again, if you just email me@thegoaltemplate.com they'll give you this outline. The goaltemplate.com but again, the accountability is so much more important. You could write down three goals and be accountable, and you'll get more done than a guy that writes down 80 goals and is not accountable. But we do. Relationship. Family. First, Spiritual contribution. Second. Physical health. Third, Intellectual growth. Fourth, lifestyle adventure. I didn't even touch on this, but I go climb mountains and I go throw myself in foreign countries or I go do mission trips to help people that are much less fortunate than me. We're doing one to Haiti this year with the entire family. And I do all the lifestyle adventure stuff to remind myself what's important. It's so easy to get lost in America and think like a victim or like things are bad until you actually go try to help other people or go climb a mountain. So the lifestyle adventure is a big one for me for shifting that unconscious system, the implicit system. I climbed Kilimanjaro, for crying out loud. I was playing Dungeons and Dragons in high school. I was not an athlete. I didn't have physical kids capabilities. I just had nerdy, goofy mental capabilities. And so I went and climbed a mountain to change my physiology with guys that are much more athletic than me to sort of drive myself in that direction. Right. Environment tribe. Who do you hang out with? What does your house look like? Is it clean? Is it organized? Is your car nice? All of this stuff gives you energy. Who you hang out with really matters. So I try to manage all of that. And if I don't want to do it, I have someone else do it. And then personal, financial, which is your personal world, and then business. Those are my eight gardens. So there's no silver bullet for this stuff. But it's a process. And it's taken me 20. I mean, I'm a master of it now. But I've been applying myself with total failure and procrastination for 25 plus years. I'm absolutely certain I've taken too much time. Thank you for your last question. Thank you guys very much. It's been a pleasure to be with you.

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