The Blueprint to Being Rich

Welcome to another CEO Wisdom podcast. We have Sir Darren Jackling with us today. Darren is a general partner at Smashing Numbers. He's into acquiring accounting and bookkeeping firms across North America. He's a board advisor in M&A and strategic growth. The guy's a pretty wild man, has a couple of properties, travels around the world. And yeah, you're, you're an adventurer, Darren. I would say that's how I describe you. Tell us a bit more about yourself.

I'm grateful to be here. Yeah, I love, uh, you know, I spend about 5, 6 months a year traveling the world on cruise ships, and I hike some of the biggest mountains in the world like Mount Kilimanjaro, Mount Kailash, Mount Everest Base Camp, and other mountains around the world. So, uh, when I'm here in Vancouver, Canada, I have a very large hiking group of a few hundred entrepreneurs, business owners, CEOs, people from all walks of life, all different backgrounds. So very active in the hiking community globally. And, uh, yeah, very active in rolling up companies. So I'm very active as a general partner in a company called Smashing Numbers. We built into a multi-seven-figure company the last few years by acquiring multiple bookkeeping, accounting, tax planning firms across the USA and expanding to Canada. And then I serve on different paid advisory boards and boards of directors of companies globally as well. And I'm very active in the real estate space as well. I've got my own portfolio of a lot of real estate across North America that I'm hands-off. I've got people that run the day-to-day operations of that. And then I'm involved in a project right now. We're actually creating affordable apartments. We've got a master plan of A new hospital being built. And so the key thing is, I always share with people, is what's the business behind the business? Where's the real money made? Well, if you have a sports arena, you have a sports franchise, and people are building into a new market, that's great to have the arena, but the real entrepreneur looks at what's the master plan behind that. Well, the next 5, 10, 15, 20 years is the whole master plan as that all gets developed that supports that engine of that sports franchise or a hospital. Which will be around for like 50 years or longer. And so, I like to get around entrepreneurs who are playing at a very high level that see opportunities that most people don't see, that are 10 steps ahead of everybody else, and then position myself in an equity position or seat at the table to then to do that. And really, the game for me is philanthropy. You know, to have a very successful exit in life, which I've had, you know, been done very well in my life. And I've had a lot of adversities and challenges and mistakes as well. You know, I'm the kid that was labeled most likely not to ever succeed. I was never good enough. I've been on welfare. I've been homeless. You know, all that kind of stuff. So, I have quite an amazing backstory, come-up story, and success story. But I've learned now at age 54, certain key systems and processes and systems and strategies that you do, that you execute on, that you get certain results. And then, the people you surround yourself with, your environment, makes such a big difference. So, but I'm really good at seeing opportunity zones before everybody else is there. And then build the right team and then everybody catches up from there. So, that's a little bit about me.

Yeah. Well, you're street smart, right? And you're quite an anomaly. Tell me a bit more about your background and how you started out in life.

Oh, great question. So, I failed grade 1. Just full transparency, I failed grade 1 of public school and I was misdiagnosed with a learning disability and also a reading disability. And they brought my parents in and said, look, you know, we don't know what to do with your son. He's very hyperactive. he can't sit still in school, we've got to put him on a drug called Ritalin. And but what happened was when I was 1 year of age, I had a sister that was 4 years of age who died unexpectedly, and I had a 6-year-old brother. And so that was childhood trauma on my family. And so, you know, I didn't feel safe going to school. I felt unsafe, and I didn't feel safe coming home at times because my parents were suppressing trauma that they didn't know how to deal with. They're in their 20s when they, you know, they gave birth to us as children, and So at age 7, I created my first business called Rent-A-Kid. And I would go out knocking on doors and I was collecting money at age 7 on my own. I was going out solving problems, serving people, and making a difference in my neighborhood. What I learned was, practically, was that money changes hands when problems are solved. We don't have money problems in life. People say, oh, I got a money problem on social media. No, you don't have a money problem, 'cause you got no money. A money problem is when you've got lots of money, you don't know how to allocate it or how to deploy it. You gotta hire smart people around you to structure it to deploy money. That's a money problem. Okay, I got friends of mine, they got millions and millions of dollars or hundreds of millions of dollars, they got money problems. But somebody who doesn't have money doesn't have a money problem, they have a thinking problem. So there's no lack of money, there's a lack of the mindset, the creativity of thinking. And how you change that is you change your environment. So you get around people who think differently, who see, turn a crisis into an opportunity and how to monetize that opportunity. And that's what it was. And so me as a young kid, I was out there knocking on lots of doors. And by the time I was 9 years old, I had overcome rejection because I was a kid playing games. And one of the games I still play to this day at age 54 is I play this game where my focus, if I'm gonna go knock on 10 doors or make 10 cold calls or prospect 10 people either through social media or online or at a trade show or at a conference or on the street, my focus is I want to get to 10 nos in a row. Because there's a thing called the law of averages. And so if I'm selling water bottles door-to-door, for example, And my goal is to get 10 nos. I want 10 people to say no to me and close the door on me and say, get off my property. The thing is, 1 in 10, through the law of averages, is going to buy the water bottle. And so every time I get 1 in 10 that buys the water bottle, I got to start the game all over again. And what I start to realize, I start getting yes after yes after yes after yes. And the more I get better, because whatever I lack in skill, I make it up in numbers. I make it up in numbers. So whatever you lack in skill, but say, well, I'm not good enough, I don't know how to do that. I don't know how to do that online, or I don't know how to make an offer online. Whatever you lack in skill, you make it up in numbers by taking massive, consistent action. And so, these are the things I've learned. And so, as a young kid, I realized that all we are is a network of conversations. As human beings, we're a network of conversations, and opportunities get created inside of conversations. But most people are selfish, focusing on themselves, and when you're selfish, you suffer. So, when you see people that are on social media all the time, always complaining, oh, things are so hard, challenge, because they're selfish and they're suffering because they're focused on themselves, Versus serving other people and solving their problems. The fastest path to making a lot of money is solve rich people's problems, because rich people pay for speed and they'll pay for execution. They pay for results. They don't pay for the hour. They pay for the results, the performance of the results. So I always find— say to people, I say, if you want to find something like, you know, I just took some creatine. This isn't my product, but I take creatine. And I thought, you know, if you can develop creatine that can serve rich people and help them live longer, You can make a fortune of money. And so, what I did as a kid growing up is I always found the rich neighborhoods that I'd go mow their lawns, wash their windows, paint their fences, walk their dogs, clean their swimming pools, and I get paid a lot more money than serving other people. And so, that's the key thing is, and people say, well, I don't know where to hang out wealthy people. Well, there's Four Seasons, there are Fairmont Hotels, there's Ritz-Carlton Hotels, there's business class lounges, you know, there's, they're everywhere. And so find out if I was flat— you and I were flat broke and they put us on an airplane and they had us fly to, let's say, India. We'll just make up a country, India. And you and I fly to India. We have no money. All we got is government ID on us, our passports. We got no money. First thing I'm going to do is I'm going to get out of the hotel. I'm going to get out of the airport. I'm going to find a way to get from the airport to the most expensive hotel in the city because they've got our money. And what I'm going to do is we're going to find a way to get to that hotel, get into the lobby of the hotel, And an international hotel like that is going to have international people who speak English, okay? So I can communicate to them. I'm going to find out how can I solve their problem. Can I carry their luggage to the hotel room? Can I shine their shoes? Can I run an errand? Can I, can I take them out and find a place for them to eat for dinner? Whatever it is, find something that I can do as a fair means of exchange for some money, and then get the next 24 hours, 48 hours, 72 hours set up so I've got a little buffer of time. So I can free my mind up thinking, oh, I got, I got expenses, I got necessity to take care of. Okay, my base is covered for the next 72 hours. I've got money. Okay, I can breathe. I've got food. Okay, I've got shelter. Okay, I'm good. Now get money for 7 days, and then 10 days, then 14 days, and then stretch it out so you can do that. And that's the mindset of what can I do? What's the fastest path to cash? So I always say to people, if you need money right away, look at things around your home. Look at things in your garage, your attic, your storage locker that you're not using. The golf clubs, the surfboard, you know, the paddleboard that you can go rent for a day, right? You haven't used the golf clubs for 5 years. Repurpose them on Marketplace on Facebook and sell them. Okay, get some cash. So you have money laying around your home everywhere you are. You're just thinking, oh, my golf clubs, my surfboard, my snowmobile, my snowshoes, you know, my tennis rackets. Repurpose those. And then go rent them until you got the money to go buy them again. So, there's always— there's never a shortage of money. There's just opportunity everywhere that you can create opportunities. So, people say, oh, it's so hard out there. No, it's not. You just got to change your mindset and how you look at things and go out and serve people and solve problems.

Right, right. So, you went from a kid that fails first grade to a kid that's making money. What was your first, uh, serious business in life? Like, when Did you officially made it? Let's call it like millionaire status.

Uh, was it? Yeah, 42. I didn't make a million until I was 42. That was through real estate, uh, through real estate investing and through having equity in companies. And I served on the board of directors of a company that we took from startup to publicly traded on NASDAQ. And I had a significant amount of equity in the company, uh, that I got in early stage and we rode the wave on that. But, uh, yeah, I wasn't eXp Realty. Yes, correct.

Nice, nice. Yeah, my first clients, what, like 15 years ago, were realtors. I would do ads for them. Uh, quite familiar with eXp. Was mostly in the Quebec region. eXp wasn't too present in, uh, or, or too, uh, too strong in Quebec back then. But yeah, I'm familiar with that company. Okay, so 42, you're millionaire. What happens after that?

Well, it's really kind of— so I'll tell you a fascinating story. I'm a very practical person. So I have a buddy of mine in San Francisco, California. And he owns 25 companies, very high net worth guy, very low profile guy. I've known him for many, many years. And so, he said to me, so listen, when you make your first million dollars, you call me or text me. I'm gonna fly from San Francisco to Vancouver, Canada. I'm gonna take you out for sushi. We're gonna go celebrate. Okay? So, I'm feeling pretty proud. So, what happened was I call him up. I say, guess what? I'm a millionaire. And he says, great. He said, I'm gonna fly to Vancouver. So, we get a date and time on the calendar. A few weeks go by. He flies up from Francisco to Vancouver. And he says to me a couple days before he arrives in Vancouver, hey, why don't you go to your accountant, your CPA, and get me an audited financial statement? I said, come on, Mark. I said, that's going to cost like $500. He goes, get it done. And I'm like, okay, fine. So, I called the accountant. He gets it done. So, I bring this audited financial net worth statement to sushi. And we're in downtown Vancouver, Canada. And my buddy Mark meets me. And he's very— he's a New Yorker. Okay, he's very blunt. And, uh, he says to me, he says, uh, he says, uh, so do you got your personal financial network statement with you? I said, yeah. He says, give it to me. So he's looking at it, he's a real numbers guy, and he looks at me, he goes, do you have credit cards? I said, yeah. He goes, put them on the table. Like, what? He goes, put your credit cards on the table so I can see them. Okay, put my credit cards on the table. You have bank cards, ATM cards? Yep. Put them on the table. Okay. I said, what's the point? He goes, okay, he looks at the window, you see down the street over there's an ATM machine? Let me ask you a question. Can you go to that ATM machine right now? Can you pull out $2,000 in cash, liquid cash, yes or no? And I said no. He goes, you can't pull out $2,000? I said no. He goes, how about $1,000? I said nope. He goes, how about $500? I said nope. I said I could probably get about $240, $260 liquid cash. So he looks at me. This, this, this, this sushi restaurant downtown Vancouver is packed with people. Okay, he's a big guy. He stands up and he goes, ladies and gentlemen, can I have your attention please? Everyone's looking like, what? He's got a loud voice, New York style, and he says, I'm here celebrating my friend's, uh, my friend, he's now a millionaire. And he goes and he shows, he shows everybody, here's his personal audited financial net worth statement. And you know what? On paper, he's worth a million bucks. Let's all congratulate him. Let's celebrate him. He's now a millionaire. Woohoo! Kumbaya, right? Let's do this. And he goes, you know what? And he's flat freaking broke in front

of her.

Embarrassing. I want to punch him in the face. And I said to myself, why did you do that? He goes, Darin, remember this, you cannot eat your financial net worth. You can only eat cash flow. You're worth a million bucks on paper, but you can't even pay for sushi because I eat a lot of sushi and I like expensive sushi. It's gonna cost us $300, $400 in sushi. And you can't even pay the bill for sushi. And so, the life lesson was you cannot eat your financial net worth, you can only eat cash flow. And that was a turning point where it flipped my mindset, was realizing, yeah, I was a financial net worth millionaire on paper, but now I had to generate the cash flow. And that's why I got into real estate investing and own multiple real estate properties today and invested in multiple different businesses, 'cause it's all about the monthly recurring revenue. And so, I've been doing the roll-up now with Smashing Numbers as a general partner. Why? Why am I in that space? Because it's boring, but it also provides monthly recurring revenue for myself and for our investors. Why am I involved in affordable apartments and doing some big real estate deals right now? Why? Because of the monthly recurring revenue of cash flow. That's the key thing.

Amen to everything you've said so far.

I'm just keeping it real.

Yeah, no, that means like we shared 100% of the same philosophy so far. I see a lot of these, uh, I work with Silicon Valley CEOs and founders, right? And so Some of them on paper, they're worth three, four, five million. But dude, they've ate fucking ramen for ten years. They're unhealthy. They're not that wealthy because they need to trade their stocks for for liquid cash. They have a heavy ass California tax on the income they're about to withdraw, right? So like, is it worth it just to say that you're multi-millionaire on paper? But like in real life, you look. Like a fucking homeless person.

Oh yeah,

yeah. It's like it's probably not worth it, right? Okay, so what happens from there? That was pretty humiliating. Not sure if I would hang out with with a friend like that. It's a great fucking story though. It's like a one story. What happens from there? Did you work on your liquidity or?

Yeah, I looked at my liquidity. See, so I have friends of mine around me that tell me what I need to hear versus what I want to hear. I don't have yes people around me. I have some very uncomfortable friends. Friends that are very direct, very blunt with me. Men and women around me in my inner circle, and we have uncomfortable conversations, right? And they cause me to level up and skill up. And see, most people—they spend time with people they respect and admire, not people they're always having influence on, right? So they get around people that that you know people respect and admire them. I want to be around people where they're causing me to always be uncomfortable, so I'm always having growth, right? Like I like I'm working on abs in a six pack right now. Visible abs. I'm 54 years of age. I've released a lot of weight. over the last few years. People look at my social media timelines like, man, you're like really toned up. And I have an elite trainer that works with me 3 days a week. And like, when I leave the gym, man, like, I'm like, I'm in pain, right? And he's like, you're paying for pain. He says, you want to perform at an elite athlete level, I'm your guy. If you want to be average, there's a dime a dozen personal trainers out there, right? So it cost me $16,000 a year to hire this guy. 12 sessions a month, $1,500 a month. He was like, Oh my gosh, I'm like, the return on investment for $16,000 a year, 12 sessions a month at 90 minutes a session is incredible. If I can get 3 to 5 years life extension on my life, if I can walk into a meeting and people see, man, this guy's disciplined, this guy's accountable, this guy's responsible, this guy's got energy. See, most people my age at 54 have low energy, right? And so, with me, what I realized was in my life was I had to change my environment of the people I was around. Yeah. I want to get around people who are older than me with the gray hair and the white hair for their wisdom and their life experiences. And I want to get around young people. Like last night, I was out night hiking with guys that are 19, 20, 21 years old. They're in the tech industry, just crushing it, these guys, because their creativity, their imagination, their energy, right? So, I have a mix of older people and younger people that I spend time with. And there's a guy I go hiking with sometimes. He's 90 years old. Right, he's 90. I'm 54. I was just, I was just in, I was just on a hiking expedition over in Nepal, and my, one of my buddies was 75 years of age with me. The guy's got visible abs at 75. I said, can I touch your abs? I said, I've never touched a guy with visible abs before. It's 75. I want that. And you know what he said to me? He said, as you get older, don't let the old man in. Don't let the old man into your body. Don't let the old woman in. Always stay young and youthful. It's the mindset.

Robert,

Yeah. So, what I do, I guess the thing for myself, what I really learned in my life is who I spend time with, who I hang around with, who I associate with, but realizing that a lot— there's signal and noise, right? And there's a lot of noise on social media and on the internet and stuff. And you get around the low-profile people and they're doing boring business like rolling up bookkeeping, accounting, tax planning firms, buying real estate. Right? Boring, but it's predictable revenue. It's consistent. And so, if you look at what I'm investing with my portfolio, it's boring stuff, but it's predictable and it's consistent. It's not volatile. It's not up and down all the time. And that's the things I do. But I think the biggest thing, my biggest turning point in my life was 38 years of age. I hired an integrity coach. I was in a seminar, had a woman sit beside me. And this is before COVID So, this is before everything was going virtual and on Zoom and videos and stuff. And Woman sat beside me, we went for lunch, and I said, I said, so what do you do? And she goes, oh, I do this and that. I said, what do you really do? She was like, why do you ask? I said, uh, something about you. And she goes, well, I, I work for the 3-letter agencies like FBI, CIA, DEA, right? Uh, stuff like that. And I said, what do you do? And she goes, well, I do the screening for applicants for new hires, like for the FBI. I said, well, that's funny. And she goes, yeah, I dig into people's backgrounds. So She said to me, she says, would you be open to doing an integrity audit on your life? Like, what's that about? She goes, well, I'm gonna, I'm gonna disrupt your life and I'm gonna show you where you exaggerate things, where you embellish things, where you're out of integrity on things. I'm like, what? So I pay her a bunch of money and for the next few months she gets to work and she does an integrity audit on my life. It was probably the most confronting, uncomfortable things I've ever done in my life as a human being. But what it did was that I had a tremendous breakdown and breakthrough in my life. To realize all the blind spots that I had, and what I realized from this audit, this integrity audit, was that we hear in business that talk is cheap. Well, most people cheapen their talk because their words have no power. So when they're online or they walk into a room or they meet with people, their words don't carry any weight because for myself, when I was younger, I had a lot of broken promises to myself. Just full transparency. So, I didn't follow through on things I said I was going to do that day. And so, every time I didn't follow through on the things I said I was going to do, it diminished my self-worth. And after I was consistent with a life pattern of multiple things I didn't follow through on in terms of breaking my personal promises, which means breaking my word to myself, like making my bed, running an errand, returning a phone call, talking to someone, doing something I said I was going to do, walking around the block, doing all these things I did, I put them off, I procrastinated, I thought I'll do it tomorrow. all these excuses, what happened was that I started getting suspicious and I started to mistrust myself. I didn't rely on myself. So I started getting mistrusting and suspicious of other human beings because I can't keep my own word to my own self. So what I realized was going through this integrity audit is that once I realized that if I start focusing on whatever I give my word to, I follow through, I commit to my commitments. So I imagine now with my finger, a lot of people say, let's put some skin in the game. So I imagine now when I give my word to something like me committing to doing this podcast with you, it's locked in my calendar. If it's in my calendar, it's in my life. It's going to get done. It's not structured in my calendar. It's not going to happen. So now with my fingers, if I give my word to something, if I don't follow through on that accountability and responsibility, it's like cutting my finger off. So I'm very mindful now of what I say yes to and what I say no to.

Yeah. Yeah.

So I'm very selective on my word.

Yeah, we're a lot of people. There's a few things here, right? Like there's holding yourself to very high standards. I know you climb mountains and stuff like that and do very hard stuff scaling businesses. And there's a percentage of how much of these things do you actually accomplish, right? And show up, right? And the higher you can get, the better. And the harder your challenges are, the harder it is to show up like 98, 97, 99% of the time. I wish people would get this equation, right? Like everything you've said today makes so much sense. And I talk to a lot of founders and CEOs, right? Like they don't do volume. They don't solve stuff for people, right? Like most of them, they just think about themselves. They don't hold themselves to very high standards, right? And—

That's right.

Do you know why most humans don't think that way? Is it that they don't want it bad enough? It's like, why aren't people, doing these things?

Well, so

yeah,

great question. So a lot of it comes down to their self-worth internally, what they say to themselves, right? Their internal dialogue, their self-worth. Another thing is their environment. They're around people who hold them at a lower level standard of accountability. And a lot of people don't want to be criticized by their loved ones, friends, or family. Like, for example, me. People ask me all the time, oh, you still doing that hiking thing? I said, what's the hiking thing? Like, you know, the hiking thing, you're still doing the hiking. Oh, you're still going to— like, so a few years ago, I was fat and overweight, addicted to processed foods and junk food and sugar. And I said, I'm going to get myself in the best physical shape of my life. I'm going to hire a trainer. I'm going to get a meal plan. And I was on and off the meal plan. I was cheating on the meal plan. Now I'm really dialed into the meal plan 90+% of the time, right? And, but it took me over a year to get dialed into my meal plan. But the thing was, I started telling people that I was going to release all this weight, which I've done, and now I'm going to start working on visible abs. So, in the beginning, people are like, hey, it's good to see you're making progress. You're releasing weight. You're working on your body. Now, people get awkward and uncomfortable and weird around me because when I go places, I'm using a select meal plan. I'm ordering select food off the restaurant in a meal menu in a restaurant. I say no to certain invitations or meeting requests. Now, when people want to meet with me, I go for a walk up in Vancouver on the seawall, or I take them for a hike. I don't meet them in a coffee shop or a restaurant. We're doing some physical exercise or activity. A lot of times with my calls with my teams, when we're on conference calls or Zoom calls, I'm actually walking or hiking in cell phone range. So, I'm compressing time and leveraging time where I'm out exercising while being on a Zoom call or a telephone call with my teams that work with me. And people are like, man, you're crazy. But no, I'm leveraging time. I'm working smarter, not harder. And so, but a lot of people, they don't want to take on that accountability. But I always say to people, if you're willing to do what's hard, life gets easier. If you always do what's easier, life gets harder. You choose, right? It's a choice. You want to do things that are hard now or do things that are easy and look at the results later on?

And just so that people know, right, you're not Mr. Perfect. I'm not Mr. Perfect. So, you had your your valleys of shadow of death, right? Like dealing with, I don't know, sugar and shit like that.

Yeah.

Um, is it— was it like a zigzag type of journey, ups and downs? Like, I think that's important to mention to people listening.

Yes, so for sure. So I, I really struggled with my fuel because I love ice cream, I like potato chips, I like chocolate. And so I was cheating with my trainer and he was doing all my metrics all my measurements because he wanted me to eat predictable food. Because if I eat predictable food, I produce predictable results. And so he could tell when he was weighing me in and measuring me that my predictable measurements of my food, I was off. And I just had to be fully confrontational. I said, listen, I'm paying for this. I'm paying for the training. I, I went to Dairy Queen the other day. I got a Blizzard. You know, I went to Whole Foods and I got potato chips because I love potato chips. And so now I just let him know that, hey, I want to cheat meal or a couple cheat meals each week or a cheat day. And this day I'm just going to eat my— so I now structure into my calendar that this is going to be my cheat day or cheat meal day. And I go out and I go and I go to Dairy Queen or I go get ice cream, I go get potato chips or eat some junk food or eat some chocolate. And I now do that. And now I'm disciplined enough that I look forward to that cheat day or those cheat meals. And the rest of the time now I'm disciplined and committed 99% of the time. There's occasionally I'll have something, you know, if I'm at a birthday party, I'll have somebody's like, here, we're passing out chocolate cake. I don't want to be disrespectful, so I'll have just a little. So rather than eat the whole chocolate cake, what I'll do is I'll just take a couple spoonfuls and I'll have a couple spoonfuls and then I'll push it back, say, thanks so much, I appreciate that, I'm good. So rather than eat the whole Blizzard, just a couple spoonfuls of it. Okay, it's good, then I'm good. So now I've learned to not eat it in portion size and not eat the whole thing, but just have a couple, just a little taste of it, and then I'm good.

Right, right. Um, I refuse cake all the time in parties. Just saying, like, people don't need to feel bad about that. Or I don't know, alcohol sometimes when people want to drag you in. Hey, one last thing before we go. You summited a couple of mountains, right? So just to complete the full picture, what goes on in your mind when shits get really hard, right? When, I don't know, you're about to quit, it's cold. Yeah. You have a massive headache, right, from altitude sickness. Yeah, tired as fuck. Uh, explosive diarrhea. Yeah, the stomach problems, right? Like, what, what goes on in your mind? How do you continue? How do you keep going?

Yeah, great question. So I've dealt with it. I was just, uh, in Nepal and Tibet. I was doing Mount Kailash, and 15 of the 19 people had explosive diarrhea for 3 days. I was one of them. So very uncomfortable at high altitude, 18,600 feet in elevation, you know, 5,600 meters. We've got explosive diarrhea. And, you know, do you quit and give up at high altitude, or do you carry on with the expedition? So it's called controlled discomfort. So you train and develop yourself on how, through scenario planning of best-case, likely-case, worst-case scenarios, you put yourself into uncomfortable positions, just like pilots do when they simulate simulators for commercial aviation or private aviation. So the key thing is controlled discomfort, situational awareness, mental toughness. And perseverance. And so I learned to put myself in these uncomfortable positions and have to deal with it, but still have to achieve the target of what I committed to. Unless it's a life and death situation, then we'll call the expedition off. But like last night, I took a bunch of people out nighttime hiking. We're out in the wilderness at nighttime hiking, and you want to see people who talk a really big game. But then as soon as you leave the parking lot of the hiking trail and they start going in the wilderness, People realize that social mask of wanting to look good and not wanting to look bad comes off, the image and ego. And now they got to be authentic and vulnerable and real with you, because if they get into trouble, you're the one calling 911 or calling search and rescue. Or if there's a wildlife encounter, you're the one that's going to help protect them as a group. And so you really learn. I always encourage people— I do a lot of my due diligence meetings, do a lot of my meetings on hiking trails, because you can't lie. Because when you're on a hiking trail You see people who they truly are. We can go play golf and pickleball and tennis. Those are all great sports, but it's also about looking good and not wanting to look bad. When I take you out in the wilderness and we're doing a hiking trail and you're farting and you're burping and you're sweating with me, you're bonding with me, and I get to know who you really truly are. And I see your strengths, I see your weaknesses, and I see your blind spots. You can't hide it because behavior never lies.

As long as it's not explosive diarrhea, right? I love it, Darren. Thanks for being on today. Where can people

Yeah,

you

can go to my website, darrenjacklin.com. You can also hit me up on social media as well. I'm on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, all the major platforms on there. Just look me up under Darren Jacklin. And, uh, yeah, if you, if you need any bookkeeper, accounting, tax planning, smashingnumbers.com. And if you're interested in doing real estate investing or being involved in real estate, hit me up and we can always talk. I love talking about real estate, love talking about investing. So, uh, like being around like-minded people.

That was Darren and Charles for another Founder