Books You Need To Read! | Ep. 34

There's a couple 25 cent words in there.

That's Aaron for you.

Yeah. Next is from Lauren, also in our amazing marketing part of our company, who she works for all of the companies. Well, just. Yeah. Anyway, her book was How Adam Smith Can Change youe Life by Russ Roberts. He writes a take on Adam Smith's book Theory of Moral Sentiments and discusses the underlying reasons for why people do what they do. It talks about psychology and societal. Societal interaction. There's a 25 cent word and it makes you question your underlying motives for doing the right thing. And encouraged. Encourages discernment in every situation as well as a broader perspective on what actually matters in life versus what people want out of life. It is a great self reflection book that makes you rethink how you treat people and how your books that you.

Know have led to our success. But you just made a kind of funny comment.

This is the Freedom Real Estate Group book report.

That's right. So we're gonna talk about books that have impacted us, impacted us. And we asked our team to actually chime in too. So both professionally, personally, I think success is always attributed to professional success. But I think success should be related to us on a personal level. Right.

Yes.

We're successful if we have a good marriage, if we're happy, if we're not stressed out all the time. Right. So I really love. Because our team really did a good job of taking the personal and bringing that in. So do you wanna start team and then we're going to end with us, is that right?

Yeah, we're going to start with the team.

Alright. So the very first one I got to put my glasses on. All right. Very first one is from Jason Shake. He works in our property management company. His favorite book was To Kill a Mockingbird. It's a great book that teaches lessons with believable characters. It's deep enough that you can dive in with messages about empathy, learning, individuality and yet accessible enough that younger readers can identify with it.

Awesome. Next one is from Caitlin from our wonderful marketing leader and she works across all companies. Yes. And I like that I get to do this one because I get to swear. So the title of the book is you are a Badass by Jen Sincero. I don't know if I'm saying that correctly. She has a few books in this series, even one being you are a badass at making money. Her writing is real and raw. She doesn't sugarcoat anything. And basically is the bug in your ear telling you stop feeling bad for yourself. She talks about how she went to college, got a degree and then ended up being broke and having to borrow money and was looking for a pity party. The day she changed that around and actually started to take action, her life had done a complete360. She talks about what helped her through and frankly, just you want to do as well. Get up, stop feeling bad for yourself, take action, claim leadership in your life, which I'm going to talk about here in a second. Do what makes you happy and not to focus on anyone but yourself. She does this in a very blunt manner that is refreshing. Caitlin said she's read it twice and both times she read it, she interpreted it differently. The first time she said she reflected on her work and how to become a better leader within the workplace. And the second time she took it in a way that a more personal way, completely reflecting on her personal life. And she can proudly say that she's more confident, outspoken and more of her without feeling bad for it and feeling like she has to apologize. Truly an empowering book. I actually just ordered the Making Money series off of Amazon. I love that. That's awesome.

That is great. Thank you, Caitlin. Alright, the next one is Aaron Davis. He is our leadership and operations consult. He is, he's just a gold nugget. Let's just say that like the impact that he's making on us, our team, our companies is phenomenal. And I keep on saying, hey, you want to work here forever? Do ya? I'm just kidding, you know. Anyways, he joined us and had a book recommendation here. His was Man's Search for Meaning by Victor Frankel. I'm not sure if I pronounced that right, but he was a neurologist, psychiatrist and prisoner in the Nazi concentration camps during World War II. He describes his psychotherapeutic method of anchoring one's mental framework in a life purpose in order to feel positive while working toward it in any circumstance. When I read that, I was like, whoa, I don't even read books that are like that deep. I'm so when you get to my books, I'm like, it's all business but just reading this. And I was gonna actually this, I'll share it right now. Just because he did this, we have a professional development session every Friday. Right, Right. And the last two times we've kind of changed it up to allow people to go, hey, what do you want to read? Go read what you want to read. It doesn't matter what it is. We don't have to choose the book. Read what you want to read. And Share it. And I'm attending these now out of the pure fact that you kind of say Freedom Book Report. Right. Because I just want to hear. I want to hear the little snippets about the books that they're reading because it's causing me to learn about multiple subjects. And Aaron just made me want to read this book now, which would.

Normally, that book would not have hit our radar.

Not at all. Yeah. So I just love stuff like this.

Plus, I had you read that one, because perspective on their actions. You know those words that you just can't say, no matter how old, man?

Like rural. I hate that word.

That's not nice.

I always laugh at myself whenever I say it because it's just. It's such a weird word.

I just say out of town.

It's out in the boonies, man.

That's right. There you go.

All right, thank you, Lauren And Chris Sonnino with our property management company. He's our senior property manager. His book was how to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie is arguably my favorite book. Not by Jocko.

We'll talk about him in a second.

Yes. So he said. He talks about how the approach to communication and relationships impact career positioning and effectiveness in the marketplace, how to talk about tough topics, influence complex situations, mindfulness perspective, and so much more. Favorite quote is, instead of condemning people, let's try to understand them. Let's try to figure out why they do what they do. That's a lot more profitable and intriguing than criticism. And it breeds sympathy, tolerance, and kindness. To show all is to forgive all. I love that.

Awesome.

Very powerful. Awesome. I think we're actually going to do a podcast maybe about this, too. And if we do, I'm going to get some more of this from our team, because I love reading stuff like that. So I think you're going to take it away with your book so you can reveal your books.

Yes, and I'm not going to go as deep into it like they did on their books. But first book, obviously, think and Grow Rich. This is a good standard by Napoleon Hill. And this was a twofer because this book was amazing. And I mean, I remember the first time because I'm huge on audible, and I can tell you exactly where I was in Round Rock, Texas, about a decade ago when I first listened to this book, because it impacted me so much. But what really impacted me was the story that's at the very beginning of this book, three Feet From Gold. And that story always stuck with me. And then they came out with, well, it's from the Napoleon Hill foundation, helped write this book with Greg Reed. And this book, which is 10th anniversary. So this book's over a decade old as well now. But they made a book or they wrote a book, Three Feet From Gold, which really dives more into. It's a story about this guy really in this Three Feet From Gold. And this is on Audible as well. Very good on Audible as well. We both listened to that one. That was a great book. But those two, those are my top ones. Chris had mentioned his favorite book, other than anything written by Jocko. And that brings up Jocko Willink. And Leif Babin wrote this extreme how U.S. navy SEALs lead and win. Now, Danny and I had a chance to meet Jocko a couple years ago and we really dove deep into this book and we had the entire team read it with us. And it really changed the just everything in the office. In fact, there was one joke where something happened and I went to Tiffany, our transaction coordinator. I said, I'm sorry, that's my fault. And she said, no, it's my fault. I said, no, it's my fault.

I remember that.

Yeah, that was fun. But that's a great one by Jocko to start with. And then he also has the Dichotomy of Leadership, which is amazing. I've actually read these. This one is a good one to read, but it's also a good one for Audible because it's Jocko talking and he's. Well, you just have to have, have to hear him talk. Same with Dichotomy of Leadership. And then he also has the Discipline Equals Freedom Field Manual by Jocko. This is just an amazing book as well. It's more of notes. It's not really like a normal book, so it's really easy to get to. But the Last of My Navy Seals is the David Goggins book, Can't Hurt Me. This book, if you ever wanted to understand the level of what you can handle mentally and physically, read this book because it'll change your mind. And the only thing I'm going to take from this one is he was in so much pain from running so many ultra marathons, you know, the 100 mile marathons that he could barely walk. And he was in Las Vegas with his mom and his fiance, I think, because they wanted to run the Las Vegas marathon. And so he went out the day before, couldn't even run 100 yards, barely could walk. And he said, listen, I'm going to walk with my mom on the marathon. You know, told his fiance, go ahead and run the marathon. And so they're standing there ready to get ready, and they go, 3, 2, 1. They shoot the gun off, and he takes off. He runs. And he runs the entire marathon so fast that he actually qualified for the Boston Marathon, and he could barely walk the day before. So this book is a great book. This is a good read. It's got some great pictures in here. But the Audible is even better because the audible, the person that reads the book at the end of every chapter, he stops and then talks to David about that chapter that they just. That he just read. And if you do not like swear words, read the book. Don't listen to the audible. There might be some swear words on the Audible. Just. Just letting you know those are mine. These are very inspirational.

Yes, I will say that I brought out my books, but I literally went to our library.

That's where I went. Yeah.

Right next door to this podcast room, vlog room, whatever you want to call it. Recording Studio is our innovation room, and it's got a bookcase with a whole bunch of books. And these are literally just the books that we decided to buy in physical format. Because if you look at our Audible account, it's just like. And when people recommend books, you know, to me, I usually go right straight to audible. Or like, I just bought meconomy, I think, by Mark Evans. He was just on a training that we were doing, and as soon as he said, I was like, boo, I'm either on Amazon getting the physical book or I'm going to Audible. And I went to Audible, and it's not there. That's why I got the physical book. But anyways, there's so many books I probably would be talking about right now, but they're on Audible. And so I went to the bookcase and went, let me just find these. So I'm going to talk about these real quick. We'll probably talk about the rest on the podcast. Profit First. This is actually Profit first for contractors. And it's because I got a physical book for me and my project manager to have. I actually want to say that my favorite book of this series is the original Profit First. It's really, really amazing. Opened up my mind in terms of how we should be running our financials and caused me to ask the question to Randy, because he started as our cpa, turned into our cfo, and I said, hey, have you read Profit First? Do you know how to do this? Because I want to do this for our company. He was like, yeah, of course. And so we have Been working on it ever since we had that conversation. We were trying to figure out when can we actually start implementing the buckets and how this financial strategy works. So that's my very first one. The next one is Profit Works. And the reason this is at the top of my list is because Flip and I believe in win wins. We believe in the team and who we're working with. And all of us were working so freaking hard that we don't believe in a company that is profiting without the team winning it in some way. And so this was the. When I started looking for books about profit sharing, this is the one that I found. And we had, we said, anybody who wants to be involved in the creation of this profit sharing program for our company, get the book, read it, and let's all meet. And so we met for like three or four weeks and they were spread out and people were reading it, contributing ideas. And I think that's how you grow a company, you know this size and make it truly a win win is that you do things like this and you allow them to participate in the thought process and ideas. So that one meant a lot to me, so I brought it tax free wealth. I've talked about this one a whole lot recently because I am just literally amazed at how much I didn't realize how much we could write off in taxes compared to the size of real estate investment. We've been very much single family type investors for a very, very long time. And the more I get into multifamily and now large multifamily, I'm going look at how much we can write off and how many tax advantages that we have that the government is giving us to write off. And talk to a gentleman that paid a million dollars in taxes last year and this year he's getting money back and he'll forever not have to pay taxes now legally by code. And so he said, get this book. And so in our supply room right across the hallway, I've got like 20. Because these last three books here, I bought so many of them that I could give them away. So even a local mastermind that we brought in, I said, hey, I just read this book. Who wants one?

Exactly.

So we gave them away and we send these out to clients and everything like that. So really, really powerful book about how you can legally write off taxes through what the government created for us in order to do so.

Isn't he something with Robert Kiyosaki?

Yeah, Rich Dad, Poor Dad. He's like the financial advisor for Rich Dad, Poor Dad, I'm glad you mentioned that. I forgot to mention that it even says a Rich Dad Advisor book.

There we go.

Then. My next one is Good to Great. I read this at the beginning, I think, of last year, and when I created my 2021 vision board, I actually it's called Good to why Some Companies make the Leap and Others don't by Jim Collins. This is what I put. This is the quote I put from this book on my vision board, and it says, I believe it is not harder to build something great than it is to build something good. It might be statistically more rare to achieve greatness, but it does not require more suffering than perpetuating mediocrity. Building greatness requires less suffering and perhaps even less work. And I couldn't agree with that more, because in our pursuit to greatness, there's so many times where we're not satisfied with mediocrity. We just are mediocre. We haven't gotten to that push. And that mediocrity creates such a hairball of messes and mistakes and issues, and it's frustrating and nobody's happy with that. So I really, truly believe in that. And I'm going to put it back on my digital board when we get done. And my last one, which I talk about all the time, and everybody can probably go, I know her favorite book, who, not how, and that's because it's allowed us to get to where we are right now. Because our very first who was Randy, who became our cpa, then our cfo, then vice president of business development, and he continues to grow with the company. And then he referred us to our project manager who now runs Bulldog Renovations. And then Steve, who runs Bulldog Renovations, referred us to two other people who are with us. Aaron, our leadership and operations consultant that we just talked about as he contributed, and Packer, who's running our acquisitions company, Catching a Wild Houses. And each one of those people are leaders in their own right. They build their own company all by themselves. And somehow we have just been blessed enough to be able to surround ourselves with freaking amazing people. And we're going to grow leaps and bounds beyond what Flip and I ever could imagine. And it's because who, not how, and you are who's. And so this is supposed to be a very short vlog, so I'm stopping right there. And if we want to talk about more books, we can do so on the podcast. Podcast.

So we know that you like us to keep these short and sweet, even though we don't. We hope you enjoyed this one. We will go into these a lot further and probably have more books and even show probably our audible account so we could talk about some of the books we have on our audible account that we don't have here. We don't have the physical books for but we hope you enjoyed it. And again don't forget to check out our podcast and our podcast is called.

Real Talk which is real talk for.

Real estate investors which apparently is not on MySpace. Very sad about that.

All joke man. All joke.

They don't. They die hard.

Yes and we always like to invent end all of our vlogs and our podcast with Invest smart live happy Bye everybody.

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