I didn't speak for 99 days!?! That time I joined a cult...

Homeless, broke, living under a bench, not allowed to speak to another human for 99 days, and a bunch of other stuff. This will be a very unique episode of Multifamily Strategy. I am defining what zero looked like for me when I got into real estate. I've never shared this story before, uh, frankly, because I didn't know how. But I think it's really important when we talk about mindset and becoming an entrepreneur and extreme focus to understand what it looks like for individuals who have done this. So I'm going to share my story on today's episode. This is the Christian Osgood origin story. Welcome to Multifamily Strategy. I'm your host for today's episode, Christian Osgood. Today, sharing a piece of my story that has never been shared before. Now, I have found with majority of entrepreneurs who have made it to 7, 8, 9 figures in their businesses, there's usually something a little different about them or something that's happened to them in the past that gives them extreme focus. They either have a chip on their shoulder or something huge they're overcoming., but you have highly competitive people who are ridiculously focused. This is true in business. This is true in sports. Anyone who hyper excels at one thing typically is that way for a reason. Now, when I say we started at $0 and I took $0 and starting from zero and went to hundreds of multifamily units, a $30 million portfolio in a fairly short period of time. There's a reason that I'm as crazy focused as I am. If you are starting your own journey, you need to document before you even get to goal setting, what is my starting point and where am I trying to go and why is it important? That is where you start any business and that is where you get to be hypercompetitive in whatever space you're in. So I'm going to share this crazy story. I hope you have some fantastic takeaways, uh, because this was a very unique a horrible time in my life that turned me into the entrepreneur I am today. Going through college, I was an entrepreneur major. At the very end, I switched to management and operations because I didn't know what business I wanted to start. That seemed like a weird thing for someone majoring in entrepreneurship, so I made a slight adjustment at the end. But I'd always wanted to start businesses and invest in real estate. The first problem that I went out to tackle was I went and started a church with a group of people. Now, I am of the belief that the American church today likes to do a whole bunch of production on Sunday and lacks pretty heavily in the midweek. I look at the Bible and I see a community that does not look like the community that I read about, especially going through like the Book of Acts in the Bible. Whether you're religious or not, any business, nonprofit or not, that you're trying to start or any community you're trying to start starts with a specific mission, specific goal, solving a specific problem. That was the problem that I went out to solve. Can we create community that looks different than the commercialized church that I see in the US? Started very normal, 5 or 6 people moved into a house. We're doing business together. We are coming up with strategy. We're building the framework for what we're going to launch. However, it started getting a little bit weird very gradually, as these things tend to, uh, the dietary restrictions got heavier and heavier. So we're eating less and less. Workout requirements where we're having to do crazy physical feats to sharpen us as individuals. And then we hit a point where they're like, hey, we really want to focus up for 3 months. And so for the next 3 months, we're really just not going to do any like communication with family. We're just going to focus just on, on this. So unfortunately, we had 3 things that are not good if you're trying to avoid brainwashing, which is 1, calorie deficit. 2, sleep deprivation. 3, isolation. Those are kind of the formula to get into crazy land. Where it ended, they decided that I was too talkative, and they're like, you know what, you should take an indefinite break from speaking. And I was like, well, that sounds terrible. What does that look like? They're like, well, we'll just kind of let you know as you go. 99 days later, they had drained all the money from my bank accounts. I was allowed to eat once a day. And I couldn't buy my own food. I was allowed up to 4 hours of sleep, and I had not spoke to another human being for 99 days. That sucked. By the way, they let me go home for Thanksgiving, and about 15 minutes into back into reality, I was like, oh good, other people think this is crazy too. And I got out of that. Coming out of that though and realizing, hey, I've been brainwashed into a crazy weird cult and was unallowed to speak to people. It makes you think some life questions. You go through that, and that was obviously a therapy session and multiple therapy sessions to figure out, like, okay, one, how did this happen to someone who believes they're generally rational and not a weirdo? Two, I'm starting with literally no money, a brutally hard experience, and I had to start all the way from zero. So when I say I had no money, there was an extended period of time I was sleeping under a park bench. I could not afford anything and I wasn't communicating with anyone. Fast forward to today, I'm a public speaker. I have a YouTube channel. Talking is what I do for a living. Money-wise, we've made multiple 7 figures in multiple partnerships. Cody and I on this channel talk a lot about our real estate partnership. I also have a property management company and other businesses, all of which have been very, very successful. I am hyper-focused on this, very competitive, because I have a huge chip on my shoulder. It is hard to accept that this hard thing happened to me. And in this case, this is something that I allowed to happen to myself. I think back on that more than I would like to, and that keeps me insanely driven. Now, I am not suggesting that joining a cult or taking a speech fast indefinitely because someone told you it was a good idea is something that you should implement. But you should be able to isolate the things in your life where you went, I went through this and I never want to experience this again. I want to change this, or I want my life to look different than it is. And here is why. Why am I so insanely focused on business, able to work 20 hours a day? Because I care a lot, because this means a lot to me. And I've been through a lot in a fairly short period of time. It is wild to not speak to anyone for 100 days, especially if you're someone like me and you like to speak and you like to listen to others and you're very socially based. That was ludicrously hard and horrible for me. In a 30-day period, I lost 45 pounds. I went from 200 pounds to about 155 from not being able to eat. Not good, not healthy, could have killed me. Happy to be here. I am now hyper-focused on competing in the things that I want. They took money, I'm now rich. They took my speech, I now speak for a living. Those are the things that motivate me. If you're someone else in any other situation, I'll be honest, in our mentorship program, there are people who have been very successful who have been through astronomically harder things than that. I mean, like unfathomably harder than what I had to go through. Notably, most of those people are the most successful people in the program. So the takeaway I had here, it's not even you have to go through ridiculously hard things. You do need to understand what your past is, and it really is how important is your future to you. And I think for people who have been through something that is unusual or extremely difficult, it hardens you and gives you a different mindset to where you think about your future differently. Now, if you have the ability to take the experiences of others, internalize it, and set your goals to the point where they matter to you enough all of a sudden a 20-hour workday doesn't matter and it's not that hard. Skipping that one birthday party or family event that you really want to be at because you're prioritizing something in your life or your business right now isn't that hard. Sacrificing things today for something that might be realized 5 or 10 years in the future isn't really a big deal to someone who is hyperfocused and the mission is very important. So what did this look like for me building my business? I didn't have an issue not paying myself for an extended period of time. I am not weird about money because I've had money, I've not had money. I've gone from literally zero and trying to buy yogurt on a credit card with a $1,000 limit to I have an abundance of money. And even in our business, we've had times where we've bought a lot of properties, done a lot of renovations. I don't get weird or uncomfortable when money's at zero because I know how to regenerate it. I believe that I can do it. And then I just do the steps that it takes to get back there. People who get weird about money are easily distracted or stressed, and they make bad decisions. So takeaway 1: don't get weird about money. People who've had no money, typically while they are scared to not have it, they know how to operate without it, and they're not scared of losing it when they have the skill set to build it again. 2: stay ludicrously focused. When the goal is significant enough and you know where you're headed, you're going to pursue that hard enough. You're going to prioritize it correctly. 3, sacrifice now is worth it in the future. Majority, not all, but a majority of my businesses started within the last 3 years. Almost all of them are 7-figure companies. We have an 8-figure portfolio. We have a whole lot of holdings and we've built a lot of business. You've also probably, if you're watching this channel, seen me on some podcast or somewhere on social media because we run that entire marketing branch of the company. How are we able to do all these things, run multiple companies, run a real estate portfolio, be on site with the real estate, manage contractors? It is just ludicrous focus for a set period of time. I'm 3 or so years into this journey. In 5 years, I'm imagining this gets a lot more passive or I take on new challenges. Identify your past, understand what starting from zero looks like for you and your portfolio, define where you're headed and why it's important. And I believe that you can accomplish anything. This is my story on how I started from zero and why I am the way I am. I really hope that sharing this means something to you because it's a weird story and it's really hard. Just honestly, it's— I haven't shared this in 3 years because it's weird to say like, hey, I think I'm a normal rational person and I was in a cult and I wasn't allowed to talk and it was self-inflicted. I could have said no and I could have escaped. There's more craziness and more terribleness in there, but for the first attempt at sharing this, that's about as deep as I think we're going to go here. I hope this helps. If you want more tips on real estate in the practical, that is about 99% of what the rest of this channel is. It's not a lot of monologuing or talking about personal experiences. It's talking about the technical and the practical of creative finance and managing and building your portfolio. If you found this helpful, drop a like for me. I'll be responsive in the comments. So if you guys have any questions about the craziness of this, go ahead and drop a comment. Otherwise, follow for more, like, subscribe, and we'll see you on the next episode.