Christian Osgood, a real-estate entrepreneur managing $20M in debt and hundreds of rental properties, uses a three-bucket framework to manage stress: Control (act on it), Influence (affect but don't fully control), and No Control (accept it). He navigated a catastrophic flood that damaged 19 of 24 units by categorizing each problem, turning the loss profitable.
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If you're an entrepreneur in real estate, you may have realized this is not actually passive income. It's very active. And with that active income and the struggles that it takes to make a lot of money in real estate, there comes a lot of stress. We're going to talk about exactly how we handle that, what the mindset is. I get requests to this all the time. This is also a favorite when I talk about this on the mentorship. This is one of the favorite topics. I do realize that most of you will not watch this video because videos on mindset don't do well on YouTube. So do me a favor if you are watching this. Like it, share it, leave a comment, do all the things to make the algorithm love this. Otherwise, this video is going to do terrible. I think this is valuable stuff, but it's up to you to help me get this message out. So when you have a lot of stuff going on, let's say you've raised money, you have $20 million of debt. Even if you have $25 million of real estate, built $5 million of net worth, you're still servicing $20 million of debt. That's a lot of stress. When there is a personal thing that happens with a tenant or you have a crime issue, which will happen if you scale large enough, There's drugs at the property. There's been a, a horrible crime at home. These things, you know, you're providing residences. A lot of terrible things happen domestically. You are a landlord. You're going to have to filter this. A lot of this can have a lot of stress. In addition, there's other things that happen to properties such as fire, flood, electric, plumbing, septic. All of these have a lot of question marks, which can cause people to freeze, slow down, make bad decisions, or otherwise lose sleep. And if your goal is to leave the 9 to 5 and to sleep well at night, to provide for your family, and that is in jeopardy, that can cause a lot of stress. I'm gonna share with you a simple trick that one of my past mentors taught me that has worked phenomenally. You're gonna put everything into 3 buckets. Things you can control, this direct input. Things that you can influence, things that you can get the ball rolling on or you can move, but you may not have full control over. And things you can do nothing about. The first thing you do when there is stress, identify and just accept this is stressful. I need to deal with this. The first mistake people make is they try to repress a bunch of stress, and that is where you get stuff like burnout, panic attacks. I have a friend who actually had a heart attack from not addressing any of the stress at all and just being like, I'm fine, I'm super macho. Don't do that. Identify this is stressful. This is causing me stress. I'm thinking about this more than I should. Is this something that I can actually just resolve on my own? So let's first put it in the bucket of things that we can control. If you have a large project that you need to do, but you need to drive to the property to get your head around it, or there's a piece of paperwork that you need to fill out for a government form or for your taxes or whatever else is stressing you out, and it is something where the— it stops with you, you are the bottleneck, just identify that and then do the darn action. And what you'll find is when it's off your plate, you're no longer stressed. A lot of us should have learned this in middle school and high school, and we didn't. We kept procrastinating on things. Stop procrastinating. You're gonna reduce your stress dramatically. Things you can control are the best because once you've identified it, you've actually put it in that bucket, well, the stress disappears. She's like, okay, it's on me and I have the power to fix it. Control is one of the things that causes people the most stress 'cause they don't do it. But once you put it in that bucket, stress is basically gone. You just have to go do the thing and now on to the next task. Some things you cannot control. They depend on other people. Let's say you have a major renovation. You need to lease a unit, but it's not rent ready until the renos are done. You are not a contractor. You do not have the skills to do this. So say it's a major piece like rewiring electric, doing plumbing, putting on a new roof. If it is outside of what you could control, what can you do to influence this? Uh, let's see. Have I allocated the right dollars to this? Have I called and got bids from contractors? Have I checked in with my contractors to make sure things are still on the timeline? If you do the things that you can influence and you've already done the things you can control, again, you have them in buckets, they're in categories in your mind. They're like, okay, done, done. Then you hit the thing that you can do nothing about. After, let's take the same example. We have large projects. I've done the pieces that I could do. I've influenced the things that I can influence with keeping everyone on track and on budget with timelines. Now I am waiting for the work to be done. While you may still have stress here, it actually does help if you've actually gone through the mental exercise of I'm going to put it in the bucket of I can't do anything about this. So rules of the game, I am not allowed to feel stress on this because the ball's not in my court. When there is something that I can do, when it falls back into influence or even better control, I will do the next step quickly to help it move along. But until then, that needs to sit in that bucket and I move on to other pieces of my business. What I have found, if you actually do this categorization and you identify these things, you carry very little stress Even in a large business. Now, I bought hundreds of rental properties. A lot of these are heavy value-add. We've dealt with massive drug problems, massive crime problems, and we fixed them, but they're stressful. I've had a building, 24 units, 19 of them flooded in a freeze. We had the coldest winter we've had in 50 years. Even with the heaters on and water dripping and all the stuff that you do to prevent it, I had an absolute loss of property. We followed these steps and I was actually able to roll out of that profitably on the deal. I actually made money on a deal where we had total loss of property and insurance didn't cover it. Story for another time, but we were able to get through it because instead of freezing or panicking or holding stress, we stayed calm and we addressed everything on what can we do today, what can we influence, and what things are out of our control. By choosing not to stress on those and focusing on other pieces of the business, we were able to navigate our way through this and adjust pieces. Anyone can do this, but on a mindset video, I really wanted to share this specific tactic because it has worked very, very well for me. It's allowed me to run— I have 5 core companies, Multifamily Strategy being my baby. I have my portfolio, I have 2 property management companies, I have a sales marketing arm that I focus very, very hard on that's growing fantastically well. But with all these different companies and objectives, not to mention the resort that is the bane of my existence, we're able to actually manage the stress of this and run multiple things fairly effectively. So I'll say it one more time. Control, influence, you can do nothing about. Control, you're not really allowed to stress because you just have to go do something, go do the thing. Influence usually has the most stress because you can't actually control it, but you do have action steps that you can move along. Make sure that you cleared those before you put something in the bucket of I can do nothing about this. When it's in that bucket, rules of the game, you need to build the discipline to go, I do not stress about things I do not control because stress doesn't help. On control, stress is great. You're like, I'm feeling this. Why am I feeling this? I need to go do something. You get it done. Good stress. Influence, good stress. You can do nothing about it. Not allowed to stress. Learn the fortitude to put it in that bucket. Keep it in that bucket until it falls into another one where you have an action step. In this way, you better control your universe, you better control your stress, and you can have a whole lot more fun building income to be a lot more Passive. I hope this was helpful. This was life-changing for me. Hopefully it will help you build your business. Do me a favor, drop a comment, a like, subscribe, help me get this video out there because I think people need to know it. And I cannot think of the catchy title that's going to get everyone to click the thumbnail to watch this video. So while I think of that, you, uh, help me get this live, and I will see you all on the next episode.
