It took me 8 years to completely replace the income from my job, as a full time senior manager at Cadbury. This was with passive income from my property portfolio. Since 2003, I have helped thousands of investors also replace their income but much faster than I did it. This is because they have had the benefit of learning from me exactly what works and what doesn’t work. In the last 16 years, I have been fortunate enough to observe what traits make people massively successful in their property investing.
In a nutshell, the key to massive success is making baby steps every day. Work on the right things and continually move forward until you achieve the success you desire.
What is Your Reason Why?
Your success in anything, starts with your reason why. If you want to achieve anything, then you need to take action. This will require some time and effort from you. Unless you have a clear reason why you want something, you won’t be motivated to take action. You won’t even carve out the time from your already busy life in order to take the necessary action.
So I recommend you get really clear on why you want to invest in property. Set precise goals of what you want to achieve. If you are too comfortable in life, then it can be very hard to motivate yourself.
Gain Specialist Knowledge
Once you know what you want and why you want it, you need to gain the specialist knowledge to learn what to do. You will also need to know how to do it, in order to achieve the success that you desire.
From my personal experience, I can tell you that it took me 8 years to replace my income. This was by doing it the hard way, on my own, learning by trial and error. Why would you waste time, money and effort, making mistakes and trying to work it out for yourself? When you could quickly learn from someone who has already achieved what you want.
Investing in yourself and in your own ongoing education, is the very best investment you can make. It will open your mind, expand your horizons, build your personal belief and should teach you exactly what to do . You can then fast track your success and avoid the expensive mistakes most people make who try and do it on their own.
Be Cautious
However, please be careful who you choose to learn from. Make sure they have personally achieved the success you want. They need to have become really good at transferring their knowledge to other people. You can check this by the number of people they have trained, who have then gone on to be successful in their own right.
If they are confident in their ability to transfer their knowledge to you, then they should have no problem offering you a money back guarantee. This would be on the training they provide to ensure you get value for money on your investment. They can’t guarantee what action you will take but they should be able to guarantee the quality of the training they provide.
“Investing in yourself and in your own education, is the very best investment you can make.”
Take Action
Once you have gained the specialist knowledge and know what to do, it comes down to you implementing your learnings. One of the best ways to integrate your knowledge is by actually doing it and learning through experience. You don’t need to know everything before you start. I have been investing for over two decades and I don’t claim to know everything. I am still learning every day. You will learn so much by actually doing it so you need to start taking action.
Taking action is really important, but is critical to make sure you take the right action. I meet lots of people who appear to be doing lots of things but not getting the results they want. This is simply because they are not doing the right things. This happens for a number of reasons.
- Lack of Clarity: Where people are not really sure what they should be doing. Or they don’t know what is most important. So they do lots of things without necessarily doing the right things.
- Lack of Knowledge: Where they don’t know what they should be doing because they have not learnt the strategy properly.
- Lack of Focus: Because they get distracted easily by their environment and social media. They also decide to run after every new shiny penny they see rather than Following One Course Until Successful.
- Lack of Discipline: Where people just don’t do the things they know they should be doing.
Sometimes people will use lack of time as a reason why they do not achieve the results they want. It is not so much the amount of time you have, but the quality of time and how you use it.
Most of the people who participate in my 12- month Property Mastermind Programme already have full time jobs or run their own busy businesses. Yet in just 8 to 10 hours of focused time, they achieve incredible results in just a year or two. This is often with no prior property investing experience.
Usually some of my top performers are the ones with full time jobs who seem to achieve more than the people doing propery full time. The main challenge faced by those who do property full time, is that the tasks they have expand to the time available.
What Is My Biggest Tip?
My biggest tip for any property investor (either part time or full time) is to use a default diary to carefully plan your time. This is so you know what you are doing and when you are doing it. It is a bit like a school timetable which will give you structure to your day. It will also help to keep you focused. Just like a school timetable, you need to plan in free time in which you can deal with emergencies that come up and require your attention. Otherwise if your diary is completely full, you won’t have space to cope with emergencies. This means things could easily slip in your diary.
Be careful what you put in your diary in the first place. Make sure everything you do is going to move you closer to your goals. Make sure of this before you put it in your diary. If it is in your diary, make sure it happens. Don’t allow things to slip.
Managing Your Action List
When you have a list of tasks to do on your action list, it can be very tempting to do the easy and quick task first. This is usually so that you can tick them off your list and feel good that you have made some progress. In reality, this is often not the best use of your time. What you should do, is look at your list of tasks and work out which is the most important task. Do that one first. You need to prioritise your tasks and focus until they are completed. Only once you have finished the most important task, should you move onto the second most important. If you keep switching from one task to the next one, without completing them properly, then you will not be very efficient.
“My biggest tip for any property investor (either part time or full time) is to use a default diary to carefully plan your time.”
Be Persistent
One of the most important keys to massive success is your ability to be persistent. Keep going even when you don’t seem to be getting the results you desire. Too many people give up too soon because they are unrealistic about how long it will take to start to get results.
In this microwave society we live in, most people want instant results. If they don’t get them, they assume that what they are doing does not work. So they jump on to the next thing that they hope will give them instant results for very little effort. Well let’s be realistic here. Property investing is not like that. You need to put in time and effort which unfortunately many people are just not prepared to do. However, if done correctly, the time and effort you put in will be the best paid work you have ever done. You can gain a monthly passive income and also benefit from long term capital growth.
Build Your Momentum
You need to keep going, keep going, keep going. Persistence is key to your success. If all this seems overwhelming then my biggest tip goes back to something I mentioned at the beginning of this article. Do something every day. Some days you may be able to have a few hours to focus on your property investing. Other days you will only have a spare 10 minutes. But if you do something every day, the right things, over time you will start to gain traction. Eventually this will become momentum, which will help you to keep going. Make it a daily habit to do something every day to move you forward in the right direction to your property goals.
