Never Gamble With Your Dreams

What’s up everybody? Hey, welcome back to the show. Mike Hambright here. “Real Estate Investing Secrets.” I’d love to share with you some thoughts I had. I just got back from Vegas after about five, actually I was out there for about six days and had some amazing thoughts on why you should never gamble with your future.
Welcome to “Real Estate Investing Secrets.” We’re all looking for freedom and the opportunity to live better, more fulfilling lives, but most of us were trained our entire lives to work for someone else and chase their dreams. How can we use real estate investing as a vehicle to achieve financial freedom? My life is dedicated to answering your real estate investing questions, and helping you build an investing business that allows you to change your life and the world around you, and to enable you to turn your dreams of financial freedom into a reality. My name is Mike Hambright from flipnerd.com, and your questions get answered here on the “Real Estate Investing Secrets” show.
Hey guys, Mike Hambright here. Just got back from Vegas last night. I was out there for about, I think I was gone for about five or six days. And interestingly enough, I was out there for kind of a unique thing. I actually did zero gambling, and I’ll come back to that in a second. A pretty cool little side note here. I want to talk to you today about why you should never gamble with your future and just some thoughts I had on how some people are kind of doing a hail Mary in life. Like they’ve wasted a lot of time not working on their goals and get so far along that they’re like just taking these, you know, big risks. They’re gambling more than calculated risks.
But a cool thing I’ll share while I was out in Vegas, I actually went to through a training program to help me learn how to kind of pitch segment proposals to TV producers, and I’m on a mission. I’m on a mission. It’s very clear. It’s posted in our office. My mission is to change the life of as many people as I possibly can through real estate investing. They can change their family’s lives, communities around them, and ultimately the world. And I want to start sharing that message in a bigger way.
So I learned how to pitch to TV producers and then I actually pitched my segment proposal to 12 TV producers from many markets around the country and I got accepted at an unusually high rate of eight different TV shows that I’m going to be on this fall from San Diego, LA, Phoenix, Washington DC, Chicago, Palm Springs, San Antonio. Might be missing something in there, but I’m going to be hopping around the country quite a bit sharing my message on local TV stations, Fox, CBS, the CW, a number of stations like that.
So anyway, really excited to keep an eye on social media. I’d love to catch up with you when I’m in the market. I’ve already kind of decided when I come into a market, my plan is to have some sort of get together with any friends or folks that I’m looking to network with in that market. So stay tuned.
But the lesson that I learned while I was in Vegas, I actually was in a meeting room almost the entire time. Very, very long days, hardly left at all, did not really spend. I didn’t gamble a dollar. A little side note of my history is I grew up in the Midwest and right when gambling riverboats were introduced. This is going age me, but back a while a while, and you could gamble when you’re 18 back then.
So on my 18th birthday started going into the riverboats with friends and gambling and stuff. And the truth is, is I got it out of my system at a young age. I almost never won and I was like, what the hell am I even doing here after all a period of time. And I’ve just never had an interest in gambling since then. And, you know, as a real estate investor, a lot of people think that what we do is risky. And the truth is, is I’ve lost money on I think four deals out of several hundred. And I’m not saying that there aren’t a lot of people that don’t lose money, the truth is they don’t usually know what they’re doing. So from my perspective, I honestly probably miss more deals because I’m overly conservative and that’s why my kind of failure rate is really low.
So I don’t see it as gambling at all. What I do is a very, very calculated risk. And that’s what I teach others too. So I just had a few thoughts while I was out there because I did walk through some casinos because I went to some dinners and you know, the casinos, aside from being all smoky and obviously hectic with a lot of noise and commotion is this, that, you know, Vegas has changed quite a bit.
If you’ve been to Vegas a number of times over the past couple of decades even, it’s changed a lot. It used to be a lot less family friendly. There’s a lot more shows now. There’s a lot more to do besides to just gamble. But when you walk through the casinos, it’s kind of sad sometimes to see some of the people that are just gambling. You feel like they’re on their last dollar. They’re betting it all. It’s like a hail Mary, right? This is like, I didn’t get what I wanted out of life. And I’m not saying this of everybody, and if you gamble, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that. What I’m talking about is the mentality that of, “I’m gambling to try to achieve success,” right? Like I don’t have a lot of money and God, I hope I get this because this would change my life. That is what I’m talking about.
If you gamble and it’s a sport for you and financially you’re fine otherwise, hey, no problem. That’s cool. That’s your hobby. And it’s not the hobby that I choose, but that’s cool. But I’m talking about the people that you can tell like this is their strategy for how to get ahead in life or how to try to get ahead, which we all know the odds for that are very, very slim.
Now, I’m not saying that they can’t win or have a good night where they make a few hundred bucks or a few thousand or whatever, but over time, this is not a wealth building strategy is gambling in a casino. So it was a little bit sad, just kind of seeing people gambling and thinking that, you know, what are the choices that they made to get them here? And I’m not trying to call anybody out or say anything negative about anybody in particular. What I’m trying to do is send a message to you to say, don’t do that. Don’t do that. Whatever your goals are, I don’t care if you’re 18 or 88, you can still hit your goals, but you have to have a plan to get there.
So don’t try to like hit it big and have this hail Mary of like, hey, I didn’t make good decisions or I got to some point that I didn’t want to over time. Now let me just try to risk everything in on a gamble that truthfully the odds are stacked against you.
So what do you do to achieve your goals? Well, the truth is it’s not hard. This is one of the, it’s easy to put this down. What’s hard is to execute upon your plan. So you have to set long-term goals. You have to know what it is that you’re trying to accomplish.
So what we often do, and I’ve been through a few different processes, but what we follow now is kind of a process that’s laid out. For those of you that know the EOS process, the Entrepreneurial Operating System. But this is true of anything you would ever read, anybody that helps you set goals and achieve them, it’s usually a combination of setting some longer term goal, you know, three to five years, which isn’t even really long-term, but three to five years out and then you back into, okay, well, if you want to be here in five years, where would you need to be at year two or three to get there? And if you need to be there, where would you be at the end of year one to get there? And how do you basically create steppingstones to get you towards your goal?
Writing them down is very, very important. And one of the things that I’ve found that is critical if you’re married or you’re in a relationship is to really spend time like take a half day off, take a day off, take a weekend off, whatever it takes, do it while you’re on vacation where you’re away from things and not distracted and start talking through these goals with your spouse or somebody that you’re in relationship with that cares about you and your goals and that you care about theirs. They need to be aligned. I’ll tell you, I had a conversation with my wife last night because I came back from this event all jazzed up and I’ve got some ideas on how to do some things bigger.
Sometimes every once in a while, I feel like man, am I just thinking too small, right? And maybe I need to take it to a whole another level. So that’s kind of what happened. And the conversation with her was like, look, these things like me, you know, I talked about going on a bunch of news shows around the country. Well, the side effect of that, that puts a burden on my family.
We have a son who’s 12, he’s in Boy Scouts and basketball and has other activities and me being away puts a strain on my family. Some of the other things that I want to do that I came back with, like taking it to another level would require me being gone more than I usually am. And so, it’s really important to share those goals with your spouse or your family or whoever you’re in a relationship with to say, does that mesh with you? Is that cool with you?
Now there’s two sides of that, right? One is when you’re looking to make big moves and you’re trying to get ahead, your friends and family might knock you down. They might, you know, there’s a fine line here. Now, be very, very careful with a spouse because you should be committed to that person for life, right? And your goal should be very much aligned, but it’s very common for friends or family members to knock you down because you’re thinking too big and that makes them feel bad. That makes them feel small, right?
So don’t allow people to knock you down. Your dreams and your goals are yours. You should shoot for the stars, right? But be realistic about it. And when it comes to your family, you know, think of the unintended consequences or the side consequences of that and make sure that you can work those things out.
If you’re gone all the time and you come home and your spouse has forgotten about you and they don’t think you should be doing that anyway and it ruins your relationship, well, those are all very important things to consider. If that relationship is important to you, and if you’ve married to somebody, it should be. Then you need to make sure that they support you, right? And you’ll have to deal with the consequences of whether they don’t and you’ll have to work that out but it is important that you are aligned with those that you love the most and that they support you. And if they don’t and you want to go ahead anyway, then just know there’ll be some consequences.
And I’m not saying that if they’re going to be consequences that you shouldn’t do those things if they really are your goal, but just consider everything. And my point in all this is I had a conversation with my wife and I said I want to do these big things. Here’s what I think that could do for us and here’s how it would impact other people but I know it’s going to put some strain on our relationship. And we talked through that, right? And my wife was very supportive.
So anyway, back to the goals. It’s important to set longer term goals, two, three, five years out, and then back into steppingstones. Ultimately, down to a year, down to where would you need to be in the next 90 days to hit there, break it into 90-day goals, like quarterly goals, break it into monthly goals, break that down to 30 days, break it down to weekly and daily. And you will be shocked if you set aside, if you want something bad enough, if you set aside time every single day to be taking small steppingstones working in the direction of those goals, what you can accomplish over a longer period of time. It is absolutely insane and it’s exponential, right?
So anyway, my message in sharing this with you is don’t wait so long in life and if you have, then get started now because that’s all you can do. That is all you can do. Don’t look back and say, well, my chances are there’s no way I could do it now so screw it. Like that is a terrible mentality and you shouldn’t have that. No matter what you want in life, you can achieve it. It just takes time. It takes small steppingstones. Don’t allow the casino to be your plan B or plan Z wherever you’re at, right? Plan A or the next plan is to set goals.
Work every single day on those goals whether it’s personal goals or professional goals. It could be weight loss, it could be quitting smoking, it could be business goals. It doesn’t matter. Set those small goals and get there. Don’t allow the casino to become your hail Mary of how you’re going to figure it all out at the end, right?
So anyway, a little bit of a rant. Hope you got some value from this. If you did, comment down below, share your thoughts, share this message with somebody that might need to hear it. I appreciate you a ton. See you next time.
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