Shatter Who You Are For Who You Want To Become

Mike: Welcome to the FlipNerd.com podcast. This is your host Mike Hambright and on this show, I introduce you to expert real estate investors, awesome entrepreneurs, and super cool vendors that serve our industry. We publish new shows each week and have hundreds of previous shows and tip videos available to you. All of which you can access by visiting us at FlipNerd.com or visiting us in the iTunes store.
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Hey, it’s Mike Hambright with FlipNerd.com. Welcome back for another exciting VIP interview. In fact, it’s our 200th FlipNerd show today and I have a very special guest here with me. It’s an exciting milestone. Thanks to the thousands of people that watch or listen to our show every single day. That’s why I do it. I do it to inspire others and my guest here likes to inspire others as well. So today I’m joined by Pete Asmus. He’s a real estate investor, consultant, author, speaker, radio host.
Pete: That’s the audience. Everybody’s clapping.
Mike: He’s a comedian and he’s really a mover and shaker in our industry. He really loves to inspire others and he’s going to share some of that with us today. In fact, we had to give this a title and we’re calling it, Break It ’til You Make It, How to Shatter Who You Are for Who You Want to Become and we’re really going to talk about how you can move past failures or the fear of failure to be successful in this industry because a lot of people in this industry, unfortunately defeat themselves because they convince themselves they can’t be successful. Or they let some small failure get in the way of everything they could become. So Pete is great at sharing this stuff. I’m excited to have him with me today to talk about this. So hang with us for the 200th episode. Before we get started though, let’s take a moment to recognize our featured sponsors.
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Hey Pete, welcome to the show my friend.
Pete: Man, thank you for having me. I am so excited to be here right now.
Mike: Yeah, yeah. You know what’s funny is, my wife, I talked about interviewing my wife. My wife is really the, she doesn’t think she gets enough credit but the reality is everything I do she’s the brains of the entire operation. But when I said “Well how about I interview you?” She’s like “What am I going to talk about?” She’s an introvert so she’s like “I don’t know. What do I . . .” you know.
Pete: Right.
Mike: So she said “Well maybe, I’ll do episode 250.”
Pete: So she’s got 50 more episodes to really kind of find her space. Right?
Mike: That’s right. That’s right so, look forward to having Lindsay Hambright on a future episode.
Pete: Two-fifty.
Mike: Today we’ve got somebody that’s equally as beautiful. We have the wonderful Pete Asmas here.
Pete: Did you just call me beautiful?
Mike: You did man. You’re hot.
Pete: I love it. You know what, I am. You should definitely check out all these photo shoots I’ve been doing. I feel like I’m on top of the world man. Which kind of reminds me of, I’ve really been doing probably five different photo shoots in the last week.
Mike: Wow.
Pete: And the last one I was at prior to this was for my daughter who, who has alopecia. So she has alopecia universalis and if you don’t know what that is, it means that she’s basically allergic to her own hair. That’s what alopecia literally stands for is allergic to your hair I guess. And so, we, she was in a photo shoot with other alopecians and man, I’ve never seen her look more beautiful.
And it’s funny because, I have this shot where literally there’s four different camera people taking shots of her, right, photographers. And I’m behind her and you just get to see what she sees. And I really thought that that was important to share with the world what she saw from her vantage point, right? With all these things focused on her and the reason that I feel that that was important is because the reason she was in that position was because of the situation she was in. It was because of what other people viewed as a disadvantage. It was because of what other people viewed as something that wasn’t good, right? And now we’re showing the great part of it. Does that make sense?
Mike: Absolutely. Yeah, thanks for sharing that and I know that that kind of, even flows into what we’re going to talk about today is people often think they’re at a disadvantage or it doesn’t . . .
Pete: That’s right.
Mike: . . . it always takes, you know I was in a, I’m not much a runner but the last race I was in which was several years ago, you know I’m huffing and puffing. I feel like I’m going to die and all of a sudden, some like 6 year old just blows past me. And then it’s like an 80 year old guy that blows past me and I’m like, wait a minute here. What am I doing here? So yeah. Before we kind of dive into the topic today Pete, why don’t you take a few minutes to tell us who you are and how you became so famous.
Pete: So famous, well thank you very much. My name is Pete Asmus. I really kind of refer to myself as Pete Action Asmus because a lot of my life has been based around taking action. And when you look at kind of where I was and how I’ve come to where I am, it’s been really a journey of about, probably 10, 11, 12 years since I started in real estate. Now I’m assuming that’s kind of where you wanted me to start.
Mike: Yeah, yeah.
Pete: If we go back to 16 years old, I was homeless at 16. I’ve basically been a survivor my whole life. It’s always been about me figuring out how to accomplish goals. How to get where I wanted to go. And it’s really weird because at 16, 17, I wanted to be on TV. And I did everything I could to make that happen and it never happened. And now it looks like, next year will be the year that I actually make it on with a show.
Mike: That’s great.
Pete: That really goes to all of the things that we’re going to talk about today, right? My history has been, the reason I got into real estate was because when my son was 6, he got brain cancer and basically it took me out of the job that was doing. I had just started a job about a year prior to that for a company. I’d taken over the company to take it across United States. They had done $5,000 in business in the last year. I came on and in the first with me, we did over $500,000 in gross profit, I’m sorry in real profit, right? Net. And we were halfway across the United States.
We were in Texas at the time and that’s when I got the call that my son was in the hospital and that he had a tumor and my whole life just kind of shattered at that moment. And as difficult as I thought the previous part of my life was, it was nothing compared to what I’d gone through with that. What that ended up being in its, I’m really kind of losing my mind right now because, I always tell people that you have to go through things to be prepared for the future right? And I’m sorry, I’m really losing my mind right now because I just . . .
Mike: It puts it in perspective.
Pete: Well no but I just realized, that, me having my son and the cancer and that really big hit to me right, that I probably wouldn’t have been able to do as well as I did or make it if I hadn’t been through all of the stuff prior to that of me being kicked out, of me living on the streets, of me feeling like that my parents didn’t care and that I was just worthless. And me fighting past all of that to be a survivor, I really feel like set me up that when he was there, I was able to go that well, it’s not going to happen to me. Like, I was able to put my mind somewhere else, if that makes sense.
Mike: Yeah.
Pete: When dealing with that challenge, right? And I think that that’s important because a lot of people get crippled and they become literally, paralyzed by their inability to move because of fear.
Mike: Absolutely.
Pete: Know what I mean?
Mike: Yeah, there are a lot of real estate investors that I talk to that they can’t move past something, “Well what do you do in this situation?” And I kind of found myself very often actually saying “I’ve never been in that situation but here’s exactly what I would do.” Like you just, you’re used to putting out fires or dealing with problems and you get to a certain confidence level to where, “Yeah, there’s problems everyday but I’m just going to deal with them and move past it. I’m not going to let it limit me.”
Pete: You become a solution based thinker. That’s really what it comes down to because most people, they have ANTs, right? You know what an ANT is?
Mike: Tell us man.
Pete: It’s an automatic negative thought.
Mike: Oh yeah, yeah.
Pete: Automatic negative thought and we have ants crawling all over us, right? And so, the moment somebody says something like, say maybe I said, “Hey Mike, let’s do a deal together. It’s in California. It’s a million dollars.” Now if you didn’t have a million dollars, if you didn’t have this, if you didn’t have that, your mind immediately goes to all the challenges and the reasons that it won’t work and typically that’s what people do. My mission is to change that process, to really get you to start thinking solution based thinker. There are two real big stories that had a big influence on how I viewed life. One was the story of Steve Wynn, you know Steve Wynn in . . .
Mike: Yeah.
Pete: . . . okay. So do you know how he got where he is?
Mike: No, I don’t.
Pete: One of the coolest stories, the guy had no money, had nothing. He basically connected two people. One person had a parking lot on the strip that wanted to sell it. The other person wanted to buy it and he leveraged himself into it. By connecting them, by being the resource, by being the hub, he basically worked himself into a deal. Then from that, they sold that, they ended up buying the New Orleans, duh duh duh, and now he has two gigantic hotels.
Mike: Yeah.
Pete: The second big story for me was the person that was basically the promoter for the very last Elvis concert tour, right? I don’t remember what the guy’s name was but he was a marketer. He had done producing for TV and stuff like that. Never had done anything with music, right? But he told his wife one day, “I want to be the one who produces or promotes Elvis’ next concert tour because I know it’s going to be huge and he hasn’t done one in forever.” He called everyday for a year with no, no, no, no, no. Finally one day, the, whatever his manager was, what was that guy’s name? The boss?
Mike: I have no idea man.
Pete: Anyways, he calls him up and says “Hey, we’ll do it but you need to have a million dollars here, in Vegas, in three days, and we’ll sign the opportunity with you.” Now he didn’t have a million dollars. He had to use every resource possible. Found a banker that would give him the money but wanted half of all of his earnings from any of this venture in the future period. He accepted the deal on the very first concert. When they made their money all of a sudden, the manager came in with loads, like literally trash bags full of money from all of the concessions. He didn’t understand that he got half of that too. Threw it down he said “From that moment, I was a millionaire. I’ve never had to worry about money since then.”
Mike: Yeah, yeah. That’s awesome.
Pete: A lot of people would’ve said “Well I don’t have a million dollars. I guess this can’t, I can’t do this.” A lot of people would’ve said “Well, I don’t have this.” So many people, we view things as what we can’t do instead of viewing them as we can. And this is one of my favorite things that I’ve been talking about recently. We have to make decisions based on who we want to become. Not based on who we are.
Mike: Right.
Pete: Think about that. Do you drive your car looking at the ground or in the rear view mirror? Does anybody drive that way? No. Well why do we live our life that way?
Mike: Right.
Pete: Why do we live our life and base the things that we think that we can do, or where we want to go, and we base them off of where we’re at or where we’ve been. Because if we wanted to be where we are, we wouldn’t be driving anywhere, right? We wouldn’t be going anywhere. We would be stopped. So we need to get outside of that thought process of, “Well if this is what I have, this is all I can do.” No. That’s not true. That’s only true if you allow it to be true.
Mike: Right, right. Pete, do you think . . .
Pete: We need to, sorry.
Mike: Not to get too much into, we don’t talk about politics too much but, society in America right now is largely victim based.
Pete: Oh my gosh.
Mike: Everybody’s a victim. Why does that happen? Why are we here?
Pete: I think the reason that society is so victim based is because the reality is, we’ve been raised that way for years. Everybody, we want to take care of everybody, right? We want to help everybody but the challenge is, is we always are looking for everybody else to take care of us. We’re always blaming everybody else. And it came a moment in my life when I had had probably the biggest failure of my life. It was four, five, six, seven years ago, something like that. And I had lost everything again and it was like “You’ve got to be kidding me” and I wanted to just end everything. I was done. I wanted to give up on life.
And at that moment, I had this, I thought about my daughters, I thought about their future and I realized that I didn’t want to not be in it, right? It was too important for me to be in it. So, if I wasn’t going to be that person, if I wasn’t going to give up on life then man, I was not going to let life tear me down anymore. And I decided to become responsible for where I was and I think that was the moment that my life truly, truly changed.
Mike: Yep.
Pete: And when I was talking to you earlier, all these things that are happening to me now, they wouldn’t have happened to me had I stopped my life back then.
Mike: For sure.
Pete: So many people think it’s so bad right now and they don’t realize that the gold is on the other side. You just got to get through the challenge. All those things when I was growing up and I was homeless and I was this and I was that and nobody liked me and I was going in the Navy and I had all these challenges, right? Those set me up for when my son was there and he had this that I could be strong for him. Those set me up and he set me up for my daughter when she, because of alopecia at six years old lost all her hair and I freaked out.
I freaked out because I thought man, here’s a daughter, how is she going to have a normal life? How is she going to be normal? Like, who’s going to love her? Man, and that’s a horrible thing for a father to think but I did. I thought, well how do I change this? And that’s what got me to going back to my tattoo that says “Go make something happen.” I realized I had to make something happen for her life.
Mike: Yep.
Pete: And so, we started doing videos everyday to inspire her to learn the days of the week. It was make it happen Monday. Go make something happen. Take it back Tuesday. Take back your life. Wake up Wednesday. Wake up and live your life. Thirsty Thursday. If you’re hungry for knowledge, you’ve got to be thirsty for action. We don’t want to be a library. Flip it Friday. It’s time to move ahead of the pack. Shatter it Saturday. Shatter who you are for who you want to become at any moment. And set it off Sunday.
I wanted to teach them the days of the week in an empowering way. So many things that we do on a daily basis disempower us over and over and over again. How do we regain that? One time when I wanted to start becoming healthier, they say that you should drink 8 to 10 glasses of water a day. Have you ever tried to do that?
Mike: I’ve tried. It’s a lot.
Pete: Let me tell you. You are rationing that stuff out like literally every two hours I was drinking a glass of water. I had a full glass, one of these, and every two hours I was just as fast as I could. And then, man I had to wait. It was like, oh my gosh I don’t even want the next two hours to be here. Are you kidding me? And then two hours would come up and I wasn’t thirsty but I was constantly drinking more water. What I realized at that point was, I stopped drinking soda or anything during that time frame, right? Why? Because so much water was in me, I was so quenched, I wasn’t thirsty for anything else. We need to do that to our minds when it comes to positivity.
Mike: Absolutely. That’s great.
Pete: If we start shoving positive thoughts into our brains, we can’t think of anything else, right? The ANTs have no room because all we’re doing is constantly just berating our brain with I can do it, the positive stuff. And I listen to Tony Robbins, I listen to Les Brown, I listen to Eric Thomas, I listen to so many people for four to five hours a day. A day. And people are like “Ah man, that’s too much.” Really? Well, I own two of the largest real estate groups on LinkedIn. I have a radio show on Bloomberg. I have a magazine coming out and I have a TV show that I’m working on. So, I don’t think five hours a day was too much. I don’t think anything that I did was too much. It was just right.
Mike: Yeah.
Pete: And the thing is, what you’re doing is just right to get you where you are. If you want different results from life, you have to supply different actions to it.
Mike: Absolutely.
Pete: Right?
Mike: Absolutely, yeah. So why do you think, how do people, we talk about this on the show. You know what a lot of people don’t understand is when we pick our topics or what we’re going to talk about today, you had some concerns over “Have you talked about this stuff too much, like motivation?” And I said “Man, we can’t talk about this enough.” So, I think it’s something that a lot of people need to hear because I know there’s a lot, for me real estate investing has changed my life. No doubt about it. No doubt about it.
Pete: But it’s a tool right?
Mike: Yeah, it is a tool to an end. But, I think a lot of people want that same thing and I’m not thumping my chest to say “Be like me” or anything like that. But what I’m saying is is, why can’t more people be successful in this space and it’s because they often defeat themselves. I just don’t think we could talk about it enough. So tell me why, how people, and even people that are successful on some level that hits some sort of ceiling and they can’t take it to another level. It’s usually a mental block of some sort. Maybe share some thoughts on how people can kind of break through some of those walls that are between them and where they want to be.
Pete: Okay. That’s awesome. So, I’m going to use the word NLP with that, right? How we break through these walls is by redefining words to ourselves. By changing the meanings, by changing the words, you know we have these wrist bands, right? If, gomakesomethinghappen.com the wristbands, three dollar wristbands, I created them from journey to success because I realize that, everybody, we need symbols that define, that hey we need to change what we’re doing. Should equals must. Try equals do. Can’t equals will. We need to repurpose words and have them create a sense of urgency to ourselves.
I think a lot of times success… look man, I thought when I became successful I wasn’t going to have to deal with any of the BS anymore. I thought that I was going to have anymore challenges. I am not kidding you. I literally thought, well now once I make this level of success, everybody’s going to listen to me. It doesn’t happen man. I still have people that I’m chasing down going are you kidding me man? Look, I’ve done all this stuff. Why am I still chasing you down? And the reality is because if you want the results, you have to go make something happen.
Mike: Yeah.
Pete: You have to go out and get those results. You have to create the opportunity. You have to go and do all the follow-up. You have to realize that this is your life and until you become the main star and stop being a supporting role, your life isn’t going to be your life. You’re going to help somebody else build their dreams. You’re going to help somebody else accomplish their goals. You’re going to help somebody else do what they’ve always wanted to do and you’re going to be sitting there going “Life is unfair.”
Mike: Right.
Pete: That’s what’s going to happen. That’s what we do as human beings. We don’t want to accept the fact that we need to change and the fact that, challenges aren’t going to go away. Look, the only thing that makes things different for us Mike between when we didn’t have money and now, is that when we have the free time to do things, we get to do more fun things, right? But the challenges are still there. You still have to take out the trash. You still have to put on clothes. You’re going to still have to do your laundry. I mean all these things we still have to do.
Mike: Right, absolutely.
Pete: Those don’t go away. Right?
Mike: Yeah, absolutely. In a former life I worked for a CEO of a very large company and then I met another CEO of a very large company, very large companies. And until I kind of got to know them personally, it just hit me like, these are just regular people. They still are doing errands at home. They’re still doing . . .
Pete: Right?
Mike: . . . regular stuff, like who else is going to do it there? They’re just regular people and I think, to think that those things are going to go away is ridiculous. But it can get easier for you right?
Pete: Yeah.
Mike: I don’t mow my own lawn. I don’t change my own oil.
Pete: Right.
Mike: I don’t clean my own house. There are things that you can hire away with. Life still, it can get better but I think the most important thing is to make sure that even though those things don’t go away, make sure that in your mind you succeeded at what, you became what you were trying to be.
Pete: Yes.
Mike: What’s even worse is, you still have to do those things and you’re living somebody else’s dream, right?
Pete: I think, one of my favorite quotes that I also, man I literally come up with quotes everyday because I focused on wanting to do that. I like creative wording. And one of my favorite things was become the person you’ve always wanted to meet. Who do you want to meet? What kind of person do you want to meet? Let’s talk about this. The kind of person I want to meet. Are they in a bad mood or good mood all the time?
Mike: Good mood, yeah.
Pete: Good mood. Do you want to deal with people that are in a bad mood?
Mike: No.
Pete: Stop being in bad moods, guys.
Mike: All right.
Pete: You walking around all pissed off and grumpy and “This doesn’t work, that doesn’t work.” See nobody wants to do business with me. Well yeah, because you’re completely pushing them away. So we want to do, we want to do business and we want to meet somebody that’s always in a good mood. Do you want to meet somebody that cares about what you want out of life or do you want to meet somebody that’s only selfish and only cares about themselves?
Mike: Yeah, somebody that cares about you.
Pete: Okay, so somebody that cares about you. So stop focusing on just you and when you’re talking to people, start focusing on what they need and how can you really help them to get to that next level. How can you bring value to their life, right? When we start really focusing on who do we want to meet, then if we become that person, how many people do you think that we’re going to be able to bring to us that are going to want to meet us, right?
Mike: They are inspired by you, yeah.
Pete: Absolutely. It’s all about becoming the person you want to meet. And here’s the other part, within the face of fear, failure, and humiliation, successful people choose to keep going. They choose to continue on. And I think the difference between inspiration and motivation is this. This is why I don’t want to be known as a motivator because I don’t want to motivate people. Money motivates people. Motivation is a temporary fix. People inspire.
I want to inspire somebody to change their life. Inspiration lasts forever. Inspiration is that one statement, that one phrase, that one thing like me that hooked forever. My wife said, my ex-wife when, with my son when he was like three, bad things were happening and I said “Look man, if you don’t stop I’m going to have to take him away because I don’t want the guy that you’re seeing to keep being like this, this and that” and she goes “I can’t afford to leave.” Those words have literally been burned in my mind ever since they were said. And when my daughters were born, man there’s no way I want them saying that word.
Mike: Yeah.
Pete: Right? That word track so my goal is for them to make a million dollars in real estate prior to being 10.
Mike: Wow.
Pete: That’s what we’re working on man. That’s my goal. If I miss that goal and I hit 500,000, is that still good?
Mike: Yeah, sure. Absolutely.
Pete: Absolutely, right? My whole point is teaching them how to survive to so that when they turn 18, they can do whatever they want and they can be with whoever they want. Like I’m all good with that. But I don’t ever want them to be in a relationship because it’s financially based and because they don’t know how to make money to get out of it. So I want to teach single moms to be like that. I want to inspire kids. One of the bigger things too that we’re doing is my daughter started a charity, man. I mean last we raised $900 for children with cancer and that’s my daughter with alopecia. She wanted to give back, so, I know that I’m doing right to create their thought processes, right?
Mike: Absolutely. That’s awesome.
Pete: I think that’s what it’s all about.
Mike: Yeah.
Pete: Does that make sense?
Mike: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I think whether it’s having some money set aside or other things like that which you were kind of just elaborating on, I think one of the things that I’ve seen with entrepreneurs that I know. We know a lot of the same people, but successful people, is that, you get to the point to where you feel like if I lost everything today, I’ll be back in 90 days.
You start to not have that fear of failure because you’re like, well all the knowledge I have now, all the failures I’ve had, the things that have brought me here, maybe that’s a lifetime of failures. But that’s a lesson that I can learn, that I’ve learned so I can get that success back faster than ever before because I’ve already learned all those things. I don’t have to go through as many lessons.
Pete: And what do we have to, with that knowledge, what do we have to with that, Mike?
Mike: I think it’s important to share with others. Yeah. You got to make it happen. You got to take action.
Pete: You got to take action. Yes.
Mike: You got to take action. Absolutely.
Pete: I love it. There you go.
Mike: That’s the thing is, you, I have another business that I started before I was a real estate investor and this is just a common . . . I’ve found myself saying this a few times and it’s true, it took me 10 months to learn to fail basically, but if had that to do over again, I could’ve failed in a month. I could do all those things I did in a month and compress that. It took me going through that once to learn it. But I think that’s an important thing for entrepreneurs. It’s a really important thing for budding entrepreneurs, people that are afraid to fail. It’s like, it’s okay to fail.
Pete: Yep.
Mike: Just fail fast. Get those lessons behind you and then move forward and don’t make them again.
Pete: Fail forward. Yes. Fail forward right? That’s what we really want to do. What were you just saying because you said something that made me think of something that was awesome.
Mike: I did say, I said several awesome things my friend. I don’t know exactly . . .
Pete: You did. No, no. You said several awesome things. What was the last thing that you just said?
Mike: Just failing fast.
Pete: Failing fast, giving them permission, I think it was something about giving them permission.
Mike: Just if you’re going to fail, you know fail fast. Fail forward. Just learn from it. Don’t make those mistakes again and just move on.
Pete: Now I remember. Yes. So many people want to say “Well Mike, I want to learn from your experience.” Right? And I want to learn from your experience so much so that that means that I now don’t have to go through that experience. Is that true?
Mike: I think it can be true on some levels but I think, I think you can learn from others’ mistakes. But I think the best lesson are the failures you have yourself. Yeah.
Pete: That’s right, but check this out. Here’s what really happens. You can give me all the knowledge you want right? It isn’t going to avoid the fact that this contractor’s going to forget this or this guy or I’m going to buy a house that’s going to have dry rot right? You can’t avoid, just because I learned what you did in a dry rot situation doesn’t mean that every house that I buy in the future will be devoid of dry rot.
Mike: Sure. Right.
Pete: And that’s what I think people need to understand. That you can learn from our experiences so that you have the tools to apply them when those challenges happen in your life. It doesn’t mean that you get to wipe them away and they don’t happen in your life.
Mike: Right.
Pete: Or people say “Well, I want to benefit off of your work.” Well great. I used to weigh 260 pounds three years ago. I have pictures. I’ll show you, right? 260 pounds. I went to the gym every single day for an hour to two a day for over a year and I lost a 100 pounds. If you wanted to lose . . .
Mike: Wow. Is that true Pete?
Pete: Absolutely true.
Mike: Wow.
Pete: And this is what I love to say, so all of you should be in shape who wanted to learn and benefit off of my work. How many is that, how many of you are in shape though because of what I did? And the reality is nobody. I benefited from my actions. You will benefit yours. And the other part is, we are all like a plane. So stop thinking that once you take off man, you are on this straight ride and if you go any direction off then you fail. You haven’t failed. You’ve adjusted. A plane adjusts a thousand times before it lands. It doesn’t just fly in one straight direction. Just like driving a car, you’re constantly adjusting right?
Mike: Yep.
Pete: Those aren’t failures. It doesn’t like, if you didn’t adjust you’d be a failure, right?
Mike: Right. Right.
Pete: If you didn’t adjust you’d be in the side of the road.
Mike: That’s absolutely right.
Pete: So, think about the fact that every time you adjust, you’re succeeding. So if you don’t get the desired result, adjust success. You don’t get the desired result again, success, success, success, right? It’s just a bunch of little steps to success.
Mike: Absolutely. That’s a great analogy because I think, a lot of people, I think there’s a lot, you know here talking about people that aren’t trying that fail. It’s very common, I guess this is not trying but there’s a lot of people that aren’t. What do you think causes people to fear failure? Do you think it’s, I think it’s probably different for everyone . . .
Pete: Embarrassment.
Mike: . . . but I think that there’s some people that, I don’t think there’s many people that are worried about failing themselves. They’re always worried about what somebody else is going to think of them or what society is going to think or what their parents are going to think or what their spouse is going to think.
How can people move past, because if they would just go to somebody, to their spouse and say “Look, am I bigger failure if I don’t even try something that I care about and maybe I’ll fail or if I go try out, work my heart out, and I fail?” Most people would say “Well if you don’t even try you’re a failure.” But people never have that conversation and therefore they just stay where they are and by their own standards, when they’re on their death bed they may know that they failed but everybody else says “At least you never did anything risky.” You know?
Pete: Right. Yeah.
Mike: It’s a weird thing isn’t it?
Pete: It is. And in fact you had just said something. If you can repeat the first part of that, because it made me think of a, man, I’m listening. See this is the problem with me being a host is because I’m listening and then when I listen, I forget what I was going to say because I’m actually paying attention.
Mike: We’re just kind of talking about, who are people, why do people fear failure in the face of whoever it is . . .
Pete: That’s right.
Mike: . . . they’re trying to, you know, not disappoint.
Pete: Humiliation. We’re afraid of humiliation. We’re afraid that if we do this it defines who we are. And a result does not define who we are. A result is just that. It’s a result.
Mike: Right.
Pete: The only thing that defines us is us. So if we want different results, if we want different things we’ve got to do different things and we have to realize that hey look, every successful person has hundreds of failures that litter their path to success. Hundreds of them.
Mike: Right.
Pete: Right? And it’s all jumping from one to the other. They don’t let decisions and they don’t let temporary results dictate permanent solutions.
Mike: That’s great.
Pete: That make sense?
Mike: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Pete so, we’re running a little bit long on time here. Why don’t talk, just give us a couple minutes on . . .
Pete: I love talking man. I’ll do this forever.
Mike: When you get somebody like you and me together we can talk all day. In fact, people don’t know that we actually talked for almost an hour before we even started today.
Pete: That’s right.
Mike: Which is very unusual for guests that I have on the show but it was great. Why don’t you give some actionable steps so people can try to move past anything that’s kind of standing in their way right now.
Pete: So one of the first things that you need to do is you need to really define what you want, all right? I call this kind of like the red light, green light. If you remember that back when you were a kid and you were on the roller skating rink because I think that’s where it happened, right? And they go red light, green light.
Mike: Yeah. Right.
Pete: Red light. Green light. Right?
Mike: That was right before the organ, the song with the organ. Yeah.
Pete: Then you had the slow dance backwards on the roller skating rink. But I go that, so let’s say your mission, your goal, and I mean you really have to define what you want and what you’re willing to do to get there, okay?
Mike: Yeah.
Pete: But once you define it, play red light green light. When you’re going to make a decision, does that get you closer to your goal? Yes or no. If it doesn’t, don’t do it. If it does, move forward. Meaning, if I go and it’s Sunday afternoon and the college and football is on or basketball or whatever is on right, is that going to get me closer to my real estate goals?
Mike: No.
Pete: No. It isn’t. Right? Not unless I’m going to go hang out at a . . . now, I love questions. So, how could it? Well, it could if I went to a country club where there’s a lot of individuals with high net worths that I can set there and watch and get to know and become socialized with and then at the end go, “Hey you know what, I do real estate.” If I can utilize it like that, then hey that’s a great opportunity. But if not, you need to do things that are going to move you towards your goal.
Mike: Right.
Pete: You need to do things and focus and then don’t let anything get in your way. Don’t. Well yeah but I got to, don’t but me at all. I don’t want to hear it because I had to do all of those things. When it comes to sacrifice, people are willing to do whatever. This is the motivation part, right? I’m motivated. Man, I’m excited. I’m excited. All right time to work. All right, I got to go. What time is it? Right? All of a sudden the work starts and the effort stops.
Mike: Yeah.
Pete: Right? Work starts, effort stops. So, the challenge is, focus on the outcome. What do you really want? A lot of times we get so distracted by the effort and the work put in that we decide not to do it because we’re not focused on the result that we really want, right? When you go to anybody that’s done anything that’s been challenging, it’s because all they could ever see was me standing on the podium getting a gold. All I could ever see was me crossing the finish line first. All I could ever see, that’s all they could ever see.
Mike: Right.
Pete: And they drove towards that passionately, right? They didn’t just walk towards it. They didn’t saunter towards it. They didn’t say “Ah, it would be great if it happens next week.” We’ve got to take that drive and that sense of urgency and put it in our lives because here’s the thing guys, your life. It’s a one time shot and you have no idea how long it is. You don’t.
Mike: That’s right.
Pete: You don’t know how much time you have left. And if you weren’t here tomorrow, what have you left for your family? What have you left for everybody else, right? And if it isn’t what you want, man, it’s time to make decisions right now to change that life.
Mike: Absolutely.
Pete: To change your outcome.
Mike: Absolutely. Pete, so I know you’ve got, you’re a man of many interests. You have a lot going on. If people want to learn more about what you’ve got going on or visit you online, where do they go? I fear you have about 50 URLs to give out.
Pete: Man, it’s so crazy.
Mike: Where’s the best place for them to go?
Pete: So, here’s the easiest thing I can tell you, right? My name is Pete Asmus. P-E-T-E, that’s Pete as in, you know P as in Paul, right? Pete Asmus. A-S-M-U-S. Go ahead and type into Google, put my name and hit enter. Everything you’ve ever wanted to know about me is going to be right there. You’re going to see all, everything from my websites. If you want to see a bio that’s a good bio, if you go to peteasmus.com you can hit the about me. I even think, yeah anyways, again Googling my name will get, you’ll find everything you want.
Mike: Just don’t . . . you’re asking people not to go to page, not to page 8 though right?
Pete: They can go to any page. You can Google my name with scam. You can Google my name with fraud. You can Google my name with anything. That’s the beauty. That’s why I said it’s so important to me. I may have failed over and over again to get where I am today, but I didn’t take anybody down with me. Like I was very, very conscious about the decisions that I had made which is I why I have such a great online brand. It’s why you can Google my name with all these different things and you don’t find anything because I didn’t do any of those things. Right?
Mike: Yeah.
Pete: I cared, like I said caring about that, the individuals. I cared enough about the people that I did business with to ensure that if anything bad happened, it always happened to me.
Mike: Yeah.
Pete: Again, taking responsibility for where I am, right?
Mike: Yeah, yeah. Great. Great, well we’ll add a link for PeteAsmus.com down below here and ask people to just go ahead do a couples of searches. They’ll find you. I know you’re all over the place.
Pete: Yeah, well and the GentryGroup.com if you go there, I have a couple e-books that they could download there as well.
Mike: Great.
Pete: And you know, from Force Your Dreams into Reality which is the motivation book to one that I just wrote that’s, Off-Market and Undervalued Property Finder Blueprint which is an e-book that I just wrote. I have another. Anyways I have a ton of books coming out as well. So I don’t want to bore you guys with all this stuff because really the idea is we want to inspire you to make a change. We want to inspire you to become a better you.
Mike: Yep.
Pete: And only you can do that.
Mike: Yep. Awesome Pete. Thanks for being here, my friend.
Pete: Absolutely.
Mike: Thanks for being here for episode 200.
Pete: Woo.
Mike: The big two O-O.
Pete: I love it man.
Mike: And many more to come. Thanks my friend.
Pete: You got it.
Mike: We’ll see you.
Thanks for joining us for today’s FlipNerd.com podcast. To watch or listen to more great shows, please visit FlipNerd.com or visit us in the iTunes store. To access the most robust, social platform in existence for real estate investors, where you can find off-market whole sale deals, great vendors, literally in your market, and to socialize with other like-minded individuals, please visit the one, the only, FlipNerd.com.
If you’re not yet a member, you can setup a free account in about 30 seconds. It’s pretty much the coolest site that’s ever existed in the real estate investing industry, so get on over to FlipNerd.com.
Thanks for joining us for today’s FlipNerd.com podcast. To watch or listen to more great shows, please visit FlipNerd.com or visit us in the iTunes store. To access the most robust, social platform in existence for real estate investors, where you can find off-market whole sale deals, great vendors, literally in your market, and to socialize with other like-minded individuals, please visit the one, the only, FlipNerd.com.
If you’re not yet a member, you can setup a free account in about 30 seconds. It’s pretty much the coolest site that’s ever existed in the real estate investing industry, so get on over to FlipNerd.com.