Show Summary
What does “Success” mean to you? Patrick Precourt joins us for an inspirational interview on how you can achieve peak performance, and reach your goals no matter where you’re currently at. If you’re ready to take responsibility for yourself, or ready to take your real estate investing business to the next level…then don’t miss this show. Patrick Precourt is the winner of the best INSPIRATIONAL show for 2015.
Highlights of this show
- Meet Patrick Precourt, successful investor, mentor and sought after inspirational speaker.
- Learn how to take yourself to the next level, no matter where you are now.
- Join the discussion on the true meaning of success, and how your definition may be wrong.
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Listen to the Audio Version of this Episode
FlipNerd Show Transcript:
Mike: Hey everyone, it’s Mike Hambright at FlipNerd.com. Welcome back for another exciting expert interview show where I interview great guests, awesome guests from across the real estate investing industry to help you learn and to inspire you.
For today’s show, I’m excited to be joined by Patrick Precourt. He’s a leading real estate investor, mentor, and coach, and really just a motivational speaker where he teaches others how to achieve a life of wealth and freedom. And it’s going to be a great show today. I love talking about this type of stuff that we’re going to talk about.
Patrick has a professional development program where he helps mentor over 800 elite students across the country. In fact, he’s at an event right now. So if you’re watching versus listening, you may see that Patrick is in a hotel lobby which it actually is not going to affect us at all. If you’re listening, you wouldn’t even know it. But anyway, he is a traveling man and he’s out helping people.
What we’re going to talk about today is as real estate investors and entrepreneurs we’re all concerned with growing. You just don’t want to stay where you’re at. You can never get comfortable. You got to find ways to constantly move forward, no matter where you’re at in your career. Whether you’re really working for someone else and you want to go out on your own and be self‐employed and an entrepreneur, or whether you’re an entrepreneur and you’re at the top of your game already, you’re worried about growth and staying where you’re at and being relevant and moving forward. We all have fears and all these things that we deal with.
Patrick is a great leader in helping us and helping others move forward from wherever they’re at, and he has some great messages to share with us as entrepreneurs today. Before we get started with Patrick though, let’s take a moment to recognize our featured sponsors.
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Please note, the views and opinions expressed by the individuals in this program do not necessarily reflect those of FlipNerd.com or any of its partners, advertisers or affiliates. Please consult professionals before making any investment or tax decisions, as real estate investing can be risky.
Hey Patrick, welcome to the show!
Patrick: Hey welcome, Mike, and thank you for having me here! I’m pumped, brother. I’ve been waiting on this!
Mike: Yeah, yeah! Well, I told you, hey, we wanted to have our very best guest at number 272 and we got you!
Patrick: Woo hoo!
Mike: We got you, we got you. I’m really excited, I really love the message that you share with people and I think, as entrepreneurs, a lot of us struggle. Even people that assume, “Hey, that guy is at the top of his game. He’s done something awesome.” We’re all regular people, everybody has a life. They have to go home and they have fears, concerns, health issues and all those things that every human has to deal with.
A lot of times, I think, it keeps people out of being self‐employed and it keeps people that are entrepreneurs, sometimes, those fears and those concerns keep them in a place where it’s difficult to grow, right?
Patrick: Without a doubt.
Mike: Yeah.
Patrick: I don’t know if you want to start this conversation on fears.
Mike: Yeah, well, how about before we dive in too far here, why don’t you take a couple of minutes and just tell us your background? For those that don’t know you, for a lot of people, you may not need an introduction. But for some that may not know you well enough yet, tell us your background and what you do and how you got to where you are?
Patrick: Sure, yeah, I’ll try to condense this in a really big period of time over a short little description. Started in real estate in the late ’90s. Early on into short sales and we stayed heavily in the short sales until 2010‐ish, and then processed close to 850 short sales in that time. We got into that long before anybody knew what a short sale was, and built an entire business and all aspects of everything short sale. And that was a wonderful. That was where we spend most of our time early on investment side of things.
Since then, we’ve expanded in our entrepreneurialism. Currently we still have a real estate investment company that specializes in what I call, high risk, high reward properties, Mike. An example would be a property that has a very well documented contamination, leaky oil tanks, lead-based paints, asbestos, things like that, something that nobody else wants. That kind of property is the stuff we look for. We look for things that are in the middle of really yucky lawsuits, title claims, things like that. That’s something we want to take on.
Zoning issues, zoning improve, anything that pushes everybody else away. Particularly ones that still have loans on them, that’s our current forte. That’s where we focus our real estate expertise.
Mike: Yup, yup awesome.
Patrick: Yeah, outside of that, over the past, say starting in 2002, 3, 4, got involved in the educational side of real estate starting. Again, narrowed in short sale, teaching people how to do short sales and the process that we created, very proprietary. Short sale was such a buzz word and a lot of people, the government got involved. Then we expanded that into a much larger company that we partnered with and include one of the largest real estate education companies out there. When I retired from it, it was the year I retired in 2013, it had sales in excess of $75 million.
So it grew very big, very fast, it was very successful. That just launched me to other areas of my entrepreneurial space. I retired there so I could spend more time on the self‐development, the personal involvement, the business side of what we do. Focusing especially on real estate investors narrowed it down a little too much. Since then as we launched our Precourt Enterprises brand and we recalled six primary experiences and six primary fields which are all about experience in life at a higher level.
We typically, as we grow and expand . . . typically, as we get into your age and my age, we find ourselves getting conformed by circumstances and comfort zones which tend to hold us down and don’t allow us to become all that we’re capable of doing. In this space of growing people, we opened up a lifestyle fitness center. It’s unique in that it’s big, 16,000 square feet. We havev 18 trainers in there. I call it a lifestyle fitness center, but it has the heart and culture of our fighting martial arts. Picture this, picture we combine yoga and pilates, Brazilian body and all of our cardio fitness class, and we combine that with Muay Thai and Jujitsu and boxing and wrestling.
I have is a full blown MMA cage in there. We have six pro MMA guys fight out of our fitness center. So it’s really, really unique. But the idea there, and you’re like, “How does the different businesses combine?” Because you hear often that the idea of focus and we got to focus on one. In the end, is my focus is absolute, unique and special, and I focus on expanding and growing people. And the physical part of what we do is a big piece of that.
People don’t come to our gym, for instance, to work out. They come to our gym to become better than they were the day before. We’ll talk a little bit about that later on the conversation of self‐mastery and how we produce those results.
Mike: Awesome, awesome. Where do you want to start here? Do you want to start by talking about . . . I know we started talking about fears a little bit, but maybe you can start off by talking about the entrepreneurial mindset and what it takes to become an entrepreneur, and then some of the challenges you’ve seen that hold people back.
Patrick: Sure, sure, I mean we can go right to where people start. Where do entrepreneurs come from? They come from the space of being an employee. They come from having a job and one day, we realize that we’re capable of more. We’re willing to make that leap of faith into the life of self‐employed, right? And really, let’s be honest with the life of self‐employed. Self‐employed is really now instead of working for a job, we now just own a job.
Not much has changed, our days have gotten longer, our responsibilities have gotten greater. But typically, the money isn’t any better.
Mike: The days are longer, there’s no doubt. I think most people end up working harder than they ever have.
Patrick: Yeah, and I’m not against working harder. I’m against working harder when there’s not a plan, when there’s not a specific outcome or result in clarity as to why we’re working harder. I had parents that were the hardest working individuals. They came from the era that the harder you work, the better or bigger your results would be. Let me just share the net result of that. They built, entrepreneurial minded, they built a home inspection company which I worked for, for a number of years, which is awesome, that had an outstanding reputation, more business than we can ever handle.
But that was the problem, we could only handle so much. My parents did everything themselves. They have one employee, me, okay. It’s pretty much me and my dad who did all the inspections. They’re incapable of expanding beyond the owner operated business.
They did own a business, make no mistake. This business it was exclusively about them. Quite honestly, when my dad passed away, so went the business as well. So he spent a good part of 15 years building something that never had a payoff. You know this to be true. If that’s the plan, you’re better off staying and working where you’re working and holding a job.
Mike: Yeah.
Patrick: No doubt.
Mike: Absolutely. Nobody, I think it’s a challenge of a lot of, not just real estate investors but entrepreneurs have is doing something bigger than themselves. Not just creating a job but how do they actually build something that can exist and thrive without them. That’s a whole other form of entrepreneurship that a lot of people, never get to that point unfortunately.
Patrick: Sure, that goes into the idea of going, have a job, self‐employed, business‐operator, you’re operating the business, you’re managing the business. But then, the big leap of faith into a business owner, being the actual business owner. Business owners are, quite honestly, I had to find out that by being at the business, the functions as a business, operates without you. You’re no longer operating it.
There is a big shift in mindset it to one, that if you want to see what kills the entrepreneur between year 5 and year 10, that’s when there’s a huge default rate in businesses, and a huge failure rate, it’s their inability, which is their lack of decision making or their inability to make the choice to switch from managing a business to leading a business. And the mind shift is huge. It’s simple, but it’s huge.
When you think about what does a manager do, a manager manages results. They focus on improving results and that’s how they rate themselves. That’s how they get bonuses, that’s how they judge their worthiness or value. This is in any business, what a manager’s supposed to do.
A leader, however, they don’t work on increasing results. They work on improving people and this is a hard step because you know what? Nothing big ever happened by just one person. It always takes a group of outstanding people working together. A lot of people, a lot of entrepreneurs are of the mindset that nobody can do it as good as me. I mean, I’ll call out for what it is, that’s an arrogant, ignorant position because there’s very little that we do that we’re awesome at. There’s just a lot that we do.
Mike: I think where a lot of people get hung up too is, let’s say that they’re doing . . . I don’t want to talk about money and say, “Well, if you’re not making a million dollars, you’re not doing well.” But let’s just say that the average person if they, who probably is above average, let’s just say they’re making a quarter of a million dollars a year. It’s hard for them to go out and say, “I’ll give up half of that to a superstar because I think they can double it from here.” A lot of times people can’t afford that person or they can’t afford the, in their mind at least, they can’t afford to take that risk of well, what if they don’t work out.
They got the challenges of small companies, small businesses. They generally can’t have redundancies so if you over-rely on somebody and that person leaves, then you’re the guy that has to jump back in. There’s all those kinds of issues that small businesses face.
Patrick: Yeah.
Mike: Yeah, any thoughts there on the importance of being able to think of your . . .
Patrick: . . . how do we scale? We want to scale so we increase our bottom line and we need our bottom line to be increased, so that we can scale. What goes first, is it the chicken or the egg? So let’s start out with this, Mike, we cannot go into this asking ourselves or saying to ourselves, “What if I fail?” We, no doubt, speak our future, and if we go into it, questioning whether or not, we’re going to succeed, the likeliness that we’re going to succeed is diminished greatly.
When we call out everything we want, the universe returns to us exactly that which we asked for. All you’ve got to do in order to ask is just be clear on what it is. When you start focusing on missing, then you’re going to start getting those misses. So let’s start out with the commitment that we’re going all in on this process, and “all in” simply means that we’re not going to doubt ourselves. We’ll evaluate risk but we’re not going to doubt the process, that’s number one.
Number two is in order to scale, in order to get bigger, we need more than us. Again, we have to ask ourselves, “Whenever I get to an impasse,” and this I’ll share with all of you, okay, “that is no longer acceptable – situation or terms that are no longer acceptable – you have to ask yourself, just like we’re looking at each other right now and just say, “Listen, self, how much longer am I going to continue to choose to accept the results and the outcome that I’m currently getting?”
And just pause and wait for that answer because what’s resonating at the back of your head right now, number one, is that you’re choosing your life right now, which is accepting that everything we have, we deserve. Everything we have, we have it equally to the level that we deserve it and what that means, Mike, is that you and I have made decisions, made choices, took actions, that have gotten us to exactly where we are right now. Which means everything good and bad, from our physical health, to the size of our bank account, to the quality of our relationships, are the direct result of our decisions and we have exactly what we deserve.
We have it, we deserve it to the degree that we’re committed to attract it and accept it. That’s the answer of creating change. So you want to scale, do you, brother? Well, you can scale everything you want to the degree that you’re committed to attract and accept the fruits of that labor. When we start out saying, “What if I fail?” it’s already a breach to your commitment. You’re already going the wrong way.
Mike: You’re coming up with Plan B in the back of your mind, yeah.
Patrick: And if you come up with a Plan B, you will resort to Plan B. You’ve committed to it. It’s like giving your kid a way out. “You get an A but if you don’t and you only get a B,” they’re getting a B. You know what I’m saying? That’s probably the single biggest leap of faith or change that we have to make. Then we have to start challenging our fears.
When I say challenge, is if it’s a fear under the bed. We’re afraid of what’s under the bed. It’s time to look under the bed, call yourself out, man up to this. Stop playing down, start . . . if you want to be bigger, you have to play bigger. It goes back to the same thing, you and I heard this from the day we were raised by our mom and dad, and all through time. There’s a time and a place that these three words will resonate and finally make sense to us – the words, “be, do, have.” Be, do, have.
Unfortunately, we’re taught to almost stopped to start the process in reverse. Figure out what you want to have, and be what you have to be to do it. Then finally, be the person. When in fact, it works just the opposite. It’s time we be what we have to be, so we can do what we have to do, to have what we want to have. So a vision board shouldn’t be of the shit we want. A vision board should be of the person we’re going to become in order to do the hard work to have anything in this world that we want.
This world is extremely abundant. There’s more money than there is air to breathe. The only thing that stop it from flowing our way is us. That’s it.
Mike: That’s awesome because you and I both know people that have worked really hard, and they got the things but in the process, they destroyed the things they cared about the most. Like family, health, all those things, right?
Patrick: Yeah, I’m glad you brought that up because you can’t . . . we’ll get into that idea why in a second. But you cannot achieve success by my definition without keeping your life in integrity. And your life is not just your bank account, not just the size of your business, it’s not just how many employees you have. Your life is all of those, but it’s also your relationships. It’s how well you treat your wife, it’s your relationship with your kids, with your friends.
It’s how well you keep this in tune, it’s how well you keep your word to other people. It’s all that. If one of them is out of integrity, it will affect all of the other. I describe it in terms of resistance in our lives. When I meet a point of resistance during my day, I immediately stop, I own that it’s there because I chose it to be there, something I chose, put it in front of me and I go back to try to sort out what decision did I make that put that resistance in front of me. It didn’t happen by chance, it doesn’t work that way.
Mike: Let’s talk about, I wanted to go into, you talked a little bit about the why, like why you do things and people kind of throw that around, why? Well, I do it because of my family. I don’t want to take that away from anybody but people tend to . . . I think a lot of entrepreneurs especially, they work hard out of fear. They work hard because they didn’t understand their why. Or they just work hard because they don’t really know why they’re working hard. They just feel like that’s what entrepreneurs do is work hard. But maybe share your thoughts on why you do things is important?
Patrick: Sure. If the driver is wrong, achieving success is almost impossible. So let me just shared you my definition of success. It’s got three components, very simple. The first one is a little subjective. We’ve reached a respectable level of finances, of self worth.
What is that number? That’s different to everybody but a comfort level there. It doesn’t mean you have to be the richest guy in the street. It doesn’t mean that you have to have millions of dollars. A respectable, whether you’ve understood a way to generate and track income into your life, and it’s very easy now for you to generate income. It’s become easy to, or maybe it’s a lower level than somebody else but it’s still success. So that’s number one, finances are taken care of.
Number two and number three are very similar but they feed off each other. Number two is you’re loved by many, number three is respected by most. And these two, Mike, these two have got to be earned. They can’t be gifted to you, they can’t be borrowed. They certainly can’t be paid for. In order to be loved by many, means that you’ve got to put out love and it’s got to be genuine. You can’t fake this.
In order to be respected by most, and I say “most” because not everybody will respect you, the world doesn’t work that way. That’s fine, but you can have somebody that you disagree wholly with respect you just because you shot straight. That’s what I’m talking about. Both of these have more to do with humanity and how well you treat people and how much you better their lives. If you take care of people the way they should be taken care of, the way you’d like to be taken care of, these two will rank high for you.
But if you put those three together, that’s my definition of success. So you go back to your why, so if your why is out of fear, you work hard out of fear, that train ends. I’ll tell you that right now. Because it’s coming from a negative place and that means you’ll do negative things to avoid something more negative than it. It’s not a good place to operate out of. Remember, we get back exactly what we put out.
The game itself is so simple, if we don’t like what we’re getting, just take a look exactly what we’re putting out and change it. We don’t have to ask, we don’t have to rely on anybody else. It’s wholly up to us. It takes in the idea of responsibility but I will talk more about that in a second. I want to finish this idea on why, right? Because I know you’ve been asked a thousand times, “Mike, what is your why,” in different events and different trainings and things like that.
As Mike says, and I’ve asked people the why. I was at an event that you’re familiar with just a few weeks ago in September and the why came up. Almost everybody there and most people there, mostly males, couple of females, most everybody’s married and therefore most of they why were the same. It’s to take care of my family and my wife or my husband and the kids and be financially sound. Some people would bring it a little further, “I want freedom and . . .”
All these, quite honestly, very superficial whys. I would suggest that if that’s all we think we’re capable of, we’re grossly underestimating, A, our capabilities and, B, we’re disrespecting all the God-given tools that have been given to us. You, I, everyone listening to this, we’re given a set of tools that make us unique, one-off versions of us that has never existed ever in the history of this entire earth, isn’t present now, and there’ll never be another person like you, Mike, like me or like anyone else here.
We’re unique for a reason so we could bring our own magic into this space. And to think that we’re given that attention to detail for the sole purpose of taking care of our family, our why, is really short sighted. It’s kind of funny thinking about this way, right?
Mike: Yeah, it is.
Patrick: So I help understand this at a deeper level by breaking our why into two components, our priorities and our responsibilities, or greater responsibilities. I would suggest, and I share these words for your consideration and for nothing else. You can do what you wish. I like to look at our family, our wife, or our husband or our kids or anybody else we take care of, and I take care of others in my family. I like to see them as our responsibility. They come first. We’ve got to make sure that they’re taken care of first.
No doubt, I’m pretty sure that’s what everybody means when they say their why. But I also like to share the idea, for your consideration, that we have a greater responsibility. And in the most broad description, I’d suggest that it’s our job to impact this world to the highest degree that we possibly can, while we’re on this earth. I like to describe it in terms of a dent we leave behind in the earth. We’re going to make as big freaking dent as we possibly can while we’re here.
That’s where our magic comes alive because everybody is going to do that in a different way, provided we don’t fall prey to competing with others.
Mike: And, Patrick, would you say that that’s like a progressive thing? Because I think a lot of entrepreneurs, and I’ve kind of felt this myself, you get to a certain point where your priorities are taken care of, at least certainly financially, you get to a point where it’s not about the money anymore. I don’t want to say it’s not about the money because things have to make business sense. But you get to a certain point where you’re making, whatever the money it might be for you, that you’re comfortable, you don’t have to worry about eating, you don’t have to worry about bills at all.
Then it’s just like, I have got some sort of mission I’m on here. Some people don’t even know what it is. They’re just like, “I want to make a difference but I don’t know exactly what that is.” But is that progression? You got to cover your priorities first and then you have a responsibility with everything after that to make an impact?
Patrick: Sort of, I don’t think that you have to because, let’s just say somebody’s starting out who’s really concerned right now about where next month’s bills are going to come, where the money from those bills are going to come from. Starting out, whether an entrepreneur, a new business, whatever it be, and different levels of this, from that financial position all the way up to where all your money’s taken care of, there is no one there, Mike, that is not in a position here and now, that cannot make a positive impact here and now.
Mike: Sure, absolutely.
Patrick: So to answer to your question, I think we have to wait until we’re more financially secure, stable to act on this, I would say “no”. Here’s why, this goes to the idea that we can do it tomorrow. The truth is, and this is one of those fundamental rules that tomorrow is really never more than anything of a reflection of today. As a matter of fact, it’s usually a magnification of today. I’d suggest that anything you’re waiting for tomorrow, you best get busy doing it now or it ain’t ever going to come. For those people listening right now that are planning on going on a diet someday . . .
Mike: At this point they should wait until New Year’s Day, right? At this point is that what you’re saying? That they should wait until New Year’s Day?
Patrick: If it’s of any importance to you, you’d best do it now. If you bring up New Year’s, here’s the truth of New Years, okay?
Mike: I was being facetious there by the way.
Patrick: Oh, I know. Most people fall prey to social pressure of committing to some sort of New Year’s resolution. And in fact, out of that, less than 79% of these New Year’s resolution actually ever get started and 97%, by the third week of January, get quit. So commit now to the fact that if you’re thinking it will change come New Year’s, beyond, I said stop lying to yourself because nothing changes until we get to the truth. So start being truthful with yourself, that I’m not going to doing it.
But at least if you get to the truth now, you can do something about it. So you know I’ll do it come New Year’s, knowing that there’s less than 3% chance that it will happen, then admit to the fact that it isn’t going to happen. So at least it’s an opportunity to do something about it. That’s my take on New Year’s.
Mike: So Patrick, let’s talk a little bit about this idea of self mastery. I think a lot of people are going through life and even if they have achieved certain levels of success, they haven’t really, like you’re saying, it’s difficult to be honest with yourself. It’s difficult to look in the mirror and say, come on now, you keep saying, you’re going to work out, you’re going to drop 30 pounds, whatever you’re going to do, and you just never get there.
There’s a lot of things in your life, “I’m going to get more involved in my kids’ lives. I’m going to do these things,” that you have the best of intentions to do but you just never get to them and it takes really a lot of self awareness to understand that, let’s be honest with myself right now about where I’m at and why I’m here and how I can reflect on that often and improve rapidly. Maybe share your thoughts on how people can really become aware of their situation.
Because I think that’s one problem that, especially a lot of small businesses and entrepreneurs have is they’re so caught up in creating something big and vast that they never get out of today.
Patrick: That’s a great question. I liked the way you ask that. So how do we create change and I’ll get into the idea of self mastery in a second. But let me start with this, let me start with the idea that we as entrepreneurs, let me separate the difference between competing and being a competitor and the net effect on us and how we actually start to flip flop to get this turned around. See, the challenge is, we like to compete. And there’s a problem with that.
At first, you’re like, “What’s wrong with competing? He’s a competitor. What could be possibly wrong with that?” The problem with competing is that it requires conformity. It requires that we look to be more like them, which runs in complete conflict with our DNA which we talked about earlier. We were made to be one-off, we’re designed to be unlike them. The truth only comes out of our genuine authenticity, and the second we compete, we’re no longer being genuine or authentic. We’re trying to conform to be like them just a little better as what it is they’re like.
So we immediately lose all aspects in control of self mastery because self mastery requires an intrinsic set of controls, an internal driver that is . . . our decisions and thoughts and emotions are driven from inside, not out here somewhere, from ourselves. But the second we compete, we want to be like them or conforming to them, we’re now being driven by what’s going on, on the outside.
The challenge with that when we’re working outside of our authenticity means that we’re not being genuine or true to who we are meant to be. Which then goes back to, you can’t create change until you add the truth. You hear people once in a while say, they had an epiphany, and everything changed. No, you just freaking woke up to the facts! The reality, the truth! You became clear on it, that’s all! That’s the only difference.
At that point now you can do something about it and that’s competing. A true competitor though, and this going to answer your question more specifically, is not competing out there with that bigger company or that person over there who’s thinner and drives a nicer car. That’s not the space they’re going after because this is what happens, Mike. I’ve done this in my life, more than one time, I’m sure you have as well.
Looking at another company like yours and somebody else, “Look at all that they have and look at how little as I have.” Instead of focusing and screaming at the universe exactly what you want being, instead of focusing on really where you want to go, you’re focusing on what they have and what you don’t. So you’re focus becomes in the space between the lack. Instead of focusing on what you want, you focus on what you don’t have. In doing so, you get more of what you don’t have, more lack, which completely skews the model, it confuses the universe. Right?
Mike: Absolutely.
Patrick: Search most from competing to a true competitor, they compete. You know who they compete with? Themselves. And their sole focus, their sole goal, Mike, is become better than they were the day before. That’s it. They simplified the game. All you have to do is outperform yesterday.
Even if it means, it was a crappy day and you fell flat on your face, because it’s impossible to land on your face and not fall forward, sometimes, you chalk that up as a victory. Our only competition is us from the day before. Whether it be in our relationships, a better relationship with a child or a daughter or a family member or whatever it may be. And our ability to communicate, because we know communication is a skill and it has to do with us and caring and trying to be truly interested in people.
Whatever it may be, just making sure we outcompete ourselves from the day before. That starts down the path, Mike, of self mastery because now all your drivers are coming from within you. They’re not out here. It doesn’t matter. You look at me like it doesn’t matter what Pat has because it’s not relative to me. That’s not even in my ball park. I have my own ball park, I’ve made my own rules.
I’m the creator, and truly that’s when you operate out of truth, authenticity and you’re the genuine you, that’s where you’re able to create. That’s where our magic comes from and that’s the one thing nobody can ever copy or steal. That’s the beauty of competing because people then, Mike, when they see you in that state, “Wow! Whatever it is he’s doing, we’ll copy Mike!” And you can say, “Listen, come in, you can steal my computer, you can come to my office and you can listen to everything I say, but you can’t steal this because it’s my magic. My magic comes out of my own DNA, that’s the whole rhythm behind this.”
Mike: That’s awesome. And the interesting thing about comparing yourself to others is you never know the whole story. You only know a little bit of it. You don’t know what’s behind it. I mean, there’s people all the time, that I’ve mentored and coached, “I want to buy 100 houses a year.” I’m like, “Why do you want to do that? Do you know what that means?” There’s a lot that happens behind there.
Without thinking what matters to them, it’s like, “I saw that guy do it and I want that.” It’s like, “Yeah, but guys, it could be that guy’s marriage is falling apart and his kids hate him. And he’s not really making any money anyway because he’s doing the same deals that are just for the sake of units or something.” Kind of relate it to a real estate . . .
Patrick: And what you described this is often the case. Unfortunately, I see . . . I’m sure you describe it because you know it to be true. It’s not always what it seems to be.
Mike: No, no. Awesome. Well, Patrick, we’re about out of time here so maybe you could take a couple of minutes to wrap up some of the stuff we talked about today, and hopefully do it in a way to where we kind of summarize this as a lesson for those that are listening. Because I think that what you’ve had to say today really resonates with a lot of people. It’s resonated with me. So maybe you could wrap this up here in a couple of minutes and give us a little summary.
Patrick: Sure, awesome. Let me suggest just a couple of things we didn’t bring up. All of us listening here, whether we’re all business owners or not business owners, starting out or veterans, the rules are no different. Our challenges are all the same, they only get bigger the further along we go. Our job is not to simplify, our job is to step up. The universe does not allow for simplification.
For those of you who were a single guy or girl, maybe you’ve got a boyfriend or girlfriend, then you got married, then and you got a car mortgage, then a house mortgage, then kids. Everything gets added. It does not simplify, never goes backwards. It’s just more, but it doesn’t mean that we can’t handle it.
But our job is always to step up and never to step down. But a key to this is clarity and bringing clarity into our lives. I find, and I watch closely to this, people speak in vague terms, Mike. They do that subconsciously intentionally so that there’s no accountability or responsibility to what they’re saying.
If I could nail home one thing I’d say, ladies and gentlemen, there’s two keys to this. One is clarity and the second is consciousness. I said this earlier in the meeting we were in, it’s impossible not to make a decision once you’re conscious of the decision. The decision gets made every time.
What I mean by that is that we’re confronted on a daily basis with decisions that need to be made but we often defer them. We step aside, we hide from them. But the decisions now will get made, just without our input, and they’re affecting our forward progress, but without our influence on them. And I’m talking about the harder decisions. Get to a state of consciousness in which you are aware that these decisions have got to be made, they’re going to be made with or without you.
Get to a point of clarity where, when you’re asked a question, be clear in your answer. Stop using vague terms. Start taking responsibility for everything that’s in your life.
I’ll leave you this one, my break down the word responsibility. You’ll like this. If you look at the word “responsibility”, you have “respond” and “ability”. When you put the two together, responsibility simply your ability to choose how to respond to circumstances. There are circumstances that we can control, those that we can and most we can, that’s the reality of our lives.
The moment we take responsibility for everything that’s happened to us in the past, in the current, and in the future, we’re empowered to choose . . . we now have the ability to choose how we’re going to respond to the circumstance. It’s the easiest way to start moving forward.
Mike: Awesome, awesome. Well, Patrick, thanks for being with us today. For those that might want to learn more about what you’ve got going on and all the great things you’re doing, where should they go?
Patrick: Probably the easiest way, Mike, is my full name PatrickPrecourt.com. It’s Patrick and then Precourt is P-R-E-C-O-U-R-T dot com. PatrickPrecourt.com. We’ve got a bunch of cool stuff in there. We do a lot on YouTube and Periscoping and all that kind of stuff. So if you want to see this stuff everyday, just start following. You guys will get the idea.
Mike: Awesome. We’ll add the link down below the video here. So, Patrick, great to see you! Thanks so much. I know I’m actually going to see you in a couple of weeks at a Mastermind event so looking forward to that, but thanks for being with us today. This is good stuff that sometimes we start talking about fundamentals of real estate investing and lots of in the weeds stuff in this show sometimes. But we’re all doing this for a bigger reason and whether it’s for financial freedom or to provide for our families or to make a difference or all of the above.
I thank you for spending time with us to share that lesson today.
Patrick: I appreciate the opportunity, Mike. Kudos to you, man. The questions increase the quality of a program like this, and you’re brilliant at what you do. Well done, brother.
Mike: All right, man. Thanks so much. Have a great day, we’ll see you soon!
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For today’s show, I’m excited to be joined by Patrick Precourt. He’s a leading real estate investor, mentor, and coach, and really just a motivational speaker where he teaches others how to achieve a life of wealth and freedom. And it’s going to be a great show today. I love talking about this type of stuff that we’re going to talk about.
Patrick has a professional development program where he helps mentor over 800 elite students across the country. In fact, he’s at an event right now. So if you’re watching versus listening, you may see that Patrick is in a hotel lobby which it actually is not going to affect us at all. If you’re listening, you wouldn’t even know it. But anyway, he is a traveling man and he’s out helping people.
What we’re going to talk about today is as real estate investors and entrepreneurs we’re all concerned with growing. You just don’t want to stay where you’re at. You can never get comfortable. You got to find ways to constantly move forward, no matter where you’re at in your career. Whether you’re really working for someone else and you want to go out on your own and be self‐employed and an entrepreneur, or whether you’re an entrepreneur and you’re at the top of your game already, you’re worried about growth and staying where you’re at and being relevant and moving forward. We all have fears and all these things that we deal with.
Patrick is a great leader in helping us and helping others move forward from wherever they’re at, and he has some great messages to share with us as entrepreneurs today. Before we get started with Patrick though, let’s take a moment to recognize our featured sponsors.
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Hey Patrick, welcome to the show!
Patrick: Hey welcome, Mike, and thank you for having me here! I’m pumped, brother. I’ve been waiting on this!
Mike: Yeah, yeah! Well, I told you, hey, we wanted to have our very best guest at number 272 and we got you!
Patrick: Woo hoo!
Mike: We got you, we got you. I’m really excited, I really love the message that you share with people and I think, as entrepreneurs, a lot of us struggle. Even people that assume, “Hey, that guy is at the top of his game. He’s done something awesome.” We’re all regular people, everybody has a life. They have to go home and they have fears, concerns, health issues and all those things that every human has to deal with.
A lot of times, I think, it keeps people out of being self‐employed and it keeps people that are entrepreneurs, sometimes, those fears and those concerns keep them in a place where it’s difficult to grow, right?
Patrick: Without a doubt.
Mike: Yeah.
Patrick: I don’t know if you want to start this conversation on fears.
Mike: Yeah, well, how about before we dive in too far here, why don’t you take a couple of minutes and just tell us your background? For those that don’t know you, for a lot of people, you may not need an introduction. But for some that may not know you well enough yet, tell us your background and what you do and how you got to where you are?
Patrick: Sure, yeah, I’ll try to condense this in a really big period of time over a short little description. Started in real estate in the late ’90s. Early on into short sales and we stayed heavily in the short sales until 2010‐ish, and then processed close to 850 short sales in that time. We got into that long before anybody knew what a short sale was, and built an entire business and all aspects of everything short sale. And that was a wonderful. That was where we spend most of our time early on investment side of things.
Since then, we’ve expanded in our entrepreneurialism. Currently we still have a real estate investment company that specializes in what I call, high risk, high reward properties, Mike. An example would be a property that has a very well documented contamination, leaky oil tanks, lead-based paints, asbestos, things like that, something that nobody else wants. That kind of property is the stuff we look for. We look for things that are in the middle of really yucky lawsuits, title claims, things like that. That’s something we want to take on.
Zoning issues, zoning improve, anything that pushes everybody else away. Particularly ones that still have loans on them, that’s our current forte. That’s where we focus our real estate expertise.
Mike: Yup, yup awesome.
Patrick: Yeah, outside of that, over the past, say starting in 2002, 3, 4, got involved in the educational side of real estate starting. Again, narrowed in short sale, teaching people how to do short sales and the process that we created, very proprietary. Short sale was such a buzz word and a lot of people, the government got involved. Then we expanded that into a much larger company that we partnered with and include one of the largest real estate education companies out there. When I retired from it, it was the year I retired in 2013, it had sales in excess of $75 million.
So it grew very big, very fast, it was very successful. That just launched me to other areas of my entrepreneurial space. I retired there so I could spend more time on the self‐development, the personal involvement, the business side of what we do. Focusing especially on real estate investors narrowed it down a little too much. Since then as we launched our Precourt Enterprises brand and we recalled six primary experiences and six primary fields which are all about experience in life at a higher level.
We typically, as we grow and expand . . . typically, as we get into your age and my age, we find ourselves getting conformed by circumstances and comfort zones which tend to hold us down and don’t allow us to become all that we’re capable of doing. In this space of growing people, we opened up a lifestyle fitness center. It’s unique in that it’s big, 16,000 square feet. We havev 18 trainers in there. I call it a lifestyle fitness center, but it has the heart and culture of our fighting martial arts. Picture this, picture we combine yoga and pilates, Brazilian body and all of our cardio fitness class, and we combine that with Muay Thai and Jujitsu and boxing and wrestling.
I have is a full blown MMA cage in there. We have six pro MMA guys fight out of our fitness center. So it’s really, really unique. But the idea there, and you’re like, “How does the different businesses combine?” Because you hear often that the idea of focus and we got to focus on one. In the end, is my focus is absolute, unique and special, and I focus on expanding and growing people. And the physical part of what we do is a big piece of that.
People don’t come to our gym, for instance, to work out. They come to our gym to become better than they were the day before. We’ll talk a little bit about that later on the conversation of self‐mastery and how we produce those results.
Mike: Awesome, awesome. Where do you want to start here? Do you want to start by talking about . . . I know we started talking about fears a little bit, but maybe you can start off by talking about the entrepreneurial mindset and what it takes to become an entrepreneur, and then some of the challenges you’ve seen that hold people back.
Patrick: Sure, sure, I mean we can go right to where people start. Where do entrepreneurs come from? They come from the space of being an employee. They come from having a job and one day, we realize that we’re capable of more. We’re willing to make that leap of faith into the life of self‐employed, right? And really, let’s be honest with the life of self‐employed. Self‐employed is really now instead of working for a job, we now just own a job.
Not much has changed, our days have gotten longer, our responsibilities have gotten greater. But typically, the money isn’t any better.
Mike: The days are longer, there’s no doubt. I think most people end up working harder than they ever have.
Patrick: Yeah, and I’m not against working harder. I’m against working harder when there’s not a plan, when there’s not a specific outcome or result in clarity as to why we’re working harder. I had parents that were the hardest working individuals. They came from the era that the harder you work, the better or bigger your results would be. Let me just share the net result of that. They built, entrepreneurial minded, they built a home inspection company which I worked for, for a number of years, which is awesome, that had an outstanding reputation, more business than we can ever handle.
But that was the problem, we could only handle so much. My parents did everything themselves. They have one employee, me, okay. It’s pretty much me and my dad who did all the inspections. They’re incapable of expanding beyond the owner operated business.
They did own a business, make no mistake. This business it was exclusively about them. Quite honestly, when my dad passed away, so went the business as well. So he spent a good part of 15 years building something that never had a payoff. You know this to be true. If that’s the plan, you’re better off staying and working where you’re working and holding a job.
Mike: Yeah.
Patrick: No doubt.
Mike: Absolutely. Nobody, I think it’s a challenge of a lot of, not just real estate investors but entrepreneurs have is doing something bigger than themselves. Not just creating a job but how do they actually build something that can exist and thrive without them. That’s a whole other form of entrepreneurship that a lot of people, never get to that point unfortunately.
Patrick: Sure, that goes into the idea of going, have a job, self‐employed, business‐operator, you’re operating the business, you’re managing the business. But then, the big leap of faith into a business owner, being the actual business owner. Business owners are, quite honestly, I had to find out that by being at the business, the functions as a business, operates without you. You’re no longer operating it.
There is a big shift in mindset it to one, that if you want to see what kills the entrepreneur between year 5 and year 10, that’s when there’s a huge default rate in businesses, and a huge failure rate, it’s their inability, which is their lack of decision making or their inability to make the choice to switch from managing a business to leading a business. And the mind shift is huge. It’s simple, but it’s huge.
When you think about what does a manager do, a manager manages results. They focus on improving results and that’s how they rate themselves. That’s how they get bonuses, that’s how they judge their worthiness or value. This is in any business, what a manager’s supposed to do.
A leader, however, they don’t work on increasing results. They work on improving people and this is a hard step because you know what? Nothing big ever happened by just one person. It always takes a group of outstanding people working together. A lot of people, a lot of entrepreneurs are of the mindset that nobody can do it as good as me. I mean, I’ll call out for what it is, that’s an arrogant, ignorant position because there’s very little that we do that we’re awesome at. There’s just a lot that we do.
Mike: I think where a lot of people get hung up too is, let’s say that they’re doing . . . I don’t want to talk about money and say, “Well, if you’re not making a million dollars, you’re not doing well.” But let’s just say that the average person if they, who probably is above average, let’s just say they’re making a quarter of a million dollars a year. It’s hard for them to go out and say, “I’ll give up half of that to a superstar because I think they can double it from here.” A lot of times people can’t afford that person or they can’t afford the, in their mind at least, they can’t afford to take that risk of well, what if they don’t work out.
They got the challenges of small companies, small businesses. They generally can’t have redundancies so if you over-rely on somebody and that person leaves, then you’re the guy that has to jump back in. There’s all those kinds of issues that small businesses face.
Patrick: Yeah.
Mike: Yeah, any thoughts there on the importance of being able to think of your . . .
Patrick: . . . how do we scale? We want to scale so we increase our bottom line and we need our bottom line to be increased, so that we can scale. What goes first, is it the chicken or the egg? So let’s start out with this, Mike, we cannot go into this asking ourselves or saying to ourselves, “What if I fail?” We, no doubt, speak our future, and if we go into it, questioning whether or not, we’re going to succeed, the likeliness that we’re going to succeed is diminished greatly.
When we call out everything we want, the universe returns to us exactly that which we asked for. All you’ve got to do in order to ask is just be clear on what it is. When you start focusing on missing, then you’re going to start getting those misses. So let’s start out with the commitment that we’re going all in on this process, and “all in” simply means that we’re not going to doubt ourselves. We’ll evaluate risk but we’re not going to doubt the process, that’s number one.
Number two is in order to scale, in order to get bigger, we need more than us. Again, we have to ask ourselves, “Whenever I get to an impasse,” and this I’ll share with all of you, okay, “that is no longer acceptable – situation or terms that are no longer acceptable – you have to ask yourself, just like we’re looking at each other right now and just say, “Listen, self, how much longer am I going to continue to choose to accept the results and the outcome that I’m currently getting?”
And just pause and wait for that answer because what’s resonating at the back of your head right now, number one, is that you’re choosing your life right now, which is accepting that everything we have, we deserve. Everything we have, we have it equally to the level that we deserve it and what that means, Mike, is that you and I have made decisions, made choices, took actions, that have gotten us to exactly where we are right now. Which means everything good and bad, from our physical health, to the size of our bank account, to the quality of our relationships, are the direct result of our decisions and we have exactly what we deserve.
We have it, we deserve it to the degree that we’re committed to attract it and accept it. That’s the answer of creating change. So you want to scale, do you, brother? Well, you can scale everything you want to the degree that you’re committed to attract and accept the fruits of that labor. When we start out saying, “What if I fail?” it’s already a breach to your commitment. You’re already going the wrong way.
Mike: You’re coming up with Plan B in the back of your mind, yeah.
Patrick: And if you come up with a Plan B, you will resort to Plan B. You’ve committed to it. It’s like giving your kid a way out. “You get an A but if you don’t and you only get a B,” they’re getting a B. You know what I’m saying? That’s probably the single biggest leap of faith or change that we have to make. Then we have to start challenging our fears.
When I say challenge, is if it’s a fear under the bed. We’re afraid of what’s under the bed. It’s time to look under the bed, call yourself out, man up to this. Stop playing down, start . . . if you want to be bigger, you have to play bigger. It goes back to the same thing, you and I heard this from the day we were raised by our mom and dad, and all through time. There’s a time and a place that these three words will resonate and finally make sense to us – the words, “be, do, have.” Be, do, have.
Unfortunately, we’re taught to almost stopped to start the process in reverse. Figure out what you want to have, and be what you have to be to do it. Then finally, be the person. When in fact, it works just the opposite. It’s time we be what we have to be, so we can do what we have to do, to have what we want to have. So a vision board shouldn’t be of the shit we want. A vision board should be of the person we’re going to become in order to do the hard work to have anything in this world that we want.
This world is extremely abundant. There’s more money than there is air to breathe. The only thing that stop it from flowing our way is us. That’s it.
Mike: That’s awesome because you and I both know people that have worked really hard, and they got the things but in the process, they destroyed the things they cared about the most. Like family, health, all those things, right?
Patrick: Yeah, I’m glad you brought that up because you can’t . . . we’ll get into that idea why in a second. But you cannot achieve success by my definition without keeping your life in integrity. And your life is not just your bank account, not just the size of your business, it’s not just how many employees you have. Your life is all of those, but it’s also your relationships. It’s how well you treat your wife, it’s your relationship with your kids, with your friends.
It’s how well you keep this in tune, it’s how well you keep your word to other people. It’s all that. If one of them is out of integrity, it will affect all of the other. I describe it in terms of resistance in our lives. When I meet a point of resistance during my day, I immediately stop, I own that it’s there because I chose it to be there, something I chose, put it in front of me and I go back to try to sort out what decision did I make that put that resistance in front of me. It didn’t happen by chance, it doesn’t work that way.
Mike: Let’s talk about, I wanted to go into, you talked a little bit about the why, like why you do things and people kind of throw that around, why? Well, I do it because of my family. I don’t want to take that away from anybody but people tend to . . . I think a lot of entrepreneurs especially, they work hard out of fear. They work hard because they didn’t understand their why. Or they just work hard because they don’t really know why they’re working hard. They just feel like that’s what entrepreneurs do is work hard. But maybe share your thoughts on why you do things is important?
Patrick: Sure. If the driver is wrong, achieving success is almost impossible. So let me just shared you my definition of success. It’s got three components, very simple. The first one is a little subjective. We’ve reached a respectable level of finances, of self worth.
What is that number? That’s different to everybody but a comfort level there. It doesn’t mean you have to be the richest guy in the street. It doesn’t mean that you have to have millions of dollars. A respectable, whether you’ve understood a way to generate and track income into your life, and it’s very easy now for you to generate income. It’s become easy to, or maybe it’s a lower level than somebody else but it’s still success. So that’s number one, finances are taken care of.
Number two and number three are very similar but they feed off each other. Number two is you’re loved by many, number three is respected by most. And these two, Mike, these two have got to be earned. They can’t be gifted to you, they can’t be borrowed. They certainly can’t be paid for. In order to be loved by many, means that you’ve got to put out love and it’s got to be genuine. You can’t fake this.
In order to be respected by most, and I say “most” because not everybody will respect you, the world doesn’t work that way. That’s fine, but you can have somebody that you disagree wholly with respect you just because you shot straight. That’s what I’m talking about. Both of these have more to do with humanity and how well you treat people and how much you better their lives. If you take care of people the way they should be taken care of, the way you’d like to be taken care of, these two will rank high for you.
But if you put those three together, that’s my definition of success. So you go back to your why, so if your why is out of fear, you work hard out of fear, that train ends. I’ll tell you that right now. Because it’s coming from a negative place and that means you’ll do negative things to avoid something more negative than it. It’s not a good place to operate out of. Remember, we get back exactly what we put out.
The game itself is so simple, if we don’t like what we’re getting, just take a look exactly what we’re putting out and change it. We don’t have to ask, we don’t have to rely on anybody else. It’s wholly up to us. It takes in the idea of responsibility but I will talk more about that in a second. I want to finish this idea on why, right? Because I know you’ve been asked a thousand times, “Mike, what is your why,” in different events and different trainings and things like that.
As Mike says, and I’ve asked people the why. I was at an event that you’re familiar with just a few weeks ago in September and the why came up. Almost everybody there and most people there, mostly males, couple of females, most everybody’s married and therefore most of they why were the same. It’s to take care of my family and my wife or my husband and the kids and be financially sound. Some people would bring it a little further, “I want freedom and . . .”
All these, quite honestly, very superficial whys. I would suggest that if that’s all we think we’re capable of, we’re grossly underestimating, A, our capabilities and, B, we’re disrespecting all the God-given tools that have been given to us. You, I, everyone listening to this, we’re given a set of tools that make us unique, one-off versions of us that has never existed ever in the history of this entire earth, isn’t present now, and there’ll never be another person like you, Mike, like me or like anyone else here.
We’re unique for a reason so we could bring our own magic into this space. And to think that we’re given that attention to detail for the sole purpose of taking care of our family, our why, is really short sighted. It’s kind of funny thinking about this way, right?
Mike: Yeah, it is.
Patrick: So I help understand this at a deeper level by breaking our why into two components, our priorities and our responsibilities, or greater responsibilities. I would suggest, and I share these words for your consideration and for nothing else. You can do what you wish. I like to look at our family, our wife, or our husband or our kids or anybody else we take care of, and I take care of others in my family. I like to see them as our responsibility. They come first. We’ve got to make sure that they’re taken care of first.
No doubt, I’m pretty sure that’s what everybody means when they say their why. But I also like to share the idea, for your consideration, that we have a greater responsibility. And in the most broad description, I’d suggest that it’s our job to impact this world to the highest degree that we possibly can, while we’re on this earth. I like to describe it in terms of a dent we leave behind in the earth. We’re going to make as big freaking dent as we possibly can while we’re here.
That’s where our magic comes alive because everybody is going to do that in a different way, provided we don’t fall prey to competing with others.
Mike: And, Patrick, would you say that that’s like a progressive thing? Because I think a lot of entrepreneurs, and I’ve kind of felt this myself, you get to a certain point where your priorities are taken care of, at least certainly financially, you get to a point where it’s not about the money anymore. I don’t want to say it’s not about the money because things have to make business sense. But you get to a certain point where you’re making, whatever the money it might be for you, that you’re comfortable, you don’t have to worry about eating, you don’t have to worry about bills at all.
Then it’s just like, I have got some sort of mission I’m on here. Some people don’t even know what it is. They’re just like, “I want to make a difference but I don’t know exactly what that is.” But is that progression? You got to cover your priorities first and then you have a responsibility with everything after that to make an impact?
Patrick: Sort of, I don’t think that you have to because, let’s just say somebody’s starting out who’s really concerned right now about where next month’s bills are going to come, where the money from those bills are going to come from. Starting out, whether an entrepreneur, a new business, whatever it be, and different levels of this, from that financial position all the way up to where all your money’s taken care of, there is no one there, Mike, that is not in a position here and now, that cannot make a positive impact here and now.
Mike: Sure, absolutely.
Patrick: So to answer to your question, I think we have to wait until we’re more financially secure, stable to act on this, I would say “no”. Here’s why, this goes to the idea that we can do it tomorrow. The truth is, and this is one of those fundamental rules that tomorrow is really never more than anything of a reflection of today. As a matter of fact, it’s usually a magnification of today. I’d suggest that anything you’re waiting for tomorrow, you best get busy doing it now or it ain’t ever going to come. For those people listening right now that are planning on going on a diet someday . . .
Mike: At this point they should wait until New Year’s Day, right? At this point is that what you’re saying? That they should wait until New Year’s Day?
Patrick: If it’s of any importance to you, you’d best do it now. If you bring up New Year’s, here’s the truth of New Years, okay?
Mike: I was being facetious there by the way.
Patrick: Oh, I know. Most people fall prey to social pressure of committing to some sort of New Year’s resolution. And in fact, out of that, less than 79% of these New Year’s resolution actually ever get started and 97%, by the third week of January, get quit. So commit now to the fact that if you’re thinking it will change come New Year’s, beyond, I said stop lying to yourself because nothing changes until we get to the truth. So start being truthful with yourself, that I’m not going to doing it.
But at least if you get to the truth now, you can do something about it. So you know I’ll do it come New Year’s, knowing that there’s less than 3% chance that it will happen, then admit to the fact that it isn’t going to happen. So at least it’s an opportunity to do something about it. That’s my take on New Year’s.
Mike: So Patrick, let’s talk a little bit about this idea of self mastery. I think a lot of people are going through life and even if they have achieved certain levels of success, they haven’t really, like you’re saying, it’s difficult to be honest with yourself. It’s difficult to look in the mirror and say, come on now, you keep saying, you’re going to work out, you’re going to drop 30 pounds, whatever you’re going to do, and you just never get there.
There’s a lot of things in your life, “I’m going to get more involved in my kids’ lives. I’m going to do these things,” that you have the best of intentions to do but you just never get to them and it takes really a lot of self awareness to understand that, let’s be honest with myself right now about where I’m at and why I’m here and how I can reflect on that often and improve rapidly. Maybe share your thoughts on how people can really become aware of their situation.
Because I think that’s one problem that, especially a lot of small businesses and entrepreneurs have is they’re so caught up in creating something big and vast that they never get out of today.
Patrick: That’s a great question. I liked the way you ask that. So how do we create change and I’ll get into the idea of self mastery in a second. But let me start with this, let me start with the idea that we as entrepreneurs, let me separate the difference between competing and being a competitor and the net effect on us and how we actually start to flip flop to get this turned around. See, the challenge is, we like to compete. And there’s a problem with that.
At first, you’re like, “What’s wrong with competing? He’s a competitor. What could be possibly wrong with that?” The problem with competing is that it requires conformity. It requires that we look to be more like them, which runs in complete conflict with our DNA which we talked about earlier. We were made to be one-off, we’re designed to be unlike them. The truth only comes out of our genuine authenticity, and the second we compete, we’re no longer being genuine or authentic. We’re trying to conform to be like them just a little better as what it is they’re like.
So we immediately lose all aspects in control of self mastery because self mastery requires an intrinsic set of controls, an internal driver that is . . . our decisions and thoughts and emotions are driven from inside, not out here somewhere, from ourselves. But the second we compete, we want to be like them or conforming to them, we’re now being driven by what’s going on, on the outside.
The challenge with that when we’re working outside of our authenticity means that we’re not being genuine or true to who we are meant to be. Which then goes back to, you can’t create change until you add the truth. You hear people once in a while say, they had an epiphany, and everything changed. No, you just freaking woke up to the facts! The reality, the truth! You became clear on it, that’s all! That’s the only difference.
At that point now you can do something about it and that’s competing. A true competitor though, and this going to answer your question more specifically, is not competing out there with that bigger company or that person over there who’s thinner and drives a nicer car. That’s not the space they’re going after because this is what happens, Mike. I’ve done this in my life, more than one time, I’m sure you have as well.
Looking at another company like yours and somebody else, “Look at all that they have and look at how little as I have.” Instead of focusing and screaming at the universe exactly what you want being, instead of focusing on really where you want to go, you’re focusing on what they have and what you don’t. So you’re focus becomes in the space between the lack. Instead of focusing on what you want, you focus on what you don’t have. In doing so, you get more of what you don’t have, more lack, which completely skews the model, it confuses the universe. Right?
Mike: Absolutely.
Patrick: Search most from competing to a true competitor, they compete. You know who they compete with? Themselves. And their sole focus, their sole goal, Mike, is become better than they were the day before. That’s it. They simplified the game. All you have to do is outperform yesterday.
Even if it means, it was a crappy day and you fell flat on your face, because it’s impossible to land on your face and not fall forward, sometimes, you chalk that up as a victory. Our only competition is us from the day before. Whether it be in our relationships, a better relationship with a child or a daughter or a family member or whatever it may be. And our ability to communicate, because we know communication is a skill and it has to do with us and caring and trying to be truly interested in people.
Whatever it may be, just making sure we outcompete ourselves from the day before. That starts down the path, Mike, of self mastery because now all your drivers are coming from within you. They’re not out here. It doesn’t matter. You look at me like it doesn’t matter what Pat has because it’s not relative to me. That’s not even in my ball park. I have my own ball park, I’ve made my own rules.
I’m the creator, and truly that’s when you operate out of truth, authenticity and you’re the genuine you, that’s where you’re able to create. That’s where our magic comes from and that’s the one thing nobody can ever copy or steal. That’s the beauty of competing because people then, Mike, when they see you in that state, “Wow! Whatever it is he’s doing, we’ll copy Mike!” And you can say, “Listen, come in, you can steal my computer, you can come to my office and you can listen to everything I say, but you can’t steal this because it’s my magic. My magic comes out of my own DNA, that’s the whole rhythm behind this.”
Mike: That’s awesome. And the interesting thing about comparing yourself to others is you never know the whole story. You only know a little bit of it. You don’t know what’s behind it. I mean, there’s people all the time, that I’ve mentored and coached, “I want to buy 100 houses a year.” I’m like, “Why do you want to do that? Do you know what that means?” There’s a lot that happens behind there.
Without thinking what matters to them, it’s like, “I saw that guy do it and I want that.” It’s like, “Yeah, but guys, it could be that guy’s marriage is falling apart and his kids hate him. And he’s not really making any money anyway because he’s doing the same deals that are just for the sake of units or something.” Kind of relate it to a real estate . . .
Patrick: And what you described this is often the case. Unfortunately, I see . . . I’m sure you describe it because you know it to be true. It’s not always what it seems to be.
Mike: No, no. Awesome. Well, Patrick, we’re about out of time here so maybe you could take a couple of minutes to wrap up some of the stuff we talked about today, and hopefully do it in a way to where we kind of summarize this as a lesson for those that are listening. Because I think that what you’ve had to say today really resonates with a lot of people. It’s resonated with me. So maybe you could wrap this up here in a couple of minutes and give us a little summary.
Patrick: Sure, awesome. Let me suggest just a couple of things we didn’t bring up. All of us listening here, whether we’re all business owners or not business owners, starting out or veterans, the rules are no different. Our challenges are all the same, they only get bigger the further along we go. Our job is not to simplify, our job is to step up. The universe does not allow for simplification.
For those of you who were a single guy or girl, maybe you’ve got a boyfriend or girlfriend, then you got married, then and you got a car mortgage, then a house mortgage, then kids. Everything gets added. It does not simplify, never goes backwards. It’s just more, but it doesn’t mean that we can’t handle it.
But our job is always to step up and never to step down. But a key to this is clarity and bringing clarity into our lives. I find, and I watch closely to this, people speak in vague terms, Mike. They do that subconsciously intentionally so that there’s no accountability or responsibility to what they’re saying.
If I could nail home one thing I’d say, ladies and gentlemen, there’s two keys to this. One is clarity and the second is consciousness. I said this earlier in the meeting we were in, it’s impossible not to make a decision once you’re conscious of the decision. The decision gets made every time.
What I mean by that is that we’re confronted on a daily basis with decisions that need to be made but we often defer them. We step aside, we hide from them. But the decisions now will get made, just without our input, and they’re affecting our forward progress, but without our influence on them. And I’m talking about the harder decisions. Get to a state of consciousness in which you are aware that these decisions have got to be made, they’re going to be made with or without you.
Get to a point of clarity where, when you’re asked a question, be clear in your answer. Stop using vague terms. Start taking responsibility for everything that’s in your life.
I’ll leave you this one, my break down the word responsibility. You’ll like this. If you look at the word “responsibility”, you have “respond” and “ability”. When you put the two together, responsibility simply your ability to choose how to respond to circumstances. There are circumstances that we can control, those that we can and most we can, that’s the reality of our lives.
The moment we take responsibility for everything that’s happened to us in the past, in the current, and in the future, we’re empowered to choose . . . we now have the ability to choose how we’re going to respond to the circumstance. It’s the easiest way to start moving forward.
Mike: Awesome, awesome. Well, Patrick, thanks for being with us today. For those that might want to learn more about what you’ve got going on and all the great things you’re doing, where should they go?
Patrick: Probably the easiest way, Mike, is my full name PatrickPrecourt.com. It’s Patrick and then Precourt is P-R-E-C-O-U-R-T dot com. PatrickPrecourt.com. We’ve got a bunch of cool stuff in there. We do a lot on YouTube and Periscoping and all that kind of stuff. So if you want to see this stuff everyday, just start following. You guys will get the idea.
Mike: Awesome. We’ll add the link down below the video here. So, Patrick, great to see you! Thanks so much. I know I’m actually going to see you in a couple of weeks at a Mastermind event so looking forward to that, but thanks for being with us today. This is good stuff that sometimes we start talking about fundamentals of real estate investing and lots of in the weeds stuff in this show sometimes. But we’re all doing this for a bigger reason and whether it’s for financial freedom or to provide for our families or to make a difference or all of the above.
I thank you for spending time with us to share that lesson today.
Patrick: I appreciate the opportunity, Mike. Kudos to you, man. The questions increase the quality of a program like this, and you’re brilliant at what you do. Well done, brother.
Mike: All right, man. Thanks so much. Have a great day, we’ll see you soon!
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