Stop Comparing Yourself to Others

Welcome to Real Estate Investing Secrets. We’re all looking for freedom and the opportunity to live better, more fulfilling lives. But most of us were trained our entire lives to work for someone else and chase their dreams. How can we use real estate investing as a vehicle to achieve financial freedom? My life is dedicated to answering your real estate investing questions, and helping you build an investing business that allows you to change your life and the world around you, and to enable you to turn your dreams of financial freedom into a reality. My name is Mike Hambright from flipnerd.com, and your questions get answered here on the Real Estate Investing Secrets show.
What’s up, freedom fighters? Hey, welcome back for another episode. Hey, today I wanted to share with you. This has been on my mind for the last several days and it’s things that have come up before, but I thought there’s kind of a lesson here. It’s a lesson for me too, so I really wanted to kind of share this with you, and it’s something that we probably all are guilty of, it’s comparing yourself to others. You got to stop comparing yourself to others, at least in a way that has a negative impact on you. So it’s great to look at those that are ahead of you in terms of that inspiring you and helping you on your journey to achieve more. But more often than not, I see people getting discouraged because of others ahead of them. Like, oh, well, they’re so . . . it’s so easy for that person because of XXXY whatever, XYZ whatever.
Now, the truth is, is there’s a couple lessons in there. All right, first off, this all largely happens because of social media, right? People tend to post the positive things and not necessarily the negative things. I can tell you that I know some really successful people that are not successful at home. They have challenges and problems, and I’m not making light of that situation. What I’m asking you to do is realize that there is often more to the story of what you see on social media. So sometimes people are portraying themselves in one way and they’re not necessarily doing it in a negative way to try to, you know, hide other things, but it’s just not what they want to talk about. They really want to talk about, you know, they kind of use social media as an opportunity to shed light on the good things.
And the truth is, is that, you know, not unlike Hollywood actors and actresses, those things that we see in the movies and on TV is not that real person, like they have a different life. So that’s why we’re shocked sometimes when we hear that some person that we put on a pedestal that we thought was so awesome, does something ridiculous, or illegal, or whatever in the real world. And it’s because it’s an act. And I think on social media, people are not necessarily acting and trying to pretend be somebody that they’re not, but in the vein of sharing the good things and not sharing the bad things, that’s often what happens.
And so the main reason that I want to talk about this is I don’t want you to get discouraged, right? Real estate investing is a difficult business already, and when you see people that are ahead, it’s easy to assume that they have some superpower that you don’t. And there’s a couple things that I want to say here. First, is I want to share this quote that I just shared here recently on social media, and I heard it a while back, I don’t know where it came from. But I like it and it’s, “Don’t compare your first inning to someone else’s seventh inning.” Baseball analogy there. But the point is, is somebody else has been around longer and run the bases more and been through ups and downs more. It’s not a shocker that they have learned more than you. So don’t compare yourself to that person, right? They have overcome some challenges that you might still need to overcome, or learned some lessons that you still need to learn yourself.
Now, with that said, I also encourage you, depending on where you are in your career, in your business, or in your life, is to understand that you have to overcome those challenges. You can’t just hang your shingle out and say, I’m going to be this successful person or run a successful business without going through some of those challenges, right? That’s how success, I kind of use my air quotes here, works. Success is based on having been through a series of failures and learning from those.
Now, sometimes it doesn’t have to be your failure, sometimes you can learn from others in terms of coaching and mentoring. That’s one of the great things about being around or kind of in masterminds. Like the one that we run, for example, is people can learn from one another and overcome some obstacles and challenges that somebody else faced and kind of dodged those bullets. But I promise you there’s going to be other bullets that you’re just not going to be able to dodge. So no matter where you are in your life or business, there’s always going to be people ahead of you.
Now, another thing that I want to share with you on the same vein here is that, and this is a little bit of . . . I hate using the word wisdom because it makes me sound like I’m old, like I’m Yoda and I’ve been around doing this for a long time. I’ve been doing this for 11 years, but depending on where you are in your career, maybe I’m ahead of you or maybe I’m behind you. But what I’ve discovered, one of the things that I’ve discovered along the way, is that success, or your business, or really your life, there’s not some destination. There’s not some finish line out there. There could be a goal line, but as entrepreneurs we tend to move those goal lines further and further along, so we never kind of hit our destination.
And the reason I’m telling you this is that I didn’t know that early on, I thought like I’m going to get to be successful, and no matter how successful or how many good things happen to me, I never can reach that thing. It’s elusive, it continues to move on. And that’s why it’s important to have goals, okay? Because success is a relative term, and your goals, after you set those are milestones on your way to somewhere else. Now you may not know what the milestone is a year out, or three years out, let’s say. But if you work on those shorter term ones, those are many destinations, but it’s on the path to success. So I guess my point in saying that is that business, your life, whatever you deem as success should be viewed as more of a journey, and not some destination that you’re going to hit.
And I’ll tell you that that’s why it’s really, really important that you kind of enjoy the ride, to use a little bit of a cheesy cliché. Like, if you come into this thinking that I need to get to point 100 and right now I’m at 50, and I’m halfway there. You know, you’re just going to constantly be discouraged because people kind of move your cheese, your goals change, your goals in life change, there are things that I used to think that were important to me, that don’t really matter now. I don’t even think about them.
I used to think like dumb things like, “Whenever I make this much money, I’m going to buy a nice watch.” Well, I haven’t worn a watch in years. My watch is on my phone. What do I need a fancy watch for? And the truth is, I have no interest in that now.
Like there’s other things that I thought I would get and you kind of realize like, hey, sometimes you don’t want a bigger house. Sometimes . . . I was asking my wife, we could afford much more house than we have now. We love our house. It’s way bigger than what we need and we could afford to double or triple the size of that house. And recently I was talking to my wife and she actually wants to downsize and simplify, and because you kind of value your time, right?
So my point for telling you that is that whatever your goals are now, they may change and it’s really important you kind of enjoy the ride that you’re on. Because you’re probably working hard and if you’re not, you need to be to get to where you want to go most often. And you have to enjoy that journey now.
I think probably, you know, the HGTVs of the world, the fly-by-night gurus, people like that have really done us all a disservice if you follow that, and you think that that is what they’re saying is what you want. Because, you know, the reality is, it’s not good TV to tell you . . . It doesn’t sell advertising, apparently, to tell you that this business is hard work, okay? It’s not good business to tell you that. You can have all this if you work really, really hard, because that is the truth. And how could it not be the truth, right?
But a lot of us have been led to believe early on, maybe you’ve been led to believe that this is easy. And as soon as you start on that path to meeting your goals, a lot of people get discouraged and give up. So it’s hard work. And again, it’s because sometimes we’re comparing it to what others ahead of us said, we see on social media, some of the flipping house flipping shows, they made it look so easy and it’s not that easy. And so now, I’m going to give up.
Like, don’t give up. If you want this, this is a good business, but you have to be willing to put in the work, to build a successful business. Something that’s going to help you achieve your goals, the only way there is through hard work, I’ll just tell you. Now, if you work hard enough, you get lucky more often too, right?
And if that discourages you, I want you to think about a couple of things here. If you’re working for somebody else right now, and in your mind you’re working hard. Why wouldn’t you be willing to work twice as hard or 10 times as hard for yourself, right? And if you are working for someone else, and you’re not working hard, and you view this as kind of easy, “I just kind of drift by, I’m coasting there,” I got a problem . . . I’m going to tell you, your days are numbered. If they figure out that they don’t need you, then your days are numbered.
Now, by the way, I’m not saying that it’s a bad thing to work for someone else. I always have to be careful because I have employees, people that work for me, and not everybody should own their own business and not everybody wants to. I know plenty of people that are like, “Hey, I love being around entrepreneurs and I love all this, but I don’t want to have to deal with payroll issues and all these other issues that are stresses on entrepreneurs,” right?
But my point is, if you’re listening to this podcast, this show, there’s a very, very good chance that you are excited about real estate investing, and you’re more entrepreneurial than the average person. And so if this message resonates with you, don’t be afraid to do the hard work.
Now, for those of you that my message resonates with that have been down the path a little while, you’ve been doing this for a number of years, and you have some level of success, and you have people that are looking up to you, some of you, my friends that also have arrow wounds in their back from all the trials and tribulations that we’ve made to get down the path of success at least some way. Please make sure to give to those behind you.
If you haven’t done it yet and you have some success, you have something you’d like to share, I can tell you that coaching and mentoring other people has changed my life. Honestly, it’s more fulfilling to me and that doesn’t mean it is for everybody. But for me, while it seemed like upfront, honestly, I had some reservations and thought it was some conflicts with my own success. Like somehow if I teach somebody, they’re going to take some success away from me. Whatever kind of thoughts I might have had didn’t really kind of turn out to be true. But I’ll tell you by coaching and mentoring other people, it’s made me a better business person and a better real estate investor.
And I know there’s this old mantra that those who can’t do it teach, and that is total bullshit. I will tell you that if it’s somebody that has never done it, and they teach it, then you should be a little suspect. If there’s somebody that has done it and has had the success that you want to have, and they also teach it, then that is really who you’re looking for. Somebody that’s kind of been down that path before. I would even argue though, in some spaces, you can learn a lot from people that haven’t necessarily done it to the level that you want to do it, but they have the vision. I very much believe that there are people that are better coaches than they are players, right?
You can see this in professional sports even, I’m not going to name anybody right now, of course, but there are plenty of people that are just better at coaching what they do than doing it themselves. One reason or another, I don’t think that there’s necessarily anything wrong with that. But you want to work with people that know what they’re doing.
My message really is to those that have that experience that wants to give back and feel, honestly, I don’t know. It’d be hard to have some level of success and not feel a little bit of obligation to try to teach other people as well. I can also tell you, for you folks that are listening to that, helping others can also create some amazing opportunities where that you might not see on the surface. One is just fulfillment of helping somebody else achieve success, or get down the path to success for their goals.
But also there are lots of win-win situations that could happen such as partnering on deals, and JVing in businesses, and things like that. So I’ve been doing this show for nearly five and a half years now, and for those of you that have been following along for a long time, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate you. But it’s been a life changer for me. Initially, it was a way to network, and meet people, and share my knowledge, and it’s turned into something much bigger than that which I couldn’t have guessed and didn’t expect to happen early on.
But my network has just exploded by having hundreds and hundreds of guests on the show and making lots of new friends and truthfully doing deals with people, and building all sorts of amazing friendships with people that have just turned out to be something much better than I ever could have imagined. And it’s very similar to what I’ve gotten through coaching, the friendships, the opportunities that have come up that I never would have guessed would happen just by sharing my knowledge and helping somebody out.
So that’s my lesson for today. It’s essentially, to make sure that you’re not comparing yourself to others. The truth is, is that never will end. If you haven’t bought your first deal yet, and now you’re doing 100 houses a year, then if you are comparing yourself to the person doing 500 houses a year, then it could discourage you, right? So no matter where you are, there are always people that are ahead of you. And if that discourages you, you know, you got to reframe that, that needs to inspire you and ignite you to take it to the next level.
And also, again, whatever you see on social media, you know, there’s an asterisk next to everything there, right? There kind of needs to be. So it’s easy for us to compare ourselves to others. It’s kind of the worst of us to the best of them. And it’s always going to be a gap, you’re never going to win in that scenario. So take that with a grain of salt. Don’t give up on your dreams. And, as I like to say at the end of each show, keep on fighting for freedom. Appreciate you guys so much. We’ll see you on the next episode.
Thanks for listening to today’s show. There are three ways I can help you start or grow your real estate investing business. If you’re a new investor and just getting started, the FlipNerd Investor Coaching program is the most effective program in America. I’ve been coaching and mentoring new real estate investors for 10 years, and my students have literally purchased thousands and thousands of properties. Many of them started with little to no expense at all. Our program is a paint-by-numbers program where we tell you exactly what to do week by week, to make sure that you don’t get distracted on your way to results. We show you how to build a real business, not just create another job for yourself. New memberships are limited, you can learn more and apply or schedule a call with me and my team at flipnerd.com/coaching.
If you’re an experienced investor doing a minimum of 10 deals a year up to 500 deals a year or more, or have a multimillion dollar real estate portfolio already, you should check out our powerful Investor Fuel Real Estate Investor Mastermind. Over 100 of the nation’s leading real estate investors are members, and it’s not uncommon for our members to 2X to 5X their business just from getting around other members at Investor Fuel. At Investor Fuel, each of us are business advisors to one another’s businesses, but we don’t stop at business. We focus heavily on becoming better people and living fuller lives. If you’re looking for fuel for your business or fuel for your life, please check out investorfuel.com. Applications and interviews are required as most investors are not a fit for our community. Please learn more at investorfuel.com.
If you’re not ready for coaching or masterminds, but eager to start learning more about investing, please join our private Facebook group by visiting flipnerd.com/facebook. New members get access to free training from us right here at flipnerd.com, and it’s a community to safely ask your questions. A great place to get started. Simply go to flipnerd.com/facebook to request your access today.