How you know you've made it:

You get to stop doing business with assholes.

No asshole clients.

No asshole partners.

No asshole investors.

Entrepreneurship culture in America is all messed up and it’s a shame.

TechCrunch. Product Hunt. Shark Tank.

It’s all about new ideas. Changing the world. Innovation. 0 to 1. Blue ocean. Venture capital and exits and scalability.

And ITS ALL A LIE.

You ask the average american who a real entrepreneur is they’ll say Jobs, Musk or Zuck.

We read their books and idolize them and hang on their every word.

So the brightest among us think they need a moat. A new idea. Something revolutionary.

Were setting them up for FAILURE.

I took an entrepreneurship course at Cornell in 2011. 24 kids with new ideas. Big plans. Pitch decks looking for series As.

I was #25 with a regular old-fashioned business.

When professors asked me what my differentiator was I didn’t have an answer.

I saw a company out there doing sweaty, non scalable work. They were terrible at it.

I started by trading my time for money. Bought a $1500 cargo van. Used the things I had in my life to make some profit.

I wasn’t trying to educate a customer base.

I wasn’t following my passion.

I didn’t need funding or a network.

I wasn’t competing against brilliant folks from Stanford.

I want trying to prove a concept.

I wasn’t emotionally attached to anything except adding value.

As a real estate entrepreneur you need a certain mindset to win.

From sourcing deals to dealing with bankers to deploying capital...

There are certain attributes that make you BETTER at creating long term wealth.

A thread 👇👇👇

RE is all about generating what we call YIELD.

Yield is the return on our precious capital.

And it comes in two forms:

Cashflow - the cold hard cash it puts in your pocket.

&

Appreciation - the additional VALUE to a buyer or a banker above and beyond what you paid.

And before we start. A note on YIELD.

It's getting harder and harder to find.

Capital is plentiful and yield is scarce.

Folks are chasing deals with less and less of it and they are taking more risk to get the same amount of it.

The amount of yield you get from a real estate deal is all relative to the amount of risk you take.

A risky deal deserves more upside and thus more yield.

A safe deal deserves less upside and thus less yield.

The winners think about one thing only:

Risk-adjusted yield

Successful real estate folks have a long term mindset.

The folks who win in real estate don't buy-in to the "life is short" mantra.

They know that life is long. And they are fine to do work now and get paid later.

TIME is what makes these folks wealthy.

They get paid to WAIT.

There is a lot of bad advice floating around online when it comes to real estate investing.

Time for a stiff drink and some stuff you might not want to hear.

A thread 👇

Most real estate influencers spend 99% of their time trying to sound smart.

They purposely make things too complicated.

When you do this for a while you can tell if a property is worth buying with a napkin and 30 seconds.

The problem with being a big real estate PE firm:

You need to do good deals year after year and deploy 10s or 100s of millions in capital.

It’s a hamster wheel making others wealthy.

The advantage of being you:

One building like this can change your life.

Buying real estate that doesn’t cashflow well because values have risen 10% / yr for 10 yrs while wages have risen 3% / yr for 10 yrs is very risky.

I don’t care how long your interest rate is “fixed” for.

Markets are cyclical. Trends change. Bankruptcy is real.

If you don’t know anyone with money and you have less than $250k of your own cash real estate isn’t the best way to make money.

Even a $500k property (like the one pictured above) requires $150k down and another $100k in cash reserves.

The hardest thing about entrepreneurship, real estate, or anything else worth doing:

You have to be able to look at incomplete information...

Or a complicated problem without a clear-cut solution...

And make a good decision on which way to proceed.

A thread 👇👇👇

There is nobody who can take you by the hand and lead you through a step by step guide to win.

Everybody's journey is different.

The 1,000 important decisions I made to win will look nothing like yours.

This is why success is so hard to teach..

Because there is one skill you need to have to win:

Resourcefulness.

The ability to find what you need and figure out solutions to problems that there are no correct answers to.

Life isn't a textbook.

You can't turn three pages back and look up the answer. You can't ask a teacher.

When you are an entrepreneur there is nobody out there who can help you answer problems except YOU.

And this is the opposite of what most people are used to doing.

High school and college teach you to comply and look up the answer and memorize. Google gives us answers to any question we have at our finger tips.

Except what to do when a problem in your business arises.

THREAD:

I've been very serious about personal development for 10+ years.

But not just reading...

I've been putting the principles to work as I've grown and sold my business (7 figure exit) and built a real estate portfolio worth $20MM+.

Here are a few of my top takeaways:

20% of your customers will produce 80% of your profit.

20% of your customers will also produce 80% of your headache.

The sooner you learn THESE AREN'T THE SAME CUSTOMERS the sooner you can grow, scale AND experience less stress.

The 4 quadrants of time management concept changed my life.

Urgent + important is where stressed out owners spend their time.

Not urgent + important is where you add long term value to your company and your life. Its also the easiest area to push to the back-burner and ignore.

3 keys to hiring and managing great employees:

#1 Raise your prices (so you can afford them)

#2 Simplify the job so average employees can thrive (and killer employees can crush it)

#3 Give them praise in public (it means just as much as money)

Execution > Idea

Ideas are a dime a dozen.

Folks who are willing to do the work are a bit more rare.

Folks with the chops to execute well are extremely rare. And they are the true winners when it comes to entrepreneurship.

Get a cup of coffee.

Let's kickstart 2022!

To that end, here are 22 key concepts to help you appreciate and achieve Financial Independence.

Concept #1.

What is Financial Independence?

It's a state of *self-sufficiency*. It's when you have enough money, and enough income-producing assets, that you and your family can live comfortably for the rest of your lives -- WITHOUT needing a job.

Concept #2.

Financial Independence is not really about spending MONEY how we like -- although, to an extent, that becomes possible.

It's about being FREE to spend our TIME how we like.

Concept #3.

Financial Independence is not really about quitting our jobs and retiring from work -- although that's possible.

It's about being FREE to pursue *whatever* kind of work we find most fulfilling. Things we love to do. Things the world benefits from. Etc.

Concept #4.

For most of us, the path to Financial Independence consists of:

- Starting Early,
- Saving Diligently, and
- Investing Responsibly.

Here's an inspiring story of a janitor who amassed an $8M fortune by following this very playbook:

Travelogue: Ibadan-Hills, Bottoms, Masquerades & Research

More than 15 years ago, I met an Italian who had lodged at KS Motel at Total Gardens, Ibadan.

He was in Ibadan for the first time and he was very fascinated with the city when I informed him that Rome and Ibadan shared a very unique similarity: both of them are built on seven hills. He asked me to take him round Ibadan which I did.

The seven hills are Oke Padre, Oke Ado, Oke Bola, Oke Mapo, Oke Are, Oke Sapati and Oke Mokola. But Ibadan is not just a city of hills. It is also a city of 'bottoms'. Loosely translated, 'idi' means bottom or the backside.

Several people have attached sexual innuendoes to the names. However, the actual translation indicates that some of the 'idis' indicate how the settlers converged at a point thereby leading to how they arrived at the names given.

Go round the city and you can locate Idi-Arere, Idi-Ose, Idi-Ishin, Idi-Ape, Idi-Ayunre, Idi-Obi and Idi-Ito.

Today we're gonna talk about profits. They come from stock! #AdamSmith reminds us that stock is any resource paid for in advance when doing business. In general, profits and wages don't move together. (I.ix.1–2) #WealthOfTweets #SmithTweets

As stock goes up, there's more of it to employ more workers (by paying them or providing machines for them to work or both). This raises wages! But new stock competes with existing stock, which tends to lower profit. (I.ix.2) #WealthOfTweets #SmithTweets

If you thought figuring out the average wages of labor was complicated, don't even think about trying to figure out the average profit of stock. Basically impossible. Luckily, the rate of interest tends to vary with the profits of stock. (I.ix.3–4) #WealthOfTweets #SmithTweets

Lots of laws have tried to control interest rates and stop usury. They've all failed to do either. (I.ix.5–9) #WealthOfTweets #SmithTweets

Profits and wages rising together is unusual, but it happens. In particular, in new colonies. (I.ix.11) #WealthOfTweets #SmithTweets

A potential problem is looming, and the media are pursuing a new story that builds on the following chain of reasoning: 1) higher inflation is coming;2) if CBs increase interest rates debts will explode and recession may ensue; 3) CBs are caught in an impossible dilemma 1/12

It´s perhaps too complex for some tweets, but.. Registered inflation this year is bound to be higher than present forecasts, resulting from one-off price spikes and base effects That will not start a sustained high inflation process, but temporary higher inflation is possible 2/

For example, Euro Area inflation increased suddenly from several months at -0.3% to +0.9% in Jan. This jump resulted mostly from several base effects, especially the change to German VAT. Inflation expectations increasing but higher in the US than in the EA 3/

The major one-off base effect will come from oil prices that decreased abysmally in March 2020 and have recovered. Some estimates put US inflation in April reaching 4%! After vaccinations, later in the year, pent-up consumer demand will also increase prices.4/

Despite the increased spending of accumulated savings, the savings rate will remain higher than before Covid for precautionary reasons (Fig 1). No permanent spending spree will materialise. Wages will remain subdued for a while (Fig2). Higher but not high inflation is coming.5/