Have you ever taken time off only to come back with a longer to do list?
Being a professional Property Manager can often feel like your attention is being pulled in a million different directions. But what if you’re actually just focusing on the wrong things?
In this TWLX 2022 recording, Peter Lohmann (CEO of RL Property Management) interviewed the world’s leading expert on the application of the Future Self science - Dr. Benjamin Hardy, organizational psychologist and author.
Dr. Hardy highlighted several concepts from his books including forcing functions, the 80-20 principle, lesser goals, constraint theory, strategic ignorance, and the 4 fundamental freedoms.
Those in attendance said this discussion was “unbelievably powerful.” We think you’ll feel the same way too. Let us know in the private Facebook group, Triple Win Property Managers!
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Hosted by Andrew Smallwood and Laura Mac
Featuring Dr. Benjamin Hardy, Peter Lohmann
Produced by Andrew Smallwood, Laura Mac, and Carol Housel
Edited by Isaac Balachandran
Episode Transcript
Peter Lohmann
In property management the concept of strategic ignorance is difficult to implement, I think because for a lot of us we're in the habit of wanting to know what's going on. We feel like, hey, the owner's hired us to manage this property, so I need to know if a lease got signed. Every rental application, every maintenance request, every disbursement amount, it's tempting to want to just stay plugged in because we feel like we need to know everything that's going on. But I would challenge everyone to really step back from that a little bit and ask yourself, why? Why do I need to know this information if it's being handled, let that person handle it and they can come to get me if there's a problem? But just staying plugged in or just a random reason of feeling like you need to know that's not going to help you unlock that. Time to work on ten x opportunities.
Andrew Smallwood
I'll give a totally insufficient introduction, but come on, you've been getting emails and seeing all kinds of social posts. Probably about this. We don't need to make this long. We just want to get these guys connected, and let them get into it. But I'll start with Peter, which is if you don't know Peter, he's the CEO and co-founder of RL Property Management. I also put this out, I think Peter is hands down the number one follow on Twitter for property management. If you get no other takeaway today, just go smash a follow button and you're just going to start seeing amazing content about property management that Peter just shares pretty generously for free there. I highly recommend that. Got a great podcast too as well. And I remember seeing I can't remember it was a newsletter, Peter or, or a tweet or where it was, but I think you said who not? How was the number one best book you've read this year? Really impactful. And the cool thing I saw following that and some of you may have seen this as well, is that Peter took a five-week sabbatical, many sabbaticals, I'll call it, in the business recently. Truly stepped away, and wasn't responding to emails every day and that kind of thing really did that and shared a lot of his learning experience. Do that publicly and I think credits a lot of that to the ideas and ultimately his implementation application of that. So we just thought it would be a cool opportunity to get somebody who is great at interviewing is, you know, here in the property management business operating like you all and is a big fan of Ben's work and has applied it to actually do the interview as opposed to us stepping in. So Peter, thanks for being willing to do that and step in and prepare. And Ben, it's great to see you again. It's been a minute since a best year ever conference in San Diego or something like that. I think the last time we saw each other. But if you haven't followed Ben's work, I mean, there are many bestselling books I'm remembering personalities and permanent willpower won't work to go far back. The gap in the gain who not? How? Like we've referenced your future self now there's great stuff, great books. Many of you actually, if you signed up early enough, got an autographed copy of Who Not House sent out, but there are many other great books and many other great lessons and resources, and then we're so grateful that you're here to share your expertise. I'm going to get out of the way and let Peter and you get started. Thanks for being here, guys.
Peter Lohmann
Thanks so much, Andrew. I'm really excited to interview Ben and I appreciate that really great introduction. Ben, I'm really thrilled to have you here and get to pick your brain a little bit. As Andrew mentioned, your books have been an inspiration for me and I've learned so much from them. I want to jump right into it. I mean, a key off of what Andrew mentioned, which was the five-week sabbatical I took in June. I can trace that directly back to reading years ago. I think one of your first books, Willpower Doesn't Work. You talk about in that book a concept called a forcing function. And this is essentially what kicked off. My ability to take a five-week sabbatical is that I used the upcoming five weeks as a forcing function to make sure I got every last little operational detail off my plate because I knew that I was going to be gone and I didn't want to interrupt my vacation to deal with anything. So using that as a force, as a forcing function was really powerful. So I think I wanted to start by asking you maybe what are some other examples of a powerful force in functions and how we can use that in like a small business context.
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
Absolutely. And super good to be with you. It's fun to talk about. Willpower doesn't work since that's like four or five years ago but I love the idea is still so a forcing function just to kind of give it a little parameter is any external constraint that you put in place to produce it. The desired outcome. So like as an example, forcing functions is a big aspect of software design. Like they create perf like they purposely create constraints so that you can't do certain things. Even a microwave, like a microwave, opens only one way. You can't open it like five different ways. So there's a forcing function to how it works. And so a forcing function is any external kind of lever or constraint that you put in place that kind of pushes you down a certain path, forces you to go a certain way. So I love your example in terms of like one example could be signing up for a marathon or signing up for a race and doing it with friends or like hiring, hiring someone like that. So those are good examples of forcing functions. You've made an investment, there's a deadline, there's a date. And so that that kind of pushes Parkinson's law, which is the idea that work fills the space. You get it. Having deadlines is a forcing function. As a writer, I don't get things done unless I know when it has to be done. And then it forces clarity of my thought. Simple forcing functions could just be like if you want to be present with your kids, like leave the phone at your office, leave it in your like, leave it in your bag, in your car. Don't bring it into the environment. Don't you know what I mean? Like, there are just simple things you can do. Remove the apps from your phone. Like there are just simple things you can do that they essentially remove, remove the decision fatigue and remove the habitual thing. It removes your habits. You just kind of create an environment where the habits are no longer there. So yeah, those are just a few examples.
Peter Lohmann
Yeah, I love that there are so many opportunities to use that in small business, whether you're the owner or you're working in the business. I love that example of leaving the phone in the car. I think maybe I want to do that at work to just leave the phone in the car and focus on what's actually important.
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
One other quick example is no meetings before. You know, it's like don't put meetings at the beginning of the day because that's like the wrong forcing function, you know, that's like a forcing function for busyness. So like if you want, if you're someone who prioritizes like deep work, creativity, flow, like, you know, no meetings on certain, you know, no meetings on certain days, no meetings like before, like 11 a.m. or like these are intense roles for a lot of people in the culture we live in. But these are really good forcing functions for like creating deep work.
Peter Lohmann
Yeah. And in a way, I've seen this done really effectively if you just leave that space blank on your calendar and you agree to yourself not to take meetings, it's easy to forget or override that. But if you actually physically block it out on your calendar and right, no meetings, free time, 8 a.m. to noon, you're much more likely to keep up with it. I want to zoom forward now to your most recent book, Be Your Future Self Now fantastic book. I highly recommend anyone who hasn't had a chance to pick that up. I'm going to go right to my favorite quote from the book, which is actually you quoting Robert Brock, and the quote which I'm thinking about almost continuously since I read it. It goes like this We are kept from our goals not by obstacles, but by a clear path to a lesser goal. And when I first read this, it hit me like a ton of bricks, because for me, the clear path is growing the business 10% a year, 15% a year, adding more units under management, taking care of our customers, dealing with the day to day emails. But because that path is so clear in my mind, it prevents me in a lot of ways from thinking about the bigger goals that I want to achieve with our business, whether that's growing by ten X or and we're going to come back to the ten X opening new locations and some of the other concepts that property management, you know, property management is kind of a springboard. You can use it as a platform to launch into other areas, but that clear path to the lesser goal is something that's it's like cheese, right? As a mouse, you just want to go eat the cheese because it's easy and you can see it. So I love for you to share a little bit about where you heard this quote and how you're applying it to sort of be your future self now.
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
Absolutely. And I would probably just share my screen in a second and jump straight into ten X is easier than two X in a second because this is like a really helpful framework for me to think about this quote. But just for starters. So if you think about a goal, whatever your goal may be, it could be to make $1,000,000. It could be to write a book, it could be to get 50 units. It could be whatever it is, whatever your goal is, it's not the obstacles between you and the goal that stops you. It's that you have too many competing priorities. There's a really good quote actually from Jim Collins, where he says, if you have more than three priorities, you have none. And so kind of going back to the 8020 principles, 80% of most people's time is probably not spent actually going through the learning process of getting to their goal. 80% of their time is spent on other things, which are actually a distraction from the goal. And so I look at any lesser goal is kind of like a motto for me now, like, is this a lesser goal? And a lesser goal? Is anything that's ultimately taking you away from your priorities? It could be answering an email. It could be eating unhealthy food, right? It could be anything. It really depends on what your goal is. First, you have to clarify what your goal is, and what you want, and then anything that kind of distracts from that or opposes from that is by nature a lesser goal. And so I'm going to actually just quickly show my screen and kind of teach this framework and then we can kind of go off of this or you can go whichever direction you want. This is kind of the core framework for the book I'm currently writing, which is the third book with Dan Sullivan. The book is called Ten X Is Easier than two X. And just to kind of explain this simply, this is kind of how I look at lesser goals now. So if you want to go for two x gross, meaning, you know, basically what that means is you just want to do more of what you're currently doing. And so if you want to go for two X, you can actually keep 80% of your existing self, your existing mental models, your existing clients, your existing habits, knowledge, and behaviors. Two X doesn't require much change. You only have to make minor tweaks to go from where you are to like going to X. There's no massive transformation. It's mostly just a continuance of who you are now. Whereas if you want to go for a ten x change, you have to actually eliminate 80% of yourself. When I say new, because this has to be replaced, 80% of like 80% of everything you're doing right now and the people you're working with are a distraction from ten acts. This is actually one of the reasons why ten X is really useful. There's a theory called constraint theory, and it's a theory for decision-making. But one of the things that this theory is based on is, is that like in Dr. Alan Bernard, by the way, I recommend you guys study his work. He's like the leading expert on this theory, but he talks about how if you have too small of a goal, it's like small goals are impractical because small goals have too many potential options of getting there. So like, if I wanted to double my business, that wouldn't have it wouldn't create a strong enough constraint for what I should do. Like if I want to go for double my business, there's like a thousand different things I could do to potentially double my business. But if I want to go for ten times bigger, there are not very many pathways to get there. Like it actually forces me to be really honest that most of what I'm doing is actually a distraction. So how I look at lesser goals these days is I look at it as this is the 80%, so there's the 20% that really matters that will scale up to my ten feet yourself. Like this is my, these are like my best clients or my best activities, like what I'm doing right now that makes the biggest impact. And 80% is a distraction. And it may have been what got me here, but it won't get me there. This could be my current clients or my current work activities. It could be, you know, literal, full-on distraction means like sitting around and being on YouTube like this is the lesser goal. And so now how I conceptualize lesser goals is, is this the 80%, or is this the 20%? If it's the 80%, it's two X, meaning it's kind of who I currently am and it's just more of what I am if it's and so I'm always trying to eliminate the 80%. I'm trying to get rid of anything that's like current stuff. And I'm focused on what is the few things that are relevant to my future self.
Peter Lohmann
And what makes us so challenging is like it sounds a little bit easier, like, oh, I'll just cut out 80% of the unproductive things and the things I don't like doing. It's like, no, you actually you're going to end up saying no to a lot of really good ideas and you're going to say no to a lot of great meetings, a lot of great projects, a lot of great clients because they're only good and they're not great. They don't have a ten X opportunity. One of the challenges in property management is that you have a lot of distractions and things that are competing for your attention. You have this client, you have this Senate, you have this property, you have a fire here. You have a new client over here. And in order to free up time to focus on what's really important in that tense future, you need to engage a concept I learned from your books called Strategic Ignorance. And as we were talking the other day, you told a great story of why you sold all of your Bitcoin in March of 2020, which was great timing, by the way. But tell us a little bit about why you sold your Bitcoin in March of 2020 and how that relates to what we're talking about.
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
Yeah, so there are really two concepts here. One is obviously strategic ignorance and the other one is who, not how, you know what I mean? In other words, if you're the one putting out all those fires, you're probably not focused on the 20% of few things where if you got ten times better at it, you'd be really great at what you do. Instead, you're distracted. And so this is what is where strategic ignorance comes in. Basically, the idea here is this if you want to really grow exponentially, you have to get very, very good at like a few things. You can't be you can't just be a generalist where you're just jumping around like, you know, caught up in a million different things. And so strategic ignorance is the idea that almost everything's irrelevant and that it shouldn't even hit your attention. And one of the really useful ways of applying this is like creating clear criteria and then letting, for example, a who or a system handle that for you. So for example, I've laid out very clear standards for, example, the speaking opportunities that are relevant to me. And so my assistant has that criteria. We're constantly updating it through feedback loops, but like she's already got the criteria. So when she receives my emails, only the relevant ones hit my attention span. I don't need to go through the decision fatigue of answering all those emails because I have a system in place. I've created the criteria and I have a who that's handling that for me. So I am strategically ignorant in terms of Bitcoin. I'm like totally like I have nothing against crypto. I actually spent a really long time thinking about investing a lot of money in it. The reason I got rid of it is that it was taking too much of my attention and the biggest bottleneck is a concept and constraint theory. And it's basically the bottleneck that is the thing that stops you from achieving your goal. And the biggest bottleneck for human beings is our attention span. Our attention is so limited, but it's so spread thin. Usually, it's caught up in the 80% of other people's agendas, distractions, and the busyness of our current work schedule. And so I realized that cryptocurrency was in my 80%. It was something that was sapping attention from me going really, really deep into the one or two things, the three priorities that I wanted to get ten times better at. You've got to get ten times better before you can go ten times bigger and so if your attention is overly spread thin by anything, if anything is sapping your attention, even good things, maybe it's an awesome investment if those are taking you away from going really, really deep at the few things you want to get really good at. Dan Sullivan Cause this unique ability. So for me, I know that I want my future self to write ten times better books than these ones. But if I'm too busy studying cryptocurrency, which has nothing to do with my unique ability, then I'm wasting my time. So I sold it all solely because my attention is worth more than a thousand x gains even if it made me tons of money, any form of attention deficit disorder. And so what's amazing is when I did sell it, my attention was it's like time slowed down. I stopped thinking about it. One of the things that Dan talks about is never investing in things or people that you have to think about. Decision fatigue is very costly. It saps all your willpower at speeds up your time because your attention is so fragmented. To go ten X, you have to almost eliminate everything that's that 80% so that you can go very, very deep in the few things. I'm actually reading a book right now called Catching the Big Fish. I think it's by Lynch. What's his name? His name is David Lynch. He's like a very famous filmmaker. And so the book is called Catching Big Fish. But it's all about how ideas are like fish. And if you're up at the surface, the fish are going to be really small. The ideas are really small. If your attention is so fragmented, the only way to catch the really, really big fish is to go very, very deep. And in order to go very deep, you have to have a slow mind like you can't. There's you have to have a simple life where, like, there's almost nothing that's constantly distracting you in our ever-distracting world. So, yeah, strategic ignorance is one way of doing that. But who not? How is another where? It's like if there's anything you're still doing that you could pass off to a who, that's an investment in yourself. You delegate it so that you can free yourself up to go deeper and deeper into the few things that 20% have like the asymmetric asymmetrical upside.
Peter Lohmann
Yeah. And in property management, the concept of strategic ignorance is, is difficult to implement I think because for a lot of us we're in the habit of wanting to know what's going on. We feel like, hey, the owners hired us to manage this property, so I need to know if a lease got signed. Every rental application, every maintenance request, every disbursement amount, it's tempting to want to just stay plugged in because we feel like we need to know everything that's going on. But I would challenge everyone to really step back from that a little bit and ask yourself, why? Why do I need to know this information if it's being handled, let that person handle it and they can come to get me if there's a problem? But just staying plugged in for just a random reason of feeling like you need to know that's not going to help you unlock that time to work on tenants' opportunities. So jumping to who, not how, which is, you know, as I mentioned, my favorite book I read so far this year and this was before I even knew anything about the opportunity to interview you. In the book, you remind us, to find who's for all areas of your life. Oh, and just to give some context here, who, not how? If you haven't read it, the main idea is you need to stop thinking about how can I do this. Which is kind of our default framework for clients coming to us with a problem. How do I get that done? You need to reframe that and ask yourself, Who can help me with this? Who's the expert? Who's the person in my network that's done this 100 times and knows all the details? So what are maybe some examples of who's in our personal or family life that can unlock some time and how we might be able to apply that outside of the workplace?
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
Yeah. So both who, not how and even ten is easier than two x is based on a framework that Dan Sullivan developed a long time ago called his Four Freedoms. From his standpoint, as people, we all have four fundamental freedoms we're seeking more of. And these freedoms can be quantified, but they're also qualitative meaning. There's, there's quality. So like these four freedoms are your freedom of time, which is not just how much time you have and how much control you have over it, but literally the quality of your time, like how much it's valued by you and by other people, and also just the quality of its experience. Then there's freedom of money, which is like not only how you make your money and also how much, but like, you know, your ability to access money and get it in the ways that you want. So it's quality money. It's good money, not bad money. Bad money would be like you doing things you don't want to do, you know. And so there's quality money and there's freedom of money. Then there's freedom of relationships where it's like you have access to increasing people and who you know is more important than what, you know, back to the idea of who, not how. It's to who's that ultimately opens the doors. Your network is your net worth kind of thing. And so the quality of your freedoms in relationships determines the quality of your opportunities. And that stands for freedom. The only reason I'm in the fourth freedom is basically what you can actually put your time forth in doing. What is the purpose that's driving your life as you invest more and more into yourself and get better at what you do, you've got opportunities to do like work that may have been mind-blowing to your past self, like projects that are really, really important to you. And so the only reason I give that as an example, as a, like an initial thought for why you should start getting whose throughout your life is that like the quality of your time and the value of your time is really, really essential. And so if you're constantly spending time doing all sorts of tasks, then that shows the quality, that shows the value of your time, how you value it, and how other people value it. And so once you start taking who not how very seriously you're willing to invest in a who you're willing to, for example, find someone to spend their time thinking about and worrying about all of your properties so that you no longer have to, so that you can increase the value of your time, so that you can focus on other things, whether that's getting bigger deals, you know, whatever it may be. So your time is only as valuable as what you're spending your time doing. And so you want to get who's for all areas of your life to free you up so that your like value of time. It could, you could quantify it in dollars per hour. Maybe it starts going from $100 per hour to like, you know, now you've freed yourself up and now your time worth $1,000 an hour or $10,000 an hour. And you don't have to always quantify it either. It could just be like the value of what you place your time and attention on. But the thing that stops most people from taking this idea seriously, number one, they don't value their time and they also don't they don't value their own unique skill sets. And they don't realize that when they free up their time and they now can spend more attention on bigger picture opportunities that they can easily double or triple, like the amount of money that they make their freedom of money. You can't increase your freedom of money until you increase the freedom of your time, which is the value of your time. But I'll just give a few examples. This is a fairly new house that I have. This is a second house that I have and I've had, I've had a second house before that I used as an office. But like obviously I didn't paint my own house. Like I wanted the house painted white. And so I hired a who for that and you may start to think in the beginning, well, I don't I can't afford who's like so the first who you would probably get is someone to handle the things that are taking up your time that 80% in terms of your work like finding someone to manage the properties or find someone to answer your emails, find someone to handle your schedule. Like this would be like an assistant. If you make that initial investment and it's an investment, you've now freed up your time and increased its value. And it's always usually it's often a ten x return. So like if I hire someone for $15 an hour to answer all my emails, I can probably get $150 an hour back or more from that time because now I'm freed up 15 hours a week, 20 hours a week to do better things. And so the only way you can increase your quality of time and value of time is to start offloading it. You have to actually make the commitment first. You got to make the investment first, you got to get the who, and then your time becomes more valuable. And then, through necessity, being the mother of invention, you'll find ways to do better things.
Peter Lohmann
Yeah, and what's really interesting is we are the who for property owners, right? So they've come to us to have their property managed well and get it off their plate, right? Yeah, 100%. So you can.
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
Even take investment for them. Hopefully, they value their time enough to get you right.
Peter Lohmann
Exactly. And you can use that in the sales process for those who are in the sales function, you know, discuss with a potential client, hey, what is it going to mean for you if we free up all the time you're currently spending finding tenants, collecting rent, dealing with maintenance, like what is then possible for you? And then that's a way to start thinking about the flipside, which is for us as property managers, what are the things that we're doing that we can get a who for to really unlock our own time. So sticking on the scene for a minute when I think about the who's that I brought into my life to achieve various things, I've frankly struck out a few times. I got the wrong guy. I brought in the wrong vendor which end up costing me a lot of time and money and I had to start over. And that instills doubts, like, oh, maybe I should just set it myself. So what are some ways I know the phrase? The key phrase here is always the buyer. I love that from the book. Can you share a little bit about how we can find better who's?
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
Absolutely it's a trial and error process. It's like if the first time you tried to ride a bike, you fell, like, does that mean you shouldn't learn how to ride a bike? Or vice versa, like, or even similarly, a child learning how to walk like just because they fall a handful of times, maybe they should just keep crawling because learning how to, you know like this is a skill. And if you get it, it opens up massive freedoms. If you fall a few times and, you have to like learn through failure, that's massive learning. That's where actually the gap in the game comes in as you transform your experiences into learning so that you can increase your criteria. And so that actually works. That's what takes us to always be the buyer. So this is another great Dan Sullivan concept. Basically what he explains is, is that in every social situation, you yourself are either the buyer or the seller. Ideally in a relationship, both parties are buyers. We're both like where there's where both parties are clear on what they want and they want and like they can provide each other what they want. It's more transformational than transactional, but the buyer is the person who's clear on what they want, and they're also able to walk away. If you're in a seller mentality, then you're not fully clear on your standards and you're desperate to have like you're desperate to be in a situation, in a relationship with someone else. And so you will bend over backward, you'll fold yourself into a pretzel. You'll go against your own rules to get into the relationship because you're desperate to be there. The seller is the one that's desperate. The seller won't walk away. The seller is not clear on what they want, whereas the buyer is very clear on what they want, they're clear on their criteria, and they can walk away. And so I'll give an example about where I went wrong with this recently, and I'll also give an example of how we use this not only for getting clients but also for me finding the right who's for my team. So I'll give you a bad example first. And this was more recently, one of the things that like a secondary goal of mine is to grow my YouTube channel only because the goal of that is to ultimately sell more books, which is my primary business goal. So because I'm interested in growing my YouTube channel, I'm interested in finding a who to help me do that. And there are obviously multitudes of who's out there who have programs or processes for growing a YouTube channel. Well, there was a guy I came across who's really awesome at what he does, also very expensive, but that doesn't really matter. Like if you make the investment often, it's often you get what you pay for. But the more and more I learned about his process, the more I realized it was against my philosophy. Like, I just. I knew that there was a better fit than him. But because it wasn't one of my top goals. Like, I didn't put in enough work to really specify my criteria for what I was looking for. And he was very persuasive. He really wanted to work with me because he felt like if he got me to be one of his clients, he could help me succeed. And then he could leverage, like, my testimonial to get more and more clients. And so he was very desperate to work with me. I was kind of unclear on what I wanted, but I was pretty sure about the gut check. And also just learning more about what he was doing, would be good, but it wasn't exactly what I was looking for. But ultimately he kept persisting. He kept lowering his price, and then at a certain point, he, like, made it so compelling and convincing. You know what? Like, all right, like, this is a $10,000 experiment, essentially. And so I'm like, fine, let's go for this. Let's just try this for one month. He's like, and in the and he said, By the way, I never do this. Usually commitment, my minimum commitment is three months, 30 grand because he charges ten grand a month. And he was like, I'm and so I realized he was actually breaking all of his own rules, which he uses forever now to work with me. In other words, he was the seller. He was very desperate to work with me, and he was breaking his own criteria, which keeps his business going because you really want to work with me. Well, I, in this situation, also became the seller because I was unclear on what I wanted. And I couldn't just with my clarity, walk away and just say, no, this isn't going to work. And so I got into the situation, invested a bunch of money, and felt that internal conflict like this isn't right, but oh well, like, I guess I can do an experiment. Let's just chalk it up to learning. But as the date came closer for me to actually go and film a bunch of videos with him, I had all this internal conflict and I'm like, I ended up having to throw in the towel just saying, Dude, I just don't want this. Like, I didn't want it from the beginning. I was not really clear, but I was that's my own fault because I wasn't clear and committed to what I wanted. And you were very convincing because you really want to do this. And so ultimately, because I wasn't clear, I put myself into a bad situation. And so I realized we were both the sellers. I ended up getting some of my money back. I paid him for some of his time, but it cost me a lot of decision fatigue. Again, it cost me a lot of valuable time, which is honestly more important than money. So that was one example where we were both the sellers and we were both essentially unclear on what we wanted, breaking our own rules. And so the buyer is always the one who's really clear on what they want and they're willing to walk away.
Peter Lohmann
Where my mind immediately goes here is when you're talking to a prospective client as a property manager and they're telling you about the property or the details of how they think about how they want the property managed. And there are little alarm bells going off in your mind, like, Oh, we don't really like to manage that kind of property, or this guy sounds like he's going to be kind of a jerk, but he keeps trying to talk you into it. He's offering to pay you more or whatever. It's good in the property management world to always be a buyer means even when we're the seller, we're the buyer. And that means turning away a lot of clients and being right upfront with folks and saying, listen, we actually only work with maybe one out of two folks who approached us about property management because we have a certain type of property and a certain type of client we like to work with that immediately reframes it. It gives you the OR back and lets you be selective and it also puts clients much more it puts you on equal footing with them. It's like, Hey, you're interviewing me, but I'm also interviewing you.
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
That's actually the key is that you always want to be in the position where they're applying to work with you, even if like you're the one selling the product. So like I used this, this experience and I'll tell you a situation even yesterday where I was clearing my priorities and I had to ultimately or clear on my success criteria, which is essentially your standards. Your standards are basically who you are and how you operate in the world. And if you say something's your standard but you keep going below it, then it's not a standard. And your standards are ultimately what produce your outcomes because your standards and your identity are the exact same thing. So I'll tell an example of what this led me to. So I run an entrepreneurial coaching program and in the past, we didn't have as clear criteria. We've gotten clear and clear. This is what feedback loops are for. This is like your example. You could turn it into a gain and ultimately get clear and clear about what you want. That, by the way, is the most essential aspect of applying who, not how. And being a leader is very clearly stating what does success look like in this case? So I wasn't clear on what success looked like with my YouTube channel, which is why it led me down the wrong path. But one of the standards now that's required for someone to get into my coaching program is I never want to be the seller and I never want to try to sell someone into what I'm doing. And so if someone is only like 85% interested or sure and they're not that clear, we'll help get them clear. But we're not going to try to convince them at all, like essentially if they're not 100% excited and pounding down the door, like, yes, I want to do this. Yes, I want to be in here, then it's actually a no for us. Like you're not actually not only do they have to meet certain specifications in terms of like how much money they have their business, like certain forms of knowledge, but they have to be 100% excited and committed and wanting to be in the community or else it's a no for us we're like no like you. We turn it way more people down, even people who are way qualified in all of the other dimensions. But they're like, they still aren't 100% sure if they want to do it. And we don't want those kinds of people in our group because that kills the culture. Let me give one other quick example. Yesterday. So I even this opportunity, like me speaking here, there there there was certain criteria that had to be met in order for even me to come to this Zoom call to make sense to me. But there was an opportunity where someone wanted me to come and speak at their event on Zoom and Zoom like my online speaking criteria is different than me flying out to someone in person. But we kept I had a bad gut feeling about this one that we said yes to and it had met a lot of the like. We're already weeded out most things, but I just didn't have a good feeling about it. And then the more and more we learned about it, the more I'm like, This is not right. Like, rather than them wanting to do an interview like this, for example, they want me to do a presentation and as he had bought a lot, he had purchased a lot of books before, but he was not going to do it this time. And like he just he was he was not seeing the value, I guess, or he was not wanting to invest. And I just realized this is not meeting my criteria. This is a 2x situation for me. This is the 80% this is stuff I would have said yes to two or three years ago. But I have like I've gone through ten myself and this doesn't fit the criteria anymore. And so I just told him, look, I can't do this like learning that it's actually a presentation, not an interview. That's a no-go. Like you're not buying books. That's a no-go. Like, even though we're friends and like, I've done good stuff for you and you've done good stuff for me. This situation doesn't fit. It just doesn't work. I have to say. No, I'm sorry. Like, that's the point of making standards is if you don't actually live it, then it's not a standard. And so this is kind of just it's how you actually improve yourself. Yeah, I've heard it said, you know, the only way to grow your confidence is to make commitments to yourself and keep those commitments.
Peter Lohmann
So yeah. And I think until you've tasted the fruit of saying no to two x opportunities because you know what's possible as a tax opportunity, it's so hard to visualize it. But there's been times when we said no to a client where I was like, back and forth, back and forth. You know, they've got 80 units and half of them are in a good area and they're willing to sign a long-term agreement. But those, the other half of the properties are not a good fit. And so your back and forth, back and forth and you finally say no, and within seconds you're like, I made the right decision. I feel so good about saying no. So until you've tasted that, it's hard, but it becomes clearing practice. I think as you said, it's a skill.
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
So just a quick thing also. Yeah, that is that every time you keep saying yes to a to X opportunity, something that's convenient and maybe it's quick cash, right? But it's ultimately a high cost because you're proving to the outside world, into the marketplace that you're still accepting things at this level. MM You know, like you're so there's a really good quote and there's a great book called As a Man Thinketh. It's kind of like a classic self-development book. But one of the things he talks about in that book is that men do not attract that which they want, but that which they are. And who you are is your identity. It's your standards. And so if you keep saying yes to those two X opportunities that are below the standard that you want to hold for yourself, if you keep saying yes to those, then you're shrinking your identity. And there's a lot of internal conflicts which is going to it's going to present ideas. You're not really being at that level. And so once you start saying no to the 80%, which takes courage sometimes almost immediately your confidence and your integrity will start shooting through the roof and then through necessity. It reminds me of what Dan says. Dan says nothing happens until after you commit. Once you've put yourself into that place of commitment, you start saying no to the lesser goals. Then you start finding ways. Necessity is the mother of invention. You start finding ways to get the opportunities at the level you want. And so, like, I've done this over and over and over where it's like you raise the floor, you know, your floor price may be like, you know, X amount of money, but then you raise the floor and you start saying no to the old floor. And like, that's scary for a while because you're like, I don't know like that's my main income. But by doing that, you've made a commitment to yourself and you've freed yourself up to find and position yourself in the better ways to ultimately attract those better opportunities which you will start doing. And I can just attest it happens again and again and again. Like, it feels so great. It's such a confidence builder to start saying no to those things and to be clear on who you are and what you want and to say no like that was what I would have said yes to even a month ago. But now I'm going to find a way to figure it out at this new level. And that's how you ultimately keep leveling up.
Peter Lohmann
I love it. I think we're going to wrap there. Ben, thank you so much. This has been an awesome conversation.
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
Thank you. Thanks for reading the books and hopefully this is useful to you guys.
Peter Lohmann
There's been fantastic and I'll challenge everyone as we close and I turn it back to a dare. Try and think about the two X opportunities in your life that you're going to start saying no to. I'll leave it at that.
Andrew Smallwood
That's all for today's Triple Win Property Management podcast. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you so much for sharing a piece of your life with us. We do not take it for granted. I also want to give a shout-out to Carole Housel for everything she and our team does to make this possible. It's crazy to think about. Over 5000 professional property managers have pressed play on episodes and season one and season two now, and we really want to encourage you to keep giving feedback because more and more people are listening. It's getting better and better and better thanks to everything that you're sharing with us. If you liked this enough to listen, I want to encourage you to share it with other people. You can give us feedback directly on these social media channels, Facebook, LinkedIn, and wherever you're hanging out. You can also send us an email at triplewin@secondnature.com. And we just want to give more. Where there's no sales pitch here just want to offer more resources that help you find and stack your next triple win and become a triple win-driven property manager. So where can you find that? You can find a private Facebook group, you can find our blogs, you can find our newsletter to find more resources all at rbc.secondnature.com to search for what you're looking for there and every time we see you, we want to see a better version of you and your business to that end. Keep it going, feel inspired, take our encouragement and we'll see you next time.
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