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Product Of Our Coaches: On Being Coachable In Life
This episode is a little bit different. I always get excited this time of the year because of football season. College football is kicking off. The NFL is in the pre-season and the High School football is rock and rolling along. I’m a big football fan. I played in high school and I played two seasons in college. I enjoyed football. It helped shape my life in a variety of ways. More importantly, the coaches that I’ve had while playing helped mold me more so than anything else. In football, you have ups and downs like anything else. We had some ups and downs growing up. I’ll give you an example. My parents were pretty dead set against me playing football in high school, especially my dad. My dad was always phrasing that I’d get injured and hurt. I went through a bit of a big growth spurt between seventh and eighth grade.
The first coach who has helped shape me a lot was my junior high coach and high school coach, Wayne Stevens. He retired from Ingleside School District and Ingleside High School. Stevens is one of the guys that was on my dad quite a bit. He’d come into the hardware store and he would say, “When are you letting your son play?” He’s a bit of a character and a big guy. He pitched in college for TCU as a pitcher form, but he shaped me early on in doing the right things and being a leader from the get-go. That evolved as I went into high school. Coach Stevens did a great job as well as the Titan’s coach in high school. Coach John Robledo, my linebacker coach, Coach James Heath, our defensive coordinator, Coach Larry Peel was the head coach. Also, Coach Aubie Glover was a position coach. I’ve always learned a lot from these men early on. It shaped me through my high school career and helped me get to the college level. I also took what I learned from them and put it into business.
We weren’t very good early on in my high school career, which was funny. The lessons you learn from going through a rough time can sit with you as you grow and as you go through life. In my sophomore year, when I was on the varsity, we were one and nine. We weren’t very good. We were young and had a new coach. I get to give a big shout-out to Coach Ken Shaver who was our previous head coach and had known me growing up as well. He also helped me get my college scholarship. We were one in nine and not very good. We’ve got a bit bullied around pretty good because we were young, but we grew in that. We were one and nine, then five and five, and then we were seven and three.
In my senior year, I missed the playoffs but we were in the run up to the very last game. I was able to get a college scholarship out of it. You’ll learn a lot going from one and nine. I remember sitting in the gym between my sophomore and junior years and wondering like, “We were one and nine last year. I started as a fullback and I also played some defensive. I went to linebacker in my junior-senior year.” Going through one and nine was not a fun time. I was like, “I do not want to go through that again this year. Is this going to be worth it?” I have to say it was worth it. You learn a lot, you go through a lot of things, and you went through that. Along the course, things happened. I got injured in my junior year pretty bad versus our rival. I tore my ACL running back on the sidelines. We hit each other, fell back on my legs. I heard my knee pop, and then my season was over. I was the captain of my junior and senior year. I remember working my ass off for nine months of rehab, going to physical therapy, and building up my muscle to come back my senior year.
As the captain at that point, I wanted to come back and not let my guys down. I always took things very seriously like what I do now, when it comes to things. The game day was always very quiet and solemn, but I would be a loud, fun guy. I was very serious during the games. I tried to lead not just vocally but lead by doing, taking the action and overcoming obstacles. We had some games that were behind, we came back crazy on and we had some games that we dominated. I have to give a big shout-out to the coaches that helped mold that early on. They built that ability for me to overcome obstacles. A big part of it goes from my mom and dad for the work ethic thing that they built into me early on while growing up in a hardware store and things like that.
This time, I’m always thinking about the coaches. I’m thinking about the coaches who helped mold me, where they’re at now and what they’re doing. I heard Coach Peel’s retired living in New Braunfels. Coach Mark Kellert, my baseball coach growing up was also a football coach there, doing great things. I think they won the State Championship in the TAPPS, in private school baseball. I look at some of the guys that I went to high school and college with. Some are doing amazing things and I also worry about some of the guys that aren’t doing some amazing things. I always wonder, what’s the difference between those that are finding success in life and those that aren’t finding success. It comes down to being coachable early on. The same thing comes to when you struggle in business and life, it’s all about being coachable. You have to look at what you’re doing. I’ve had some great coaches over the last twenty years after high school and football. I’m not trying to be like Al Bundy who scored four touchdowns at Polk High School and worry about that for twenty years.
Product Of Our Coaches: The difference between those that are finding success in life and those that aren’t finding success comes down to being coachable early on.
When I stopped playing football, there was a hole left in me a little bit. A lot of athletes struggle with this. When they leave doing something that they love and are passionate about and they move on to another, there’s a hole. They look for that team spirit and camaraderie. They look for that to build that environment of people who they could go into the trenches with or cutting up with a travel or going to battle with. Whenever you can find that, it’s such a great thing. If you don’t and haven’t played sports, it’s a different atmosphere. You can be competitive at other things. I’ve got some amazing friends who are awesome. They’re great at band and they’re some of the best. One of my best buddies, Oscar Diaz, won the best trombone player in America. He’s a music instructor at A&M Kingsville and he’s just doing amazing things. I’ve got other friends that are awesome at things out there because they’ve had good coaches or good instructor along the way.
As we get into football season kicking off, especially college football, I can remember sitting there one night in college realizing that I didn’t want to play anymore. It wasn’t fun anymore. It wasn’t enjoyable. I was talking with my coach, John. John Ross who played in the NFL for the Atlanta Falcons was my linebacker coach. He was talking with me about it and making sure that I was making the right decision to hang up my cleats and move on. I’ll never forget that. He goes, “I’m going to be as proud of you as the day that you walked across that stage getting your degree whereas if you were a football player or not because you’ve got a good head on your shoulders.”
Lessons For Real-Estate Investors
We’ve all made mistakes along the way. I make mistakes everyday still. It’s how you react to those mistakes. How do you overcome it? Do you face it straight on or you pass the buck? The real good players are the ones who take accountability for themselves. They take accountability for where they’re at. That’s one thing that I’ve always learned is that when you goof up, fix it. Don’t let a mistake turn into another mistake. I can hear Coach Robledo saying, “Don’t have a bad play after another bad play after a bad play because you’ve got three bad plays from when you’re coming out of the game. You can’t afford to have more than one bad play in a row. You shrug it off and move on to the next thing.”
A lot of real estate investors struggle with the inability to shrug off things. I see that with a lot of people too, it’s just not real estate investors. When something bad happens, the inability to let it roll off your back and move on. The staff likes to joke here with me that nothing gets me upset. On my gravestone, it will be engraved in there, “It will be okay, it will be fine,” and it will be fine. It can be difficult sometimes as a real estate entrepreneur or an entrepreneur, to go out and do things, to start a new business, to buck the system and go against the grain, to leave your job and do something new. In your head, you’ve got to be mentally strong. You’ve got to have faith in yourself unlike anybody else with.
The biggest thing coaches have instilled over the years is that, “You have the ability to do this.” I always laugh at people, especially at the Quest Expo and the Mastermind, the people who are not in the Mastermind are coming in, “Scott, it’s great to meet you.” It’s great meeting everybody who is not in my Mastermind. It’s also great hanging out with people in my Mastermind. They make jokes, “Scott’s yelling at you.” I’m like, “I’m not yelling at people. Maybe I do a little bit, but I get fired up on things. I want people to find that success and I believe everybody is capable of achieving the success that they want. Success is completely defined by each and every one of us differently.” It’s totally different. Success for one person could be getting a note closed and for others, it’s getting 100 deals done or being able to retire their parents, retire themselves or quit their job. It’s totally and independently upon you.
One of the big things that is so important is an early lesson that Coach Larry Peel taught us about writing down our goals as young kids. I can remember doing this my junior and senior year of sitting down, going through it and writing out the goals that we want to accomplish this season, the individual goals that we want to accomplish with the season. Then sitting down with them, discussing them and seeing how we were going to get there. Coach Larry would do that with basketball because he was the basketball coach.
You have to understand where your goals are going to take you. For some of us where we’re at here, we have lofty goals. You’ve got to mentally prepare yourself to get to those goals. You have to grow into the man or the woman that’s going to be there for these roles that take place. If you’re not here mentally, it’s going to be very difficult. A lot of people can be here mentally first and their goals become easy to go through. I love humor. Humor is a great thing to have. You had to have humor when you’re on a one and nine ball club. Sometimes it was like, “We’re not even going to watch that. We’re just going to move on and go from there.”
I see one of the great things that I love about people and being a coach to people because that’s the thing. I take that as a football coach atmosphere. I know what people can achieve if they will just do it. It’s like doing the extra reps and extra sprint. It’s like playing your position. If you have a thin skin this is not the game for you. You’ve got to have a thick skin. You’ve got to be able to deal with borrowers, investors and marketing. Some guy out there said, “I have no business and I hate marketing.” I’m like, “That’s never going to get you anywhere. Nobody wants to help a Debbie Downer.” If you’re going to go bitch and moan, then go do something else. Go get a job. I’m going to spring out of bed every morning because I get pretty tired sometimes, but I enjoy going to the office. I enjoy jumping on air. I enjoy helping you, guys.
Getting Stuff Done
Steph makes the joke that if I wasn’t doing real estate, I’d be a football coach. I don’t think I could do that. I’ve got some buddies who do that. I would probably go a little crazy and blow a vein doing some things. Especially in this environment where it’s harder to coach people to get them to do things. I’m not saying you go out and smack them in the head. I think corporal punishment is a good thing. I think spanking is a good thing with young kids at times because with all these helicopter parents out there, these parents who are living vicariously through their kids versus letting their kids live and supporting their kids’ dreams. They’re living vicariously through them. I would probably end up getting in trouble.
What I love about college football was that if you’re a college athlete, you don’t have that much free time. You’ve got a schedule that you’re keeping. From the morning you wake up, when you’re in the gym or watching a film, to the end of the day when you’re finishing the practice, you’re eating and you’re in the study hall. You’ve got a pretty regimented schedule. A lot of success can come from that even if you’re an entrepreneur. If you have a regimented schedule that you do every day, things that you focus on, you’d get a lot of stuff done. That comes from the coaches and being coachable.
People ask me all the time, “How do we get stuff done?” “You’re all over the place. You’re killing it.” The thing is we keep going forward. We keep doing things. We keep trolling along, doing what we do, staying in our lanes, doing the things that we need to do on a daily basis and rock and rolling. I’ve looked back when we had a virtual workshop, a note board room and when we were in Philadelphia for Podcast Movement. Then we had our Fast Track training and we were in Ohio, in Dallas, in San Antonio, then the Mastermind and in the expo. We have been running and gunning.
You’re going to fail every day in the little things, but you are going to learn more from your failures than you will from your successes. Eventually, success will become the normality and failures will be the minority. Your success will come from you driving, going and overcoming obstacles. It’s tough sometimes being positive. It’s tough going against your friends in the current of negativity that’s out there. I have been going through that and if people are posting stuff that’s negative on Facebook, I unsubscribe or unfollow or unfriend. That’s allowing me to naturally filter out 5,000 friends where I can get rid of people who are negative. You have to focus on keeping people positive. You’ve got to surround yourself with a positive influence. Sometimes, as a team, that’s what I love about the Mastermind, you’re able to surround yourself with like-minded people and positivity. Bill Griesmer did a great job with his recap video about the Note Mastermind, the Quest Expo and his thoughts. He said he’s around four days of positivity. Four days of positivity is great. The idea is that you try to carry that home. You try to stay positive even after you get home.
Product Of Our Coaches: You’re going to fail every day in the little things, but you are going to learn more from your failures than you will from your successes.
The thing you have to keep in mind too more than anything else is that sometimes you’ve got to remove obstacles. You’ve got to remove that negativity or stop watching TV or the news or removing yourself from relationships for a period of time. Sometimes you’ve got to be coached up. Sometimes you’ve got to have somebody to tell it to you straight. People love the fact that we just deliver it straight. No bullshit and no smoke up your skirts. It is the good, the bad, the ugly. Just be honest about it. That’s the best thing you could possibly do to help yourself out is to face things and be realistic about things. Be truthful and be coachable.
Be Coachable
If there’s something going on, get somebody to help you. If you need some help with something, reach out to somebody. Don’t go this alone. You’re not in this world alone. There are plenty of people out there, especially in the note space. I had a pretty in-depth conversation with a gentleman at the Expo talking about the old guard versus the new guard and how the old guard in the note industry is very secluded. They like to hide everything and peek out, “I can’t share anything. I’ve got to keep it myself.” The new guard, which is what we represent, is totally different. The new guard has a very coopetition mindset. They’re very much doing things together, sharing resources, sharing vendors, sharing stories, working together, joint venturing on projects. It’s all about the team. You can be doing your own thing, but you’ve got a tremendous amount of resources of people that you can reach out to on a regular basis. With the use of social media, it’s so much easier to get things rock and rolling.
If you’re going to be coachable, you have to first go out and find some good coaches. Life is like science, half of the new information you discover or learn or begin to apply to a new course of action going forward is due to an error, a miscalculation or a mistake. These are otherwise known as failures in our society now and it’s tiring. Innovation doesn’t come about via perfect execution every single time where we wouldn’t hail our innovators. So much creation is the direct pivot of failure. I think creating and masterminding and stretching the brain on one’s experience to wire things are what makes that magic happen. That’s one of the big things about coaches. Coaches are there to help coach you up. When you fail or are not doing something right, they’re there to help you and to coach you into doing the right thing. The right angles in football, the right stance, the right cadence or the right play to call.
In sports and in business, you’re going to run different plays all the time. You’re going to run your bread and butter plays like for the Green Bay Packers, it was a toss and sweep for years. That’s the thing to keep in mind with. The Cowboys has been to get the ball to Elliott, getting it to Dez in a pass then to Jason Witten. You have to realize that not every play is going to be a homerun, not every note you buy is going to be a touchdown or a homerun or whatever you want to call it. It’s not going to be something that happens every single time. We’re not going to find success every day. You’re going to struggle some days. The struggle is what leads to making the victory so sweet. The juice would not be as sweet without the squeeze.
I always crack up when I see people out there who are bashing the people who have had failures along the way. I’m like, “Failures happen and you’re not always going to have success. At some point, failure is going to introduce itself to each and every one of us.” You have to be prepared for that. Unfortunately, a lot of people that are working in jobs aren’t prepared. They’re not prepared for when they get laid off or they get downsized or they’re replaced with somebody younger and cheaper. They often struggle with that.
We met somebody at the Quest IRA, Austin grand opening. A young guy in the area reached out to me and was looking at buying a house. I asked him some questions like, “Is it going to foreclose?” He’s like, “It’s going to foreclosure in a week.” “There’s not really much you can do. Have you talked to the homeowners?” “No.” I was like, “Do you know who the homeowners are?” He’s like, “No, but we’ve got a great deal. It needs a lot of work, but we need great money.” I was like, “That’s great. I love that you’re hungry, but you’ve got to find a way.” The guy is looking for some work and looking for anything right now to put food on his table and stuff like that. I told him, “Do some things. Get yourself educated. That’s what you need.” I wasn’t trying to wholesale. The guy was floundering because he’s not got somebody to sit there to coach him and to walk him through some things. We gave him some guidance, he reached out to me and he showed up at the event, which was great. He’s coachable. We gave him some advice and, hopefully, he’s off running. He’ll work his way through things. He’s just going through a bit of a tough time and we all go through that.
The thing to keep in mind too is that you get better at it, the more you do it. Some people fail from trying but they never try again. They stop after that first bit of failure. Keep failing forward. Fail fast and fail often. This accelerates us towards innovation and great solutions. A lot of people focus so much on our failures that we often forget that everybody has been there. There are people ahead of you that have walked in your footsteps or you are walking in their footsteps. That’s the beauty of a Mastermind event. It’s designed to help people talk with those who are doing well and also those who aren’t doing well, having to come from fresh ideas and a fresh discussion.
Product Of Our Coaches: A lot of people focus so much on their failures that they often forget how everybody has been there.
One of the great things that we had people do is I try to get everybody to coach each other too because we create beautiful ideas from those in the group. We have round tables and we’re like, “What’s your best marketing thing? What’s your best raising capital thing?” Sharing that, not only as a group at each table but we get everybody up in front of the room from each table to talk about their capital raising, networking, what they do to raise money, how successful they are, and where they are finding deals? That is one of the beautiful things. People out there also get a bigger picture because we have people there who were running big real estate firms, who are getting to be more in the note industry. It gave people a fresh approach like, “I don’t have to drop 30,000 postcards a month. I don’t have to drop 75,000 postcards. I can drop some email blasts and get stuff done. It’s much easier.”
That’s the thing I want to post out to everybody out there. Don’t get sucked into the four-night a week football thing. Don’t get sucked into it to where your Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday nights are all open early. On Tuesday and Wednesday, there’s football. On Thursday night, there’s college or pro-football. On Friday night, you have high school football or some college games. On Saturdays, it’s college and on Sunday’s the NFL and on Monday is Monday night football. That’s like four or five days of the week right there that you get sucked into it. Don’t get sucked into that.
There’s nothing wrong with Fantasy football, but your Fantasy football is not only this fantasy, it’s taking away focus on what you’re doing. I’ve got buddies who spend a lot of time on the fantasy side. They get points and get drafts together. I’m like, “I’m not playing one Fantasy league on ESPN.com. That’s about it. I’m not playing one free league. I don’t care if it’s ten minutes a week.” I have buddies that spend hours tracking it down. It takes away from you accomplishing your fantasies and your dreams. It takes away from your energy to achieving bigger things.
You’re then living vicariously through LeSean McCoy, Dak Prescott, Ezekiel Elliott or Odell Beckham. When was the last time Odell wrote you a check? When was the last time that you scored a touchdown? I’ve seen one or two emails from people whom I’ve met at the Quest Expo. There were over 500 people at the thing and that’s fine. I know we gave out a bunch of information and a bunch of cards. A lot of people got our information and I’ve only seen a couple of emails go out. It’s sad. We’ve got an email out to everybody that we met. I had it written up for it to go out. All I needed was to upload our list of contacts. We divide and conquer. I wrote the email, we got the list, the business cards uploaded, and it went out. We already had success with that. We’re pretty stoked about that.
Going to come back to full circle here, the thing you’ve got to keep in mind more than anything else is you’ve got to be coachable. If you’re not coachable and you’re not doing the things your coach is telling you to do, you’re going to struggle. You’re going to constantly bat your head because maybe you don’t know the best thing. I was talking to some guy and he was asking about Austin. I was trying to give the guy some advice and he just barreled over me, “I know better.” I was like, “You don’t know better.” You’re coming and moving into an area or you’re doing some of this other stuff. You’re trying to give somebody advice. You’re trying to save them from making mistakes and you just can’t help everybody. At some point, he was like, “Why did you get so quiet?” “He was a know-it-all.” That’s fine. You can try to know-it-all, go ahead and offer it up. I’ll just move on to somebody else who’s more coachable.
The thing you have to keep in mind is you’re going to make mistakes. Don’t be afraid of making mistakes, getting smacked in the mouth, falling down, missing a tackle, dropping a pass or fumbling. Pick up the ball. Pick it up and do it again and again. Get in there and practice because eventually, you’ll end up playing as you practiced and you’ll find success. I want to give a big shout-out to the coaches in high school and college. I’ve had some amazing coaches in my real life here: Greg Reid, Bob Leonetti and Tom Hopkins. Some people that I look up to and they’ve done an amazing job helping me adjust, my dad and mom. I have to give a big shout-out to Stephanie Goodman as well. Behind every good man is even a better woman. I’m very lucky that she’s in my life. We may butt heads a little bit about some things. We have a totally different take on some things, but I would not be where I’m at now without having somebody there to help coach me through some things or when I feel down, there’s somebody to pick me up and vice versa.
If you’re struggling, drop us an email. If you’re having a hard time getting things rock and rolling, drop an email at Scott@WeCloseNotes.com. I encourage anybody out there that’s reading this, shoot me an email. Tell me what you’re struggling with and we’ll be trying to help in any way we can for you. If there’s anything we can do to help coach you up, we’re glad to do it. If you see someone struggle, take a second and give them some coaching because we all have coaches around us. Don’t be afraid to coach somebody up. If you’ve been through a bad situation or experience or something like that, don’t be afraid to reach out to somebody who’s struggling and help them as well. Other than that, go out and make something happen. I’ll see you all at the top.