EP 475 – The Power Of Your Goals

We know that you can benefit from identifying your goals and writing them down. In this episode, Scott Carson shares the importance of not only setting your goals, but also sharing your goals to your network. Sharing your goals not only to the people closest to you but also to the people outside of your circle helps you accomplish those goals faster. Scott also shares the importance of making a pivot in your life when we’re faced with struggles. Sometimes changing things up will help us accomplish a goal which will snowball into a bigger goal. We just have to believe that we can accomplish these goals that we are bravely sharing to the world.

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The Power Of Your Goals

I want to talk a little about something that is important out there. It’s something that a lot of people slack on and it’s causing them to delay their success even further than it should. I’m talking about the power of sharing your goals, not only writing your goals down, but the power that your goals have over you if you take them seriously. Let’s all face it. We all have different goals that we want to accomplish. The fact of, “I want to lose weight. I want to close more deals. I want to raise much more capital. I want to get rid of things out there. I want to get rid of credit card debt, pay the debt off or pay my student loans off.” Those are the things that happen to drive a lot of us are doing things. I only speak from the voice of experience. I see people failing on a regular basis because they’re not sharing their goals with people. They’re not posting it.

I only want to say share this a little bit because I had a goal. I had a situation occur that’s surprised me and taken me back. This flashes back to over a decade ago to when I first moved to the Austin area. My office is on the north side of Austin. It’s literally about two miles from where I first moved here in Austin, when I first moved to Austin from San Marcos, Texas. I’ll get to the important goals. I moved to an apartment down the street off of Parmer Lane. I was driving around and trying to figure out where we’re located and what’s near around here. I saw an office building. I was like, “That’s pretty cool. I would love to have an office at some point.” Flash forward about a year later and I was writing some goals down. I was like, “I’d love to have an office in that office building.” I put it away. It got socked away in a file folder along with other goals and stuff like that. Lo and behold, we signed a lease for us to have an office in that same building. I moved to Austin in 2001. It’s several years later. Time flies if you’re having fun. It happened but I’m even more excited about it now than I was back then.

I have seen this happen a couple of times where I’ve written goals down and what I want to accomplish. I posted them somewhere in my office, shared them somewhere and things occur. Sometimes it doesn’t happen quite as fast as we would like it to happen. It takes us up. Sometimes we have to grow into those goals. Sometimes things have to change a little bit. If you have a goal, something that you want to accomplish that’s important to you, it can be a variety of things. I want to run a faster 5k. I want to bench 300 pounds. I want to travel the world. The only person that will limit you from accomplishing those goals is going to be the person looking back at you in the mirror. It’s only going to be you that’s causing you to get delayed on the things that you want to accomplish.

Why is that important? Why do I believe that? It happens all the time. If I say I want to close on a 100 deals this month and I write it down, I’m probably going to close on 100 deals in a month. If I want to lose 30 pounds and I write it down, it’s in front of me, I’m going to lose 30 pounds as long as I’m doing the things that I need to do. That means going into the weight room, working out, eating less and getting sleep. Most goals are pretty easy to deconstruct. If you want to make $100,000, that’s great. That means you need to $8,000 month roughly, that means $2,000 a week. What can you do to make you $2,000 a week? It’s $50 an hour. If you wanted to make $100,000 a year, there you go. Financing that pays $50 an hour or financing that’s going to make you the $2,000 a week. That means wholesaling one note every week at $2,000 a pop if you need to or wholesale on a piece of property.

Oftentimes, we get blinded by what we believe is the direct path to what we want to accomplish and don’t realize there are a lot of shortcuts, there are a lot of back roads, there are a lot of alleys. There are a lot of different ways to get where we want to get to. That’s one of the things I want you to understand. I shared a goal about the show that we had 150,000 downloads in our first year and I would love to have doubled that number and tried to make it 500,000 downloads. By the time we roll around or hopefully the next couple years, hit a million downloads. Something popped up. We have the opportunity to have our show on seventeen AM/FM radio stations across the country and now we surpassed three million viewers, three million downloads, three million listeners listening to episodes, which has blown me away. That’s happened relatively quickly because I was open to opportunities. I shared my message. If I had never shared my message with my fellow podcasters or fellow friends out there, I’d never have somebody approach me with the opportunity to do that and it was easier for me to do it than expected. There’s power in sharing your goals. Your goals have power over you if you’ll allow them to do that in a good way.

Have A Goal And Write It Down

You’ve got to share them. First of all, you have to have a goal. The second thing is you have to write them down, that’s an important thing. 1A) You’ve got to have a goal. 1B) It’s got to be measurable and specific. It means you’ve got to try to put a date on them. Sometimes the dates are going to come and go. Don’t worry we all fail on the date stuff. At least you have something that you can go by, something you can look at. That’s an important aspect of things, but when it comes to the stuff to having goals is that you’ve got a measurable, that you have something that you can guide yourself by.

I’m a big proponent of posting them wherever, whether it’s posting on your laptop in the corner, posting it in your driver’s seat, if you’re behind the wheel and the odometer. You never look at the odometer. Having a little sheet there, having it basically on your wall if you’re looking at the house, if you’re in your bathroom, have it where you see it, laying on the toilet, having it on your mirror. Sharing it on your fridge. The more you can share it not only around the people that you’re around the most, the more they’re going to help you achieve those goals. The more you share it with your tribe or the people that you surround yourselves, not only with your closest but also people outside of you.

Power Of Your Goals: Have a goal that’s measurable and specific

You may never know who has a connection to help you accomplish those goals faster. I used to put it out there, put it out in the environment to share it out there. A lot of times, it will come back to you in a different way than you ever expected. Sometimes we get embarrassed about sharing the goals. I’ll give an example. I had the idea that my marriage wasn’t going to work out that well when my wife at the time started hiding all my goal sheets. I would post them up, “We want to do this and do this.” I posted on the fridge and the mirror. I had it pinned next to the wall. When I’d wake up, it was one of the first things I’d see. I would crack up when I’d come home if my in-laws are getting going to visit because all of a sudden, my goal sheets were gone. They were hidden in a drawer. I would get frustrated, stinking mad about it because the fact is, “Why are you hiding it? Why are you doing it? Aren’t you proud of what we’re trying to accomplish?” The sheet not only had my goals, it had her goals.

What it proved to me is you’ve got to be willing enough to believe you can accomplish those goals. That’s why you want to have your goals measurable. “I need to lose 30 pounds by the end of the year. I need to quit drinking a pint of vodka every night.” As our buddy, Mark Yuzuik, likes to say, “Take your goals a little bit.” If you want to lose 30 pounds, then eat 10% less a little bit. Instead of eating chocolate at night, eat chocolate in the morning so you can burn it off. There are many different ways for you to accomplish goals.

I’ve talked to quite a few people and a lot of people have shared with me when I asked them what their goals are, they can’t give me a specific number. They can’t give me specificities of what they want to accomplish. I was like, “No offense. I love you but if you don’t know how many deals you want to accomplish or you don’t know the numbers, don’t know what income you want to make, you’re going to have a harder time in this business.” They were like, “Why is that?” “It’s because you don’t have a focus.” You have to have specifics. Share it. “I want to make $100,000 in the next twelve months. I want to lose ten pounds this month. I want to run a 5K. I want to take a cruise.” What that means is go find it, research it. I hate to sound philosophical, but if it’s something that you’re meant to do, God will put it in your way to happen

How I Got Started

I was interviewed on a podcast. The lady asked me how I got started. I told her the story about literally going back to 2008 or 2009, I was sitting there watching TV. I was watching a preview for a Visa card commercial. You may remember like, “Grabbing a hot dog, $5. Cold beer, $8. Visiting every baseball park with your adult son, priceless.” That drove me to the idea of like, “How awesome would it be to go to all 30 Major League Baseball parks in twelve months?” Instead of thinking about it, why don’t I go ahead and write it down? I pulled up ESPN.com. I started looking. I started plotting, “If I left Austin and I saw opening day in Arlington for the Rangers and I went to the Astros next, and then whenever it’s off the Braves. I went down to Tampa and saw the Rays and then down to Miami for the Marlins. How would that path look like? What would it take? How many days would I have to travel to be able to hit all the Major League Baseball parks and end up back home in Dallas or end up back home in Austin?” It’s 26 weeks because you’re going to hit a couple of teams in the same week. You hit the Yankees and the same week as the Mets. You’re going to hit the Pirates roughly by the same time you hit the Phillies or the Phillies the same week you hit the Yankees. Some of these clubs are pretty close together.

It would be cool. I could travel. I could join investment clubs and things like that along the way or build a grassroots effort. I wrote it down. What was funny is I went into my calendar. I literally scheduled what the days or the weeks was like, “I would be seeing the Miami Marlins this weekend or I would be seeing the Minnesota Twins this week.” I put it in my schedule and I created a separate calendar in my Google Calendar for that. I didn’t think about that. This is the 1st of March. Flash forward a few weeks later and I had four or five investment clubs reached out to me who were either wanting to use my blogs that I was writing to share about the note investing space. They asked me to come to speak or they wanted me to come out and network if I had the opportunity to. These clubs, when they asked me this stuff, I asked them what date would work. It matched up almost exactly for the schedule that I was at. Some people have heard me tell this story, others have not. The minute I started seeing these dots pop up or double dots, I’m like, “Somebody is telling me something. Something has put me in place to do that.” If I had been married, with kids or anything like that, I could not go on the road for 30 weeks straight. Initially, for the most part it was well-planned out because then you’re planning for other people in life. If I had a regular job, I wouldn’t be able to do that like, “I’m going to take a 30-week sabbatical to go enjoy some baseball parks.” It doesn’t happen.

The thing to keep in mind is when you start seeing signs from people, from God or Allah or whoever, start pointing in that direction. You have to start taking those directions. Otherwise, they’re going to reroute what you’re focused on going to something else. In the matter of the next few weeks, I’d sold everything in Austin. I had some garage sales sold off most of my assets and then literally gave it my gung ho. I was like, “I’m going to do this.” I planned it. I had a few weeks’ worth of time planned besides the schedule. I made it work. I didn’t hit all 30 Major League Baseball parks. That’s the bummer of it. I had hit 22 of them. That three-week period turned into three-and-a-half-years on the road. There are a few ballparks I have not made yet. I’ve been to Seattle a couple of times, but they’ve not been playing a home game. My big fans, the Minnesota Twins, I’ve not made it to. It looks like they’re doing well. Maybe I’ll make a playoff game. I have not been for a Tigers game yet. I need to get up there to Detroit for that. The Brewers, I have not made it too, even in Milwaukee. I’ve not made it to a Pirates game in Pittsburgh yet.

Those are four of the clubs I’ve not made it to. I’ve made it to a lot of others. I made it to every California team. I’ve made it to Arizona. I’ve made it to Texas, all the Florida teams. I made it to a lot of them. Cleveland is the other one. The thing you have to realize is I wrote it down, I planned it out and it happened. Did I have the money for a thirty-week trip? I didn’t have the money for that. I knew I could make money along the way and worst case, “When I got below $2,000, I would turn and end up coming home.” I crashed in some friends’ places, crashed my brother’s place. I always had that emergency. We’ve all got that. We’ve all got places that we can crash for a period of time. We’ve got friends and family. We’ll do that. That was a deal that I was willing to run with.

Power Of Your Goals: If you put your goals out there, if it’s positive, you’ll start attracting positive things and opportunities to help you accomplish that goal.

Another deal that’s worked well is this idea of this office space, this place I’m moving to. I’m excited about this. Steph’s excited about it. I shared this with her when we were walking out. She chuckled. She smiled. I said, “I wrote it down.” I came across some file folders and lo and behold there it was. It was the day after we signed a lease and I was like, “That’s pretty cool.” I want to challenge everybody out there. If you’re struggling, if you’re not having fun, if you’re not doing some things, then change some things up. If you’re passionate to become a job, which is the worst thing you can do. If you listen to our episode with Jason Bible, he talked about how his passion or what he was doing at Houston House Buyers and Right Path Real Estate turned into a job for him. He didn’t want that. He had to make a pivot.

Make A Pivot

We all run through those things. We all run through peaks and valleys. We all see different things taking place in our lives. Sometimes you’ve got to make a pivot. Maybe it’s not notes. Maybe it’s not real estate. Maybe it’s not marketing. Maybe it’s a whole variety of different things. What you have to do is if you have to put your goals up there, what you’d like to accomplish and what you’d like to share, there are funny things that will start attracting to you. If you’re negative, you’ll get negative things attracted to you. If it’s positive, you’ll start attracting positive things, opportunities to help you accomplish that goal. In this age, we’re all not six degrees away from Kevin Bacon. We’re all one or two connections away from the Mr. Baconator himself, Kevin Bacon, whatever it is.

Maybe you’ve got a goal to play golf on Torrey Pines, Pebble Beach or you want to meet Tiger Woods. There are many different things that can happen out there if you get the word out on what you’re doing and sharing with your tribe, sharing with your audience. The things that you can do to hit those goals have become easier than they ever were before. Do you want to start teaching? Start teaching. If you want to start a podcast, film some episodes. If you want to go on a cruise, go look at cruise lines. Take a cruise at Galston or the Carnival Cruise Lines. That’s pretty cheap. Norwegian is pretty inexpensive. There are a lot of great places out there that you can go to.

Do you want to travel abroad? Great. Plan a trip. Start sharing more with your audience. Start sharing more with your tribe. Start sharing more with your family. A lot of people forget to share because we get bogged down like, “I’m not good enough. This whole self-inflicted pain, I can’t do that.” When you say you can’t do it, you’re programming your mind to believe that you can’t. If we took away the apostrophe t and start saying, “I can do that. Why can’t I do that? I am worthy of doing that. I can do more.” I can become a whole lot more powerful than I can’t. The worst thing you can do is write a goal down and not believe it. You have to realize if you are not good at accomplishing your goals, it’s probably for a couple of reasons. You’re probably not specific enough about it or you’re all over the place and you let life dictate your schedule versus you dictating your schedule.

Make It Happen

We’ve got people that have been around us for a long time, “I’m still trying to close my first deal.” I’m like, “Why are you waiting to close on your first deal?” Close on your first deal. Go make it happen. I would love to hear what’s a big goal that you want to have. I’d love for you to share in the comments, shoot me a text message or shoot me an email at Scott@WeCloseNotes.com. I want you to reach out. I want to talk to you. I want to help you accomplish your goals. It’s important because the more goals that you accomplish, they start to snowball. If you accomplish a little goal, it can snowball into a bigger goal which can snowball into an even bigger goal. You are literally going to look back and be like, “I’ve accomplished so much in such little time.” I look back at what the craziness of what life is. Life is crazy. I have had some relationships as far as meeting amazing people that have led to even more amazing friendships and peers. I’ve been blessed to meet and hang with some of the best people. I looked up as here as now I call them good buddies, people out there, speakers, vendors, experts.

I was exchanging text messages back and forth with my buddy, Greg Reid. Sharing a text message back and forth with Sharon Lechter from Rich Dad Poor Dad and Think and Grow Rich, Three Feet from Gold and Outwitting the Devil. There are some amazing things that can happen if you reach out and grab them. I remember one of the biggest goals that I wanted to accomplish, one I set for myself was I wanted to play college football. I remember the day that I got my scholarship and I was excited about that. I also remember the day that I tore my ACL in high school. I remember how painful that moment was. I remember how sad I was and how devastated I thought that a goal of mine was gone.

That goal drove me for nine months of rehab, nine months of physical therapy, nine months of working my rear off to get back to where I needed to be fast, be able to work and play. Where I end up still getting a scholarship to play college football. I ended up realizing my dream. That was one of the first biggest ones and then when I finished that goal I was like, “What do I accomplish next?” I didn’t have goals for a while and then I bounced around and didn’t know what I wanted to accomplish. A lot of us are going through that. What do you want to accomplish? What do you want to be known for? What’s something that gets you rock and rolling? What gets your juices flowing in a good way that if you spend a lot more time on it, you’d have success?

Power Of Your Goals: The world works off positive and negative energy. We all are responsible for what we put out.

Relationships And Connections

If you had a little bit more confidence in yourself, maybe it’s not just confidence in you, but you had other people around you that have relationships, they could introduce you to somebody. They can introduce you to an event or to a person. You’d never know who you’re connected to. It’s an amazing thing. This world is getting smaller and smaller each day. With the help of social media, it gets even smaller than it used to be. It’s also other things out there. I’ll give you an example. Stephanie had a birthday. She turned 29 again. It’s different for the second time. She’s always been a big fan of The Girls Next Door and Bridget and Holly from that series. Who isn’t a fan of that series?

I was able to reach out and in fact came across this new thing called Cameo. It’s a service you can use, online, inexpensive thing from $10 to a couple of hundred bucks, that you can use and reach out to somebody if they’re on there and they’ll do a little cameo video and give you a shout-out. I found this Bridget Marquardt, reached out and lo and behold a couple of days after Steph’s birthday I get this text message with a video that, “It’s Bridget from The Girls Next Door. I want to wish Stephanie Goodman a Happy Birthday. Congratulations on her podcast.” That’s awesome. That’s pretty cool. That will tickle anybody quite a bit. We all have things like that. We all have, I won’t say crushes, but maybe we’ve got a woman crush or man crush or heroes that we’d love to connect with. Mine originally was Gary Vaynerchuk. I got a chance to meet him a while back and that was great. I’m a big sports fan. Steph got a chance to meet Tim Lincecum because that was her favorite pitcher who won a couple of World Championships with the San Francisco Giants. I got to meet him here in Round Rock because he ended up pitching.

The thing you have to realize is that the world works off positive and negative energy. We all are responsible for what we put out. If you have a negative thing in life, you have a negative outlook on life, negative things are going to happen. It’s going to push you further away from accomplishing your goals. If you have a positive mindset, you’ll get closer and closer and things will put you in the way. You’re attracted. Negativity attracts negativity, positivity attracts positivity. If I can challenge you to anything, take some time, pull out a piece of paper, pull out your cellphone. Jot down two, three goals at the max of what you want to accomplish the second half of 2019. It does not have to be real estate focused. Be something personally, “I want to lose fifteen, twenty pounds. I want to start a podcast or whatever it might be. I want to make $50,000. I want to close on five deals by the end of the year.” Put that down and then start looking at what you need to do. If you want to close on five deals or six deals, then you’ve got to make 60 offers. That comes down to making ten offers a month to make that stuff happen.

Do yourself a favor. Feel free to jot in one or two or three of your big goals on Facebook or on YouTube. If you’re sharing this on iTunes or Stitcher, drop me a text message or shoot me an email. I would be honored to try to help you accomplish those goals. I’d be honored if you would share those goals. What are you scared of? If you’re scared of success, then success will always be beyond your grasp. If you embrace it and realize there’s an opportunity to make things happen and that you deserve good things. You might be a lot closer than you believe already. You might be a whole lot further along than where you think.

I talked to people a lot of times and they get these goals thought of and then further complicate it. They make the goals much more complicated than what it’s supposed to be than how it is going to be than what ends up being. Most of the time, a goal can be pretty much cut and dry, black and white. It’s just a matter of going out and making it happen. I remember the story of Jack Canfield, the author of Chicken Soup for the Soul. He wanted his first check to be $100,000 or $1 million. I don’t remember, it was a comma or two in it. He wrote a check out to himself for $1 million, post it next to the bed, posted above his bed. He woke up lying in bed each morning, he would see that. It would be the last thing he saw at night and the first thing he saw at night. You guys should do the same thing too because it worked out for Jack. The first check he got was $1 million because of the fact I believe he manifested it by putting it out in the world.

I want you all to manifest your dreams. I want you to manifest some of the most amazing things that you can think of. If you put it out there, you might be surprised at some of what your friends, your families, your colleagues, your tribe might be able to do to help you accomplish those things. That’s what I’ve got for this episode. I want you to accomplish things. As we get to where the year is halfway done, if you’re not even close, don’t worry. Start now. Make whenever you read this your day one and start planning to accomplish those things, start working towards making those things happen. If you don’t, you’re going to be sitting here a few months from now, “It’s the New Year’s resolution. I need to plan my 2020. It’s my best year yet. 2019 was horrible.” The reason the years are horrible isn’t because of the years. It’s because of what you accomplished or didn’t accomplish. I would rather embrace the year and make it my thing, to make it my most productive year, my most productive day, my most productive month, my most productive quarter ever. You have the power to do that. I don’t care what it is. You solely you have the power to accomplish those things. Go out, take some action, share your goals. We look forward to seeing you closer to the top.

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