For today’s episode, we will be discussing eight important habits that have gotten us to millionaire status.
This is going to be an interesting clickbaity conversation as we shed some light on life-changing habits.
New book LIVE! Passive Investing Made Simple: How to Create Wealth and Passive Income through Apartment Syndications
[00:01 – 07:43] Opening Segment
- Bad investing tips
- Do not get caught in fads
[07:44 – 16:18] The First Habit To Make A Million
- Explaining what a million means first
- #1 – Read constantly
[16:19 – 18:48] The Second Habit To Make A Million
- #2 – Exercise daily
- Maintain your temple
[18:49 – 21:37] The Third Habit To Make A Million
- #3 – Finding mentors
- Actively be seeking mentors that have done what you want to do
[21:38 – 24:47] The Fourth Habit To Make A Million
- #4 – Return on karma
- Try to help everybody as much as possible
[24:48 – 27:09] The Fifth Habit To Make A Million
- #5 – Network every single day
- Use a longer-term time frame
- Asking the questions
[27:10 – 34:26] The Sixth Habit To Make A Million
- #6 – Keep a decision journal
- What is your system when deciding
- Email Anthony@invictuscapital.com for a copy of the decision journal template
[34:27 – 38:00] The Seventh Habit To Make A Million
- #7 – Practice daily gratitude
- The goods outweigh the negativess
[38:01 – 45:43] The Eighth Habit To Make A Million
- #8 – Ditch the to-do-list
- Time block and rank your list to do
[45:44 – 41:50] Closing Segment
- Right now we are in a good market
Book Recommendation
“There are commonalities among people who are successful and one of them we are talked about reading, they’ll read but the second one is they’ve all got some sort of physical activity thing that they do on a regular basis“ – Dan Kreuger
“Money is just a tool that allows us to buy back our time and live life on our terms“ – Anthony Vicino
“judgment is a superpower, hone it with intention” – Anthony Vicino
“How does the universe not pay you back if, like you provide a ton of value like it’s got to reconcile at some point?” – Dan Krueger
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8 Habits That Made Me A Millionaire
Anthony Vicino: [00:00:15] Hello and welcome to multifamily investing made simple, the podcast, it’s all about taking the complexity out of real estate investing so that you can take action today. I am your host, Anthony Vecino of Invictus Capital, who joined, as always by this guy, Dan. I have a creaky chair.
Dan Krueger: [00:00:31] Kruger. Yes, I apologize to our listeners in advance. We have some really good microphones in a really creaky chair, so you might pick up on just ignore it. They might want to talk about it. You could leave it in the comments.
Anthony Vicino: [00:00:40] Leave a comment. Go to iTunes, leave a five-star review and in the comments, let us know. Hey, Dan’s creaky chair. Very distracting, but I don’t think they’ll actually be able to hear it because these microphones are really great. Oh, good, good. Good. So guys and gals, thank you for joining us. Man, today’s episode is going to be an interesting one. We’re going to get a little clickbaity. We’re going to talk about a post that I made. I don’t know a couple of weeks ago at this point called eight habits that made me a millionaire. But before we get into that, I just wanted to put that out there. I wanted to bury the lead. So you go. That’s interesting. Now you stay nice. You stay tuned. Don’t go anywhere. But before we get to that, before we get to the delicious meal, that is how to become a millionaire because everybody wants to be one, Dan. Why don’t you take us onto on a journey into the deep, dark, scary forest of bad investment advice?
Dan Krueger: [00:01:32] Ok, this is my favorite. I love giving people horrible advice that will sabotage them and people can’t
Anthony Vicino: [00:01:38] See this at home. But you, like physically like, perked up, like I’m
Dan Krueger: [00:01:42] Ready so full of bad ideas and just bad things in general. All right, let’s do it. Let’s talk bad advice today. The bad advice for today is don’t get caught up in fads. I don’t know her usual good goodness. Well, I mean, I guess I’m kind of talking about, you know, 2016, 2017, and 2018 Bitcoin. All the subsequent coins that came out and everyone was just like, What is this madness? This is just, you know, you look at EMC, you look at GameStop, you look at all this stuff that’s been happening the last couple of years.
Anthony Vicino: [00:02:16] So you’re saying, don’t get caught up in those fads, that’s my bad. That’s a bad investment. So I should get caught up in the fad. That is good. Like, that’s the good investing advice, right? Hmm. Ok, so let’s walk this out. Actually, this is interesting because it’s part of me agrees, and part of me disagrees. And I think that makes for the most interesting conversation. Hear me. Ok, hear me out.
Dan Krueger: [00:02:34] What I want to make the point I want to make is sometimes your initial perception of a thing could be flawed. Right. We’ve all been wrong before. We’ve all judged something very early on in our learning curve before we fully understand the thing and we’re all guilty of this. But the point is that you’ve got to be able to pivot as you learn more and as things change and as things evolve, right? So you know what the bottom line is like when you’re investing, right? Do you want to be right or do you want to make money? That’s the question you need to ask, because a lot of people get caught up with their initial belief and they don’t want to admit that, hey, actually, you know, now that I know more information, I have changed my mind. People don’t want to say that and they want to be right more than they want to make money and they will go bankrupt.
Anthony Vicino: [00:03:24] Oh my God, that happened. Ok? I’m really excited about this. Actually, this is really this is a really interesting topic. It’s so apropos, and there are so many different ways that we could go with this. When I when you’re talking about people want to be right. Somebody said this the other day. I don’t know who it was, but it resonated with me immensely. It was. He doesn’t care about being right. He wants to get to the right answer faster than anybody else. And that’s not necessarily him being right. That’s just, hey, my team, the people around me, the community at large, they have information that maybe I don’t. I just need to get to the right answer faster than everybody else. But it doesn’t matter if that came from me in this topic is so interesting as we’re watching crypto kind of explode. And really, if you were to rewind five or six years ago, pretty much all the major investors in this space, all the institutional guys and gals, they were like, Pooh-pooh, no bitcoin. This whole thing. Most of them were saying, this isn’t going to work out, but almost to a T. Every single one of them. By and large, there are some holdouts that have turned, they’ve pivoted and they’ve said, OK, maybe this is a thing and they’re starting to invest in it now. And what’s really interesting about that is the underlying psychological strength of not being ideological and saying, You know what? The information has changed. I was wrong. I have new information now. I see the trend, I see the opportunity and not being so tied to being right and like that past impression where everybody is like, Hey, Dan, you said bitcoin was stupid. Now you’re investing in bitcoin, and this reminds me of a really killer quote, which was I I think it was John Maynard Keynes who says when the data changes. I changed my mind. What do you do? Yeah, right, like boom, right there it’s the marks. I don’t know who it was. Honestly, I think it was John Maynard’s cadence.
Dan Krueger: [00:05:16] Ok, yeah. Yeah. Well, I was thinking I was just reading some Marx recently, and I feel like that was that was in there. But I mean, it’s the same kind of concept, right? It’s like just get rid of the ego, right? Really? Ask yourself any time you’re kind of at a crossroads with something like it when it comes to investing, just ask yourself that question like, am I doing what I’m doing or saying what I’m saying because I want to be right? Or is this actually going to put money in my pocket? Right? And sometimes what you think should happen doesn’t happen, and you just have to be OK with that while you understand why things are turning out differently than you thought.
Anthony Vicino: [00:05:50] And on the topic of trends, I think this is really interesting because when you’re saying like, there’s a lot of things that if I was to rewind 10 years and you were like, Hey, and 10 years from now, literally pretty much everybody is going to be comfortable getting into a car with a stranger and sending their kids into a car with a stranger to go to school rather than buying them a car or saying, Hey, when I travel to a new city, I’m going to be comfortable renting a bed in some random strangers guest bedroom like Airbnb and Uber. Are you seriously rewind 15 years ago in the concept behind that is so ludicrous. Yeah, but now it’s so common nature. And so like if you were to say, I would never do that well, it doesn’t matter what you think because there’s a market for it and this is what the people are doing. And this is where trends do matter because some of them are fads, the trends. If there’s enough. Organic. I would say interest like there’s a reason for that, and you might not agree with it, but it’s there. Yeah, and if you want to make money, pay attention.
Dan Krueger: [00:06:54] Yeah, it’s like it doesn’t really matter. You know what the hell is going on if everyone is kind of in consensus that this is a thing that matters, it matters, right? We were just in our last episode. We were talking about money and really how worthless it is because if the Fed wants to create more money, they just tap a couple of zeros into a spreadsheet, and all of a sudden, there it is, right? It just appears out of nowhere. And we just kind of magical trust that it is what it is because people say it is what it is and everyone just kind of goes along with it. But at the end of the day, that’s really the only thing that’s holding it up is just the kind of consensus among us all that, yes, this is a thing that’s worth x things right? I can get an iPhone for a thousand bucks, right? Right now, we all agree that that’s a pretty fair trade, and it’s just because we all agree. That’s all there is that holds it up. Mm-hmm.
Anthony Vicino: [00:07:44] Weird. Yeah. So that was actually really killer advice. There’s a lot to think about there, but the takeaway is don’t be ideological. It’s more important to find the right answer than it is to be right at the end of the day. And that’s going to tie nicely into the topic of today’s conversation, which is talking about eight habits that made me a millionaire. Now, what’s interesting about this? Well, let’s unpack the term millionaire. First of all, and also points out, unfortunately, that don’t be ideological did not make it into this list of habits. But if I could go back, I would put that in there because there’s room for nine. There’s room for nine. Yeah, yeah. So let’s unpack the term millionaire and why it’s this is a clickbaity title. Yeah, for sure.
Dan Krueger: [00:08:28] Well, I mean, if you ask the average person what that means to be a millionaire, I think a lot of people would say that means you. You earn a million dollars or more per year. There’s a lot of people that would say that means you’ve got a million dollars sitting in your checking account or your savings account. And there’s a lot of people who are going to be the ones that I think are technically right. That would say that if your net worth is over a million dollars, then you qualify as a millionaire like you’re your total assets. All the things you own, minus all your debt, equals over a million dollars. Then you hit that threshold. That’s technically the definition, technically,
Anthony Vicino: [00:08:58] But those are wildly different. You’re already there was a wild like think about let’s take that net worth income and liquid, right? So-net worth takes into account all your 401ks and equity in your primary residence and your real estate. So that’s going to be the easiest threshold to hit a million. And honestly, that’s not super hard or unattainable for most people. And once you get there, you realize actually, that’s not super helpful. Like, that’s good. It’s a good start, but it’s not. Sounds good. You’re not the end of the race for sure. Write a check
Dan Krueger: [00:09:29] For a million bucks and have it not bounce. But that’s
Anthony Vicino: [00:09:32] So. Then the second type of millionaire would be an income millionaire. So they make a million dollars in a year.
Dan Krueger: [00:09:37] Yeah, they might spend one point two and be flat broke.
Anthony Vicino: [00:09:39] Two might be. So that’s I mean, that’s a lot of money, and that’s great. But what are your expenses? And for a lot of people that are making that type of money, their expenses can be very, very high. And the other thing is, depending on how you make that money, it’s going to be taxed in a very disadvantaged, disadvantaged way. And so maybe you’re really only taking home half a million of that or four hundred thousand, which suddenly changes the conversation quite a bit to me. I think the most the coolest type of millionaire is a liquid millionaire, somebody who literally has a million dollars cash sitting in the bank. Like, that’s the coolest.
Dan Krueger: [00:10:11] Like, yeah, to be clear, it’s not necessarily like you literally have a checking account with a million dollars. Like most, anyone who has a significant amount of wealth is not going to have that much just sitting in a checking account. However, what they do have is the access to get liquidity very quickly. So usually all that capital is in something, whether it’s equities or bonds or some sort of relatively liquid asset. What they do is they just draw on some sort of line of credit or, you know, they can get as much cash as they want pretty quickly because they’ve got so much on their balance sheet, right? It’s not necessarily literally a checking account with a million. You probably don’t see that, but they can get it. They make one call and it’s where they need it to be, you know, in a matter of, you know, 24 hours or less
Anthony Vicino: [00:10:53] Usually and rewinding real quick to the net worth millionaires. Something that’s interesting about this is thinking about business owners because owning equity in a company, is it? Well, you know, if you guys have listened to us at all like we’re really big proponents that if you want to grow wealth like you’ve got to own equity in a business or real estate, like those are the best way you’ve got to sell something. But the problem with that, like when we talk about Jeff Bezos, got trillions of dollars, people latch onto that and they’re like that. That’s unfair. And it’s like, well, the majority of that’s held in stock in the form of equity in a company, and he could liquidate it. He could sell it. But for a lot of small business owners like the value that they derive from their company isn’t easily transferred into easy cash.
Dan Krueger: [00:11:36] Yeah, usually what these guys do, like Bezos or Musk or somebody who’s got real, the ninety-eight percent of their net worth is in the equity of their company or. Companies or, you know, basically something where they would have to have some taxable event happen and turn around and sell a bunch of shares to like Bezos got his mega yacht, right? What does he do for that? He doesn’t go out and sell a bunch of Amazon shares that take the tax hit. What he does is he borrows against his holdings. Very low-interest rate and he buys it that way, right? So, yeah, technically he’s borrowing to do it, but it’s because he’s borrowing against his is his equities as what he’s doing. So it’s very cheap to do that. The cost to do that is less than inflation. So it’s a really good deal to do because you don’t pay the tax head-on, selling the things you get access to the capital and you’re borrowing money at such a low rate. I mean, even if you’re buying a mega yacht, that just because Bezos owned it, it’s probably gonna go up in value like he’s going to make money on it.
Anthony Vicino: [00:12:26] I was reading something the other day that somebody is making a compelling argument that yachts are a pretty good asset because it’s like mobile capital. It’s like, All right, well, I don’t know. You can park
Dan Krueger: [00:12:36] Them pretty much anywhere,
Anthony Vicino: [00:12:38] Anywhere. I just don’t think of them as I appreciate depreciating assets.
Dan Krueger: [00:12:41] But I don’t know, actually. I mean, I guess, you know, the question with a certain point. I mean, the
Anthony Vicino: [00:12:46] Megayachts maybe don’t depreciate super much. I don’t know.
Dan Krueger: [00:12:48] I have no idea.
Anthony Vicino: [00:12:49] I don’t have a mega yacht. So if you guys, if somebody is listening out there who has a mega yacht and who’s done some research on this, like come on to the show and talk to us about inviting us on
Dan Krueger: [00:12:57] Your mega-yacht. We’ll do this episode. We need to do
Anthony Vicino: [00:12:59] A live on deck episode, a mega yacht that music. Ok, so let’s get to these eight habits that made me a millionaire, and let’s go ahead. And for the sake of this episode, let’s just remove the millionaire and just say eight habits that will help you move forward and progress in life. Because really, that’s what money is for. Like, money is just a tool that allows us to buy back our time and live life on our terms. And so these are habits that help facilitate that.
Dan Krueger: [00:13:26] Eight Habits That Help You Accumulate Wealth Millions, billions, trillions,
Anthony Vicino: [00:13:31] Whatever wealth and whatever way doesn’t have to be a currency, right? Ok, so number one, read constantly. And in this tweet that I had was all the successful, all the successful people I know to read. This is beyond correlation. This is causation. Like, I’m convinced of this at this point. Like, I don’t know anybody truly. And I say this without being hyperbolic. Like, I don’t know anybody who is like further along in life than me that I want to trade places with that doesn’t read like, I don’t know, a single one.
Dan Krueger: [00:14:02] Yeah. And it’s really simple. I mean, if you want to be successful at just about anything, the only thing that you really need to do is accumulate knowledge and take action towards that goal, right? And so 50 percent of that is accumulating knowledge, and that is done by reading, right? Primarily. I mean, you can consume content and get smarter, but via a bunch of different mediums. But at the end of the day, the old most of the data that you need is in books. So read them, get smarter and then go utilize that knowledge.
Anthony Vicino: [00:14:29] And I’ll make a caveat here too, and say reading can take form in all sorts of different ways like you could read a blog article, you could read tweets, you could read a book, you could. There’s a lot of different types of reading, but there is something about the action of taking in information visually that’s written down that’s fundamentally different than pretty much any other form of learning.
Dan Krueger: [00:14:50] You retain more. If you read it, you retain a certain amount. There’s been a lot of studies on this. You probably know him based on your psychology and like, yeah, so like if you read something like you’ll retain X amount, if you just hear it, you’ll retain X amount, which is less. If you read it and hear it, you’ll retain more than just reading it. If you read it, hear it, and then do it. Like at that point, you’re pretty good
Anthony Vicino: [00:15:13] As much as it can be, you know,
Dan Krueger: [00:15:14] That’s about as good as it gets. So like the more kind of mediums that you can kind of bring together to get this data inside your head, the more you’re going to retain it. So my personal favorite is to be listening to an audiobook while reading the physical book, I find that I retain significantly more. And if I just read it, and if I listen to something like it’s kind of a casual thing I do for entertainment, not a whole lot sticks, but the act of reading physically with your eyes in a book and listening to the audio version at the same time is great for just cramming a ton
Anthony Vicino: [00:15:43] Of money into the head. Yeah, and that’s actually super supported by the research. Another thing that I like to do is I like to read something if I find it really deeply compelling and I would really want it to retain it, I’ll listen to it. And then afterward, I’ll take notes and I’ll write it down because now I’m taking the physical action and I’m going to talk about this later in one of the other habits. But writing is is a superpower.
Dan Krueger: [00:16:03] So I mean, there’s a reason you did book reports in school, right? There’s some logic there. You learn about a thing and then you write about it even more. It gets retained. That’s the practice thing I pretty much just mentioned is like the action of doing the thing. Like you just said, the action of writing it down is massive. Yeah.
Anthony Vicino: [00:16:19] So, all right. So I bet no habit. No. Two, I’m tripping over my words here. Hit it. Number two to hit it. Number two. Give it to exercise daily. Your body is the only vehicle you get to navigate through the world. Take care of it and it’ll take care of you. Dan Mr. Fitness Kruger, What do you think about this one?
Dan Krueger: [00:16:38] I’m on board. I knew you would concur.
Anthony Vicino: [00:16:42] This one doesn’t, even doesn’t even. Aren’t like digging into it’s just so simple and straightforward, we know we need to take care of our body because it’s only when you get it, but most people aren’t prioritizing it and that is a mistake.
Dan Krueger: [00:16:54] Hmm. Yeah, I think it’s one of those things where, like, you’ve heard it a million times like exercise, right? But it doesn’t need to be like, you know, for those that you don’t know, I come from like a fitness background. I went to school for finance. I’ve been, you know, that’s been my main thing for a long time. But for a long time, I did have a side hustle, which was nutrition coaching, because I was really passionate about getting in shape and getting a little body. And yeah, it’s just I just like personal development and for a long period of time, the physical manifestation of that with respect to the body was really fascinating to me. And so I got really into it. And there’s something you notice when you study successful people, which I do, and Anthony does a lot. There are commonalities among people who are successful and one of them we are talked about reading, they’ll read. But the second one is they’ve all got some sort of physical activity thing that they do on a regular basis, and it does not need to be getting up and going and doing a morning run right. A lot of people do that. If you happen to enjoy it, great but have some sort of physical activity that you actually enjoy that you do on a regular basis. For myself, it’s lifting weights for Anthony. Right now, it’s tennis and spins rock climbing that’s been martial arts. It’s been umpteen million different things, but it’s just the activity getting your heart rate elevated, doing something physical, challenging yourself, and pushing yourself through that. That process is hugely beneficial and you get a little bit of a dopamine hit, right? You get a little high off of it and it’s you don’t have a hangover. So it’s a really great drug. If you’re depressed or not feeling good, it makes you feel better instantly, and it does not have a comedown. And then it just gets you ready, right? It gets your mind awake.
Anthony Vicino: [00:18:24] What’s really crazy about it, too? And this is almost counterintuitive is that by exercising and burning energy, you create more energy. You become more energetic.
Dan Krueger: [00:18:34] Yeah, it’s super metabolism. So it’s like you just rev the engine on your car.
Anthony Vicino: [00:18:37] Basically, it’s perfect and really to be successful in life. It’s about effectively using the time that you have and getting like doing the most that you can with what you have, and it’s a
Dan Krueger: [00:18:48] I tired at the same time.
Anthony Vicino: [00:18:49] Oh heck yes, it doesn’t work out. Ok, so let’s stop kicking that horse like exercise every single day. Habit number three, find mentors. The quickest way to the top of the mountain is to follow somebody who is already been there. There are no bonus points awarded for figuring it out on your own. Now, this is a is like, what do you mean? This is not a habit of finding mentors? No, it is. It is actually a habit like to be constantly on the lookout and seeking saying, Who can I learn from? Who can? Who do I need to put myself in the same room with so that I can grow just by being in the ray of their sunshine?
Dan Krueger: [00:19:27] Yeah, I’d argue that this is a prerequisite, not just a habit that leads to being successful at, you know, becoming a millionaire or accumulated wealth. Whatever we want to call this like, it’s not just a habit that contributes, it contributes. I think it is a prerequisite that if you do not have this Inc., either actively or just by happenstance if you don’t find yourself surrounded by this kind of people that fall into that mentor type of role, someone who’s been there before who knows more than you, you’re probably going to be at an extreme disadvantage because there’s no better way to expedite the learning curve than to have somebody who’s already done the thing show you how to do it. Because if they’ve already put in years of their life to accumulate all this knowledge, why wouldn’t you want to try to soak that up in less than overlong took them? Yeah. Like, why wouldn’t
Anthony Vicino: [00:20:12] You can compress decades into days, right? Like that’s what a mentor can help you do. They can. They can help you avoid a mortality event. They can save you from doing something really stupid. Yeah, I mean, you risk like the only reason I can see why you wouldn’t want a mentor is because of ego. Exactly. And if you can own that fact, then you can put it aside. Get out of your own way.
Dan Krueger: [00:20:38] Hey, I’ve been there.
Anthony Vicino: [00:20:39] We always mean, yeah, I was there two good couple of years. Yeah, my twenties were definitely spent in that state where I was like, I would rather just learn it myself because I want all the credit. Well, it wasn’t even about the credit. What it was is that I the act of asking for help or asking questions and putting myself into that student position. It was like being vulnerable. Yeah, and it played against my ego is the short, long, and short of it. Like, it’s when you unpack it and you look at it for the stupid thing that it is. It’s like I wasted so much time just because I was too proud to, like, put myself.
Dan Krueger: [00:21:19] Back, yeah, yeah, for me, it was a hundred percent ego. I think it’s probably different for different people. For me, it was all about just like, I want to be able to say that I did this by myself. No one helped. No one showed me how I was self-taught. I had this fixation on being self-taught.
Anthony Vicino: [00:21:35] Yeah, yeah. I don’t know. I get it. I get it.
Dan Krueger: [00:21:37] There’s doesn’t even matter,
Anthony Vicino: [00:21:38] You know, when I think about the ego. Like, for me, actually, a lot of it was like this embarrassment or shame, almost of like having to ask for help or having to ask somebody else. Like, I should be able to figure this out on my own. Like, it’s not even that I wanted to be the one that did figure it out on my own. It’s like I should be able to figure this out. And that was the limiting factor, actually. So go find mentors like make that a habit. Number four, give more than you take the most important investment metric. It cannot be tracked on a spreadsheet. It is the return on karma. Mm-hmm. Dan, when you think about that?
Dan Krueger: [00:22:10] I concur. I agree with all these things are surprising. But I mean, this one aligns with so many things on a personal level and a corporate level for me. I mean, one of our core values is we lead with value, and that is just been a big part of my life for a long time. Even before Invictus, I found that when I was actually doing the side hustle, the fitness industry, I kind of came across Gary Vee and did a lot of reading that stuff that he put out and just really embraced his whole like, give it all away for free mentality and like, it’ll come back at some point. Right? It made a lot of sense, and I put it into practice and it worked. You just go around trying to help everybody as much as possible, and the rest kind of worked itself out. I mean, it’s not necessarily that simple. Every business has got its own marketing strategy and this will be implemented in different ways. But at the end of the day, if your main goal is to help people versus just make money, the likelihood of you being successful is so much greater. Yeah, because like, how are you like? How does the universe not pay you back if, like you provide a ton of value like it’s got to reconcile at some point? Yeah. If you can just like build up a balance due from
Anthony Vicino: [00:23:22] I think it was like Zig Ziglar, who says you can have anything you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want and like this, think about this for a second. If you could help somebody make a billion dollars, a billion. Like, just don’t out a crazy wild number there. But if you could do it, there’s like zero chance that doesn’t reciprocate. Whether they’re like, I should probably pay it forward to you or the skills that you’ve acquired in doing so and just giving it away has made you so much more potent than you can go do it for yourself.
Dan Krueger: [00:23:51] And my philosophy was like a worst-case scenario. I at least get compensated with the satisfaction of knowing I helped somebody achieve something, right? That’s kind of like my worst-case scenario. My downside is like I might not get paid back monetarily. However, at least I’ll feel good about myself, which I could be super broke and feel really good about helping people and be super happy. So that was a pretty good downside. And you know, you can probably back this up with your knowledge of human psychology, but humans are basically kind of hardwired to pay it back, right? Not everybody. I mean, there’s some debate out there. But generally speaking, if you help enough people, they’re going to feel obligated to provide you some sort of value in return.
Anthony Vicino: [00:24:31] All right. We had some technical difficulties and had to. We lost, we lost habit number five. Twice now. So this is our third run at trying to give you habit number five for the people at home. They’re like, you have no idea what’s happening because we’ve seamlessly edited
Dan Krueger: [00:24:47] The Hollywood magic,
Anthony Vicino: [00:24:48] But just know this is the third time we are diving into habit number five, which is network every single day. Your network is your net worth. It’s cliche, but it’s true, and I encourage people to substitute the word relationships for the word network, and suddenly the whole dynamic changes. It’s not about going and ninja starring your business card at people or friending everybody on Facebook. It’s about going deep and creating relationships that last and that matter, and so that when you need somebody, when you need help. People actually respond.
Dan Krueger: [00:25:21] Yeah, I know so many people that just prioritize adding as many people as they can on social networks and they go to an event and they just try to meet every single person. Mm-hmm. Which sounds kind of good, I guess, if you don’t really know a whole lot about how business works. But at the end of the day, that piece that you mentioned there is so important is like, can you actually pick up the phone and call some of these people that are in your network, quote-unquote, and ask for something, right? Can you actually call them and say, Hey, I need help with this problem? Who do you know? Can I talk to this person? Can you hook me up with that? Can you help me with this thing? Like if you can make that phone call like that’s that’s a strong gesture. So it’s not about having as many contacts as possible. Obviously, you do want multiple good connections, but it’s really about the quality of those relationships, not the quantity of the people in your Rolodex.
Anthony Vicino: [00:26:12] So when with this habit of networking every single day, it’s not necessarily about just going out and meeting new people. It means reinvesting back into the relationships you already have and going back and saying, Who haven’t I talked to in a while, who needs to hear from me? Who do I who? Who have I let slip through the cracks? So and you’ve got plenty of people, I’m sure.
Dan Krueger: [00:26:31] Yeah, it’s pretty simple, right? Just kind of try to learn about the people around you. That’s my approach is not to say I’m always kind of struggling to try to figure out how I can provide value to people. But I’ve found if I just sit there and I ask them enough about themselves and really try to learn about who they are and what they’re trying to accomplish, the ways I can add value to them become very clear. And so I just make a habit of asking tons of questions. I try to not do it in a rapid-fire. Make it awkward.
Anthony Vicino: [00:26:57] Yeah, like.
Dan Krueger: [00:26:58] So I tend to do that a little bit because I’m very typing into the point, but it’s coming from a place of curiosity and it’s always served me because then I don’t have to think about what to talk about. I just listen to other people
Anthony Vicino: [00:27:10] So that I hope, I hope we finally made it through habit number five so that now we can get to habit number six, which is a fun one because I think this one is probably of all the habits that we’ve talked about so far. You’ve probably heard these and thinking, OK, that’s pretty straightforward. That’s not surprising. I’ve heard about reading and I’ve heard about networking. And so habit number six is to keep a decision. Journal judgment is a superpower, hone it with intention, and most people have never heard of a decision journal. Now, whether or not you actually keep a decision journal in the formalized way that I do it, it doesn’t matter really what this is getting at is saying. Humans are bad at making decisions in general, and because we look at things with hindsight bias, we don’t actually improve our decision-making capacity. A lot of times we look back and say when we have a big pivotal decision, we look at it in the future with hindsight and say, I made that decision for these reasons, but you’re making that with the benefit of knowing that you couldn’t have possibly had at the time. And so we’re really bad at objectively marking what were the reasons and the rationale and the emotions we were feeling at the time of a decision. And so we give ourselves the benefit of the doubt. Now the problem with that is that’s no way to improve our decision-making capacity. And really, our ability is to make a decision like a good decision as you’re moving up in life and business or in your relationships it is one of the most defining skill sets that you can have is good judgment. Mm-hmm.
Dan Krueger: [00:28:43] Yeah, especially as you kind of climb the ranks in the professional space, whether you’re a business owner or whether you’re just a powerful member of a larger team, you know, useful member. Yeah. You know, with a good title, right? Someone who can basically, I’m trying to say, you’ve got some regional director. Yeah, system to the right.
Anthony Vicino: [00:29:04] There you go.
Dan Krueger: [00:29:05] Yeah, you’ve got some power there, right? If if you’re up at that kind of echelon, they’re like your decisions, move things. They have big impacts. And so you’ve got to make sure that you know, you’re wielding that, that that power well. But I think that you know, the process of journaling, we’ve talked about this a little bit recently on recent episodes where we just kind of dive into like the mental framework and like why we do things the way we do and I’m always been. I’ve always been a big proponent of, you know, being process-driven, not results-driven. Yes, that’s really the biggest thing is because you can get great results from doing something that was horribly wrong. It could just work out for you and you can do something absolutely perfect and have bad results, right? And so it’s not really important to track results. Really, all you can do is focus on what you can control, which is your process. And in this case, we’re talking about decisions like if you have a good framework for making quality decisions, then no matter what, give it enough occurrences. Things will play out well for you because that assumes that you’ve got some sort of edge, some sort of process that’s been honed and given enough occurrences, those statistical outliers where things don’t work out, where they should, those get washed out. So if you can fine-tune you. Process of decision making, then you don’t have to worry about whether you’re right or wrong, right? All you have to do is follow the process, check the boxes, and it’s really interesting to be able to unpack that through the journal the way you mentioned because most people will look back in hindsight and say, Oh, I did X, Y, and Z. Because, yeah, you’ve got the benefit of knowing how things played out. You’re cheating. But yeah, but you don’t really. Most most people don’t try to unpack what they were thinking at the moment.
Anthony Vicino: [00:30:47] Yeah, we have. We have a recency bias.
Dan Krueger: [00:30:49] Exactly right. Exactly. So if you do the process of logging these things and I do it a little differently, I don’t have a decision journal necessarily, but I do log things in a journal throughout the day with respect to investing and where there’s money and emotion involved so that I’m in real-time writing down what’s going on in my brain so that when I look back and I try to review my decisions, I don’t look at the results. I look at the process that I was going through in my brain and make sure that that makes sense and make sure that the logic was there and there wasn’t some sort of emotional flaw in what I was doing. And if there was, I address it, and if there wasn’t and I had bad results, but I did all the right things. Then I go to bed feeling good about myself because my one job was to follow the process, not to get the result.
Anthony Vicino: [00:31:30] Exactly if you’re hearing this and you’re like the idea of having a system for making decisions is new to you. Well, that’s where you start. It’s not about the decision journal. That’s really just a tool for the framework, which is what’s your system for making a decision? And most I would say ninety-nine percent of the population does not have a formalized systematic way of working through big, life-altering, or even small daily decisions and just having that skill and that ability, like ingrained in your day to day process, you’re going to level up and become so much more potent and so much more capable through that one skill set.
Dan Krueger: [00:32:06] And it makes life so much easier because these frameworks are so simple they could be four bullet points, right? There are four things that matter in any major decision, and I’ve got to check these four boxes. It could be just, you know, aligning with your core values or something as simple as that. If you can ask yourself four simple questions and have it set so that, OK, does this align with my, my vision of my company? It’s either yes or no. Do I check it or not? And you could say a really good quality decision is where I check all four boxes. If I only check three, you know, that’s not. That’s not the best, but that’s still doable. And if it’s two or less, then that doesn’t fit and we move on, right? 50 percent. It makes things so much simpler because you’re not worrying about how you feel. You just look at whether it’s a binary thing. Did I check the box or not and move on?
Anthony Vicino: [00:32:49] If you want some help on creating a decision journal or a formalized system, I actually have a template for the decision journal that I use and I. I recorded a video while back diving into how I particularly use it. So shoot me an email at Anthony at Invictus Multifamily, and I’ll hook you up with that. If you’re curious to learn more about how you can formalize your system for making decisions, I think it’s hard to overstate just how powerful that skill set is because at the end of the day, your judgment as you move up through the echelon, as we were saying before, you’re not paid for your ability to execute mundane tasks. You’re executed, you’re not executed, you’re paid, you might be executed. You’re compensated for your ability to make good decisions. And if you don’t have a process for evaluating your decision-making process, then you’re no better than anybody else. Yeah, I think
Dan Krueger: [00:33:40] I saw a Bezos interview make some comments that were somewhere along the lines of like his job is to make really good decisions, and he was kind of talk about like why it’s important for him to sleep and, you know, kind of focus on those really basic things like he works out, he sleeps, he reads, and all for the purpose of, you know, him and his role at Amazon right now is effective to make like three good decisions a day, I think. But that takes so much mental capital and so much focus and so much energy that he’s only worried about making those three good decisions. And then he can go to bed for the day. So he’s not worried about trying to stay busy all day with a bunch of tasks. He’s identified the thing that matters, and it’s like there are probably three big decisions I need to make for this company today. If I could make those, well, follow my framework that I can go to bed and check today off as a success and then do it again tomorrow.
Anthony Vicino: [00:34:27] All right. So that’s habit number six. Keep a decision journal or just create a decision-making matrix or framework a system. A process habit number seven is so simple, so straightforward, and you guys are probably heard of this before practice. Daily gratitude is linked with a 30 percent increase in productivity. Also, it feels good. What more do you need?
Dan Krueger: [00:34:51] Yeah, that’s the main thing right there. I had the benefit of ending up with my wife, Liz, who has been she’s so much so opposite in me than me and like all the right ways, and that’s something that she really kind of opened my eyes to because I’m the type of person who always focuses on the problems in life that need to be solved. And I’m a problem solver. And so I find these problems and I, I focus on them and I solve them, and I feel good about that. It’s like I solved a puzzle and I get satisfaction. Not that, but there’s something that there’s a downside of that, right, because you’re focusing on effectively negative things and that’s going to put you in a somewhat negative mindset. And with the gratitude thing does, if you actually proactively incorporate that into your day, it keeps you in a more positive mindset. And if you’re in a more positive mindset, you’re going to be happier, you’re going to be more motivated, you’re going to be more inclined to get up and get things done and hence the 30 percent increase in productivity. It’s like because you feel good about yourself and you just do better. When you feel good, you’re happy.
Anthony Vicino: [00:35:49] Yeah, whether you’re using this as a productivity hack, which honestly. Cool productivity is great. At the end of the day, though, gratitude feels good. And here’s the really interesting thing I was talking about this with somebody the other day is that the reason we always hear about bad news on the news and newspapers and everybody’s always talking about it on social media is like all the things that are going wrong. All the terrible things are because net, the amount of good news, the number of good things that are happening in this world at any given instant so far outweigh the negatives that it’s not even newsworthy, right? Like when you stop to think about all the things that have to be happening right now for you to be experiencing my voice in your ears like, Oh, you have air to breathe, oh, the sun rose. Oh, you’re still alive. You were born a human and not a tree. Oh, you have enough money to buy a cell phone or to have some audio equipment that you can listen to this. Oh, we have. We’re born in the age of the internet and we have soap. And how cool is that? Like, those things aren’t noteworthy because they’re just so abundant. And so if you can just as investors, as entrepreneurs, as just humans, we spend a lot of time trying to put out fires and we lose sight of just how many good things there are. And if you let the fires dominate your view, then you lose sight of just how remarkable the whole thing really is. So that’s really what gratitude is about is just taking a little bit of time to enjoy this really cool opportunity that we have to exist.
Dan Krueger: [00:37:16] Yeah. And you don’t have to walk around all day just like, Oh, the sun’s out today. What wonderful. You don’t have to be like. That’s annoying. Nobody likes that. Yeah. Well, what Liz did for me was the end of every day when we go to bed at night. She would always just ask me, what was the best part of your day? Just really quick spending like 30 seconds thinking about all the good stuff of the day and then just going to bed like those little 30. Those 30 seconds at the end of the day had a tremendous impact because you know what? I put my head down initially. I’m thinking about the things I’m going to do in the morning, which are going to be the things I’m going to work on and try to solve. But then she asked me that question. I think about all the good stuff and I just get relaxed and I go to bed and it’s just it’s a really good way to tie up the day, a relaxed day, and is a good dad. So it’s a really good practice. So it’s good to have that be a part of your day, even if it’s 30 seconds a minute.
Anthony Vicino: [00:38:01] All right. So habit number eight has made me a millionaire. This is the last one that we’re going to talk about today, and this is a very tactical one. It’s ditching the to-do list. To do this, I believe, is a complete waste of time. Truly, I don’t think that they have really any benefit. So you have to learn. For me, at least, what’s been effective is learning how to time block and taking control of my schedule. And so if you’re not familiar with time blocking, we keep it on the to-do list. But instead of just keeping the to-do list, we schedule all the tasks onto the calendar and we say I’m going to do emails at eight a.m. until eight 15 and then from eight 15 to eight 30. I’m going to have this phone call with such and such, and then I’m going to work on this thing like actually taking the to-do’s and rank, ordering them with prioritization skills to then say, When am I going to do this? And then putting it on the calendar so it gets done. And what’s really interesting is that the to-do list just keeps growing exponentially.
Anthony Vicino: [00:38:57] There are always more to-dos, but they’re not all very important. And what ends up happening is that to-do lists just kind of grows into this really big monster that just keeps stretching from day to day today. And you have things on there that you’re never going to tackle. You don’t need to tackle them. And if you need it to tackle them, you probably would have done it by now. And what you get to do then is see of these things that are important. When can I schedule them? What’s important enough to actually put on the calendar? And then you start to come to this term of like, OK, this is the most important things that I should be doing with my time. And by taking that with intentionality and creating the schedule at the beginning of the day or the beginning of the week or however you want to do it, you’re not just victim to the world’s whims and other people intruding on your calendar, which if you give people the opportunity, they’re all going to intrude on your calendar.
Dan Krueger: [00:39:47] Yeah, that was the biggest game-changer for me when I started to incorporate this practice because I was, you know, an avid user of the to-do list. And I would love to kind of take this all my things and categorize them and rank them and say, This is the order. I’m going to do this and these are the priorities. But what I found myself doing is like people would call and email me and, you know, ask like, Hey, do you have time to do X, Y or Z? And I’d look at my calendar and I’d see the meetings that I have on there. I’d see my appointments and I’d see these things I had scheduled with other people or other entities. But my to-do list was off to the side. And so I’d look at my calendar and I’d see the. Gaps like, yeah, have the capacity to do that, I can help you out with that. But in reality, it didn’t have the capacity. If I actually took my to-do list, put it on the calendar, all of a sudden my days full, I might only have three or four meetings, but in between those mediums, I’m going to be doing other things that need to be getting done. And so this was a hugely powerful resource for me to just really get more intentional about guarding my time because that’s like one of your most precious resources. You don’t get more time ever. You’ve got a very limited amount of time to utilize towards the things that really matter. And so you’ve got to be, you know, a bit of a Nazi with your time and guard it, especially if you’re an entrepreneur growing a business and it’s going well, people are going to want to ask you for things all the time. And if you’re like us, you just want to always help people. You’re inclined to just say yes, yes, yes, yes. But you can’t do that without holding yourself and your whole company back.
Anthony Vicino: [00:41:06] What’s really interesting about that is when you looked at your calendar and you don’t have it scheduled out and you see these empty time blocks, you’re like, Oh yeah, I could do that thing because you don’t have anything to compare it against of what you should be doing, but when you time lock it. What’s interesting is like if somebody comes up to me at 11 15 and I have something already blocked in at that time and they’re like, Hey, can you help me with this thing? Well, now I look at my calendar and I compare that task versus the task. They’re asking me and at that moment, I have to prioritize and say which is more important. And just by doing that and like breaking the pattern, interrupt for just a moment to like. To do that comparison, I can say, OK, that thing actually is more important. I will help you with that because I couldn’t have known that was going to come up on my calendar today, but that’s actually a pretty good thing to put there instead. Or I go, You know what? I put this on my calendar for a reason. It needs to get done. So this other thing is important and I would like to help with it, but I can’t help with it right now. So let’s put this into the next time block and just that one exercise you’re going to oh man, the amount of improvement that you’re going to find in your productivity and effectiveness throughout the day, it’s just going to skyrocket.
Dan Krueger: [00:42:13] Yeah, that was to me today, actually. You shot me a message this morning and said, Hey, we need to record some content because we’ve got episodes that need to go out this upcoming week. And I had some stuff on my calendar because I’m doing this now. And you showed me the message. I looked at it and I thought about it and I was like, This is a higher priority than some of these other things. I have some time very early tomorrow morning and I can do these other things, and no one will notice as long as they’re done by Monday. We’re good. This has to get done. So shove some stuff for the very early Sunday morning and here we are. Getting things done
Anthony Vicino: [00:42:44] Is the same thing for me. I had something in the same time block I looked at and I said, OK, this other thing, the recording more important, I can move this. But if I looked at it and it was like, I have doctors appointments like, I can’t move
Dan Krueger: [00:42:55] That my daughter’s birthday, I would have been like, You know what? I’m actually a little busy today. Yeah, but
Anthony Vicino: [00:43:02] So time blocking, like, do some research figured out how to implement it into your schedule? It’s so powerful, but it’s
Dan Krueger: [00:43:08] Really satisfying to kind of fit everything in there and just map out by the minute. Basically, it feels exactly what your day is going to be. It’s like, you know, there are no decisions to make anymore. It’s like, OK, here’s my day, I just do this. I don’t have to like, think about things, or prioritize them like, that works.
Anthony Vicino: [00:43:22] Oh, my god. That’s the other thing about this is when you have it scheduled out, you know exactly what you should be doing from minute to minute. There is no sitting there and then having to look at your to-do list and do the mental gymnastics of like which what should I do next? Because that’s a waste of time and energy and willpower and decision-making capacity. If I just know, oh, that’s the next thing I’m supposed to be doing, I just start tackling it without any intermediate like break and I can get more done and I can be more focused. So, God, there’s just so much there.
Dan Krueger: [00:43:52] Yeah, decision fatigue is like a whole. It’s a real topic. We don’t need to go down that rabbit hole completely. But when I was in the coaching space, I used to use this example a lot to kind of illustrate this concept with food because people have this issue with food. If they plan their food out ahead of time and they don’t have to decide throughout the day while they’re hungry what to eat, they tend to make better decisions because they plan their food up before they’re actually hungry. And they make good decisions, right? And so I kind of look at like your decision is almost like the life bar on like a video game like you’re playing like a first-person shooter and you got your life bar and then someone shoots you goes down a little bit. That’s kind of like your decision energy for the day or how much gasoline you’ve got in your decision tank, right? The more decisions you make, the more that that takes down. And you start to make poor and poor quality decisions, the more decisions you have to make. And so you want to try to get as much of that done beforehand as possible so that you can save that, that juice for those things that really matter, not whether this thing should be done before that thing. Like you do that like the night
Anthony Vicino: [00:44:46] Before, when you’re already tired, your decision-making is already compromised. Do it when you’re tired, right?
Dan Krueger: [00:44:51] I mean, it’s you’re deciding what to do with tomorrow’s time, which you can do much more objectively in the moment you’re deciding. Do I want to do this thing right now? It’s like, Oh, that sounds like a pain.
Anthony Vicino: [00:44:59] It’s like creating a grocery list before you go to the grocery store, if you go to the grocery store and then just try to make the list as you go,
Dan Krueger: [00:45:06] You’re going to end
Anthony Vicino: [00:45:07] Up with a lot of treats us. So that is the horse it has been beaten to death. These are the eight habits that I mean if you implement into your life, they’re going to make massive. There’s a team of habits, honestly, we love habits, but just from the top these are read exercise, find mentors, give more than you take. Keep a decision journal practice daily gratitude and start time blocking. I’m into it. There you go. So let’s do our book recommendation and then mosey on out of here. What do you get? I got a good one. A good one. I got a good one. I don’t like it good. I don’t like good books.
Dan Krueger: [00:45:44] I got a good one because I feel like it’s like apropos but not OK. Creative Cash. Bill Ham or boy, I was late to the party with the song I read. This came out a while ago and I read it a decent amount of time after it came out. I really liked it, and the reason I’m recommending it now is that it’s not super applicable now. This is the type of info for those of you who don’t know. The book is about creative financing in real estate, and so this would be more so for the active guys out there who are actually going to sellers and trying to find properties to buy. Not necessarily for passive investors, but if that’s you, this is a good thing to have on your radar now because we’re in a good market and a lot of the stuff he’s talking about in this book is going to be super applicable in a really good market. It’s going to be more applicable in a time where there’s some sort of turmoil. Maybe the interest rates are going up the standard. The regular debt market isn’t quite as great and you’ve got to get a little bit more creative. Having this stuff on your radar before that part of the market cycle happens is, I think, important. So that’s why I’m recommending this book now. So you can get those ideas in your head, start to noodle on them and be ready. So then the next few years, when things change a little bit, you can put those tools to use.
Anthony Vicino: [00:46:55] Yeah, that’s a really good book bill. Ham’s a
Dan Krueger: [00:46:56] Genius. He knows the stuff.
Anthony Vicino: [00:46:58] He knows it. Stuff. Well, actually, Bill’s not a genius. Bill’s just been in the game for so long. He’s got so many skills,
Dan Krueger: [00:47:04] Been around the block. I need sharp.
Anthony Vicino: [00:47:06] Check out that book if you’re an active investor looking to add more arrows to your quiver. It is creative. A cash buys the one, the only Bill Ham and that’s going to do it for us, guys. Thanks for joining us. We appreciate you taking a little bit of time out of your day just to come to hang out with us. Let us into your ears for a little bit now before you go, you know what’s coming? We always ask for a review, but guys, seriously, it’s so important because it helps us spread the word. And what we’re trying to do is spread financial literacy, trying to spread the good gospel of multifamily investing so that more people can get involved in this asset and they can become millionaires or, you know, just be able to take back control of their life. So if you get a second, please go over to iTunes and just drop a review and help us helps us a lot with the algorithm and it makes us feel really good. Lets us know that you guys care. Or maybe you don’t. Yeah, that’s fine. That’s fine, too. All right. That’s going to do it for us, guys. We’ll see you next week.
