Scheming is totally underrated.
It gets a bad wrap.
Just the thought of "scheming" stirs up images of Walter White in Breaking Bad brewing up huge batches of blue meth. That's him up top.
But scheming is good.
In fact, we'd go as far as to say it's necessary.
Behind a lot of top level mastermind meetings we attend there's countless top notch professionals in all fields: law, dentistry, chiro, finance, real estate, auto, marketing, design ... all scheming.
We've observed that the very highest performing people we've met in any category of business or life take time away from their offices and their work to hide away and scheme.
They lay out carefully thought out plans ... usually for the next 12 months.
And then they attack the plan.
Here's one of the moments in time where we went into our own scheming mode:
We had been reading all sorts of books about real estate investing. Literally for years we read almost anything we could find from all sorts of authors.
I remember taking a week off of work - using a week of vacation time to stay home and lay out a plan on how to create a real estate investing business.
It would involve finding motivated sellers. I would buy their homes and "flip" them for profits.
I put up a website, bought 100 bag signs that I began plastering all over the exit ramps of Highway 401, 403 and QEW.
I bought a pager.
Yes, that's how old we are, we bought pre-paid pagers - they still existed back then.
And every time someone called our bag signs that said something like "We buy homes fast" my little pager would go off at work.
Then on my lunch break I would call these people back.
Nick and I met some of the craziest people ever that way.
At one point we met someone who owned a large apartment building off of Lakeshore Road that he was renting out by the room!
He had this 12 storey building and it was full of 2-bedroom and 3-bedroom apartments that he was somehow renting out by the room.
And he wanted to sell it fast to buy something else.
We met someone else who was renovating three townhomes in Mississauga, Ontario and he had the creepiest looking trades people ever working on them.
I mean these trades belonged in a horror movie, we're serious.
Looking back I think they all must have had serious drug habits and they were working during the day to support their zombie drug walks at night.
It was insane.
After a few months of this we learned a lot but realized that either we didn't have the experience to capitalize on what was coming up or it wasn't a good strategy.
We kept looking for another angle.
Then we decided to get our real estate licenses.
We had figured that we were going to be in the real estate business for a long time in one way, shape or form - we already owned rental properties at that point and had both flipped properties - so why not get our licenses so we could sell our own properties and access the Realtor databases ourselves.
At about that time I really began to hate my job so I took several days off to plan out a "real estate career" for myself.
We're talking "regular" real estate here.
On the side I then began acting as a "regular" real estate agent for friends and family.
And I HATED it.
At that point both Nick and myself realized we liked investing in real estate but we didn't care to deal with the process of buying and listing people's homes.
We both continued at our jobs for several more months and I would wake up every morning at 5am to write a little bit, meditate a little bit and just think ... and scheme.
And I vividly recall thinking...
"If there was only a way to combine my real estate license with our love of real estate investing - that would be amazing!"
Each morning I would draw out sample business plans.
And during the day I would magically begin noticing anything that could help me develop such a business.
My conscious and unconscious radar were working in hyper drive for me.
Then one day I was casually reading a magazine that referred to a broker in Ohio who had created a brokerage in Ohio that was working soley with investors.
It was literally one sentence in this article. I immediately hit Google and found him.
Within a week Nick and I took a few more days off work to go visit this guy.
And then we schemed.
We planned how we might implement something like that right here in the GTA.
And the rest is history!
We've been helping people invest in real estate since 2006 and Rock Star Real Estate was born shortly afterwards.
Why are we sharing this?
Because time is precious.
It's our most valuable asset.
If you're not investing in time to plan and scheme for yourself then you may wake up ten years from now with a lot of regrets and we don't want that for you.
Take a day off, two days off ... plan out your life.
Draw out a blueprint for how you want your life to be.
It's funny that these plans don't always work out as expected but they seem to build on each other.
As our real estate career has for us.
We still take time to scheme.
In fact, Nick and I met yesterday morning at a local coffee shop to get away from our routines and do a little serious scheming.
And out of that meeting we have some new plans for 2015 that we're PUMPED about.
So if you're not scheming in your life please find an excuse to start!
Just don't spend your time scheming to make meth, like Walter White (if you haven't watched the TV series Breaking Bad yet then got on that too ... its amazing!)
Until next time ... Your Life! Your Terms!