Striving to create a better life for everyone by sustainably solving real estate problems

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Tag Archives: Mindset

I’m Making Them Birds

Lee wearing a Bob Ross T-shirt

While you can’t just paint over all your mistakes or confusion, you can choose how you let them affect your mindset.

Starting with Why: Every day in business, you encounter things that annoy, frustrate, or confuse you. I wanted to talk about how I’ve chosen to accept some of the things I cannot change.

One of the more frustrating points about running a business is that you can either know what it’s really worth or keep accurate books for taxes. And never the twain shall meet.

Businesses are punished on their balance sheets for being good negotiators. At the same time, they are required to take totally fallacious “expenses” while being forbidden from taking real ones. Here’s a few examples:

  • Cost basis
  • Depreciation
  • Capitalized expenses

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We Need a New Elevator Speech

A cute white puppy.

I don’t care what you do unless you first convince me why I should—quickly. Are there treats involved? Remember, I’m a puppy and I have a short attention span.

Here’s another example of why we need to Start with Why.

At Rotary this week, we spent a lot of time talking about how we don’t do a very good job of explaining why anyone would want to be a Rotary member. If members even know why, they tend to focus on some of the things that Rotary International does, not why it does them. That doesn’t necessarily encourage folks to visit or join.

Our district governor said we need a new elevator speech. An elevator speech is a short description of your organization, short enough you can deliver it between floors in an elevator. What he suggested was something like this:

Rotary is 1.2 million people working together to make the world a better place to live.

See why I like Rotary? #mindset

When you push the button, are you ready with YOUR elevator speech?

I realized Hermit Haus also needs a better elevator speech. Like too many businesses, we focus on what we do, trying to cram as much as possible into a few words. But if we focus on why we do what we do, we don’t need so many words, and we make a more effective argument. Here’s what I came up with, just before the DG gave his suggested Rotary elevator speech.

We strive to make a better life for everyone by sustainably solving real estate problems.

Let us know what you think about ours, and share yours if you have one!

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Book Report: Chip Gaines and Choosing to See the Good

OK, so I’m reading the new book by Chip Gaines, called Capital Gaines. That’s right. I’m reading a book by the man who made Waco ridiculously famous. I have reasons (which I will share below).

I like this book more than I thought I would. You might, too.

He spent much of his younger days flipping houses, and during that time, he managed to put together a great team of guys that he kept for years (some still work with him). He even tried to go to Mexico to learn Spanish by immersion so he could communicate better with them, because they shared work ethics and were fun. However, he also ran into some folks in his career that disappointed him, didn’t follow through, etc. He even told a story about some young workers from the less fortunate side of town who were great until one day they just walked out with all the cash in the store.

It’s how Chip reacted to these experiences with people that gave me an aha moment. He’s far more advanced in dealing with disappointments in workers, contractors, and customers than I have been. He talked a lot in the book about how he makes a conscious choice to focus on the good in other people. He chooses to assume that people are going to be ethical and treat him as he treats them. And when the inevitable disappointment occurs, he doesn’t spend a lot of time blaming, name-calling, and seething about it. He acknowledges the issue, but then reminds himself that there are things going on in other people’s lives that he doesn’t know about.

Perhaps the young people who took the cash in the drawer at his store had an emergency come up, and felt the immediate need for money was more important than keeping their job. He said that he’d have given them the money, if they’d have asked, but that probably wasn’t even an option in their minds.

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What Do You See?

Closed Sonic Drive-In

What do you think of when you see something like this? If you’re first thought is, “I wonder how I can use this location to make money,” you may be an entrepreneur.

What do you see when you spot an abandoned building or a closed business?

The trick of being a successful entrepreneur, especially a commercial real estate investor, is to see opportunity where others see failure.

This fact was brought home to me by the recent closing of the Sonic Drive-In in the small town where I spend most of my time these days. This being a Small Town, the closure was a big deal and sent the small town grapevine into overtime. All kinds of reasons for the failure were floated until another business closed for failure to pay sales taxes to the state. (We know this because the state is auctioning off all their assets.)

But the one thing that nobody talked about in either case was: “What’s going to happen to the building?” Okay. Nobody talked about the loss of a handful of sub-minimum-wage jobs, either, and they certainly should have. Finding new jobs in a rural small town is no easy matter.

In kind of a combination of those two thoughts, my initial reaction on seeing the sign at the Sonic (I learned about the other closure much later) was, “I wonder what kind of business could go in that location.” You see, a drive-in is a very special-purpose building. There aren’t a lot of other options for using it. In fact, there are so few options and it is so costly to build that Sonic has a program to repurpose other commercial buildings as drive-ins.

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Do You Have the Mindset of Wealth or Poverty?

Book cover: Mindset by Carol Dweck

If you want more information on mindset and how to change it, I highly recommend this book, which focuses on obtaining a growth mindset.

I’ve been thinking a lot about mindset lately. Simply put, mindset is your basic attitude — the way you look at the world. Most of what I’ve been reading categorizes mindset into two dichotomous groups:

  • Abundance versus Scarcity
  • Growth versus Fixed

There’s a lot of overlap between these groups. Perhaps overlapping tendencies might be a better way to say it. For example, people with a fixed mindset are more likely to also show characteristics of people with a scarcity mindset. Check it out.

People with an abundance mindset look at ways to grow their income or the economy. When they want something, they don’t ask, “can I afford this?” They ask, “how can I afford this?” As Robert Kiyosaki suggests, if you want to new car, you don’t buy the car; you buy a rent house that makes the payments on the car. That way when the car is paid for, you have both.

People with the scarcity mindset tend to look at the economy and their income as being fixed objects. “You can’t have more unless I have less.” They don’t understand the difference between good and bad debt, between debt that makes you money and debt that costs you money. I ran into this a lot when I was president of my church. Instead of focusing on how to raise enough money to fund the program is the church held as its core values, most people focused on how much money the church already had or on pledges.

The growth/fixed mindset is probably more familiar to most people. The fixed mindset says you are what you are. You’re either smart or dumb, graceful or klutzy. And there’s no way to change. Failures define your limits.

The growth mindset takes every failure as an opportunity to grow. If you don’t understand a concept, learn everything you can about it until you do. If you lose money on a deal, figure out why and don’t do that again. If you suck at an activity, keep practicing until you reach your desired level of competence.

If you think of the two concepts as ends of a line, most people fall somewhere in the spectrum between. Finding someone who is completely in the abundance mindset is rare. Most people have an abundance mindset about some things and a scarcity mindset about others.

I also see mindset as correlating with what psychologists call “locus of control.” The fixed or scarcity mindsets remind me of people with an external locus of control: they believe their destiny is more or less predetermined or out of their control. People with an internal locus of control—people who believe they are masters of their destiny—behave more like people with a growth or abundance mindset.

But here’s the thing: you get to choose your mindset. It’s not usually easy. Like recovering from any adversity or addiction, changing your mindset is a daily activity fraught with setbacks. But in the end, it’s worth doing. Happiness and abundance abound.

Here at Hermit Haus, we work very hard at focusing on our opportunities for growth and for increasing our abundance. These are our core values. The cool thing about the abundance mindset is that we don’t believe we can only get more by taking away from someone else. We find a way that we all come out ahead. It’s not a win-lose scenario; it’s always win-win.

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