Play like there’s no tomorrow
From football to dancing to real estate tycoon – Emmitt Smith does it all - and does it very well.
My daughter Hailey, 4 years old, is obsessed with Dancing With The Stars, the hit ballroom dancing show on FOX where Emmitt Smith won the last season. Emmitt if you don’t know is the former Dallas Cowboys / Arizona Cardinals NFL superstar where for years he ran the ball in a stellar career.
Well Emmitt, according the latest issue of the Fortune magazine, got the real estate investing bug even when he was playing in NFL and now he has gone from doing real estate investing in residential homes to some truly big things in commercial real estate and development.
The article is extremely good and there are 3 BIG Emmitt size, life changing lessons for everybody and anybody who wants to buy and sell bank foreclosures in Michigan.
Here they are:
1. Emmitt Smith made a plan even when he was playing with Dallas Cowboys to get involved in real estate. He knew no matter how exciting the journey – one day it had to end and he did not wanted to wonder “What I am going to do now?” once his career in professional football was over. So he started learning about real estate investing way even when his football buddies were planning to blow their paychecks buying yet another expensive mansion.
What is the lesson here? If you live in Michigan and work in the automotive or information technology related job than I don’t have to tell you that tomorrow is uncertain for these industries.
What you do and how well you do in your job is no longer a guarantee that your job is going to be around in 2008. And if you doubt that well just go to Google and type in “Pfizer layoffs in Ann Arbor and Kalamazoo” and read the writing on the wall.
The Fortune 500 companies of the world – who were once known for job security are laying off people like this is a game of who gets to chop most heads and they have to win the tournament.
After laying off thousands of people, Wall Street is still not happy with Ford or Chrysler – they want more cuts and typically what Wall Street wants; Wall Street gets from corporate executives in any Fortune 500 company.
If you know that your job could be on the chopping block– then the time to learn new skills, get the knowledge to buy and sell bank foreclosures, build the Million Dollar Rolodex in Michigan real estate, start that business that you always wanted to do is NOW not once they have fired you.
If Emmitt Smith can juggle a high pressure NFL career, family obligations, travel that comes with being a NFL superstar and still learn about real estate – well so can anybody in Michigan. Excuses on how it could be done are easily made. Decisions to ignore these excuses and get things done are always in short supply.
2. Emmitt Smith asked Jerry Jones, the billionaire owner of Dallas Cowboys who made his fortune in real estate to let him “sit in his office and soak in what he was doing.”
Fortune says:“Smith was pondering the endgame of his career while other young players were still discussing their next extravagant purchase. Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, who made his own fortune (estimated to be about $1 billion, give or take) in real estate, recalls
Smith approaching him early during the player's career with a unique request: Could he observe Jones "doing business" in order to see how a successful entrepreneur conducted himself?
"During breaks in practice he'd sit on a couch in my office and just watch me talk on the phone," Jones recalls. "He was soaking it all up and figuring out ways he could put what he heard to work." “
Can you even imagine how uncomfortable it would been for Emmitt initially to leave his comfort zone of being the star in the football field to sit in the corner of Jerry Jones office and just watch him do talk on the phone – half of the time having no idea what was going on?
What are the lessons here? One is that nobody is going bring you the knowledge you need to be successful to your home. You got to go out, find people who can teach what you want to do, ask for help, pay for it one way or another and then if you are lucky enough to get a mentor then try to get as much knowledge you can get, as fast as you can, from them.
A good mentor will shave off years of making mistakes from your life, can save you hundreds of thousands in dollars by stopping you from making expensive mistakes; can show you the shortcuts that took them years to find out and perfect.
Next lesson is this – the fastest easiest way to learn a foreign language is to go and actually live in that country. Your mind, once immersed in the local environment, will literally reformat the hard drive in your head and start taping the new language in your head. What will take you 10 years in a college could be done in literally months this way. You got to “immerse” yourself in what you want to do in your real estate business.
I am a big believer in the power of mastermind – you got to surround yourself with people who want to do deals, build a business, be somewhere in life in Michigan. We all have dozens of people in our lives who will tell us in an extremely convincing tone of life why nothing in life is going to work out. To find and surround people who will tell you how to get what you want is much harder and extremely needed. Success just does not happen by itself.
After all it is always easier to criticize someone then to help someone. Being a movie critic is easy – making a good movie much much harder.
Learn the business and find people in Michigan who are like you, who want what you want out of business and life, who want to make more money on their own terms, who want to go from employees to being an employer.
3. And finally here is the BIGGEST LESSON from Emmitt Smith:
Smith recalls another encounter with Jerry Jones in which he wrote down a list of all the goals he wanted the owner to help him achieve. He handed the list to Jones and asked him to check the ones he thought were doable. "He looked at the list and checked every one," Smith recalls. "He said, 'We'll get to some of these now, and some of these later, but we'll get to all of them.' I'll always appreciate that."
To get $2,000,000 in cash financing – you have to get that first $50,000; to get a network of REO realtors flooding your email Inbox with REO listings – you have to get one to do business with you; to learn how to sell houses no matter what the selling marketing in Michigan is – you got to sell one house. To learn how to package and sent out 10 short sale packages - you have to do one short sale first. To build a list of 500 other real estate investors in Michigan to whom you can wholesale flip houses to - you have to get 1to begin your list.
But you have to start somewhere. So many people just give up so early in the game that it almost seems like that they are relived that success did not come their way.
There are lots of things that can and will happen overnight in your Michigan real estate investing business if you take some action. There are lots of things that you will plant a seed today and then see the benefits some months down the road.
Planting always precedes harvest.
Got to do it. Got to do it now. Two years are going to go by anyway. 2007 will end. 2008 and then 2009 is going to come one day anyway whether you like it not. The world and the ones who make money and get what they want out of their business will go on with their business and doing deals - whether you join them or not.
Nothing in life – nothing in business – is unachievable if you want it bad enough.
I saw this really cool ad for Gatorade in this week Sports Illustrated Magazine – they have Peyton Manning of the Colts, raising his fist up in the air after the end of the Super Bowl – this is what the headline on top of Peyton said:
