My life completely changed direction at 42 years old and it happened relatively quickly.  I discovered a new way of living, that was accompanied by a brand-new career, which conveniently supported this new way of living.  Making a career change at this age would be a risk not worth taking for most, especially when you have a family with two kids and a job that is secure and pays very well.  The journey down this path towards change started 3 years ago, but I was able to take this career move from conception to reality in only 18 months.  This may or may not seem like a quick transition to you, but when you’ve been doing the same thing for your entire adult life and know literally nothing about this new career idea or how you’re going to do it, this is quick in my opinion.  Taking 18 months to learn the basics, gain momentum, establish proof of concept, align with a team, and finally burn the boats takes obsessive focus and faith.

 

I always thought that I would be working as an employee until I was in my mid-60s and then retire with a nest egg that was hopefully large enough to get me through for another 3 decades, assuming life expectancy remains where it’s at.  I never questioned that path and was ok with it for most of my 21-year career because I didn’t know I had better options.  Through hard work and dedication, I had successfully attained a salary at 40 years old that was only a pipe dream when I was younger.  This income threshold was a number that I had in my head for a long time, that I thought would feel like true success once I arrived there.

 

Well, surprise!  It did not feel like I had imagined.  It was quite empty actually.  This empty, unfulfilled feeling killed my motivation for a bigger paycheck.  When the drive to simply make more money than the year before was gone, all I was left with was a job and the realization that I had very little freedom along with it.  That ambition for the bigger paycheck pushed me through 20 years of employment without question.  Now, I was questioning it all.

 

So, I began a quest for answers to what I should be doing with my life, for something more and without boundaries and rules.  I became obsessed with learning about success from highly successful people, about the brain, the human body, and the power of mindset.  The more I learned, the more humbled I was in the face of realizing how little I actually knew at this age.  There was a world of possibility out there that I didn’t even know existed.  There was a world of amazing human beings that were figuring things out and teaching others that I was completely blind to until I started looking.

 

Every time I learned about something new and felt the power of my increased awareness, my appetite for learning more increased.  I had absolutely no idea where this was leading me.  All I knew is that it felt really good to expose my mind to new ideas and new ways of thinking.  I tried implementing the things I was learning into my life to see how it would make me feel.  From perfecting my diet, fasting, and intensifying my workout regimen, to meditating, doing breathwork, and taking cold showers.  I was intrigued by the idea of optimizing my body.  More profound than all of that was my introduction into the world of personal development.  I knew that the next step was to learn about my mind and figure out how to optimize my mindset.  Constantly feeding my brain with the words and ideas of the greatest personal development teachers, I really started fully believing that there wasn’t anything that I couldn’t accomplish.

 

Then, at what felt like the right moment in my journey, the solution to my employment issue and the correct path for my future was revealed, as if it was being handed to me.  I took the day off from work and while sitting in the warmth of the spring sun, I watched an interview with a humble man named Manny Khoshbin, who immigrated from Iran with nothing when he was a teenager.  Through a process of envisioning his future, believing, and taking action, he was able to build insane wealth and freedom through real estate investing.  When I was done watching that interview, I knew in that moment that I needed to pursue this.  I immediately read his book and that evening I told a friend of mine that I was going to quit my job and become a real estate investor.

 

The more I researched the world of real estate investing, the more I realized that this aligned perfectly with who I was, who I wanted to be, my ambitions, and my desire for freedom.  I could have the freedom to make my own decisions and make my own schedule, while having no ceiling above me preventing me from reaching my full potential.  This idea of freedom from the rat race and becoming an entrepreneur immediately turned into a burning desire.  The feeling was so strong it was all I could think about.  I felt that I was being pulled by a force beyond me and I needed to make this happen as fast as humanly possible.

 

My original plan was to keep my great job and do this on the side for the next 10 years.  Then I could quit and live off my real estate cash flow and continue to invest and grow my portfolio.  A few months into my journey down this path, my patience grew thin and my desire grew stronger.  I knocked my timeline down to 5 years and wrote a plan on how I was going to do it.  In the end, it actually took me only 18 months.  The idea was formed in April of 2019.  The last day at my job was in October 2020.  The freedom I longed for is now a reality.  In looking back at the last year and half, I began analyzing my steps and how I got here.  What I discovered for myself is nothing new and not some secret sauce.  It comes down to learning and then implementing the principles and practices taught by the successful people that have lived it already.  Here are the steps that I took to make my dream a reality.

 

Step 1: Exposure

Start by accepting the fact that you know very little and become open to learning new things.  I know that’s tough for your ego but it’s necessary.  You may think you know a lot, but in reality, you don’t.  Actually, the human race as a whole knows very little.  We know a lot more than we did before and that’s why we think we are so smart, but we have just scratched the surface when it comes to our understanding of the universe and our existence.  On top of that, we are constantly proving ourselves wrong with new evidence and debunking old beliefs.  So, with that in mind, start exposing yourself to new people, new ideas, and new ways of thinking and throw your old beliefs out the window.  This will allow room for growth.  If you’re set in your ways and your beliefs, growth comes to a screeching halt.  Your search and exposure to new things will lead to new ideas that you otherwise never would have had.  If I didn’t start my quest to learn, I never would have found real estate investing and my life would have remained stagnant, stuck in the same patterns, with the same conditions.  Your life-changing idea will not come from what you already know or by doing the same thing you did yesterday.  My exposure to the unknown was a critical first step for me.

Step 2: Belief

It helped that I had always been ambitious and achieved success whenever I put my focus and energy into something.  Having a successful career for 20 years and confidence in my ability to achieve made it relatively easy for me to believe that I could do it.  Doubt and fear may be where a lot of people get stopped in their tracks.  There were many days though, when a wave of doubt would quickly smack me in the face along with a rush of anxiety saying, “What am I doing?  This is crazy.  I can’t quit my job!”  But this is where mindset is so important.  As you now know, I had just come off a deep dive into the world of personal development and establishing a strong mindset leading into this decision.  So, my mind was primed to handle these doubts and I put into practice everything I had learned in the past year to keep the belief and faith in my plan strong.  By reading books like “Think and Grow Rich” and “Rich Dad Poor Dad”, and absorbing content on a daily basis by Tony Robbins, Earl Nightingale, Bob Proctor, and Jim Rohn on YouTube, I was able to keep my positive energy high and maintain a mindset and state of belief to push through the moments of doubt.

Step 3: Commitment

After you believe that you can do it, you need to commit to it.  There is no time limit on a commitment.  Fully committing to something means that you will accomplish your goal, no matter how long it takes.  You can set a time frame, but if you don’t hit it, it doesn’t mean that you give up.  Obstacles are irrelevant.  It doesn’t matter that it could be hard or that there are risks or that people don’t understand.  Establish your commitment by writing down your goal and reading it often.  Napoleon Hill gives you specific instructions on how to do this in his book “Think and Grow Rich”.  If you don’t commit to it, you’re likely to give up when things get challenging or when you start losing patience.

Step 4: Education

Now you need to immerse yourself into your subject matter.  Use every extra minute you have to soak up more knowledge.  My car became my Mobile University.  Driving is such a waste of time normally, but not if you can listen to a book, podcast, or YouTube video that teaches you.  I already had the learning bug, so diving into the new world of real estate, that was going to change my life, was nothing short of exciting.  I couldn’t wait to get into my car to learn more and proceeded to listen to hundreds of hours of content.  Stop wasting time and start educating yourself in your downtime.  As a warning, make sure you are still paying attention to your family or the other important people in your life.  My desire to achieve my goal was so strong that I had trouble with this and still do sometimes.  Don’t completely neglect other very important things and people in your life.

Step 5: Small Daily Action

Small, seemingly insignificant steps are very important when you start.  You are not going to know what you’re doing.  You’re in uncharted territory.  Know that upfront.  It is common for people to not take any steps at all because they can’t figure out Step 5 and therefore, they don’t take Step 1.  If you know how to take Step 1, take it and then worry about Step 2.  Don’t worry about Step 5 until you get done with Step 4, and usually by that time, Step 5 starts to make sense.  Worrying about the unknown down the road will only stop your current progression.  Small steps that I took to give me momentum were things like creating my LLC, opening a business bank account, and getting business cards.  Then I started networking by going to local meetups and reaching out to people on online forums.  I had no idea how to start buying real estate, but I knew how to go to a meetup, so I did that.

Step 6:  Take Massive Action

At some point, you’re going to be faced with a major decision that may be pushing you well beyond your comfort zone.  For me it was spending a large sum of money to become part of a mentorship program.  When I was faced with that decision, all I could hear in my head was Tony Robbins saying, “Take massive action!”.   Taking that big step and making a large financial investment in myself was a crucial turning point that led to the acceleration of my journey towards freedom.

Step 7:  Find a Worthy Partner

Finding my business partner Chris Roberts was ultimately what gave me the confidence to burn the boats and quit my job sooner than I had ever thought was possible.  I was no longer alone in my journey.  I knew that our combined efforts would propel us faster and farther.  I feel that together as a company we are more powerful than the sum of our individual parts.  Now together, we have momentum that cannot be stopped.

We all have to perform the daily tasks that take up 3/4 of our lives.  Sleeping, working our jobs, preparing meals, eating, personal hygiene, attending to our families, doing laundry, relaxing, and the list goes on.  There is no way around the time spent on that “stuff” and it has to be done.  The question is, what are you doing with the little time you have left over?  If the remaining hours are spent watching TV or scrolling Facebook, you can be 99.9% sure that your life will pretty much be the same exact thing the next day and the next year.  But what if you spent your spare time taking Step 1 above, and learning about something completely new?  And what if you increased your available spare time by listening to inspiring content while you exercised or during your commute?  By making the effort to expand your awareness, you’ve instantly opened the door to possibility and opportunity that is waiting for all of us on the other side.  It is only through exposure to new experiences and knowledge that change and growth can occur.  We are living in the age of the internet and the world’s knowledge is at our fingertips.  Are you taking advantage of that?

You don’t know what you don’t know.  Therefore, from your current perspective, it doesn’t seem like there is anything out there for you beyond your current trajectory.  The belief that you’re stuck in your current situation will prevent you from searching for more and ultimately from finding your true purpose.  The fact is it that it is only YOU that is in your way.  Leave your ego and beliefs at the door and start exploring and expanding your awareness.  It all starts with an idea, so make it your mission to find a good one and then take the steps listed above to make it a reality.

If you want to learn more about the powerful world of real estate investing, which is the vehicle I used to change my life, take a small step and go to www.SterlingRhinoCapital.com and sign up for our free Passive Investor Income Calculator or join our Investor Club.  There is no obligation, and we aren’t selling anything.  Here you can gain the education required to become an investor yourself, have the opportunity to build wealth, become financially free, or maybe even retire early.  Find out for yourself why I believe that this is the best investment vehicle on the planet.  It’s all possible, so start believing.

 

Paul Wilcox
Co-Founder & COO