Why You Need to Set Goals to Achieve Your Dreams in Real Estate

Why You Need to Set Goals to Achieve Your Dreams in Real Estate
By Larry Goins

It’s easy enough to dream big about your future in real estate investing. We all have lofty expectations of what we will get out of life – our careers, our families, our networks of friends, etc. But without a vehicle to get from where you are today to where you want to be tomorrow, those great expectations are barely attainable. When you put the key into your vehicle by setting goals, you begin to chart out a roadmap for reaching your highest potential, and achieving all your dreams.
Without a charted course, your vehicle just sits in the driveway reminding you of all the things you could have achieved if you’d only had a plan. I was once told that “prior planning prevents poor performance”. As a young man, this was just another silly saying that the establishment put in the way of me doing what I wanted to do when I wanted to do it. Hindsight is truly 20/20 vision and I can see that a lot of time can be wasted when you don’t have a clear path laid out for reaching your brightest future.
When you write down your goals, you begin to plot the path to help you achieve your dreams in real estate investing. In fact, when you begin to lay out goals, you start your vehicle on the road for a journey far greater than perhaps even your wildest dreams!
Goals Must Lead to a Specific Destination
Imagine contacting Triple A for a trip tick to Alpena, Michigan. And they provide you directions, and recommended hotels, and favorite dining spots to the Michigan state line. Although your directions are specific, and your course is charted, you aren’t ending up where you intended to go because your directions don’t give you a specific destination. You’d have a better chance of arriving in Alpena with only a loose selection of interstates and byways without all the extra information, as long as it gets you where you intend to go. When you initially set out your goals, they don’t have to be so detailed as to cover every stop along your journey, but they do have to get you where you want to go. Your goals should lead you to the end that you desire – the reason you began investing in real estate in the first place. Perhaps you don’t initially know exactly what you need to do every minute of every day to get where you want to go, but if you select your destination then you can goal plan backwards to reach your dreams.
Goals Must Be Meaningful and Achievable
Your goals must mean something to you. It isn’t enough to want to make a million dollars in real estate, you have to have a reason to want to make a million dollars to achieve it. Even the lucky dog who wins the lottery meant to buy his ticket. Likewise your goals must be achievable. It doesn’t even matter if naysayers doubt the validity of your dreams or your ability to achieve them. It does matter that you believe that your goals are achievable. Perhaps they seem a little out of reach today, if you’ve just purchased your Ultimate Buying Machine or received your first copy of my Ultimate Investor Report Newsletter. But you must truly believe that you can reach your goals, and reaching them must be something that you have a purpose driven approach to accomplishing.
Goals Must Be Quantifiable and Measureable
It isn’t just enough to want to be successful in real estate investing. You must really, really want to accomplish a specific goal that can be quantified on the front end and measured on the back end. It may be that you want to be a Larry Goins’ Prodigy and sell 5-10 houses per month online. It may be that you want to earn $2.5 million per year or that you want to build a portfolio of rental properties generating $250,000 per year. Perhaps you want to create a nest egg that enables you to travel or retire or provide things for your children that your parents couldn’t provide for you. Whatever your goals are, they are essential to succeeding in the world of real estate investing. And unless you can quantify and measure them, in the back of your mind you will never really know whether you reached the destination at the end of your road map or not.
The bonus of setting quantifiable and measureable goals in real estate investing is that you can break them down to a ridiculously simple morsel that you can measure on a daily, weekly, monthly, or annually basis. If you know that you wish to make $2.5 million a year, then you can break that down into an accomplishment necessary in smaller chunks. You can further quantify, with an understanding of the number of houses you need to look at and make offers on, what your goals need to be on weekly and monthly goals to reach your long term goals.
It’s important that you don’t get side-barred trying to set your goals. The most successful people that I know set big goals and make big plans. They don’t vary from the course they know there vehicle needs to take to reach their goals. And you shouldn’t either!
Goals Must Be In Agreement With Your Actions
You cannot set a goal to lose weight and reach it by dining at McDonald’s four times a week. You cannot set a goal to get a new boat and reach it by never looking at boat ads. You cannot set a goal to walk on the moon and reach it by staring at the stars. And you cannot set any goals in real estate and then reach them without stepping out and starting to make your deals. Dreams do come true, but not by accident. Make sure that you set goals you are capable and willing to act accordingly to reach.
Picture Your Goals Already Met
No matter what I say when I teach the art of buying and selling 5-10 houses per month without ever leaving my office, some people just can’t picture it happening for them. They buy the course. They attend the class. They think long and hard about all the reasons it won’t work for them. And then they do nothing.
Don’t picture yourself failing. Don’t picture yourself struggling. Picture yourself at the end of your two, five, or ten year plan with all your goals met and your real estate investing dreams come true.
You don’t have to spend hours and hours each day picturing yourself with your goals achieved. But just a few minutes a day helps you to trick your mind into believing that you have already achieved the goals that you’ve set for yourself. This keeps your mind from dirty dog downing you into forgetting that you can do exactly what you set out to do with your real estate investing vehicle. And it is a lot of fun! A few minutes a day you get to picture yourself on a white sandy beach, or driving the car of your dreams, or living in your own luxury home custom appointed with all the features you associate with living exactly how you set out to live when you planned your goals. But don’t forget to come back to today, or you will find it a lot harder to reach your goals. This concept of creative visualization is all about getting what you really want out of life. Those things you focus your mental energy on creating, are the things you ultimately get. That’s why it is so important not to give your conscious mind a chance to dirty dog down your subconscious into thinking you cannot reach your goals. You can!
Systematically Complete Your Goals
Now it is time to create the little mini-morsels of goals from your big goals. You know how much you want to make per year. You’ve figured out how much you have to earn per week or per month to reach those bigger goals. Its time to start knocking the mini-goals off your to do list one at a time. Remember, you must plan your work and then work your plan.
Separate and Prioritize Your Goals
I am assuming at this point that your goals are about more than just money, or even just the things that money can buy. Maybe you want to ensure that your kids can attend any college they want, or that your grand children won’t have to worry about getting student loans. Perhaps you want to support a charity or ministry that has been dear to your heart but not so near to your wallet for years. Or maybe you want to see your spouse back at home with the kids instead of working in an office. Perhaps even you want to leave the corporate grind and return to a home based office yourself.
At this point, you probably have a pretty good idea what the reason for each of your goals is. You can begin to think of each goal as its own vehicle to reach the reason. The goals is the means to reach assorted ends that you want for yourself or your family.
Number each of your goals and begin to prioritize them so that you can reach them in not only their order of importance, but in a timely fashion that they can meet the reason for which they were set. For example, if you wish to send your kids to college through your real estate investing profits, you want to reach that goal by the time they reach age 18, right?
Review and Revise Your Goals
Sometimes things change. Maybe your real estate investing career takes a back seat to other priorities for a while. Perhaps your exemplary child is graduating a year early and the college money is needed sooner rather than later. Or that same child has received a full scholarship to the school of their choice and you suddenly have more money to put into your real estate portfolio than you expected.
You have to stay just a little bit flexible with your goals. Things change. And if you review and revise your goals and find that you are a bit ahead or behind your previous schedule its okay. It’s no different than making an unscheduled stop on your trip. You modify your trip tick from Triple A or reset your GPS and modify your road map. You can modify your goals in the same way. But if you don’t set them, you cannot reach them.
Goals Must Have a Defined End Date
Yes, you have to be willing to modify your end dates for your goals. Not everything will be achieved on exactly the day you project. However, your goals must have a defined end date. Goals without dates aren’t really goals at all, more wishful thinkings. Yeah, you might achieve them. But the driving force of meeting a deadline goes away when you don’t have an end date.
Four Categories to Set Goals In:
FINANCIAL
Any goals that include net worth or rental property incomes or even college tuitions are financial goals. They may be directly tied to your real estate investing or they may be more closely connected to things that are more important to you personally, such as putting a child through school or setting up a trust fund.
FITNESS
You might want to tell me to mind my own business, but unless you want to die wealthy fast, your personal health and fitness goals are important to reaching your final end goals. Honestly, I’ve learned that when I don’t feel good I don’t work well either. Your health is one of the most important factors to your ultimate success in real estate investing. Furthermore, you owe it to your family – to everyone that you are creating this real estate wealth for – to live as long as you can , not just as prosperously as you can.
FAMILY
Unless you set goals that involve your family, your financial goals will only keep you from being a viable member of your family. Trust me, your spouse and your kids care a lot more about the time that you spend with them than the money that you spend on them. Yes, even your teenagers, but don’t tell them that I told you so. Most people spell love T-I-M-E. If you don’t set family goals, then you are not truly building wealth, you are only hording money.
FAITH
Everybody has to believe in something, right? This article isn’t the place to preach or even to force feed my love for Jesus on you. But let me share this with you. If you don’t have goals for your faith and your spiritual health (as well as that of your family) then once again you aren’t building wealth, you are only hording money. And it’s a known fact that you can’t take it with you.
If you are totally at a loss for where to start with faith goals, then perhaps that is exactly where you need to start. We are talking about journeys in vehicles here. You might not have a quantifiable faith goal right this second, but I encourage you to crank up the engine of your vehicle and get on the road to finding some.
Finally, think about the company that you keep. Surrounding yourself with people who have like goals and dreams helps to keep your vehicle on the road leading to your real estate investing dreams. You can’t fly with the eagles if you scratch with the turkeys. And you cannot stay on the path to your real estate investing goals if you get side-tracked with the negative cynicism of people who don’t believe that your goals are important.
“Hang onto your dreams for if dreams die hope is a broken winged bird that cannot fly.” Langston Hughes

I hope you have enjoyed this article taken from my course called the Ultimate Buying and Selling Machine! that teaches how we buy and sell 5-10 properties a month, never look at them and have them sold in less than 2 hours. For many more articles and a 10 part ecourse on how to create your own Ultimate Buying and Selling Machine! as well as over 50 training audio recordings you can listen to online, download and collect, simply go to www.LarryGoinsFreeOffer.com where you will gain instant access to all of this and 51 Exclusive Editable real estate investing Forms and Documents all FREE! You will also get two FREE real estate investing eBooks, A free Personal Coaching Profile to help you jump start your real estate Investing, FREE Nationwide Wholesale Property Listing Notification, FREE Weekly Training Teleconferences with Different Topic Each Week, FREE subscription to Larry Goins “Almost” Weekly Investing Newsletter, FREE Admission for Two to Investor Palooza 3 Day Training Event, FREE Admission for Two to Larry Goins 3 Day Boot Camp, Plus over 31 Exclusive Articles on real estate Investing and Much More! Just go to www.LarryGoinsFreeOffer.com. Thanks and I look forward to working with you, Larry Goins