This week we started watching the documentary series “Inside Bill’s Brain” as a family. I’m delighted to say that both my wife and kids were as interested in the programme as I was.
Having never read much about the founder of Microsoft I was intrigued and excited to get tucked into this docu-series, where the director tries to shine a light on what makes one of the world’s wealthiest people tick and what formed him?
I’ve often heard it said that success leaves clues so naturally I was looking to pick out and remember what golden nuggets I could. In the space of watching the first two (of three) episodes 3 key things have jumped out at me (I’m sure I’d find more if I were to watch it again).
Here are the 3 things I picked out that I feel can serve to help property investors:
#1: Early in the documentary Bill points out that the brain can only FOCUS on a finite amount of things at any one time.
#2: Bill reads books with a specific purpose in mind (bearing in mind Bill reads enviously fast, taking in 150 pages an hour with about 90% retention- wow! And fun fact, he carries around a heavy duty bag with about 15 books everywhere he goes).
#3: Bill is intentional about taking quiet time to THINK and problem solve.
So lets unpack those quickly to draw out the relevance for property investors.
NUGGET #1: ON FOCUS – Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have become BFFs. As told in the documentary, “Becoming Warren Buffet”, Gates’s father once asked them both to write down a single word to describe their success. They both wrote the same word: focus.
I feel like we often need to be reminded of this. As investors becoming educated in property today we can be spoiled with a wide menu of strategies from the good old buy-to-let, HMO, through to serviced accommodation, commercial, development, build to rent, rent to buy, and any combination of the above. The problem with these choices means that one can often suffer from either a) overwhelm and indecision on where to get started, or b) shiny penny syndrome where you fall victim to jumping into another strategy before getting traction in the first one you tried.
The fact is that any one of these strategies can work amazingly well and help you achieve your bigger goals, however each investor is unique and their own context, resources, network, likes/dislikes will inform the most suitable option. The key is that once the strategy is chosen, the investor must FOCUS on that one thing until a certain level of success is achieved before jumping into something else.
We absolutely want to be in a position where we are experienced enough to draw on anyone of these strategies to optimise the exits, but time and experience generally tells us that we can’t expect this from day one. It comes from focusing and mastering one thing at a time.
NUGGET #2: ON READING WITH PURPOSE
This makes total sense and follows on neatly from point one. If you are investing your learning time on mastering serviced accommodation then it makes sense to go deep on that topic through the course, the books, the webinars etc that you allocate time to. And beyond the content consumption, reading with purpose must be followed up with implementing the key learns in order to get the return on that content.
In short, what Bill confirmed in my mind was that we need to proactively align our reading to the specific skills and capabilities we are looking to grow.
NUGGET #3: ON SCHEDULING TIME TO THINK
This point is something I suspect can easily be forgotten or neglected in favour of busy activity. You know what it’s like to set ambitious goals, we can get caught up in a full day of activity – the phone calls, the viewings, the internet searching, the emails, the social media……feeling busy but not necessarily acting as the highest leverage version of ourselves.
Busy activity is needed at times to get certain things done, however another part of the puzzle that I feel is essential is the quiet thinking time. Whilst Bill allocates vast amounts of time to think about solving world problems to do with disease eradication and such like, property investors first need to solve the problems of figuring out how to achieve their own financial freedom [or fill in the blank for your goals], then they can step into the philanthropic space.
By my interpretation this would cover time to figure out your why, set a vision for the year, plan out your 90 day sprint, your week ahead and your day ahead. In addition to planning, conscious time needs to be scheduled for figuring things out – we typically have a lot more answers within ourselves than we think, we just need to create that headspace to ask ourselves the better questions and noodle on the possible answers. Whether it be in relation to how we structure a JV deal, coming up with all the possible exits to a deal, how to scale your SA business…or whatever, it needs focused time out of the ‘weeds’ of busy activity to think about this stuff. You could say time working ON the business as opposed to IN the business.
So that’s my 3 applicable takeaways for property folk so far from this fascinating documentary. I’d love to hear what lessons others have taken into their property businesses by learning from successful figures in the business world.