Step On It: Focus

Working hard is not enough to be successful, you can work really hard everyday and end up spinning your wheels and just going around in a circle. Without focus, you may not get to where you want to go. While learning a new investment strategy, it's important to focus on practising the tasks that will get you results.

In real estate investment, there are many strategies that you can work on: flips, buy/rent/hold, lease option, land development, etc. Although I think it's good to know all strategies so that given the opportunity you can take advantage of any situation, I also think that while learning these strategies, you'll need to focus on one at a time.

A lot of task will be necessary for each strategy, for example having your buyer's list database, or having your power team in place. These are task that are good to concentrate on no mater the strategy you are trying to master.

Also, don't get caught up on the administration details. I've witness a lot of people in the real estate investment world get distracted on sideline event. I agree that seminars are great networking opportunity, but you can easily become a seminar junkie. They can also become expensive quite quickly mostly if they require travelling.

I've seen a lot of people getting started in investing get caught up on the minor details of their business card, or website. Again these are good things to have in place, but a business card will only be of use to you if hand them out regardless of what it looks like and a website, no matter how pretty, will do you no good without traffic.

So do spend some time on every aspect of the business that you are working on mastering but concentrate the majority of your time on the task that will create results. As a real estate investor the two major task should be finding deals and finding financing; every other task should pale in comparison.

Tony Robbins, motivational speaker and author of Awaken the Giant Within, talks about the power of focusing on what you want and the three pillars you need to go through. Pillar one is get focus and clear, pillar two is get the best tools, pillar three is resolve your inner conflicts.