Welcome back to the REI Agent. My guest today is Linda McKissack, a Keller Williams agent, leader, and co-author of Hold alongside Jay Papasan, as part of the Million Dollar Millionaire book series that Gary Keller and Jay have written, which is widely considered the definitive guide for real estate agents who want to build and buy a buy and hold investment portfolio alongside their sales career. Linda was featured in 10X is Greater than 2X as well. She has lived the strategy herself, growing her own portfolio while running a top producing real estate business. And she has helped countless of agents understand what that commissions they earn are not just income, but seed money for long-term wealth. We built this entire show around this idea. So Linda, you’re a perfect guest. I’m super excited to talk to you more about this. Welcome to the REI Agent Podcast. Thank you. Thanks for having me. So let’s start, I guess, with kind of how you got into real estate. I mean, what made you want to be a real estate sales agent and did you start with selling or did you start with investing? Yeah, great question. Well, actually, I always like to say that sometimes the worst thing that happens to you in life can wind up being the best thing that happens to you in life. And how I got into real estate sales and then very quickly into investing was, I always say in life, you’re either given a 10X goal by life or you can use, learn to use 10X goals as a strategy for life, right? And so in this particular case, I always like to say it’s kind of like getting pushed into a 10 foot hole and you’re only jumping two feet high to get out. It won’t work, right? We were given a 10X goal of all of a sudden, my husband had to sell a business that he had just started the year before, which was a restaurant and nightclub, kind of like a mini Dave and Buster’s if people have those in their area. And we had to sell it because the economy and taxes crashed, worst crash they’ve ever had before or since. And we had to sell that business for $600,000 less than we owed against it. Literally, we went overnight to getting rid of anything we could get rid of, to downsize, to figure out how to pay that money back, to be honest, because neither one of us had any idea how we were gonna pay that off or what to do. But I always say, like, again, when you’re stretched and you’re forced to think how to do something, you’ll actually figure it out, right? So in the conversations, Jimmy said, my husband said, Linda, I need your help. And I had never made more than minimum wage. So to be honest with you, I had no idea. Now I’m a hard worker. I would always have at least two jobs. And the most money I’d ever make is if I bartended or waitressed at one of his nightclubs because you can always get tips. So to be honest with you, I always say there was a lot of anger in our home at that time because under anger is fear, you know? And I was afraid because I didn’t know how to go, you know, make that kind of money. And he was afraid because he had never been in that kind of situation or had something like that happen to him. I now call those gradually and suddenlies. It’s where we’re not paying attention to something in life and all of a sudden, gradually, then suddenly, then suddenly is when we actually wake up to the situation. And so when he said, I need your help, I need you to go to work and help me, I didn’t know what to do. I said, you know, I’m a hard worker, but what in the world am I gonna do to make that kind of money? I mean, at that point, I’m in my mid-20s. I don’t even know what the word economy means, much less is it a good one or a bad one? I mean, literally. And he said, you know, a mentor of mine told me a long time ago, if you wanna make a lot of money, real estate’s the way to do it. Now, this was a mentor, his dad was never around. So this mentor would come pick him up and take him to his football practices. And somewhere in there, probably in my husband’s 10-year-old or 12-year-old brain, he registered real estate as a way to get rich. I tease him today and say, I don’t think he meant get a wife and get her to sell real estate, y’all. I think he meant buy some, build some, develop some, you know, more along those lines. But the truth is, real estate sales was a perfect vehicle to create cashflow. And that’s exactly what we needed at that moment. And so I always like to say, I didn’t start off fantastic, I only made $3,000 gross. Jimmy said, this is super gross. He said, I think I spent 15 for you to make three, we’re going the wrong direction. But to be honest with you, Mattias, back then, there was no education or training or podcast or anything you could listen to that would help leverage you to know how to do anything, sales or investing or anything. But very quickly, an affiliate paid for me to go to a seminar. And at that seminar, I realized, okay, this is possible. There are people out here who are making the kind of money we need to make, I just need to figure out what they do. And then go do it. But once I started in real estate sales, we read a book called Cashflow Quadrant, because when you’re in that kind of pain, you start looking for people or books or anything to help you relieve that pain. And so one of the best books we found was Cashflow Quadrant, because in it, it showed us exactly what our problem was. Our problem was we were like the rest of America, Americans, we had our income coming from the left side of the quadrant, meaning we were either an employee or self-employed. And because he was in the restaurant nightclub business, and I’m in real estate sales, we’re both in the self-employed category. And that if we ever wanted to be wealthy and not have as much pain when those kind of things happen to you going forward, we needed to get as much of our money over from the right side and figure out how to do that. And at that moment, we had zero on the right side. We were actually negative on the left side. So because again, I say, you’re either, life’s gonna give you a 10X goal that you’re forced to figure out, and it’s gonna take courage because you don’t know how you’re gonna do it, or you could learn to use this as a strategy to just build the biggest life possible. And so I went out and found a property pretty quickly and came home and told Jimmy, I’m excited, found this house. I think we can, back then, this was a lot of money, but I think today it wouldn’t be that much, but we could sell it for $15,000 if we fix it up and sell it. And 15,000 was a lot to us at that moment, right? Anything would do. And he said, that’s fine, Linda, but there’s no way we can go to the bank and borrow any money because we owe all this money and we don’t have any money. And so I went to sleep that night. I always tell my people in my challenge group, there’s some place, and for me, I’m a God-fearing person, so I feel like God kind of gives me my answers in certain places, sleep, running, out in nature, those kind of places when I’m quiet and still, which is very seldom. And so I went to sleep that night, and when I woke up the next morning, one of my builder’s names was on my brain. And I said to my husband, I said, I’m gonna go ask Lew Craft if he will buy this house with me. He was in construction. I told him, all I have is my commission, but I’ll throw my commission in if you’ll fix it up and we’ll split the profits. And so the very day that we split the profits on that house, and it was exactly 15,000, an RTC property, which was the Resolution Trust Corporation who foreclosed on commercial properties back then, had a property come up for $15,000 exactly over by the college. And so we drug Lew out there and said, look, let’s don’t spend this money. Let’s put it in and buy this house. And so while he was out there looking at it, he said, I think I can turn this into a fourplex. And so, Matias, we laughed today because we still own that particular house and it pays us more than Jimmy’s Social Security for working for 40 years or 50 years, whatever he’s worked. But we did one more house with Lew and we flipped the first one. So obviously we only had two left to hold. And when we did that, we asked, when we got ready to split up our partnership and we had established credit again, we just said, which of the houses would you like? Because we wouldn’t even be here if you hadn’t done what you’d done for us. So we let him pick the house he wanted. We kept the other one and still have that house today. So that’s kind of how we got into both. You know, life is a situation that forced us to think differently and learn different things. And I always say, again, it was the greatest thing that ever happened to us, but I wouldn’t want to go through it again. Linda, we have a lot of parallels here. So I’m in the final processes of a book and maybe I just like somehow subconsciously read yours and just wrote it. Sorry, I referenced the cashflow quadrant. No, I think, you know, the cashflow quadrant is great because I think a lot of agents kind of get to a point where they feel like they’ve made it, right? Like getting from employed to self-employed is a big thing. But then I think a lot of times, especially agents are really stuck there because you can take your business and make it, I’m sorry, you can take your self-employed thing you do and make it more of into a business, right? You can get it over to the other quadrant. For the most part though, you are just kind of a slave. You don’t have a boss, you have whatever, 70 bosses, whatever, how many people you are working with that year. And it is definitely not leveraging other people. It’s definitely all on you. You have to wear all the hats, et cetera. And then about the, you know, putting yourself into a hole or whatever. Like, so when my wife and I got married, we actually, on the honeymoon, on the flight back from the honeymoon, I was like, all right, let’s add up all our debt. Oh boy, I’m glad it was after the honeymoon. She wouldn’t let me see her student loans until after we tied the knot. But we were 120 in the hole, which is not near as bad as 600,000. But we were, you know, making like $70,000 collectively probably at the time. We just bought a house and we were determined to try to just get that monkey off our back as fast as possible. And that’s actually why I got my real estate license. I was looking for a side hustle. And also kind of had that itch to be an entrepreneur, to be out, being my own boss, that kind of thing. So, and then that house turned into our first rental. But, you know, there is the ideal, you know, situation for, I think, any agent is if you can build your business up or you can build up your, you know, the other side of that column to a point where it covers all your expenses. And then you can be so much less worried. Like, you know, market swings, you know, just your general business being up and down, like from, you know, for whatever reason, you can just be a lot more comfortable in that situation. Because I think to your point, like, you know, there can be a lot of conflict. There can be a lot of, once you are the, if you’re the main income of a house and it’s a hard time, it’s a rough season, a rough patch, that causes stress. And that, like you said, can come from fear. And if you have all your expenses covered from having that other side of the quadrant, you know, it’s a great place to be. Yeah, so true, absolutely. Yeah, so the premise of Hold is that real estate agents have a unique advantage as investors. Can you walk us through that thesis and share how your own portfolio grew alongside your sales career? So you told us about the beginning. And then what do you wish you had known earlier in that journey? Yeah, honestly, I just wish I had known earlier that there’s momentum for everything. And we think we have enough time for everything. In other words, we sometimes don’t feel like we should hurry when I feel like when someone says to me, what’s the one thing or two things you would do differently if you had everything to do over again? I would always say more of and quicker. And so I think we tend to not understand how quick time goes, right? And so our premise of Hold is at some point in your career, you want to be working because you want to, not because you have to. And the only way to do that is to have cashflow coming in. And the only way to have cashflow coming in and properties paid off and all of those things is to buy and hold, right? And to me, that is what we call your freedom number. That is the number you need to get to because you are working because you want to, because everything feels differently. I mean, I just did a call with a group of very, very successful top agents. And this is one of many calls I do because someone will either hear how I had someone run my business for 20 years in the real estate business and then sold it to them. And they get to a place after 30 or 40 years in the business and they’re stuck. They’re burnt out, but they’re committed to the people. They’re committed to the business. They don’t want to keep going and they don’t want to quit. It’s just a really catch 22. And so I always say, you know, if you prepared for what does that number need to be so that I’m always working because I want to, not because I have to, then I have options. But when there’s no options, nothing feels worse when you feel like there’s just no options. And so the premise of hold is get enough income coming in from paid off property someday that you’re working because you want to. And you’re prepared for what I like to call last graduallys and suddenlys. There’s not a person exempt from these. You know, I teach it and we had one last year that we weren’t expecting. So now the good news is no one feels sorry for me because we were way better off. You know what I mean? We’re going to be fine. But the truth is at some graduallys and suddenlys, you’re not fine. Like yours that happened and the one that happened to us, we were not prepared and we had not done any of these things yet. So I just think that they really, everybody needs to understand is work on your hold portfolio. It’s okay to flip along the way. And I think one of your questions that you ask is what’s a mistake I see agents make and in their investing, if they’re investing, one is they’re not investing, but if they are investing, they think flipping is building wealth just like holding is and it’s not. It’s no different than if you go sell a house. And so I will see them build up their portfolio and for some reason they start selling them. And I ask, I usually ask this question, can you replace the deal you bought 10 years ago or 20 years ago today, the same? Can you, no, they’re never the same. Things keep going forward. And so I think that’s why I always say do more and do faster because there’s certain things in life that you got to ride the wave and the wave is always changing. And so if you’ve got a good one, do it, buy the houses at that moment and hang on to them. Don’t keep flipping them because that’s no different than you selling another house. Yeah, like I often say, the best time to plant a tree was 10 years ago. The next best time is today. And that’s true for houses. Yes, it’s true for everything pretty much. Yeah, no, and then if you need the beauty of real estate too is like if you need the capital, if you need, if you do want it for something else, I mean, you can do a cash out refinance that’s tax free. Yeah, and it depends on what stage you’re in also. The stage Jim and I are in right now, we don’t want to buy things that we got to hold for 20 or 30 years to be paid off. We’re looking for flips. We’re buying, we’re doing more flips now than we have ever because now is the stage of life where, okay, that’s going to give us more cashflow. We want that. I don’t want to wait another 20 years to pay things off and do all that. So depending on where you are in life, especially the younger you start, the better advantage you have, you can stretch out the loans longer. Where we had to do, because we started when Jimmy was 39, about to be 40 when we bought our first house. And we wanted a certain number coming in passively to us by the time he was 60. So that meant we had to put them on a shorter payout, which meant we had to find better deals. They had to cashflow at least 150 to $200 a month because we were already in our peak earning years. We didn’t need to live off that money. We just needed to have it there for taxes and different things like that. So that’s a different strategy than if you can start young enough and we teach our kids, put them on 30 years. And if you want to pay them off early, either bi-weekly payments or paying an extra principal, whatever, there’s many, like you said, many strategies to do that. Well, yeah, and if you’re thinking about it long-term, I mean, like it’s, I think it gets sold. Like a lot of times the passive income, the investing in real estate and rentals, all that stuff kind of gets sold as this, you’re going to be getting rich quick or you’re going to be financially free really fast. And I mean, you have to think about it long-term because it can be challenging to have a super awesome cashflowing property from day one. And then you’re going to have to have things replaced. You have an HVAC go out and that eats up a lot of cashflow for a few years. So it’s really that long-term mindset that’s important, but it is so important. I mean, we are self-employed people. We don’t really have retirement funds, like retirement accounts. You don’t want to be working at 70 or whatever just because you have to. You know, like if you love this business so much, that’s great. I’m so happy for you that you still want to do it, but like you don’t want to be in a position where you have to. Well, and a lot of times, Matias, they’re doing it because they have to for whatever reason, either their ego or they feel stuck and can’t do it or they need the money. But it’s always at that stage in life, what I’m seeing is it’s a sacrifice of something else they’d rather be doing. Like their spouse would rather than be in Florida with them or their grandkids, they’d rather see their grandkids more. I mean, so I am definitely seeing sacrifices. I’m seeing the cost of it, you know, and that’s what’s hard to watch. Absolutely. What is the hold formula? Can you walk us through how like, you know, if an agent is closing around 30 homes a year, how could they allocate some of their commissions towards building a buy and hold portfolio without sacrificing the business they already have? Yeah, well, I always say usually money is the number one reason people give that they can’t do it. You know, they don’t have the money to do it. And I always say you’re either driving it, living in it, wearing it, eating it, or someone else has it. And so pick one of those or whatever. Because I think when the goal is big enough and you’re committed enough, the answer is there. It is, it’s there somewhere. Just like I woke up, I wanted us to start doing what the book told us we needed to do. And I wanted it bad enough to think about it constantly and to come up with a solution that I didn’t have before. You know, it seemed impossible. But to me, it’s having that impossible goal and dream that forces you to go to work. And our brains are pretty amazing things. And then, you know, I just feel like we can figure it out. But if we don’t ever even challenge ourself with it and be committed enough to it, then sure, it’ll seem impossible and we just won’t ever do it. But I would say mainly figure out how to get started, you know, and I also say that it should be a priority as much as your sales. Because it’s kind of like your health. One of these days, the gradually and suddenly is gonna catch up with you and you’re gonna wish it was right on your goal sheet, right at the top of more houses sold, you know. So number one, I think the time is there. You just gotta allocate it to it and you gotta make it, you know, a freedom number, what’s your freedom number. And then start saying how many houses would I have to have free and clear to get me that number passively. And then, because I think something magical kind of happens to Matias once we decide, you know, and we’re committed to big goals like that, we start to see opportunities we couldn’t see before. And I truly believe that. And so I think the answers are there, they just have to be committed enough to work through it and figure out where could I get that money and where could I get the time. And they have both of them because the one common denominator is God only gave us 24 hours. He didn’t give you 48, me 24. So if anybody’s doing it, you can do it too. That’s why I always tell the story about finding a partner because our deal seemed impossible. No credit, no money, you know, most people say, well, that’s impossible. But it’s not impossible. It’s just, you know, there’s a solution and you gotta be committed enough to find it. Yeah, and you mentioned, you know, like basically lifestyle too. I mean, that’s such a huge factor because like if you, yeah, I think the stereotype of agents too can be like that they feel like they have to go out and lease like a Porsche or something so that they look successful. And you know, if you’re like needing to have this lifestyle, whether or not it’s to show other people just because you like things like Rolexes or whatever, you’re making your lifestyle more expensive. Your money is going towards these things instead of building up that passive income. And I think if you can possibly build up that passive income to allow yourself to, you know, increase your lifestyle, that’s the way that you really build wealth. And sustainably, right? If you’re young enough or flexible enough or just committed enough, really, I mean, house hacking is the perfect way to just get started. I mean, you don’t have to have a ton of money. You have to have a place to live. Turn it into a rental. Even if you just, even if you don’t even rent it out, like just buy a house that’s a good rental, live in it until you’re ready to buy the next one, then move and keep it. Yep, that definitely works. So yeah, I mean, so have you looked into syndications at all? Do you think that the syndications could be another option for agents that maybe don’t wanna actually manage? Maybe that, you know, like they don’t wanna have the headaches of owning rental property? I know that’s a great strategy that a lot of people use. It’s not one for us. There’s a couple of things that were super important for us. One was not being over leveraged because in the 80s and 90s in Texas, when everybody lost everything, the common theme was they were over leveraged in everything. So there’s a couple of factors that we knew going forward, no matter what we do, would be crucial and we just wouldn’t violate those. And being over leveraged is one of them. And then the other one is not being in control, you know, because, you know, I think it’s Warren Buffett says, invest what you know and understand and can somewhat control. And so that’s always been key to us is to be in control a little bit more. So that’s why we haven’t really done anything like that. So I’m sure there are people are, and if it’s something someone’s interested in, I always say, don’t sit around and ask yourself how, sit around and ask yourself who, who’s done this successfully that I admire, that I could be them. In other words, they have the same risk tolerance I do. You know, they keep their family first. I mean, there’s certain things that if I’m gonna look for someone to follow or learn from that, that are key pieces, I wanna make sure are there. But if they’re there, there’s always somebody who’s done what it is you wanna do. And I say, find that person, you know, and follow their plan, do what they tell you to do because they’ve been on that journey that you’re trying to go on. Well, I think it can be a tool for sure, but it shouldn’t be like, I mean, it’s not, they’re typically, you know, five-year plans or so, depending, so they’re often you’re getting your money back, you know, provided that everything goes as planned, which obviously that doesn’t always happen, but so they’re not, it’s not quite the same as owning, you know, a rental for 30 years or whatever. It’s, it is gonna be different than that. But, and often you can’t really get into them until you have a net worth of a million dollars outside of your primary residence or you’re earning enough money. And it’s, which can be a good goal or a good reason if you wanna do that to build up that rental portfolio first, then, and then use that as your, yeah, your base to try some of those things out when, you know, hopefully they work out. And to your point, yeah, you don’t have control. It’s the beauty and the curse of it. Yeah, that’s true, that’s true. But I’m sure if it’s working for somebody, it could work for you. Just investigate and explore and then make a decision. Well, and to your point about like the Warren Buffett idea is, you know, if you’re putting your money into the stock market, like you probably don’t know the businesses. Like Warren Buffett reads all day, right? I mean, he’s reading in detail about these businesses. You’re not doing that. But as an agent, you probably understand real estate, right? So you can understand some of the fundamentals to a deal that might be a little bit more complex or, you know, and there’s many ways like joint venture, like what you’re talking about too is another thing that’s, you know, a great way to start. If you don’t have all the capital you need or if you want somebody to help take on a project, like if you’re not familiar with flipping, for example. Did you ever do to accelerate your growth, did you ever use like equity lines on the properties you owned? Yeah, we have done that. You know, one thing you just said too, reminded me, you know, part of what Kiyosaki teaches you is there’s only so many ways to build wealth, which I’m a simple person. So if it’s too complicated, I probably will freeze and won’t do it. But, you know, at the time we really understood is it’s either stocks, real estate, or owning businesses. And for us, we just, we’d already been burnt from a business. So we needed to give ourself a little bit of a break before we went back into businesses. But real estate was something we felt confident, a little more confident in, and we felt like we understood better. So that’s why we picked those. But the equity line, yes, we have done that. So we started out with a builder as a partner because we didn’t have any money. And then we went and got lines of credit at the bank because, well, we just borrowed the money from the bank. We got really lucky in that a community bank president as he was moving up the ranks was our neighbor. And so we got to know him. He knew our reputation in real estate sales. He was building his career. He saw us building ours. I think we even did an interview with him one time on one of our podcasts. But local community banks are great because they like real estate and they like local real estate. So we started with him, built a relationship. And then when the 2008, 2009 crash happened, there were tons of foreclosures. And in Texas, you got to take cashier’s checks to the foreclosure steps. You can’t get the money later. So what we did is we took some of the properties that we’d had paid down by then and put up the equity as collateral and just kept a half a million dollars worth of line of credit at all times so that we could just go to the foreclosure sale. We bought a bunch of properties during that time. We probably built the most of our portfolio during that time. That makes sense. What a great time to do that. I mean, it does go against the grain because I’m sure everybody was just incredibly fearful about real estate at the time. So you have to kind of understand that as well. Like, you know, that’s the time to be greedy is when everybody else is afraid. Yeah, honestly, I can’t remember who said it, if it was Warren Buffett or somebody. It’s, you know, most really smart people, money-wise, buy when other people feel like they should be selling and they sell when other people feel like they should be buying. And so I think you got to almost be okay to go against the grain of what the rest of the world is telling you it’s okay to do. Yeah. Well, what you just outlined, I mean, is exactly, I mean, what we did as well. I mean, we had our first house that we were, we put it on a 15 at the time. I don’t know if I would have done that again, if I would start over, but we were brainwashing ourselves with Dave Ramsey at the time to get that debt down. And we were, you know, very hyper-focused on that. And it was, that was helpful. I’m not gonna, you know, diss Dave Ramsey, but I think, you know, now 30 year would make more sense because we were 24 or whatever. But anyway, so, but we were able to, when we moved into our new house, we were able to get a couple of lines of credit for both properties. And if you’re able to move again, like buy, keep, move, rinse and repeat, you’re gonna start building up equity. That’s gonna be able to, like, you can get like one line of credit that’s over multiple properties if you want, or you can get a line of credit before you move out of each property because you get better terms if it’s a primary residency and then you don’t have to close it when you move. But all that will start amounting to you getting dangerous when you can go buy a property in cash, right, at a foreclosure or whatever, just, you know, wholesaler, whatever it is. I mean, that’s often needed to get deals done. And so that’s an awesome way to do a flip if you don’t wanna hold the property depending on where it’s at, et cetera. But definitely for the BRRRR method, like to be able to rehab it, refinance it, get the money back out, keep it as a rental. And then you have this like freshly renovated rental that performs probably better because it’s freshly renovated and you don’t have any actual capital in it that you put in. It’s a beautiful thing. Linda, do you have some golden nuggets for our listeners? I do, I do. I loved this question, by the way. I think it’s a great question. One of the things that I always think of is most people don’t need more information, which we’re, you know, we all are information seekers. We just need to set a bigger future of ourself than our comfort zone feels good with. In other words, when I went back, because I was featured in the 10x is easier than 2x, I had to actually go back in my life and progress is only seen looking backwards. It’s hard to see progress otherwise and we don’t look backwards very much. And so what I realized is the big leaps and jumps I had in my life were places, times that I was either forced to have big 10x ideas and goals or I chose them for myself, right? And so I think it’s not really more information that we need. It’s a future that’s bigger than our comfort zone is. If we can imagine our future self as something we’re not right now, that’s bigger than we can even imagine and it’s gonna take courage and things we don’t know yet to get there. To me, that’s the answer to everything and we just don’t do that enough. And then the second one is cashflow is not freedom. That was really well put. Okay, thanks. I really liked that. Thank you. Sorry, go ahead. Cashflow is not really freedom if your income stops when you stop working and I think people get confused about cashflow and wealth being two different things. And then my last one is the biggest threat to most high performers is not failure, it’s unconscious complacency after we’ve had a success. In other words, everybody’s had success, that’s how you got where you are, right? But a lot of times we will spend a lot of time after we do something like that because usually it takes courage to do that, it takes getting out of our comfort zone, learning things we don’t know and then we get a whole new level of confidence and we get a whole new future self, right? We’re someone different. But the problem is we sit there too long and that’s where I think people start saying things like I feel stuck, I feel burnt out. And what we’re riding is that success that we’ve already had what we really should be doing is going out and setting a bigger goal or seeing ourselves as a bigger person than we are now, right? And now what do we have to do to get to be that person, right? And I think we sit in complacency and in our comfort of our past success way too long. It’s okay to sit there a little bit but what we really should do is immediately go back out and say, who would I like to become now? One of my mentors, Gary Keller who when you got to the KW early enough and you were a top producer which I was the number one agent in the company, he was coaching me personally. And I remember asking him one day, I really am struggling because I have a natural tendency to want to achieve but sometimes people in your life want you to feel bad about that. And you’re not sure why you’re that way, you’re just that way. But I truly think Mattias, everybody’s wired that way. I just don’t know whether some people just squash it down and don’t know what to do with it. But then on the other flip side, my job was recruiting people to a bigger opportunity and I was struggling because they didn’t seem to want more. So I’m like in this conflicted place of, I want more and I want to achieve but I have to feel bad about it because people in my life think I should be not like that, right? And he gave me something that was so freeing to me and it’s so true. And this is where they always say the joy, real joy is in the journey. And I think this ties into that. He said, you know what Linda, life is about becoming. And the way that you become, all that you can become is you go out in the world and you see what else it is you can achieve. Sports teams don’t win one Super Bowl and go back to the gym and field house and do nothing. They go back and train and prepare and see who else they can become. And that was such a freeing moment for me because I don’t want to get to the end of my life and maybe could have become someone else or more or different or you know what I mean? And so when I really thought about that, I thought really you could take every accomplishment I’ve had, all the money, all the rewards, but who I’ve become from going out there and trying and failing and succeeding and failing and succeeding, that’s priceless. And so, and along about this time, my mother passed away and she had these major regrets in her life. And she called all of us kids together to tell us, what her major regret was. And I just remember thinking, I don’t want to get to the end and have regrets, especially in the major key areas of my life. And if you read Bonnie Ware’s book, The Five Regrets of the Dying, the number one regret that she said people had on their deathbed was not living a life that was true to themselves, but living a life that was expected of them by others. And to me, that’s someone else that’s letting the world or somebody else design who they’re supposed to become. And so, I think when we change the way we look at achieving as not a bad thing and not as a greedy thing or not as a thing that we shouldn’t want, I think we’re wired that way. I think we’re wired for growth and the only way you’re going to grow is to go out there and try stuff that you don’t know how to do and fail. That’s important, that’s it. You know, Linda, I think we’re like sold this idea that comfort is what we want in everything. I mean, like this is like all the products that we’re being sold to is gonna make our lives easier. We’re coming from air-conditioned homes to our heated garages or whatever and then go into our air-conditioned cars and that’s all great and stuff. But I feel like if we don’t impose, we have to artificially impose hardship on ourselves. And that is where we actually get true happiness from. Like that’s where we feel achieved. We need the struggle. We grew, like, I mean, you know, however you believe we came about, like there was times where, you know, it wasn’t easy just to get a meal. It wasn’t, you couldn’t go to a drive-through and get a hamburger super easily. Like we had to struggle for things and we had to face, you know, extreme temperatures. We had to exert ourselves physically and I think our brains are wired, our function better, we’re happier. We don’t need medicine to make ourselves happy if we are out there achieving things. And I think that is business. I think that’s pushing yourself out of your comfort zone. I think that’s exercise. It can be all those things. I 100% agree with you and I love the angle of it too of like, you know, what was it again? Like what we’re becoming? Yeah, you know, life is about becoming. All that you can become. And the only way you’re gonna know what that is and achieve that is to go out in the world and see what all it is you can achieve, right? And, you know, as I think about that, as I reflect on what you were just saying, I see more people and I take more calls from realtors who are unhappiest in the most comfortable situations. You don’t really see a lot of unhappy people when they’re striving for something, when they want a bigger future or they wanna become someone that they’re not and they’re trying to figure that out. They don’t really have time to focus on being unhappy. They’re busy, right? Trying to figure this stuff out. And, you know, the courage it takes keeps the adrenaline and all the cool stuff actually flowing while we’re trying to figure that stuff out. And I think, you know, you’re right. I like comfort too. Trust me, I like that. My gym is over here and my stretch lab is here. You know, I like all those things, but the truth is that’s not how my life got to a place where I have the freedoms that I have. You know, I get to have the experiences I wanna have. I can help people who can’t help themselves because I’ve thought ahead or I’ve planned a little bit better than they were able to, or maybe I was given some gifts or blessings that someone else wasn’t. I couldn’t do that if I hadn’t gone out there and seen what else I could achieve or if I’d had some kind of limit that I let someone else self-impose on me because of whatever, wherever these beliefs come from, and we all have them. And part of, I have a group in my challenge in my community right now, my 10X community right now. And, you know, part of what we work on is understanding there’s naysayers in your life and there’s noise and the noise comes from within on, you know, why do you want more? And here’s the thing. I think we always compute more to more work and that’s what we have to change immediately. If you really 10X, it’s not more work. It’s the 2X that’s all the work. And so because we’ve 2X so many times and I think, God, I don’t wanna do that again. That’s horrible, right? We think 10Xing is more of the 2Xing and it’s absolutely not. And so that’s what I love about trying to just change the way you think about stuff and say, what if I set really big impossible goals that forced me out of my comfort zone and just see what happens, right? And I know I’m gonna have voices in my head that tell me I’m crazy for thinking it. I know I’m gonna have people in my life who think I’m crazy for trying it. You know, all those things. But at the end of the day, I bet anybody who’s listening to this could go back a time in their life and they could find a time when they made such a big commitment that it scared them. And when it scared them, they immediately got to work to figure out how to get the credentials to solve it. And they became a whole new person afterwards. But the question is how long and what is complacency and comfort actually costing us? Yeah, you know, we could probably talk about this for a long time, but when we, Erica and I were paying off our debt, we had a lot of people that were, I mean, Erica lost like her whole friend group, honestly. They just didn’t understand what we’re doing and thought it was like they wouldn’t meet her halfway, that kind of stuff. Like we were just not spending money. We were, you know, we had a, what was it? $150 a month in groceries and like $30 a month in eating out. I mean, we were really strict and really disciplined. And to everybody in the outside, it was like, weren’t they crazy? Like, wow, you gotta enjoy your life. Like this is crazy. We paid it off in, I think like three years. But the point I’m making is that we look back at that time as one of the happiest we’ve been as a couple. Yeah, no kidding, no kidding. And it’s like Dave Ramsey saying this, you have to live like no one else. So someday you can live like no one else, right? And the world is, if you’re not growing in the areas that are important, health and wealth and family and spiritually, all those things, the rest of the world is passing you by. There will be a moment when you’re gonna be totally behind the rest of the world, right? Either financially, you know, in your relationships, you know, health-wide, all of those things, they’re big rocks, they’re big glass balls in our life and we have to treat them as such. And sometimes that means sacrifices and the world just doesn’t wanna hear sacrifices right now. You know, they just, I want it all and I want it now. I don’t wanna have to wait for anything. And that’s just a, that’s a big trap, I think. 100%. Linda, do you have a favorite book, a one that you think is fundamental that everybody should read or simply a favorite one now? Gosh, I have so many books. I’m such a book nerd, I love books. I definitely am gonna say 10X is easier and 2X because I think one of the things, especially knowing the real estate world like I do, one of the things that holds agents back from anything, going for anything bigger, like focusing on wealth building or, you know, turning their business, real estate job more into a business where it’s actually, they’ve got leverage and freedom in their life, all is held back because they think it’s more of what they had to do of the grind to get them where they are and it’s just not true. So I would say definitely 10X easier and 2X, who, not how, because it, you know, God only gave us 24 hours, so you gotta figure out different forms of leverage and I think the most powerful is who’s in your life. Of course, Cashflow Quadrant and then I love The Gap and the Gain. I love Dan Sullivan’s, all of his writings and Dr. Benjamin Hardy’s, but The Gap and the Gain is big because we don’t tend to look back at our progress enough to find a rhythm and a system that got us to where we are. We just tend to focus on what we’re not getting accomplished and there’s so much nuggets and values by finding what we actually have accomplished and that’s hard to do. I always say when I did this exercise in Strategic Coach years ago, Jim and I both did it and we both forgot and less than, you had to write what accomplishments had you made in the last 90 days? Neither one of us remembered to put we had just written a best-selling book. Neither one of us. That’s how, it was like, oh, that was so yesterday, right? Well, there’s so much cost to that. One, there was a momentum that we could have ridden with that success, but because we’re so onto the next thing or thinking about what we haven’t accomplished, we’re not even utilizing the accomplishments we’ve already had. So I think entrepreneurs do that a lot. Yeah. And so I love that book also. So there’s actually more than one, but it’s hard to take. Actually, I haven’t read that one, so I need to put that one on my list. Yeah. Linda, where can people find you if they want to follow you on social media? Where are you active? Yeah, everywhere. At McKissickLinda on Instagram, and there in my bio is where the next 10X Challenge we’ll be doing in a couple weeks is gonna be there. And just follow along with anything we have going. And then lindamckissick.com is my website. And just, yeah, pretty much anywhere on the socials. I hang out there. Not a lot because I know what a time suck it is, but I am there some. Sure. Well, Linda, thank you so much for your time today. And this was a great conversation. My pleasure. Thank you for having me. Thanks for listening to the REI Agent. If you enjoyed this episode, hit subscribe to catch new shows every week. Visit REIAgent.com for more content. Until next time, keep building the life you want. All content in the show is not investment advice or mental health therapy. It is intended for entertainment purposes only.