Hi Peter Jones, author, property investor, ex-chartered surveyor.
I’m just doing a short series of videos really comparing 2008 with 2020 and trying to sort of transmuting across the lessons which I learned 12 years which may be helpful lessons to today. Now I’m not saying that today is like 2008 in many ways to probably much worse and in some ways is probably slightly better, we will see how things pan out over the next months and years but there are lessons which I think do directly translate across.
In the last video, we were talking about the very first thing which I did which I shouldn’t have done was that I panicked and I started doing things that I shouldn’t have done and they didn’t serve me. And kind of like the flip side of that is that I stopped doing things which I was doing previously and which I should have still been doing. But let me just take a step back and explain this to you.
Because I really wanted to create my own security and because I wanted to fix the problem, the problem being that I was now insecure, I thought to myself that the only reasonable position I could take as a mature adult, and I use the words loosely because if you know me you’ll know that I’m probably not that mature, there we go won’t go into all my personality flaws, but I thought the only mature thing I could do was just go into my office and to start working hard to make sure that I could fix my problems and to make sure that I could create the security I wanted for myself and my family.
So that’s what I did, I went straight into my office, I was doing things I shouldn’t have been doing, watch the last video and you’ll know what I mean by that, but I started doing it in a way which was not serving me either so I was locking myself in my office doing stuff .
This is the second lesson. The lesson is this: don’t confuse busyness with productivity.
I suddenly thought to myself as a mature adult I should be working all the hours that God gives in order to get us through the situation but the reality is actually the stuff I was working on either wasn’t the right stuff to be doing or there wasn’t really that much stuff to do but I just felt I should be there doing it.
You’ll see this in the corporate environment when people are sitting in the office and they’ve got nothing to do but they feel that they’re justifying their existence by working long hours. So they’re getting in at seven they leave at seven but actually between seven and seven they’re not really doing much and I was kind of doing that in my home office.
It made me feel in some ways that I was being productive although I wasn’t being, in other ways it made me feel very frustrated because I knew really that actually sitting there I wasn’t producing very much and it wasn’t really solving my problems and it wasn’t doing things that I wanted it to do.
That really actually compounded maybe the problems with my mindset that I was having, you could call it mental health, it wasn’t a great point of my life, the reality is though that a lot of the stuff that I was worrying about actually turned out to be not a worry at all and it didn’t really happen. That’s a future video we’re coming to that.
But this is the main lesson which I want to put across in this video. Busyness isn’t the same as productivity. I could have spent the time with Mrs. Jones, I could have spent time with the family, I could have maintained my exercise routine and you know what I would probably have achieved more than I actually ended up achieving, that’s the irony of it, and I would have been better off financially because I wouldn’t have been throwing what money I did have at projects which weren’t going to actually bring any return.
So big lesson is building, on last weeks video, don’t get yourself into this kneejerk reaction and panicking and do think about what you’re actually doing, don’t lose your routine, don’t get sucked into this lie that it’s all down to you to fix it, don’t get sucked into this lie that by spending time doing stuff is going to resolve all your problems. It’s about being strategic.
One of the things which looking back now it is baffling is that I knew all about 80/20 principle. The 80/20 principle says that 80% of our outputs come from 20% of our inputs so probably, and you can look at the 80/20 principle across a whole range of things, but you know in our world probably 80% of our income comes from 20% of our activity and yet I was swapping it around I was concentrating on the sort of like the 80% activity and trying to squeeze a little bit out of that and not concentrating on the 20% of the activity which was going to get me 80% of the income, for example.
Why was I doing that? Well because I suppose if I’m going to be completely transparent and honest I just lost my head a little bit, which is why I want to be able to help if you’re suffering today, if you’re worrying about what to do, if you’re not quite sure what to do, I hope that these videos will help you because we’re all in it together.
So don’t do what I did, take a deep breath, don’t get yourself locked into this trap of thinking that if you work hard you’re going to solve the problems. If you work hard on the right things you can solve your problems but just working hard on its own isn’t the answer.
Until next time, here’s to successful property investing.
Peter
Peter Jones
(ex) Chartered Surveyor, author and property investor
https://thepropertyteacher.co.uk
PS. By the way, I’ve rewritten and updated my best-selling e-book, The Successful Property Investor’s Strategy Workshop, which is an account of how I put together my multi-property portfolio, starting from scratch and with no money of my own, and how you can do the same.
For more details please go to:
https://thepropertyteacher.co.uk/the-successful-property-investors-strategy-workshop
