beingcoreybayless

What’s the last book you read? How often do you sit and read a book?

This is an important thing… It is frequently an overlooked part of success…

It is important to continue learning and expanding your horizons; it truly never ends. The rich and successful spend more time reading than they do watching television… and I am not referring to random fiction. They are reading things that expand their minds or help them grow in their field of expertise.

It is also important to know that it can be incredibly helpful to read things written by your peers. Doctors, psychologists, scientists and theologians are constantly reading works written by their peers. Sometimes we need to be reminded that this is not only okay, but the best way to broaden your horizons. Sometimes, in business, people allow their pride or ego get in the way of progress. You never want to take someone’s ideas…that is stealing and wrong and will almost never help you; it nearly always blows up in your face. You do not want to waste time and efforts on something like this. But we all get influence in everything we encounter… it is only natural that influence is all around is… it is just a matter of whether we pick up on it.

The idea that it is all around us, as I have expressed many times before, you already have ideas and direction… it is what makes you, you. But there is always room to grow and learn. The most successful people know better than to stop learning and being open to growth. You must be on that level.

The reality is that you may need to adjust your train of thought or maybe there is that little something that you need to know that you may not have been aware of before.
When I was about 22… I was young and eager to learn more and more and grow myself into a business mogul; at the time, I was really open to so many possibilities and always had an interest in real estate because of a small collective of people I knew. My cousin was a realtor and a friend that I had worked with for some time had been flipping houses and was quite good at it. My uncle ran his own business, but it was simply built by him without any investments as his began as a fluke (that is a story for another day). My Mom and Dad had multiple successful and some not so successful businesses as did my grandma. I had another close friend that at the time seemed a lot like me with ambitions of success and was eagerly seeking new opportunities. He knew some things about business and he and I had began working on some business adventures together. Nearly all did fizzle out… (stories for another time…) you do learn from the ones that fail… sometimes more than the successes. Having been under the influence of so many people with what I thought was the right mentality, I felt I had a pretty good base of business knowledge already from a young age… having said that, I was ready to learn more; I wanted to soak up everything like a sponge.
So, I went with a friend to a seminar on real estate thinking I would learn so much… from this particular experience, my friend and I both walked away feeling as though we had missed something… we were aware that we were not yet moguls nor were we successful business men yet. We were just trying to get started, but we felt like we already knew most of the information that was presented at this seminar. We weren’t sure what we were missing, yet we were excited about the one little nugget of info that neither of us at that time knew… Neither of us knew about a ‘hard-money loan’ nor did we have any idea of how such a thing would work. We walked out of their looking shocked that we felt aware of most of the rest of information but were stoked that we both looked to one another and said nearly at the same time, “what about that hard money loan?… Yeah, that’s pretty tight.”

My friend who had been flipping houses for some time now, never did it that way. He had his own system which he shared with me and seemed much more challenging but for him it worked. Him and his wife had a system. Their system worked for them. You will always find new information even if just a small detail… that detail may not be ideal for you, but you have at least expanded your knowledge and some day it could be what you need. Or today, it could be a game changer. You never really know. You must be open to learning. The fact that what you have going works, doesn’t mean there isn’t more out there… something better or more efficient. You may learn that something you were doing just a s a hobby, could really be your future… Be willing to learn.

Pick up a book.