As you may know I have been re-reading the 4 Hour Work Week. I haven’t read it for a while so it has been great to revisit the ideas it presents and to use it in my everyday life.
One of the concepts that stuck out to me in this reading of the book was that a task will grow in it’s complexity compared to the amount of time you give it. For example, if you give yourself a month to complete a paper it will grow in complexity to fill that month, but if you give yourself one day to complete the same paper then you will make sure that you finish it.
I think my property deal has dragged on because of this very issue. Their is no defined timeline for the completion of this project.
One of my goals has always been to become more flexible. For me this means having the ability to touch my toes, which I am very rarely able to do. In fact it was one of my goals all last year, yet I never achieved it. Why? Because I gave the simple task a year to accomplish. I would therefore have all year to achieve this. Which means some days I would stretch a little bit, but most days I would forget.
After reading about this concept in the 4 hour work week I set the goal to be able to touch my toes TODAY. Not in a month, not in a year, in one day. You know what??? I achieved it, I can now successful touch my toes. The short time period pushed me to stretch until I achieved it.
It seems that achieving things is easy if you give them short time frames.
UPDATE – Yesterday I emailed my building inspector and the real estate agent saying I wanted the building inspection done today because I want to sign the contract by the end of the week. I pushed them to do it that day. After three weeks of trying I finally got my building inspection done because I created a small time frame.
When I was looking at joint venturing with my buddy (you know who you are) he wanted to achieve $50-100k in passive income in just 2 years. Prior to that my goal was $40k in 5 years. Lowering the timeframe didn’t make the goal less achievable, in fact it pushed us to make it happen and therefore makes it more achieveable.
So even though that partnership fell through I definately got a lot of good out of the short experience. My goal is now $40-$50k by Jan 1 2012 (about 2 years away). The shorter the timeframe the less complex the task becomes.
Mix this with the ability to outsource time consuming tasks and you can create complete focus and achieve great things.
In my 5 year plan I had planned to buy 3 properties this year. I am in the final stages of my first property and I am about to have my offer accepted on a second property. That is 2 properties and we are still only in Feb. By the end of March I want to have signed on 3 property deals. The short time frame mixed with outsourcing makes everything less complicated and easier to achieve.
No wonder new years resolutions fail. They give you a whole year to achieve something, maybe if new years resolutions had a shorter time frame more people would achieve them.
That is really exciting Ryan! Good luck with your property purchases.