We live in a society where the expectation is instant results. The belief that our success should be as fast as our food, text messaging, faxes, overnight deliveries, 30 minute photo processing, and one hour glasses. Darren Hardy, the publisher of Success Magazine has a brilliant book called The Compound Effect. You need it; your kids need it as he sets the record straight of what’s involved to be successful.
The book confirms most of my belief system of what’s really involved to create value in the world and a successful business. I love this paragraph in the book: “If you want to succeed we have to recover our grandparents work ethic. It’s time to restore our character, if not for the sake of saving America, at least for your own greater success and achievement. Don’t buy into the genie in the lamp idea. You can sit on your couch waiting to attract checks in your mailbox, rub crystals together, walk on fire, or chart affirmations if you want to. Much of that is hocus-pocus commercialism manipulating you by appealing to your weakness. Real and lasting success requires work – and lot of it.”
That’s the message that needs to be delivered in schools everywhere from 1st grade on. And look, I’ve walked on fire at an Anthony Robbins seminar, I’ve chanted the supposedly secret mantra “Om” when I took transcendental mediation over 20 years ago. It’s all well and good to use a fire walk as a metaphor for what you can accomplish when you don’t put limitations on yourself of what you can or cannot do. Transcendental mediation is a good stress and anxiety reliever but if you want to be successful it takes hard work and plenty of it.
The new NBA basketball sensation, Jeremy Lin, appears to be an overnight success. Forget about it. This guy worked his butt off practicing and training for years. It’s an insult to him to call him an overnight sensation with all the work and sacrifice he’s made over so many years and then one day – one day he gets the opportunity to prove himself.
And isn’t that the real story of success? My belief has been for years that when preparation meets opportunity, success is possible.
Candidly, it’s the story of my own life in many ways. I was fortunate to have my heritage begin with hardworking immigrant grandparents that passed down a work ethic to my parents, which was passed down to me and my siblings. We all did what we could to educate and prepare ourselves to add value to the world so we could support ourselves, our families, and set an example for our children. It’s ironic that my dad, two older brothers, and myself were teachers and coaches.
But there is far more to just be educated as I am sure you know a lot of educated derelicts that have gone nowhere in life. There are two key ingredients that I believe are required to be successful:
1. Courage of your beliefs
2. Ability to take action
And if you really want to be successful, in the words of Anthony Robbins: “You must take massive action.”
We live in an imperfect world. It isn’t fair. It isn’t always just. But one thing is for sure, if you handicap yourself and let the realities of everything that is wrong about the world impact your efforts to do what it takes to succeed then you will never have more then a meager existence, with meager experiences in the only life you have on this planet.
Putting your hope in the next infomercial isn’t going to help you achieve success. Success requires hard laborious work with a lot of self-sacrifice and doesn’t happen overnight. Jim John said it best: “There are no new fundamentals. Truth is not new. It’s old.”

Collapse
Some things are inevitable

The United States real estate market collapse is not over by a long shot.  We are experiencing the most unusual financial times in modern US history.  If you think it can’t get worse…keep reading.

The statistics in this article was derived for accuracy purposes from Real Estate on MSNBC.com in an article written by Michael B. Scuter and Douglas A. McIntyre.

I’ve thrown in my own two cents and my practical approach for assimilating information and then creating an action plan.

The best guestimate is that real estate values will drop significantly in ten specific markets over the next year and I think a few other areas of the country are extremely vulnerable.  This doesn’t mean the entire USA is in the toilet, but if you’re not careful, your investment dollars could be.

With all the information available with a click of a mouse, it is imperative that you interpret the information and look at it through your common sense filter.  Never accept someone else’s opinion as a fact, including mine.  I read and review a lot of information and assimilate all that I see and read and then make decisions to move forward.

More importantly, I am in the streets talking and walking with other landlords, property managers, tenants, wholesalers, attorneys, bankers and others.  By observing different perspectives and actually discussing topics that affect the people around me, am I able to derive m own conclusions.

So, let’s start with the cities that are supposed to drop significantly in value and sum up my personal conclusions at the end of this article.

The following cities were identified by Wall Street to drop ten percent or more by 2012.  Now, we know Wall Street is always right – NOT… but they have some statistics to back this up and I believe there is something to their analysis, especially in the areas with which I am most familiar.

Methodology: They used data from the Fiserv-Case-Shiller Indexes which tracks real estate activity in 380 cities.  They selected those that are forecast to have the largest percent price drop between the first quarter of 2011 through the first quarter of 2012.  Adding unemployment information, household median income and other pieces of information gives a complete picture.

There is a direct correlation to home prices, unemployment and household median income.  The unemployment rate in some of these cities was over 18%.  By the way, that unemployment level is similar to Spain, Greece, Portugal and Italy.  Would you buy houses there in that kind of market?  The inventory in these cities is large and the demand is low because the unemployed cannot be buyers.  The fear of further price drops has paralyzed buyers, which further exacerbates the problems in these cities.

All the efforts of the Federal Government to prop up house values have failed in these markets.