Life Beyond the Briefs
At Life Beyond the Briefs we help lawyers like you become less busy, make more money, and spend more time doing what they want instead of what they have to. Brian brings you guests from all walks of life are living a life of their own design and are ready to share actionable tips for how you can begin to live your own dream life.
Life Beyond the Briefs
Creating Habits, Not Just Goals: The Key to Sustainable Success | Aaron West
Wondering if real wealth is more than just a fat paycheck? In this episode of Life Beyond the Briefs, we’re shaking things up with Aaron West, who made the leap from the fast-paced jewelry industry to building a thriving real estate empire—even in tough markets.
Aaron shares his incredible journey of transformation, revealing how he shifted from being a "hunter" to a "gardener," cultivating a business that flourishes independently. Discover the power of persistence, genuine relationships, and the systems that allowed him to guide a team of eight agents and six support staff.
Want to balance success with sustainability? Aaron’s insights on creating a brand rooted in core values like excellence and community service will redefine your relationship with money and set you on the path to true financial freedom. Learn how to develop a stewardship mindset that turns financial stability into disciplined wealth-building through smart saving and investing.
Plus, Aaron dives into mastering focus and setting ambitious goals across all areas of life. With actionable strategies for habit formation and effective goal-setting, he’ll help you transform your dreams into reality.
Ready to design a life that’s not just about being rich, but truly wealthy? Connect with Aaron on Instagram at @theaaron.west for more transformative content. Hit play now and start your journey toward sustainable success!
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Brian Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury lawyer in Fairfax, Virginia. He is passionate about living a life of his own design and looking for answers to solutions outside of the legal field. This podcast is his effort to share that passion with others.
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There's a difference between being rich and being wealthy. Rich is a state of account, wealth is a state of mind, and so I really love focusing on building wealth, because you can be rich and have a horrible life, and I want to be. Well, now I want to be rich too, but I want to have wealth because I want to build a world that is an amazing world, and so I think the number one is just making the decision that you want to build wealth the mastermind behind the West experience.
Speaker 3:If you're a lawyer feeling stuck in the grind of billable hours, this episode is for you. We're talking about the real difference between being rich and being wealthy. Spoiler alert it's all in your mindset. Aaron shares his journey from hustling hard to mastering the art of sustainable success. You'll learn why focusing on one thing until you achieve mastery can unlock creativity and endless opportunities. Plus, we'll tackle the biggest mistake in goal setting chasing results instead of actionable steps. If you're ready to break free from autopilot and start living a life of your own design, buckle up. Let's get into it with Aaron West and discover how to create lasting habits that lead to real success.
Speaker 2:Hey guys, welcome back to the show. Today I have a guest for you, special guest, mr Aaron West. Aaron is the owner of the West Experience Real Estate Group out in California. He's a triathlete and Ironman and he's a goal setting and achievement savant, which is what we're going to dive into today, aaron. Welcome to the show, my friend.
Speaker 1:Hey, thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 2:I would love to start with some context on your backstory, how you got into real estate and what your practice looks like now.
Speaker 1:I got into real estate in 2005. My previous career. I was in the jewelry industry for about 10 years and experienced a lot of success. I did some national training for some companies and had really just kind of capped out my potential in that industry with the company that I was with and in all of my wisdom in 2005, decided that real estate was the way to go, and so got into real estate in 2005, had two easy sales and then the market started to turn, so really really just built my business through the great recession.
Speaker 1:I was a little bit different than a lot of agents in that I didn't do the bank on homes. A lot of the professionals that I'm friends with still to this day decided to go the bank route, and I really thought about it a lot and then realized that for the majority of them, they had one client, and that was the banks, and I was building my business for the long term, so I made the decision to really just slog it out in the trenches and build my business the old fashioned way. With real buyers was mostly what it was at that time, and then, as the market started to shift and rebound, those people became sellers. I started a team in 2017. So right now I have a team of eight real estate agents and six admin. I got out of production a couple of years ago, so now I truly am just a business owner whose business happens to be real estate.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I want to ask you about that period in 2005,. Many people would have looked at that early success and then the turn of the market and then gone back to what they did before. And so I'm curious did you consider returning back to the jewelry business or no?
Speaker 1:You know, I never. I never did. I knew that the skills that I had accumulated over the years and acquired and honed over the years would equal a very successful career in real estate.
Speaker 1:And once I made the jump I was all in and there was no other option but success. And so I just knuckled down and I don't think I ever thought about quitting once, because it was just a matter of I knew that if I did the right thing for long enough, that I would be rewarded for it. And it was tough. I mean the first six months in real estate. I was working 60, 70 hours a week and I sold two houses in my first six months. So it was by no means this rising shooting star story. It was just slog it out, get the skills and build the relationships and reputation.
Speaker 2:What does your practice look like now, with your, your eight agents and your six admin and you in the owner's box, in terms of your hourly commitment and your roles on a week-to-week, day-to-day basis?
Speaker 1:You know it actually changes. So the last year and a half I've really reengaged with the team because it is one of the toughest markets real estate markets that has happened since the early 80s. I was just having a conversation with my broker who you know we've got 800 agents and I was asking him about the market and he was talking about the struggles that they were experiencing as a brokerage and he said, aaron, it hasn't been this hard since 81, when rates went to 18.5%. He said the Great Recession was horrible for everybody. It was horrible for real estate, but there was still a ton of activity that was happening. And with the market that we're experiencing right now, the Fed has just put such a lid and compressed everything, but the activity just isn't there. So even if you are working really hard, it's really hard to be successful.
Speaker 1:So I've really done a deep dive back into my team and been working diligently with them to help them be successful through this market.
Speaker 2:And let me ask you about that being out of production. Now, I imagine there was a time where the people who are currently in your business, currently your employees, were working alongside you and then they've watched you elevate yourself into an owner's box and out of the doing of the work and into this eight to 15 hour a week role. And so how have you managed in your own mind and in the messaging to the team that this really is what's best for everybody is to have Aaron up here working on the big picture things and to have him out of the buying and the selling and the cultivating of any of the business?
Speaker 1:It's actually pretty easy because, you know, when I left, I was still about 60% of the business and I knew that for the business to continue to grow, I was the biggest stop gap to the growth of my business. Every single time I stepped away from the business and stepped out of a role, the business actually grew and someone grew into a leadership position in that role, and so I finally decided that I was no longer going to compete with them, because every time I took a listing, or every time I took a buyer and helped the buyer, I was actually competing with my own agents, and so I told them I no longer want to compete with you. I want to give you the skills to help you be successful in whatever market that we're in. And that's really the story of the success of our team is that I have been through a bunch of really tough markets. So in a market like this, where 99% of the agents really have no idea what to do, I do, and so coming back in, or actually just I never stopped pouring into them and figuring out what we need to do to help them achieve the goals that they want to achieve, and then, just like any other business, the business makes a profit or the business gets a piece of the people who are in the business, but we've lost almost nobody.
Speaker 1:I have agents that have been with me for seven years a couple with seven years and five years now who have experienced a ton of success and continue to see value. Ben Kinney said it once, he said, who is a real estate agent who has a huge team and a huge business. He said my job is to build a world that is so big that the people in my world can have the world that they inside of my world. And if I can't do that, then they're going to leave and they really should leave, and it's my fault for not being able to cast that vision and give them the opportunity to have the success that they want to have in my world. And so that has been like a real integral part of me building my business is understanding that I have to grow, the business has to grow and I have to know what the people in the business want for, what success means to them, so that I can help them achieve that inside my world.
Speaker 2:And I think that's such a limiting belief for many law firm owners and young partners at firms is looking around and thinking that you taking a step back and working on the business instead of in the business is taking away in some way from other people on the team.
Speaker 2:And I know, because I've been a couple of lawyer masterminds with guys and this is the biggest barrier to scale is recognizing that there's somebody else who's out there in the world who's better at doing the job than you are.
Speaker 2:And lawyers we talked about before we got on about lawyers are bad with money Lawyers. We also have enormous egos and so we think that we can do intake the best and we can write briefs the best and we can cross-examine people the best, but there's always somebody who's slightly better than you or way better than you at everything, and so finding a way to have to elevate their skills and to move them into a role that makes them happy is really the way to continue to grow your business and to remove yourself, like you said, as the bottleneck. So we're sitting right now at about 15 employees right in the same spot that you are, and I find myself fighting with this like, no, I've got to stop doing that. I've got to stop being the one who's in the production and that's the only way. Like either we're going to stay here forever or, if I get out, we can continue to scale. So did you have any coaching or or mindset blocks around removing yourself from the business, or was it really truly natural for you?
Speaker 1:Oh no, it was not natural. I, I there were. There've been a couple of of like lifealtering periods in my life and one of them was when I changed my relationship with money and had to relearn a healthy relationship with money. And then the other was going from the hunter to the gardener, and there are a lot of similarities in law and real estate in that it is an ego-driven business and you are the person who's at the front and everybody wants to see you and everybody wants to work with you.
Speaker 1:But the reality is that you're really only good at a couple of things and everything else someone else should be doing for you. And if you really want your business to grow, you intentionally find people who are as good or better than you at those couple of things and then you step away and you become the gardener of your business and you start helping people grow. But there was a period in just full disclosure of about six months when I stepped out of the business where I was like what the freak am I doing? You know what do I do? How do I make this real work? How do I fill my time that I had spent with so much busy work doing stuff? And you know, I know, lawyers are hourly. They bill everything on the hourly. So when they step out of a role and all of a sudden there's hours to fill, they're like oh, what do I do with these hours? I'm not making money because I'm not billing right now.
Speaker 1:But if you find people who are good in their niche of whatever it is that you are filling that hole for and you're looking long-term I think that was one of the most important things for me was. I was like what am I building? What do I want to build? And I want to build a business. Or I wanted to build a business and I knew that I could never sell my business and I could never have a business that truly gave me the financial and time freedom that I wanted, if I was the person that everybody went to for everything and that everybody saw.
Speaker 1:Now I'm still a figurehead for my business, I still do all the marketing and advertising and all that kind of stuff, but I've put systems in place to really handle everything, and I think that's something that a lot of people that are trying to and since we're talking to lawyers, I think that that's one of the things that people don't understand is the importance of systems and how systems can take you out of production really, really easy. Because I think that the mindset that we have and the roadblock that we have is that no one can do it like I can do it. But the reality is is that the systems are there. Everybody can do it like you could do it. But the reality is is that the systems are there. Everybody can do it Like you could do it if you just train them the way that they, that you want them to be trained. So that was, that was the transition to get out of production, was it was. It was actually really, really difficult for me to go from that hunter to gardener mindset.
Speaker 2:Let me ask you about the sale ability, because you know you've done the same thing that many lawyers do, which is put their name on the front of the business. And then the problem that I think many lawyers have is like what do I have, especially in my practice? I have an auto accident practice, single injury event kind of practice, much like the buying and selling of houses. I think what do I have that's valuable to somebody else three or four or five years from now, when my current pipeline of cases is done, and so can you talk about some of the systems and processes that you built in your business that are unique to the West experience, that somebody would be interested in buying from you at some point in the future. Well, first it's not.
Speaker 1:Aaron West experience, it's the West experience. So it could be Jim West, bobby West, joe West, whatever. Nobody knows, it's just the West experience. It's the West experience. So it could be Jim West, bobby West, joe West, whatever. Nobody knows, it's just the West experience. And I've intentionally removed myself from all of the things that matter, so the revenue that comes in is no longer they're not calling Aaron West, they're calling the West experience, because we've built a brand.
Speaker 1:Our core values are for our team and for our businesses Win every day, intentionally. Excellence in everything we do, serve and give back, because charity is really important to us. And torch held high, which means we're a beacon to the community. And people know who we are and what we do. And so we live by those four core tenets and then put the systems in place to where anybody can plug in and be successful within our business. We've stayed small intentionally, but I could have 25 agents and all of them would be successful because they're all out there doing the lead generation. They're the ones that are doing it. The West experience is just the brand that all of them are working under to help grow.
Speaker 1:So at some point, if I ever do decide to sell, aaron West will have nothing to do with the success of the business. It will be a business that has the ability to stand on its own, and I think that's an opportunity for a lot of lawyers. One of my friends said once he said I want to be the rich dentist and I was like well, what are you talking about? The premise of the rich dentist is the guy that you go to for 20 years to get your teeth fixed and then all of a sudden you walk in one day and there's a new guy standing there and there was no announcement, there was no anything. There was just a new guy there and you open your mouth and he does a really good job and you keep going to him forever, because dentists build these businesses where they have a ton of clients and then they just sell it and they just disappear and they lead these amazing lives because they don't have an ego. It's not a dentist. Doesn't walk in and go.
Speaker 1:I'm the greatest dentist in the face of the planet and you only need to work with me they build a business and I think for law firms and real estate and there's other industries as well is when I heard that that resonated with me, that I want to be the rich real estate agent where I just sell my business at some point or walk away and sell it to my team or give it to someone and it continues to grow and I get paid for doing that.
Speaker 2:So I think that comment on the rich dentist and then the rich real estate agent is a good transition to your change in relationship with money.
Speaker 1:So tell me about that your change in relationship with money. So tell me about that. I think we all have a jacked up relationship with money. The majority of us all have, at some level, a fear-based relationship with money and it is a relationship so most people say I want to be a, and because savers have money in the bank. But a saver's relationship with money is so fear-based that once that money goes into a savings account, you could tell them they could double their money with 0% chance of loss, and it will not come out of that savings account because to them, money is security. So once it goes and they take ownership of that money, they will not part with it for anything. I have a client right now that sold a big piece of land to a school 18 years ago and she got a million dollars for this piece of land and she has a million dollars in that bank account right now 18 years ago.
Speaker 1:that's now probably worth five or 600,000 compared to what it was 18 years ago. And even if she'd put it in just a regular savings account or anything, it would be two, two and a half million dollars right now. So that's the saver side of things. I was a spender. Spenders are afraid of having money. They're much more comfortable with their backs against the wall. They're much more comfortable with feeling like, okay, I got to get up and grind. I got to get up and grind and the stability that money gives them is uncomfortable. So I had made a great living, I mean.
Speaker 1:But I was just as broke in my previous career in jewelry, when I was making $10,000 a year when I started, as I was when I was making $135,000 a year when I left. And it wasn't because I was extravagant, it was just there's always a place for money to go. You can. You can Starbucks yourself to death and spend any amount of money that you have and really have nothing to show for it. And and my relationship changed when I went and talked to one of my mentors you know those like Jim Rohn kind of mentors that you see from afar, they know who you are. But and I walked up to him and I said, brian, I don't understand why I can't keep money. This is literally the question that I asked him. I know how to make money, but I can't keep it for anything.
Speaker 1:And I think our conversation probably lasted three or four minutes, but he asked me this question. He said what's your dad's relationship with money? And I really, for the first time in my life, I felt like I got punched in the gut and I was probably 38, 39 years old. I realized that I was reliving my dad's financial life. We rented our whole lives. I'm the oldest of six kids. My dad made good money, but with six kids, there's always a dental appointment or a doctor's appointment or shoes or something that needs to be done. So we were constantly with our back against the wall.
Speaker 1:And I realized that for me to build wealth, I had to start changing my relationship with money, and so it started really simply, and I'll do this too. So this is an easy way for you, as a listener, to picture what your relationship with money is is close your eyes for just a second and let's do this first. Let's say you win a million dollars. What are you going to do with that million dollars? Right, everybody says, well, I'll invest it. And that's bull crap, because you're going to do whatever you've always done with it. If you're a spender, you're going to go spend it. You're going to buy a boat, a house, all that kind of stuff. If you're a saver, you're going to put it into a savings account. And that's the reason that 95% of people who win the lottery are back in the same financial position that they were five years before, five years later, like dead even. It's because they'd never changed their relationship with money. Now I want you to close your eyes and I want you to picture your best friend, and I want you to imagine that your best friend comes to you and he or she says Brian, I need to talk to you. I just found out that I have stage four. I'm going to die in the next couple of months and I have a $1 million life insurance policy that I want you to take care of for my three-year-old little girl and when she turns 18, I want you to be able to give her whatever you've built out of that to her when she's 18. So let me ask this question Would you treat that money differently than you would, the million dollars that you won in the lottery? And almost I would say that 99% of you would say yes, I would, because I have stewardship of that money. I don't have ownership of that money, I have stewardship of that money. So to have a healthy relationship with money, you have to have both. You have ownership of the money that is yours to spend or save or whatever it is you do, but then a portion of your money. You have to create a stewardship relationship of it.
Speaker 1:And most people say, well, I put money into the stock account, so my stocks are my stewardship money, and I would challenge them that they have no control over what that money does or what they do with that money. And I would challenge them that they have no control over what that money does or what they do with that money. They're abdicating their control, so they don't have a stewardship relationship with that money. They're abdicating and giving it to someone else or giving it to the market and they just forget about it and let it go. To truly create a stewardship of your money, you need to be able to hold on to it and then make a decision on what to do with it and invest in it.
Speaker 1:So I created I called it my, not my money account and literally it was a savings account and you know how you go in your bank account and you put taxes or I named it not my money and I made the commitment to myself because for most people, if you're spenders, a savings account is really just an emergency account. It's like, oh, I need new tires, I'm going to go grab it out of my savings account because there's money there. So I made the commitment that I wouldn't spend a dollar of that money and I wouldn't make my house payment. It would have to be that bad before I went and touched that money, because that wasn't my money. That was the money for Aaron, who I had the potential to be, and the Aaron who I wanted to be.
Speaker 1:And as that started to grow and I started to get momentum. With that I would get an itch and then I would go buy an asset and I would go buy a house, or I would go buy something that was an asset that would help me continue to build wealth, and then I just washed, rinsed, repeated. I still have a not my money account to this day that I put money into because I want to make sure that that muscle that I've created continues to stay exercised.
Speaker 2:And you were beginning to describe the spenders and the savers, I was thinking in the back of my mind like I'm both.
Speaker 2:And then you described the not my money account, which is exactly what I've been doing. So I'm a saver in the way that I want to have this pot of money over here, that's safe. But I'm also a spender in that at the end of every month, every pay period, I want to have all of the money that I earned out of that account and over somewhere else, right, so that I'm constantly living within my means to two weeks to two weeks, month to month distribution to distribution, whatever it is. And I have been fearful over the last I don't know 15 years, ever since I got out of law school, of making that transition from being a salaried employee even though I'm a partner and an owner of a law firm, like treating myself as a salaried employee but also feeling like it's okay to spend money sometimes. And, as you said, the thing about your parents, and both my parents. This is my parents' favorite podcast, if you didn't know, so they're going to hear this.
Speaker 2:But I have a mental image in my mind of exactly why my relationship with money is what it is right. So thinking about how your parents treated money is really really guiding to how you treat money. And so the question that I have for you on the stewardship sort of not being in the stock market and being in assets instead, is that for me growing up was all Dave Ramsey and millionaire next door and dollar cost average into the stock market and that to me is safety and being around go abundance and guys like you and hearing assets and nobody owns you know, quote paper, paper assets. Everybody owns hard assets. My next dollar an hour is not well spent on a duplex or a single family home and the renting and the management of that, and so my approach to that has been to invest in syndications and park my money with somebody else. Do you view that as the same thing as putting my money in the stock market, where I have limited control over it, or is that for some reason different in your mind?
Speaker 1:You know, I think that the answer to that question is yes. It depends on how you look at it. If it's an intelligent decision that you say this is a person who's buying a multifamily property, they are a proven racehorse. That is going to be a fiduciary of my money and I'm okay with advocating that because my goal and my focus is on my practice. Right, I'm going to continue building my practice. That's my inch wide and mile deep. I have this excess money. I don't have the time to go out and create a new mastery and learn a new field, so I'm going to follow in somebody's wake who I know and trust or have done my due diligence on. That's going to allow me to stay in my lane and still continue to build wealth, and I, on that's going to allow me to stay in my lane and still continue to build wealth. And I think that's one of the things that people don't necessarily understand is the path to wealth is going an inch wide and a mile deep and staying with that. If you're a lawyer, you should freaking stay a lawyer for as long as you can continue to build wealth and then you diversify that money or you put yourself in a group like abundance, where you have all of these different perspectives and different opportunities and different people. For you to put that money into places that are not my money, but they're not taking them, they're not distracting you.
Speaker 1:I'm in real estate, so I come across real estate, that is, I've never met a piece of real estate that I don't like. So for me, it's easy for me to go into real estate, but it's also just as easy as finding an agent or finding a trusted professional that you can go. Okay, I don't have the time to do a lot for this, you bring me the deal and I'll buy a piece of real estate. It just has to make business sense with whatever my parameters are and you can start doing things like that. You just have to find the right partners I guess is the right word and do your due diligence and put yourself in a place where you're not having just your bubble.
Speaker 1:We all live in this little bubble and for a lot of us, that's the only bubble we know or we're accustomed to. If you're a lawyer and all you do is talk to other lawyers, or if you're a doctor and all you do is talk to other doctors, they all have the same jacked up fears and experiences and as soon as you step out of that world, I've got a good friend who's a doc. Not a doctor, he's a CEO. He just retired last about two months ago from it's a three and a half billion hospital organization. There's 26 hospitals. He was the CEO of it. His salary is in the multimillion dollars and he still pays 50 percent in taxes because he's never been exposed to any other opportunity or anybody to, where he knows that there's any difference. There's any difference. So that would be my encouragement is just start, you know, looking in different places and surrounding yourself with other people that are going to give you a better or different perspective, so that you can make a more educated decision.
Speaker 2:Well, I love that advice and all of my best ideas in the last year, two, three years have come from people who are not lawyers, because I spent the first decade of my career around entirely lawyers and and it gets to be a point where you've heard all of the ideas right and everybody is handling this certain type of cases this way and so expanding your circle of who's influencing you and hearing from CEOs of other companies about how they handle HR issues or new client acquisition or whatever else, is the way to continue to grow.
Speaker 2:The warning that I would give to anybody who goes and does that you're gonna spend the first six months to a year with shiny objects in room because you're gonna hear about all the cool things that everybody else is doing and you're gonna wanna go and do it. So in the law, that looks like well, I've got this one really well-developed practice area, but I could learn how to do this other type of cases or I could do. I could learn how to do this other type of cases or I could find somebody to come in and do this type of case. But in real estate it's like and with abundance my experience has been that guy's buying mobile home parks. That guy's buying triple net leases.
Speaker 2:I could do all like I'm as smart as every one of these guys, I could do all of that Stracts you from where I'm really good at earning money, which is in the law, and so there is that learning curve of like there's all this opportunity out here, but I need to stay, like you said, an inch wide and a mile deep and focus on what I'm good at. And so I want to pivot there and ask you you host the 728 show, Ingo Bunnins, in which you interview guys who have gone from seven-figure net worths to eight-figure net worths, and I want to ask you what the common theme or themes you see in guys who have done that outside of inch wide. Wide and mild, it's inch wide and mild deep.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's it. I mean, really, that was like the perfect transition to the 728 show, because that is probably the most common thing that we see is that they stay focused on one thing until they have mastery of it, and with mastery comes creativity and with creativity becomes opportunity. And then from that opportunity they now have the ability to go out and find mastery in other areas. But until they've achieved that mastery in that one thing that they're doing on, be it law, be it real estate, be it multifamily mobile home units, storage units, whatever it is every single guy that we've talked to it is a hockey stick curve. If you've ever read the book the Compound Effect by Darren Hardy, and he shows that curve of just little differences, darren Hardy, and he shows that curve of just little, little differences and then all of a sudden, they start to compound on each other. That is how people build massive wealth is it's an inch wide, and almost every single one of them has had this year or two year period where they got distracted and and in hindsight they look back and they're like man, if I had just stayed focused, I'd be two years ahead, and two years ahead right now, two years ahead of to get to the momentum of money, and then I'd have two years of momentum of money. So I think that that's one of the actions. We're actually writing a book about it right now, about that that seven to eight and what the seven levels of wealth are, you know. And number one, and the first one, is making the decision to build wealth. And there's a difference too and I just want to just as an aside there's a difference between being rich and being wealthy. Rich is a state of account, wealth is a state of mind, and so I really love focusing on building wealth, because you can be rich and have a horrible life, and I want to be well now. I want to be rich too, but but I want to have wealth because I want to build a world that is, that is an amazing world, and, and so I think the number one is just just making the decision that you want to to build wealth. Another one is finding a board of directors, having those people that have different perspectives so that when you have a problem, one of them says one thing to you and you're like, and a light bulb goes off and you go. I never would have thought about that. So having a board of directors is really important when things go wrong.
Speaker 1:Almost every single one of these guys that has built massive wealth has had a significant period in their life where something went sideways for them, and every single one of them did the right thing. One guy drove up to Canada to meet with a banker that he owed a quarter of a million dollars to, to sit down with him face to face and say here's what's going on, here's where I'm at, and then he figured out how to pay the guy back. Another guy had two investors that bought stuff and invested in him, and he didn't take a dime for like eight months to make sure they got paid back. And every single time, those circumstances of doing the right thing down the road rewarded them from the same people because they showed who they were. And then those people said oh, you've got another opportunity. I know you're going to do the right thing.
Speaker 1:And not only do I know, I'm telling all of my friends that you're going to do the right thing as well. And then they've been rewarded for it as well. And then, yeah, there's so many similarities of it. A lot of them have amazing spouses because they're building wealth, not riches. So they understand that having a spouse that's on the same journey as you are, and that you have conversations about your business and you have conversations about money and where you want to go and all of that to where they're there to support you and you support them is something that has been a commonality between a lot of these guys as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that having a spouse who supports your goals and who you can talk to about your goals is such a cheat code, and I think many of us. My wife and I met when I was 24. And so just kind of got lucky early in the journey because I had no idea where I was going I wasn't talking about any of this stuff 15 years ago and I just got lucky that I have somebody who supports me on the journey. What is your system or your weekly schedule look like for discussing these things with your wife? How do you make sure you're staying on the same page?
Speaker 1:You know it started with the five love languages book, my wife's love language, quality time and acts of service. And most of us, if you guys, if any of you, have read the book. If you haven't, you really should. But most of us fall into the trap of showing our love language to our spouse the way that we want it received. So I would walk by, slap my wife on the butt and then just walk through the kitchen and she was like you are a total prick.
Speaker 2:My wife? Yeah, she's going listen up dick.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But once she understood that my love language was physical touch, literally last two days ago, my wife said you don't love me anymore and I was like what are you talking about? She said you haven't slapped me on the ass in two days. I walked over and I was like, well, let me take care of that right now.
Speaker 1:And so you know, once we understood that and I started having coffee with my wife for 15 minutes every morning. We still have coffee 15 minutes every morning. It's our quiet time. She tells me what's going on in her day, I listen and I don't try and fix, and we just have created this. We're going in the same direction. So we do a date night every single week. My goal, when I write down my goals, is 52 date nights with my wife. It's three relationships books, books with my wife and one marriage retreat with my wife. That's something that we do every single year. We go on vacation. Even since the kids were little, like little little. We would do weekends and overnights without the kids. Because someone asked me once how long do you plan on being married to your wife? And I said forever. And then he said well, how long are you going to have your kids?
Speaker 1:Like 20 years, maybe at the most. He said then why would you ever put your kids before you put your wife? And so that's been kind of a mantra of mine is husband, father, business owner is the order in which my priorities are in my life, because my kids are now 18 and 20 and they're getting ready to leave the house and my wife and I have the strongest relationship that we've ever had. And, coming from the jewelry industry, it was amazing how many people I saw that looked like they were having amazing lives and as soon as their kids graduated and moved out, they looked at each other and they said I don't know, you and the other one said I don't know you either, and then they ended up getting divorced because they were just living parallel lives.
Speaker 1:So every single time we go on a date night, every single time we go on vacation we're getting ready to leave next week on a vacation. That's pretty epic. As soon as we either get in the plane or at some point in the car, one of us will go, reach over to the other one, shake the hand and say hi, I'm Aaron, and then she'll go hi, I'm Jennifer. And it's like we're reintroducing ourselves where it's just the two of us instead of the chaos of the family life that sucks us in.
Speaker 2:I love that and I will pivot and we will get to the goal setting that I promised everybody at the beginning of this episode.
Speaker 2:But I just want to hit like. That point to me has been the most surprising and a good way thing about being in GoBundance is that you come for passive income epic adventure, making a lot of money for real estate. You think you're going to get all these tactical things and you do get some tactical things, but when we were in Tahoe in January, if we didn't spend 50, 60% of the time talking about relationship with your spouse and relationship with your kids and as as men, as professional men, there's not another room that I've been in where people spend 50% of their time and they're you know. Success leaves clues, right. And so you have all of these multimillionaire men who spend 50% of their time not talking about how do I buy the next deal, who has the best you know interest rates, but talking about how do I be a better husband, be a better father and show up better for my spouse. So just want to hit on that and I don't know if you have any thoughts to offer on that.
Speaker 1:You know, nothing has changed my life more. I've been in GoB. There are very, very few places that men can go where they can talk about money and share their successes One of my good friends who just got into GoBundance he's now a good friend Him and I were talking and I asked everybody what's your net worth? You know how much you make? Because I have no relationship with money, it's just information at this point and he was like, yeah, I had this exit and so I've been super excited about it. And I said, well, mark, what was your exit? How much was it? And he was quiet for a second and he said $14 million. And I was like, dude, that is so amazing, that is so awesome. He goes, aaron, that was four months ago and I get emotional just thinking about how sad this world is. He goes.
Speaker 1:You're the first person I've told this, and we live in a world where people think that as soon as you celebrate a success, you know for guys it's like whipping up, whipping it out of your pants and you're throwing it on the table and going look at what I just did.
Speaker 1:But the reality is is that we all work really hard and GoBundance has been and is, and will always be a place where you can celebrate your successes, talk about your losses and have a group of people around you who are confident enough in themselves and who are building something for their own world and are trying to win their own game, that they're able to pour into you to help you be successful.
Speaker 1:Because they understand that this, you know, go abundance comes from the word abundant. They understand that if they live a life of abundance and they share their experiences with you, at some point someone else is going to pour themselves back into me. If I'm sharing with you and I tell you something that is an epiphany, at some point the same thing is going to happen to me. So why not be abundant and share everything? I mean? You asked me a question about my finances, my wealth, my wife, my kids, where I invest, how much. I'll tell you any of those things at all, because it's a safe place for us to have that conversation and I know that you're just gathering information and you're looking for a way to pour yourself into me and and add value to my life.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's really well said. Let's get to the goal setting. Let's get to what I promised everybody at the outset. So you are, I think, really really good at this, and I watched you again in Tahoe go through Matt Aitchison's one sheet with him, and you said a couple of things that stuck out to me. One of them was that every year, as you sit down to plan your goals, you ought to have at least one thing on your your prospectus and your one sheet if you're a good one, and so on on your new year's resolutions or whatever it is. That scares the shit out of you, and so I'm curious for you what that one thing is in 2023.
Speaker 1:You know it's writing three poems. Crazy to say that out loud, but I said I would be transparent. So I was teaching a class on goals and someone put up their right three poems and I it. Just you know, anytime you look at something in it and it causes a reaction to you, you need to dive a little bit deeper into that. And I'm I'm very pragmatic and and I was like you know what? The last poem I wrote was in the third grade and I can still quote it. It was more along the lines of a limerick than it was a poem. So it's either three or five.
Speaker 1:I'll have to look at my goals and I think it's five poems and two of them have to be about my wife that I give to my wife. So that truly just scares the crap out of me, because that's a whole muscle that I've never exercised.
Speaker 2:The other thing that I heard you say was that you ought to have goals that are targeted at the portions of your life that aren't doing so well, and so that that seems to me like right in line with that muscle, you have an exercise as well.
Speaker 2:So we talk about well, if I'm doing really well financially, but not so much physically or not so much in my relationship with my wife, but I don't have any goals that are aimed at solving those two problems that I've made a mistake in my goal setting. So it's really easy to look at the financial one and go, okay, I want to 2X what's really good in my life. But what strategies would you have for people that are looking at improving the parts of their life that are not doing so well and what, and what? I'll touch on that just with me is like I find myself when I'm hitting those points where, like I just don't want to go and touch the stuff that I'm not doing well on Right. I'd rather leave it alone and put it in a closet and go focus on the accelerating the stuff that's already B plus and above. So how would you approach that?
Speaker 1:So two things one, that's where outside accountability comes into play, and having someone to share your goals with, I think is really important, because they can poke holes. You know me going over the goals with Matty. I poked holes in his world and he's a really, really successful person. I think that one of the reasons that people don't focus on the areas where they have weakness is because they make probably what I think is the biggest mistake when it comes to goal writing, and that's writing results. Goals, it's be a better father, run a marathon, buy three houses those are all the results that you hope to achieve from actually doing the activities, which are the goals that help you achieve that. So the goal isn't to run a marathon. That's the result. The goal isn't't to run a marathon. That's the result. The goal isn't to be a better father, that's a result.
Speaker 1:The tangible, trackable activities that you can do are the goals. Is it, if I want to be a better father, am I doing 48 family meetings every year, taking my kids on a date every single quarter? Is it, you know, having one-on-one conversations with my kids once a week where it's just him and I, or them and I? Is it reading a family book once a quarter and by doing those things then you become a better father. It's like the result that I want is to stay married and be a better husband.
Speaker 1:I talked about what my goals are, and that's to read three books with my wife, one marriage retreat, 52 date nights with my wife, and then we have four vacations where it's just us. So those are the actual goals, and so those are things that I can actually track, and I think that's probably one of the mistakes that people make is, when they write these goals, they don't assign a number to them. Another one that I hear that is a mistake is people say weekly date night with my wife and that's their goal, january 1. The problem with the way that that's written is that the first time you miss a weekly date night with your wife, you have failed your yearly goal, whereas if you say 52 date nights with my wife and you miss one, you can do two the next week or three the next week if you miss two weeks in a row and still achieve your goal of a date night a week with my wife.
Speaker 1:You know, read Bible daily is another one. I hear that from people all the time that have a spiritual side to them, and the reality is that priests don't read the Bible daily, so it's not a realistic goal for you to write that down. You need to write 325 times of reading the Bible and then you're able to track that. I have a daily tracker, that I have a list of 14 things that I try and knock out every single day, and I know that by doing those things, the results that I'm trying to achieve will happen.
Speaker 2:And is it the same 14 things every day, or are you knocking out 14 out of 20 things on the habit tracker every day?
Speaker 1:No, my habit tracker has 14 things. My goal is 85% on my on as a month on those, but then I also track how I'm doing individually as well. Like, the thing that killed me last month is I want to do a sauna and I meditate in the sauna. So I was only at about 60% for my saunas and so I was only 60% for my meditations, and that changed my whole number for the month on how proactive I was. I think I ended up at 83% and it was because I didn't do those two things. So this month I'm very intentional about making sure that those two things get done so that I can get to that 85% for those 14 things that are important to me. And every month it changes too. When for a while it was getting eight hours of sleep, well, I do that every night now. So that has fallen off of the goal tracker and I've added something to the goal tracker.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So let me ask you that, because that was a question that I had coming into 2023. So 2022, I would count as the best personal and professional year of my life. And then, as I sat down to write my 2023 goals, there were not a lot of things that I felt like I wanted to do a whole lot better on. That didn't just feel like resetting the milestone at 110% or 125%. So how do you approach that? When you've had an area where you've been successful, like sleep, and the goal would not be to get nine hours of sleep next month or to hit 100% again, what happens with that on your tracker? Does that just fall off, or do you amend that, or how do you think about that?
Speaker 1:The purpose of a goal is to create a habit. That's the purpose of a goal is to create a habit. Once you've created that habit, you find another habit that you're trying to create. So one of the things that I do is you know, I love the atomic habits from James Clear and he talks about habits stacking in there. So whenever anybody says they want to start doing something, I say what is something you do every single day? What do you do? The first thing? When you get up in the morning and they say, well, I have my coffee, and they're saying they want to journal, let's say I say, well, what would it look like if, before you're allowed to have your coffee, you have to journal and you just stack that habit on top of each other until that becomes a habit and you track journaling so that you say, okay, I actually was. And I would challenge you. I would challenge you that unless you were able to say I hit these numbers, you really.
Speaker 1:You achieve success by accident. You achieve success by hard work and the market and but not necessarily creating habits and intentionality. So if you actually went back and said I want to do X 325 times, you may be fit, but you may be fit working out 150 days a year, you may be fit working out every other day and you go, man, I look really good. But if that's something that's really important to you and you say, okay, I'm going to actually track that I want to work out 250 times this year. And then all of a sudden you realize, well, shoot, I've only been working out two days a week. Now you're creating that intentionality where it's not going to 110%. You're actually just achieving what you know you have the potential to achieve, whereas before it was just kind of an accident.
Speaker 2:So I mean, it's almost Alex Ramosi talks about, like what activity would you have to take and how many times would you have to take it to make achieving your results unreasonable? Right? And so for fitness it might be. You know, I want to have if you want to lose weight, I want to have 250 days and a calorie deficit coupled with a certain number of workouts, and what would that have to look like and how many times would you have to hit that mark for the end result that you really want to be, for it to be unreasonable, that you didn't hit that thing right? What is your process? Because I hear you with a lot of habits and a lot of numbers, but what is your process for determining the end? I don't know if your terminology would be result it's not goal, but your end result and then working backwards towards that, the goals and the habits to support that.
Speaker 1:That's a really great question and I think and I and I remember talking about this at the GoBundance event also I think what most people want to do is they want to go right to the goal gold. It's like I want to do this daily or I want to be a better husband, and the reality is is you have to start with. If you think about mining for gold, I mean, yes, you can go find a nugget by painting in a river, but the reality that most of the gold is found by taking a big, huge rock and then just continuing to refine and break down that rock and smelt it down to where you end up with gold. So for me, my process is and I can walk you through it real fast is in November I will take two days and I usually do it with my team and it's one eight-hour day and then one four-hour day where we go through each pillar of our life and we write 10 goals and it doesn't matter if they're results or if they're activity goals. So one of my goals that is for the year is to get to 10% body fat right. So in my health goal, that's one of my goals. So one of my goals that is for the year is to get to 10% body fat right. So in my my health goal, that's one of my goals. Another one is to do yoga so many times. Another one is to intermittent fast so many times.
Speaker 1:And then I put at least 10 goals in each area of my life and then from that I say what are the three most important ones for me to put as yearly goals. And one of the things about goals also is that you have to physically write them down. They've done so many studies that the act of taking pen to paper creates synapses in your brain that weren't there. That tells your brain that this is important and this is something that I want to achieve. So if you say you have goals and you don't have them written down, you don't have goals, you have wishes. As soon as you put pen to paper, your brain starts to go to work on how to make this happen. There's a ton of science behind writing goals the right way. So I take those 10 and then I narrow them down to three in each area of my life and in six different pillars, and so that's my yearly.
Speaker 1:We call it the one sheet. That's my yearly goals. I still have those other seven that are working in the background. My brain's still working on those and it's amazing how, at the end of the year, without me putting any bandwidth to it at all, I'll go back and be like man, I got that done, that done, that done, that done, because my brain's always working. The brain is always working for you. So then I'll take those three and then I break it down into quarterly.
Speaker 1:So in the first quarter, for my health, I wanted to do 70 days of intermittent fasting. I wanted to drink a gallon of every day. So instead of every day it was 120 days of a gallon of water, and I broke those down into quarterly. And then, from those quarterly, then you have weekly, then you have daily goals, and so there's this intentionality that I've created over the years of writing goals, to where I understand that the writing of the goals is so important because it allows my brain to go to work on this. Now I'm going to tangent just for a second, if that's okay with you, because one of the places that people struggle is this there's different personality types and there's different kinds of people. Right, there are free spirits who think that rules mostly not lawyers, because lawyers are typically like Not free spirits. Black and white.
Speaker 3:We're not free spirits, we're black and white.
Speaker 1:So I won't say anything about the free spirit. But there's create, there's execute and there's finalize in people's profiles. Only about 10% of the population have create in their profile. Most people have execute and finalize in their profile. Once you tell them what to do, they say, okay, I can knock this out, like if I did goals. For if you're execute, finalize and I said, well, what do you want to accomplish? And I wrote the goals out for you, you're like, great, I'm going to go knock these out and I'll be successful.
Speaker 1:So they don't have that create muscle. So when they go to write goals because it's not a muscle that they ever use or that they're not used to using it is a real struggle to get that first part done, that big rock of what do I want to accomplish for the year, that they can then refine down to the daily and weekly and monthly activities that they can execute super easy. So if you're struggling with goals, just understand that it's not necessarily your fault. It's that you don't have that create in you and so it's just a muscle that you really need to work hard and understand how to do that.
Speaker 2:And so your process is you approach the goals in November, and then is there a refining process that happens in December and coming into January.
Speaker 1:It's always so. We do 12 hours and then I'll spend probably another four or five hours of working through those goals and saying are those results or others activity goals? And if it is a results goal that I've got, what are the activities that I need to do? Or what are those actual goals that I need to do to achieve that? And then those get added to those 10, because those are the things that your brain can grab onto, because our brains are computers.
Speaker 1:It's one or two, it's white or black, it's just electrical impulses. So when you give it this ethereal or this, this result that doesn't allow it to grab onto, that says, okay, I need to do this and this and this and this, it doesn't interpret it and it doesn't go to work on it the same way. So I'll take and I'll take that 12 hour stretch and I'll spend probably another four hours just going through those and saying, okay, what are the activities? And then I'll transfer it to my one sheet and say these are. If at the end of 2023, I achieve these three goals in each one of these areas of my life, no matter what else happened in my world, I'm going to say it was a successful 2023. And then you know some of my goals that are yearly goals. I know aren't going to happen until the second half of the year.
Speaker 1:So when I do my quarterly goals, my first quarter goals, I go back to that list of 10 goals and I say, hey, are there any of these that I can put in my quarterly goals, that I can knock out now by which I'm going to be achieving success, and then hopefully, those add to that end of year goal or build up for that end of year goal, so that through each quarter, each quarter is a refinement. And then I go through and go, okay, what are the weekly habits that I need to create? And then from that I go, what are the daily habits I need to create? One of my goals is looking at my goals 52 times.
Speaker 1:So, I missed a couple of weeks already. So I'm going to have to go through and check it twice a week, sometimes to get to 52. But I'm actually tracking. How many times am I looking at my goals? How many times am I looking at my finances?
Speaker 1:I have one of my best friends is one of the smartest financial guys that I've ever met in my life, daniel Belreal. I'll give him a shout out right now. But his goal is to have all of my finances laid laid out, like the seven to eight where it's everything that I own, what my equity is, what my payments are, all of that kind of stuff. And I'm going to sit down with him by the end of the first quarter and have him take a look at my world and give me his perspective on am I doing the right things to continue the path and journey that I'm on. So that's that is one of my first quarter goals is just meet with Daniel and have, but, but with that I've got to have the sub goals of putting together all of my numbers, going through the sheets that he sent me, all of that kind of stuff. Those are actually goals that I have to have set up so that I can meet with him by the end of the first quarter.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love that there and I love and thank you for so much tactical advice on creating goals and on executing goals, and I want to be mindful of your time as we're banging on about an hour here. Aaron, where can people connect with you and find you if they'd like to?
Speaker 1:Probably easiest is Instagram. It's the Aaron dot West A-A-R-O-N dot W-E-S-T. That's really where we're starting to put some focus and we're going to be doing some pretty pretty cool stuff. We're writing a book on the seven to eight show and then we're putting together some goal writing courses and we're going to do a goal writing retreat at the end of the year. So if any of this resonated with you, just follow me on Instagram and and I'd be happy to answer any questions, or you can reach out anytime you know, I.
Speaker 1:I come from a world of abundance, so I'm happy to help anybody who would reach out.
Speaker 2:All right. Thank you so much, Aaron.
