SPEAKER_00 0:04

Welcome to the High Level People Podcast with your host, PJ Crescenzo. This is the show where every week we go inside the minds of modern market leaders. These are world-class entrepreneurs, thought leaders, and ministry leaders who are making a generational impact on the world today. The question is, if you're gonna compete, why not compete at the highest level possible? And that's what the show is designed for, to give you a playbook for your life so that you can continue to climb levels week after week. This is the High Level People Podcast, and welcome to today's episode. Welcome to the High Level People Podcast. Today I am honored to have David Osborne, who wrote an incredible book that I just had the privilege of reading. Wealth Can't Wait. From my understanding, at one point, or maybe still actively, he owned the largest Keller Williams franchise in the country. He's an avid investor. Uh, he's an expert on wealth-building habits. He's also a member of Tiger 21, which is on my bucket list down on the list. And he's accomplished an incredible amount with very humble beginnings. So, David, welcome to the podcast.

SPEAKER_02 1:11

DJ, it's great to be with you. I look forward to spending this next hour with you.

SPEAKER_00 1:16

Yeah, absolutely. So, walk me through your mindset on day one as a real estate agent, just starting out, and how your mindset around the way business works, the way life works, how has that evolved from day one when you're going around trying to sell real estate to where you sit today in the tribe of millionaires t-shirt? Walk me through that mental evolution of what David experienced.

SPEAKER_02 1:42

Yeah. So wow, that's just a we're gonna start right there, are we? Let's start with that question. I love it. You know, uh like many people at the beginning, um, and remember, I well, I did not want to be a real estate agent. I my mom was a real estate agent. I was a tech sales guy before that. I was I was broke, I had negative net worth. And uh I my mom's assistant quit and I said, I was looking for a job in tech at Novell or IBM or something like that. Tech sales. So don't get me wrong, I'm not I'm not an engineer. I couldn't build the iPhone, but I didn't want I sure as hell thought I could sell it. And then um my mom's assistant quit and I said, Look, mom, I'll come work for you temporarily while I look for a real job. And uh I got into real estate as a as an agent, and I took an old you know friend out from college and we rode around looking uh at houses all weekend. We'd have a beer after every showing, and then he bought a house and I made 5,000 bucks. I'm like, wait a second, this seems like a pretty good job. I like this job. So that's how I got into real estate was almost by accident, by default. And at the beginning, like almost everybody, and I see so many people still trapped in this same place, um, I just thought it was about the money. I thought it was about how much money can I make? What is my income? What is my commission income? And what I loved about real estate is there was no limit, really. I mean, there's there was no limit on how much you could make compared to most jobs, right? So if you work as a great accountant and they hired you, you know, back then probably 75 was a lot. Maybe today it's 150. I don't really know. Uh, your odds are the next year you might get a $10,000 raise. And the year after that, well, you know, another $10,000 or whatever. You're on this scale that is limited. But if you're a real estate agent and you're just selling on commission income, I think my first year I made $35,000. My second year I made $55,000. My third year, I made $100,000. So it was like this, you know, where else can you almost double your income every year? Um, and so I loved that. Uh that that unlimited aspect. And I also loved that you didn't have to report to anyone and you could work as hard as you wanted. You know, we used to joke you have to work a half day in real estate, you just got to decide if it's the first 12 hours or the second 12 hours. So um, but we it was great. I mean, I love it. It was a wide open frontier. I learned pretty quickly that all you needed to do was to find clients, buyers and sellers. Once you had them, it was pretty easy. So the number one job was prospecting. Um, and then yeah, I just thought it was all about the income. So I was doing whatever I could to drive my paycheck up as much as I could. Today my mindset is I don't care how much salary I get, I don't how much care how much money I make uh from any kind of one-off paycheck. I'm only looking for equity, or I'm looking for programmatic income, programmatic opportunities that can generate return for me that somebody else can be responsible for eventually. Maybe not right out of the gate, but something I can hand off and it continues. I'm not somebody could say, hey, you can sell this $100 million building, you get a 3% commission, that's $3 million. I have no interest in that. What I do have interest in is building a brokerage where I can hand that deal to one of my agents and they can help me attract another 50 agents. And then with uh, you know, 51 agents and them doing a lot of business, I have a little business that makes me $500,000 a year every every year, whether I go to work or not. And, you know, so that's programmatic income. I'm only interested in either programmatic income or working for knowledge. Like if Elon Musk called me and say, Hey, I need you to come work for me, I'm paying you zero, and your job is carrying my suitcase around, I would do that. Or, you know, like Warren Buffett, same thing. If Warren Buffett was like, hey, I want to give you a job, I'm not gonna pay you anything, just carry my suitcase and bring me tea, I'd be like, okay, that sounds like a good deal because I get the knowledge. So it's either knowledge or equity.

SPEAKER_00 5:41

What was the moment, or maybe it was a sequence of moments, that created that shift? Because I would say, especially since you're in the real estate industry, 98% are income focused. So what was required of you, or what happened where you started to just have a different relationship with time and look at the incoming streams of income through a different lens?

SPEAKER_02 6:01

Well, I think it happened a number of ways. Uh, I bought my first rental property in 1995, and I kind of I you know got a little mailbox money, a little check here, a little check there. Uh Cal Williams also had this thing called profit share, which is like uh a lot of the real estate companies have it now. It's like a multi-level as you help them build the company, you get paid on the production of the agents you bring in. Um, so that was the second piece. And then um and that was kind of like little nuggets. And then after selling for three years, um I was kind of done selling, like I drove down the same street for the same same time. I I drove down the same street for the third time on the same day, saying the same thing. And I was like, okay, I don't want to, I could be a tape recorder. You could just put a tape recorder and a video in this car, and it would have the same outcome. But Keller Williams was growing really fast at that time, and I was lucky enough to have opportunities to go to Dallas and start opening franchises. So I went up to Dallas, even then, not with this tactical mindset that I have today, but of course, kind of like, here's my next opportunity. I'm gonna go recruit agents, I'm gonna build brokerages. Um, and I got up there and you know, I had all kinds of challenges. We took over some failing brokerages. I had I had a guy that was dealing drugs out of one of the offices. I had an alcoholic team leader.

SPEAKER_00 7:20

He was in logistics and real estate.

SPEAKER_02 7:22

Yeah, exactly. He was he was figuring out how to pay, you know, he was figuring out if the real the where the real money was, which is in pharmaceutical sales. Um I had another guy that was threatening, you know, he was a good recruiter, had a lot of charisma, but when he lost his temper, he threatened to throw the agents through the window, not out the door, but through the window. So I had a lot of different things I was dealing with. But I kind of worked really hard on myself and worked on turning that all around. And then I it turned out that because when you're opening franchises, you're working through other people, so you kind of have a built-in leverage, and I started getting like success in those offices. So now I got a rental property, I got some profit share, I got a little bit of income from an office. Um, and then I met this guy, Tim Rhode, and Tim Rhode was part of my peer partnership group. The first guy I was with was Pat Hyvin. This is how Go Bundes was born in the Tribe of Millionaires book. But Tim was like, yeah, he'd been a really famous realtor in the in the 80s, but now he was skiing 100 days a year, he was mountain biking 100 days a year. And when we met him, he's like, I get 18 paychecks. And me and Pat, you know, I was working with Pat at the time, and uh we were like, What's that mean? What do you mean at 18 paychecks? And he said, Well, I got an enterprise rental car place, I got this rental income, and he went through his 18 checks that came in every month that gave him total freedom. And that's when I was already kind of doing that by default, like I already had multiple checks, but I hadn't locked it in like I did then.

SPEAKER_00 8:41

I was like, holy crap, like that's really what exposure to different income streams, exposure to different mentors, exposure to new opportunities is 100%.

SPEAKER_02 8:50

Just your your mind slowly evolves over time if you allow it. Um now I've seen a lot of realtors just get stuck in that income thing, and I've often wondered what I'd have been like if I'd been at Coal Banker or a different real estate company, Remax. But I suspect even there I would have built a portfolio of 100 or 200 rentals.

SPEAKER_00 9:07

So if I'm a real estate agent today and I'm working 80 hours a week, what's my first step to changing the reality of my life? Step one, I don't want to do this for the next five years and I want to be wearing a tribal millionaire shirt and scan 100 days a year. What's step one?

SPEAKER_02 9:23

Yeah, step one is are you working 80 hours a week and making money or are you not making money? So we have to, there's some qualifying questions. Okay. If you're not making any money, you need to figure out something different, you know, about how you approach real estate. But let's say you're over $50 million a year.

SPEAKER_00 9:39

Let's say I'm making a million dollars a year, you're making $600 or $700 or $800 or a million and one. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But like my life is never gonna change, and I just can't understand this concept of passive income and programmatic income, which I've never heard of. And I'm now I'm fascinated. I'm gonna study when we get off this call. What's step one to changing my reality?

SPEAKER_02 10:00

Yeah, and and then you gave me multiple answers there. So if you're if you're bringing in a million and you're spending a million and one, you need to go to accounting school and you need to learn about controlling your impulses to spend money. Okay, if you're making if you're spending 600 and you're bringing in 400, now you got something that you can work with. Um and the last greatest uh tax, you know, legal tax deduction in the country is cost segregation. So if you're in real estate, you should only be selling real estate to be in the business of buying real estate, of owning real estate. Um and you should serve your clients as best you can to make money to buy real estate. That's it. I mean, more money, more millionaires were made through real estate than any other industry in the history of time. And if you're and and if you're in real estate, you can buy multifamily, you can buy industrial, you can buy commercial. I don't really like office, you can do single family, but you should be in the business to buy real estate, knowing that you get that cost segregation. Like I got a friend that has, I don't know what he has now, like 11 million square feet of retail. He never pays income taxes because he just keeps buying new properties, cost segregating them, which gives you a very big deduction for the first three to five years, totally legal, above board, just depreciation. And then he keeps adding and adding and adding to his portfolio. Now, one day when he quits, or you know, if you die, you get the cost basis goes up anyway, then then he'll have to start paying the taxes. But you get to have the government as your partner. You get to go in and keep expanding your real estate portfolio. And even though I did a lot of that, if I could go back and do it all over, I would have done way more of it. Like I could have bought so much more stuff. And then the second thing that person needs to do, that's if they're making some money, and then the second thing they need to do is think in terms of their time. How do you get the time to become an expert in investing in real estate or in whatever niche you decide is going to be your real estate build? Because all of us know if you're a real estate agent, you all know that agent that was kind of pretty good as an agent, but not great. But they were always flipping a property or rehabbing a property, and suddenly after 10 years, they're gone. And you're like, well, what happened to that guy? What happened to Robbie? And you find out that Robbie retired to Mexico because he owns 35 properties, they're half paid off.

SPEAKER_00 12:08

He's drinking a pina colada in candy.

SPEAKER_02 12:09

He's drinking uh margarita on the beach and fishing, and he's making 20 grand a year. And that's Robbie because Robbie didn't, and he was never the best agent, he never looked the sharpest. He was a little stinky sometimes because he'd come right in from working on his property. He kind of wanted him to use some more deodorant or cut his hair, but that guy got financially free because he focused on what really matters, which was equity.

SPEAKER_00 12:30

Do you think that's an ego trap that keeps real estate agents in the competition in the rankings, or is it just a lack of knowledge? What keeps more agents from becoming Robbies? I mean, both of them, yeah, I think there's a ranking Mexican resident.

SPEAKER_02 12:44

Humans can tend, we're human patterns. Humans are patterns. We continue to keep doing what we've always done. So I think part of it is just inertia or momentum. You could say momentum, really. You know, the difficulty of change is high. Number two is, of course, the egoic rewards you get from being a top performer. You get to go on stage, everyone applauds you, you get that feeling of significance, which is dangerous because if you get your feeling of significance from external means, um, you are being guided by something outside of yourself. Like my significance came from paychecks in the mail. My my competition was with these two guys that were my peer partners that I had for dozens now of years, who were focused on health, financial freedom, net worth, and that became our mantra. Our internal uh significance maker was what strategies help us win the best in the game of life, not what do I look like when I go to the company party. And I'll tell you, if you play the game I played, which is like internal significance and internal resonance, um, you may not get all the rewards early, but later on you will kick everyone's butt. Like you, if you can focus on equity, passive income, multiple streams of income, programmatic income over glory uh in 10 years, you'll you'll be on the golf course playing golf while they're all 80 years old, still trying to go up on stage to get that you know, that ribbon or whatever it is that people work for.

SPEAKER_00 14:14

$40 plaque. All right. So I have so many questions. I'm gonna go one thread deeper on the income wealth building journey, and then I want to shift to some of the philosophy and mindset shifts that were required for you to become this new person because it's a becoming journey, you know, and that's the high-level people podcast is want people to become better versions of themselves as they climb in levels. You've seen a lot of different uh deals get done, different levels of wealth, different access of capital. What is the income target a top performer should be shooting for today? Is there a number? Is there a hey, if I make 250, I make a million, I make two million, at what point does income transition into equity? Or is that an irrelevant question?

SPEAKER_02 14:54

It's kind of irrelevant because the income only turns into equity if you have a strategy for turning your income into equity.

SPEAKER_00 15:03

And most people that I see focused on I want to go from one million to two million. I should be more focused on I want to own my wealth-building strategy with the income from earning.

SPEAKER_02 15:12

What's your strategy for getting out of the rat race? What's your strategy for never caring whether you earned another dollar again? I don't care about, and I haven't for dozens of years, I don't I don't care about a single dollar from earned income. I don't I think it's almost a failure to get a paycheck. Wow. So when you see people out there, and I see it, by the way, it's not just realtors, it's doctors, it's rock and roll people, it's uh it's athletes. They all think because they're making five, ten million a year or whatever it is, that they've they've succeeded. Now, some of them make so much money they're gonna win no matter what, but a lot of them just blow it off because there's no programmatic built-in methodology for accumulating wealth. I can't tell you how many doctors I meet that are just kind of dead, they're paycheck to paycheck. And they might make two million a year, but they're spending two million a year and they're just living this big life, and they look like they're astonishingly successful, but in reality, they're one broken leg away from bankruptcy because if they can't produce and go to work, then they're not gonna be able to pay all their bills. So the game is okay, I I make this much money and I save this much. The game that's the most important to building wealth is what do I do with this much? Whatever you have, we call it left to invest. So whatever you have after your paycheck, after your living expenses, after your taxes, what is left to invest? And then how well do you play that game? That's the game within the game. That's the game of the inner sanctum. And that game can start very small. It could just be a single rental property. Like my first rental property was $77,000. I still own it today. It's worth half a million bucks and it's rented, but I moved out in the $77,000 house, I put down $20,000, I moved out. The clients paid for, they paid for my uh rent, my P I T, everything, all my expenses on that property forever. Um, I refined it once uh eight years after I bought it, took out 60 grand and bought three more properties. And to this day, I own all four of those properties. They're worth about a million five now, a million and a half, and they generate, after all expenses, about 50,000 a year in income. So they're not the best investment now, by the way, but I've kept them because it's a nice little microcosm of what's possible. I turned 20,000 into a million five to 50,000 years. Yeah, what's that?

SPEAKER_00 17:24

I said it makes every podcast that much better when you get to say you still own those original properties and started the yeah.

SPEAKER_02 17:30

Yeah, I mean, they're not the wisest thing for me to own now, but that little grouping is the story of what's possible for every single American. Because when I bought that first one, I think I was making a hundred grand a year. I might have been making 75. It was somewhere between 75 and 100. Bought my first property, 20 grand, lived in it for two years, moved back into an apartment so I didn't have to deal with maintenance and turned it into a rental. And then from then on, you know, I have that little microcosm of a million and a half in net worth and 50,000 a year in income from 20 grand. Now it was over 30 years, but I also just stopped at that. In my real life, I actually continued in other ways. But that little like scientific experiment exists in my life today of what 20 grand can be turned into over, say, 25 years.

SPEAKER_00 18:14

Final question on income. What is your advice or framework around delayed gratification and also building in reward systems along the way? Because what I see today is everyone wants the pleasure. They they worked hard, they had a big month, they go on the cruise, they book the trip, they get the wife, you know, the nice car. How do you create discernment around when it's appropriate to reward yourself on this journey and when it's time to really have the discipline of delayed gratification because your wealth building journey isn't accelerating at the rate you would like it to?

SPEAKER_02 18:47

You know, for me, I had this philosophy that every $10 was $1 a month a year in income. So every $10 was $1 a year. So instead of looking at it as a $10 bill or $100 bill or a $1,000 bill or $100,000, if I have a if I had $100,000, which was the price of a Cadillac, I would think of that as $10,000 a year for the rest of my life. So every dollar to me was an employee. Um so I believe that you have to have some kind of delayed gratification if you want to be financially free. That you have to sort of, I never bought a new car until I bought one for my wife when she was, I was deep into my 40s before I never bought myself a new car until much later. Uh I never sold a single house I lived in. I turned everyone into a rental after I moved out. To this day, I've never sold a house that I lived in. Um and I always lived below my means. I tried to live on 70 cents of every dollar. So I tried to save after taxes, after everything, 30 cents of every dollar. Uh, but what I would do to incentivize myself is I would set a target, usually one that's behaviorally driven. And if I hit that target, I would reward myself. So it could be, okay, I'm gonna try to earn, you know, 250,000 this year net. I prefer like make calls because I I knew my business was all about prospecting. So I'd probably prefer the target of like meeting 10 prospects a week over the entire year, which is 500 prospects. So adding 500 prospects to my database. And if I hit that goal, I'll take my family to Paris or I'll go to Disney World or some like reward like that. And I even broke that down quarterly. Back I used to wear Armani suits or you know, really nice suits. I don't anymore because nobody does anymore. I wear a t-shirt and and uh I'm not wearing anything on below. No, I'm just kidding. Like fly like the Viore pants. So if you if you wanted to like have a reward every quarter, back then one of mine was a Viore suit. Uh, one of them I remember was to get myself a new secondhand car. So I would just target anything I wanted, I would use it as material or motivation for me to go do hard things to get what I wanted, if that makes sense. Um, but all of it is about the becoming, like all of this is about the becoming. Now I'm much more generous with myself because I have a lot of money. So now I kind of get to enjoy more things.

SPEAKER_00 20:59

Walk me through goal setting, right? So you said, hey, I used to set goals quarterly. We just gave a version of goal setting, which is a reward-based system for hey, when you execute and accomplish Y, you can experience Z. But I actually just heard this morning prepping for the podcast, a stat, and I don't know how how accurate this is, but 85% of the goals you you write down become true. I don't know if that's an actual stat or if that was just a motivational speech, but it got me fired up. Walk me through the do's and don'ts of goal setting, right? Because some people set them annually, quarterly, weekly, daily. You know, you're you're founder of Go Abundance. Like, just take me on a deep dive into the world of goal setting. If I'm a high-powered entrepreneur today and I say, I just need to do a better job with the frequency or the quality of my goals, what do I need to learn from David Osborne about this practice?

SPEAKER_02 21:44

So, goals for me are a way of calling forth your future. So you have this beautiful potential in life because we are divine beings and we have this divine spark within us. And we get to co create with the universe if you believe what I believe. A bright and shiny future. And the way you do that is considering what you'd like to bring forth in the world, what your area of service is, what you would like to do, what you'd like to contribute, and then designing sort of a flight plan for that. When a pilot gets into a plane, they don't just sort of go, oh, I'm going to go from Austin to New York. I know it's roughly that way. I think I'll start flying in that direction and see what happens. They have a flight plan. And the flight plan includes like tracking with local ground operators, and it it can it includes a route a route with a lot of different like modifications on it. And if they hit a storm, they refile their flight plan and all the rest of it. And so I believe humans should have a flight plan for their lives. They should have an intended sequence of outcomes that they're intending to have for their life, and they should craft it in the eight gardens of life. So I think a stat I heard is that only 5% of people set goals, but 90% of 90% of millionaires set goals. It could be wrong, by the way, like all these stats. It's just something I heard, right? But the idea is one thing I know for sure is that the one definition between wealthy people and driven people and successful people and unsuccessful people is that successful people are always very purposeful. And it doesn't matter, by the way, if you're running a charity and you're trying to, you know, put shoes on the shoeless or bring glasses to those who can't see, or if you're just trying to make a billion dollars, or you're trying to cure cancer, anyone up to something meaningful ha is a purposeful human. They're driven with a purposeful tempo towards their outcome in life. So um, so for me, that's your flight plan. And if you look at me right here, I can put this up for your this is my wow, that's my flight plan even to this day. Uh this was 2025. So if they're yellow, I completed them. And then there's the different gardens of life. So what are the gardens of life? Well, one is I just call it love. I used to call it different things, but it's basically my family, my my children, my friends, my mom. What do I want to do in the world of love? Um, my second one is spirit. So what do I want to do to like enhance my spirit? That would be like meditate, prayer, uh, supporting some kids in Nepal. Uh, the third one is body, like, what do I want to do to nurture, nourish my body? How do I look after? What's my diet? What's my exercise routine? Uh, the fourth one is the brain, like what am I doing to sharpen my brain, increase my capacity and my intelligence. The fifth one is lifestyle adventure, and this goes back to what we talked about. You said, should you live life? Well, I believe you should live life, and I was a little bit more stingy with myself when I began. But what I learned along the way is when I'm working 80 hours a week, if I don't have something to look forward to, my engine starts puttering. It starts like glitching out. But if I know that in 90 days I'm taking my family to Disneyland, or I know that every quarter I'm doing something meaningful, something that's adventurous. So, like in five days, I'm taking my son to Japan for 12 days with another dad and his son. So we're doing a my son's nine, his son is 11. We're doing a father-son trip uh with John Burman. You might even know John Brohman. Do you know John? Yeah, me and him and taking his kids. So it's like that. That's the that's the lifestyle adventure. Things, what can you do every year that you'll never forget? Um, then the the seventh uh one that I track is my environment. Like I didn't get this one when I was younger either, but actually the clothes you wear, the car you drive, the house you live in, everything gives you or takes away from your energy. So what can you do that adds to your energy? Life really is energy. Money is energy, business is energy. So, what you can you do to increase and manifest greater energy for yourself? And then the last one is just personal financial. And that's where I would say um saving money and investing wisely comes. So that's my personal gardens. Then I also have my work gardens, which is a whole other thing, and that's just where I set business goals and all of my business. So I would say I'm a black belt of goal setting, but I didn't start there. I started like anyone, setting New Year's resolutions and not doing them and setting goals and not following through. And now today I laugh when people talk about how no one finishes their New Year's resolutions because that is 100% not me. Like if I set a New Year's resolution, I'm getting it. Like 90%, I hit probably 85 to 90% of my goals. And it's that magic I first described you with. I am co-creating my life with the universe. I write down what I want in a creative environment at a Starbucks or by a beautiful river or at Mount Shasta. I was just doing a retreat at Mount Shasta, and then I and then I know I could manifest it with 80, 90, 85, 90% probability just because of focus. Uh, willpower is not really the key, although it's a part of it. It's really just focus and alignment and integrity and co-creating and manifestation with the divine.

SPEAKER_00 26:55

That's beautiful. Let me ask a specific question on goals. I think I just got my blue belt. I just got upgraded from white belt. I got a long way to go until I'm a black belt, but I love goals in general for eight years. The thing that I still am trying to enhance in my relationship with goal setting is frequency. Should this be a daily, a twice a day? You hear so many different feedbacks about how often I should be writing and reviewing goals? And then the other question I want to ask for you specifically is how much should my goals be stretching from where I'm at today, right? Like if I have a if I have a million dollar net worth, is my goal to get to 2 million? Am I writing 10 million or am I writing 100 million for where my current reality is at today?

SPEAKER_02 27:34

Mostly I prefer goals that are built around action. So the problem with a lot of people set intentions, and I still do it too. It's very tricky, this one. They set intentions and they call them goals. So if my intention is to be worth 300 million, that's an intention. It's not, it's a goal, yeah, but I can't. There's no like action steps. You know what I mean? So if you the really powerful goals are clear action steps. And then going back to your other question, like my goal is to go to work out 240 times a year. I don't need to break that record, I don't need to enhance that record. As long as I'm moving my body in a meaningful way 240 times a year, I'm crushing it. Does that make sense? So that's there's different things. And then what do I need to do for money? Well, prospecting or um raising money or um various things like that.

SPEAKER_00 28:21

I've never heard that intention versus goals, and that is a massive moment of clarity because I'll look at my goals and say I can't do anything with these. I want to accomplish them. I don't know how to take any action on this right now to make this come true, other than say it over and over again and work 12 hours a day.

SPEAKER_02 28:40

So that's an intention, which are also beautiful. So I believe you should have a vision for your life, and the vision is like an intention, what you intend. And for me, I used to put vision boards up a lot, which I would have a picture of a house by the lake and a private jet flying through the air and a house in the mountains. And that was sort of just get my body in alignment with what was possible, what I wanted to manifest. I also used to do sometimes a current PL uh uh income financial statement and a future financial statement. So I would I was constantly trying to show my brain and my energetic being the direction I was leading my life. Um and I still love that visual component, but the but the vision, and I'd also write a five-year vision, which is like it's you know, it's uh 2031. I just hit 500 million in net worth, and I bought that new, you know, Falcon 2000 I always wanted. Uh my oldest daughter is now married and have three kids, and my second oldest daughter just got engaged with a beautiful partner, and then my son, you know, so I would like literally craft my way through everything that was going on in my life, and that is a vision, it's an intention for my life. And then when I came back to my goals, it's always it's ideally, it's always an action. So going to the gym is an action, right? So 240 workouts, I can put a little freaking Roman numeral by that every time I hit it. I try to meditate 150 times a year. So, you know, just 10 minutes, like just trying to center myself. Because I believe I believe the the lesson that I've probably learned latest in life that is the most valuable for me is manifesting is not about brute force, it's about alignment. Wow. Manifesting and creating your future is about really listening inside and seeing what your maker is calling you towards, what you are also calling yourself towards, finding that alignment and then just staying centered and allowing that to show up and manifest. And that's a way easier path for any of your listeners than just working 100 hours a week and grinding your way to success. And I've done both, by the way. You can definitely do it with the grind, and and it's hard to get there without the grind, so that's all part of it. But if you just align yourself more with what wants to come through you, which will feel a lot like what you want when you really get in alignment with it, um, then you're just really the midwife to your own manifestation.

SPEAKER_00 30:55

That that's a book in and of itself, midwife of manifestation. Yeah, there you go. All right. So another question around limiting beliefs. I find insecurity is the greatest threat to human potential. So often, it's the inability to take one step forward because I just told myself a narrative that doesn't exist. As you've climbed into higher echelons of society and built higher quality relationships with people who are making more impact, what have you found as some of the most fruitful limiting beliefs you've been able to break or shatter or you know, lies you used to tell yourself or used to believe that you just said, Yeah, that's no longer true. And that allowed me to get into different rooms with higher quality people.

SPEAKER_02 31:35

Yeah, when I was first driving up to Dallas to build Keller Williams, I remember I would drive from Austin to Dallas. There'd be a point on I-35 when I'd come over a rise and I would see downtown Dallas, and I would see the post, you know, the tower with the circular thing, and all I would see all these skyscrapers. And I remember I'd always think I'd have my heart would catch in my throat, and I would think to myself, who am I to come to this big city and big build a real estate company? Like, who am I? Like, how who do I think I am? So my insecurity would just pop right up and start doing a dance in my brain. And then one day I think I was listening to Jim Rohn, but I, you know, so long ago I've made it my own now. And I think Jim Rohn said, Why not me? Like, and what what what what and that's become like my mantra for everything? Why not me? Like, there's someone out there that's gonna be worth a hundred million dollars that's stupider than me. So why not me? There's somebody out there that's gonna have an amazing wife and amazing kids that isn't as kind and loving as me. So why not me? There's gonna be somebody out there that's an example of an everyday dude that came from like the middle of the middle class but became super, super successful. Why not me? And why not me became my mantra to myself. So anytime that insecurity popped in, I just go, Well, why not me? And the mind would be like, Well, actually, I don't know. I don't got an answer to that. My insecurities can't answer that question. Wow. You know, I'm just like, who am I to build that?

SPEAKER_00 32:57

That's a powerful statement right there. My insecurities can't answer that question. Are you asking questions that are so powerful your insecurities are unable to respond?

SPEAKER_01 33:07

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_00 33:08

Yeah. Yeah. That's yeah, that's beautiful.

SPEAKER_02 33:11

Yeah, and then to me it became like the movie A Beautiful Mind, where if you remember Beautiful Mind, he's like schizophrenic, and there's three people that don't really exist that he sees all the time. And by the end of the movie, he's no longer tormented by them, but they haven't gone away. They're still there. They, you know, he's walking in to collect his Nobel Prize and they try to talk to him and he just ignores them. And that's what I think you have to do with your insecurities. They don't go away, they get smaller, and you ignore them, but they're never completely gone. They're just they're just part of your life. I mean, if you didn't have that insecurity, you probably wouldn't be human.

SPEAKER_00 33:46

Absolutely incredible. Wealth building non-negotiables. I know we talked about wealth. I just want to make sure I didn't miss this question because I wanted to ask it. Is this a monthly review of my PL? Is this a certain amount of discretionary income invested? Right. So one takeaway I already have personally, which I'm implementing, is when we get off this call, I'm redispersing my visions and intentions versus my actions and my goals because they've just been a conglomerate that's made it, I think, more confusing than necessary to take action. Now, on the wealth building side, what should my habits be on what I'm reviewing, what my frequency of investments are? What's the cadence and the rhythm that you would like to see somebody incorporate?

SPEAKER_02 34:27

Yeah, great, great question. I would look at my goals at least once a week. I would read my vision at least once a week, maybe once every two weeks, my five-year vision for myself. My belief is that being consciousness is like ivy. And if it doesn't have anywhere to grow, it just grows in a pile on the ground. And we all know people that are just like growing like a pile on the ground. They're all confused and they're all mixed up and they're all jumbled up. And our job is if we're lucky we have a parent that helps us with this, but our job is to lay down a lattice work or like a grid for the ivy, the consciousness, the expression to grow along so that we're our own farmers. And that's what your goals are. That's what your vision is. So I think review your goals once a week seems plenty to me. It gets hard because if you read it too many times, you start like not really seeing it. And then the vision once every two weeks, something like that. Your financial statement, you should review it every month or maybe every quarter. You know, that's it's amazing to me how many people don't look at their financial statement. They don't know what their net worth is, they don't know what their PLs are. And I know it can be difficult because a lot of entrepreneurs are more energy based than specific, you know, tech technical base. But what you focus on expands. So that agent you talked about that's making a million a year and spending a million and $1,000 a year, they're just not focusing on their PL. They're just not doing that little thing that doesn't come naturally to them. But if they did, they'd realize I probably don't need that 900, you know, I don't need that $9,000 cold calling, you know, thing that I bought. I don't need that gadget that I bought for my garage. I don't need the I don't need the Peloton that I don't ride. If you're gonna ride it, buy the Peloton, but don't buy it thinking that's gonna make you healthy.

SPEAKER_03 36:05

It becomes a little coat rack.

SPEAKER_02 36:07

Yeah, it becomes in a coat rack. And the secret to really finding that out is go to the gym and see if you ride the Peloton and make a goal with yourself. Let's go back to what we talked about. Set a goal of riding the Peloton a hundred times at the gym. Then you hit a hundred, buy yourself the damn Peloton. But most people do it backwards, they just go buy the thing, thinking the thing will do the thing that they want to do that they're not really motivated to do, and it won't. It'll just be a thing that you have in your house. So you buy the database, but you don't use it. You buy, you know, like I'm trying to learn a little bit about AI right now, and I keep adding like new AI bits. But guess what? None of it's doing anything for me. I gotta figure it out myself, which isn't that easy for me. And I'm getting there. Don't get me wrong, I'm making very slow progress, but I'm an old dog and teaching me new tricks is tricky. Just because I do I have definitely bought things that I haven't used. My son and I just bought this video game making AI, and we used it intensively for, of course, like two weeks, but I'm pretty sure I'm sp still spending 30 to 40 bucks a month on whatever I bought. And it's we haven't used it now in probably two months, right? So um that is just an awareness I have about life. Now that's fine because I have plenty of discretionary income, but if you're at the beginning, I bet people are doing that 10x. Um, you don't need the brand new Mercedes when you could buy a two-year old Mercedes for half the price that looks just as pretty. So it's um so I would the financial statement really matters, reviewing it. And I like to do where I'm at and where I want to be. Like I used to do that, I haven't done it in a while, but here's what I'm worth, and here's where I want to be. Because really you're calling forth your future into the present and what you focus on expands.

SPEAKER_00 37:37

How have you used discernment on what the right amount is to invest in personal development and growth? Have you had a difficult time finding out, hey, is this hundred thousand dollar mastermind worth it or not? Because I think that's my greatest financial leak right now is I just justify every single investment in myself because I'm gonna grow. And I've started to find, hey, not every mastermind actually has any master in it. It's just a bunch of minds in a room. So how is it?

SPEAKER_02 38:01

It's really good to have that awareness. It's I'd rather you erred on overspending on yourself than underspending. Okay. Um uh most people think school ends the day you graduate from either high school or college, whatever your thing is. But for me, that's when it just began. You know, like it's getting out of high school. High school wasn't that much good to me, even college wasn't that good to me. But once I got into business, I'm like, holy crap, Jim Rohn, Tony Robbins, um, all these courses, Tiger 21, YPO. Now I'm in a group called R360. I still probably spend close to a quarter million dollars a year on my education every year. Um, not all of it is to the greatest use, but it's better to overspend than underspend. And then you've got to ask what you're getting out of it. Like um, you know, at GoBundance, we are a uh member-led, member-driven. What we're trying to do is create a culture where being awesome feels normal. And I think the best thing you can learn in life is through osmosis. So when I spent $55,000 to go hang out with Richard Branson, um, it wasn't what he said at a seminar, it wasn't uh a class that was taught there, because all the classes they taught on Necker Island I could have seen on YouTube. It was the fact that I got to sit down with him one day while he was working with his assistant, and I said, Hey, can I sit right beside you? And he said, Yes, but his assistant kind of shot me the dagger eyes, like she didn't want me there, but he said yes. He said, just don't talk. So I just sat beside him with my journal and listened to him go through his emails. And then what I realized is he's dyslexic, so he doesn't really do his own emails. He has his assistant read them to him, and then he just communicates back with her what he wants her to say. And it changed my life. Like I came back from that, I said, I'm never looking at my emails again. I told my assistants, my team, you guys are now looking at my emails. You're gonna summarize them. I had AI before there was AI because they would answer them if it was a lawyer very formally, if it was a buddy, they'd say, yo, dude, let's go play golf or whatever. Like they just kind of learned my language and they would repeat it and then they would tell me what had happened. And I would tell them, I'd rather you action is always better than inaction. I'd rather you made a mistake than waited to make any kind of action at all and got it right. So they would answer everybody and they would just be me, and it just gave me all this time back. And I got all that from sitting with Richard Branson and realizing you can be a billionaire and never look at an email again. And so I still have my emails on, but I just don't look at them that much. And we've gone through several people, and it's you know, it doesn't always work as well as I would like it to, but and then just through osmosis, when you're around greatness, there's a certain osmosis that occurs. When Richard Branson looked at me, I could see the eyes of a of a predator, like of a lion. Like he's a good dude, he does a lot of good, but there was a no-nonsense vision-focused way of being that he carried that I was able to pull some of that into my way of being and my way of approaching life. So um, yeah, you want to be around as good a people as you can, and then be willing to change really quickly. Like um, I got so much out of Tony Robbins when I was younger, and I haven't gotten as much out of it later. But the thing that Tony taught me was self-discipline, having a big vision, pushing myself really hard, walking across fire, doing difficult things, just an abundance of great emotional self-management tools. But that wasn't where I got the techniques of how to build my business or how to, you know, manifest greater wealth or how to raise capital for my private equity. That was a more nuanced uh level of knowledge that I had to find elsewhere. And then I also found that at Tony Robbins, you go to the event, there's not really a filtration process. So it's just a bunch of people, usually they're very enthusiastic. But when I joined R360, which is a minimum $100 million net worth to be in it, there's like a natural filter where I happen to be around people that have done things similar to what I'm trying to do. Now, money doesn't make you a better person, but to make that amount of money, unless you're lucky and inherited, you have to have gone through certain trials and tribulations and tests of life. And people that I do that with, I can learn from. And so that's what I'm looking for. Who are my tribe that I can learn from? Who's going to take me to another level? And right now, a lot of my work is, you know, spiritual and contribution. So I'm hanging out a lot with people that are uh giving back to the world and like doing doing good things in the world. And um, yeah, I mean it's it's and it's still the same thing. I'm still having to hang out with people that have a big heart for others so that I can pick up through osmosis what it's like to be a person that spends a large portion of their time and money and treasure and talents giving back to others. Uh it's always the same thing. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 42:29

All right. So one question on time, then I want to transition to Goabundance and ask you some questions about creating that community. Was the email the greatest tactical step you took on leveraging your time? Or was there something else that you would say created the most bandwidth for you and your business and your life once you implemented it?

SPEAKER_02 42:47

I mean, for me, the biggest bandwidth implementer was um leveraging through people. Like when I learned how to hire great people, there's three kinds of leverage. One is easy, it's capital. When you have money, you have leverage. So I can use money. I could say to a person that's downstairs, go fill if I didn't have a Tesla, go fill my car up with gas and get it washed. And then I didn't have to go fill my car up and get it washed. I got it done for me. And then the energy of being in my car feels better because I'm in a car that's full and is clean. And both of those things matter when you're thinking about managing energy on a daily basis. You're maximizing your energy. So that's capital. That's the easiest. Number two is systems leverage. So what if I didn't have to think about telling someone to go check my car, fill my car and wash it? What if I had a process where an assistant comes in once a week, every Monday, they looked at my gas meter, and then they look at whether my car is dirty or not. And if the answer is yes and yeah, empty and dirty, they go take it and they take care of that. They check my calendar, make sure I don't need my car, and they just go do that, probably while I'm at the gym. So that's a system. So systems leverage, again, liberates your brain from having to think about these technical details. So that's systems leverage. But the one that I think's made the biggest difference in my life is people leverage, like really learning. The riddle of people. Because there's the riddle of self, right? The first thing you have to learn is the riddle of the self. And that's how do I make myself do the things I need to do to get where I want to go? That's self-discipline, it's goal setting, it's doing the right things, it's dollar productive activities, uh, it's being around the right people. That's all self. Like I have to choose all that myself. That's the riddle of self. But the riddle of people is learning that to scale anything, you need to hire and have great people in your life, whether it's someone who's your personal trainer or who can either hurt you by the way, or make you much stronger, or choosing a nutritionist versus just eating junk food, or somebody who's running a franchise for you. So when I was building these franchises in Dallas and I had the guy dealing drugs and the alcoholic and the guy that was threatening to throw people through windows as my employees, what do you think my life was like? I was constantly putting out fires. I was trying to build new businesses and save my old ones. And then one day I hired a girl who was her name was Holly. And I remember people, I was like, I really need somebody new. My alcoholic team leader had run out of room. You know, she was she was actually trying to undermine me inside of my own business because I'd put pressure on her. She wasn't succeeding. And actually, one of my agents came today and said, Hey, this person said this about you and this about you and this about you. I'm like, what? I mean, I assume they were appreciating that I was trying to save their job for them, but they weren't. They were feeling the pressure. And like a drowning person in the water, they were trying to take me down with them, which is normal. I mean, I don't look at this with any anger or judgment. I've just learned so much that a drowning person is going to try to take you down with them. And it's just the nature of what happens. Um, and then this person in my office said, Well, I know the perfect candidate, but she'll never do it. She'll never take the job. And I said, Well, why don't you let me be the judge of that? Why don't you let, you know, just give me their name and let me be the judge? Um, and then I met with them and I would recruited the crap out of her and was able to seduce her over to my company, um, meaning very clean seduced, not that's not that's probably a poor choice of word, but I was able to convince her to come join my company for, by the way, like a 50, not quite a fit, 40% pay cut. So she went from 125 to 75,000 with incentives. You said with incentives. And then I brought her over and she started doing well. So at that time I had, you know, six franchises. One of them was doing well, and one was doing okay, and four were doing badly. This is one of the ones that this was the one doing okay. And and it was only doing okay because I was doing most of the recruiting. I was working my tail off, driving all around town trying to bring agents to all of these shops where I had bad managers that might keep them or might run them off. Uh, but I brought Holly over and all of a sudden she started getting people, and that was over the first year, a lot of training, a lot of conversations, and she started making a difference. And all of a sudden, I noticed that business didn't need me. And then all of a sudden, I noticed it not only did it not meet need me, it was making more money. And I was like, whoa, wait a second. Like all of a sudden, it's like easier to make money, easier to make more money, and it was harder to make less money, and it's all because of one thing. I hired the right person. Yes, I learned how to train them, less I learned how to hire, keep them accountable, but that one person started making a big difference in my life, and that's when the light bulb really went on, and that's when I learned the riddle of people. So I again I spent hundreds of thousands of dollars learning how to hire, learning how to interview, which by the way, people are terrible at interviewing, that's a whole other subject. Learning how to like resonate with. How do you attract talent? Well, the only way you attract talent is by being having a vision big enough that they can fit within your vision of the universe. So having a big goes back to the goal setting and the vision. If I want to be a billionaire, a guy that wants to be worth 100 million will work for me. But if my goal is to be worth five million and they want to be worth a hundred million, they won't work for me. So it's a vision, but then they have to know that you have the integrity, going back to where we talked about earlier, the integrity with my own vision to be a person that they want to come work for, work with. So all of these like lessons of my life are sort of like wrapping together into a business DNA. And then all of a sudden I've learned the riddle of people, which is how do I find a great person? How do I convince them to come work for me? And then what kind of opportunities do I have to create for them to be willing to stay with me, stay in my world, and help me build for the long term?

SPEAKER_00 48:08

This is a master class. I could probably give this episode 19 different titles. Uh, so first I just want to thank you in advance for the wisdom. This has been incredible. I have three questions before we wrap. I know your time is very valuable, and I just want to thank you in advance. I have how has created, how has creating go abundance changed you? What have you learned from that process? Um, what what do you wish you knew when you started the journey? And what do you want to be known for? So we could go those one at a time. We can start with go abundance. I just want to cap us off on our final agenda. So, question number one is how has creating I'm trying to still get the grammar right, created or creating go abundance changed you as an entrepreneur and as a man as you've kind of built this community and watched it evolve.

SPEAKER_02 48:48

When I built Keller Williams, I was working under the vision of somebody else, Gary Keller. And I was working with my mom. So I was kind of got there by default. So I got there because my mom was in the company and I wanted to help her. And so it was great. I loved it. It was a battle. We're now number one in Dallas Fort Worth. I have an amazing partner. We still own that business. Uh, Smokey runs it, and we're 50-50, and it's uh top, you know, we sell 10 billion a year of real estate. So that was a great journey. That was where I learned the riddle of self. I learned how to manifest myself. I learned how to drive myself, I learned how to do the right things, not the wrong things. I went through lots of challenges to get to where I am today. People often say to me, Hey, I want your life. I'm like, you might want my life, but you might not want to go through what I went through to get to where I am today. Number two, but building but building cobundance was really special to me because that was the first time that I really felt like God's hand on something that I had manifested with my partners, Pat, Tim, and Mike, uh, and now Matt King. So that one felt like it was bird through me because the world needed it. It was a needed a place for men to be authentic, transparent, honest, to sharpen one another like iron sharpens iron, and just to become better versions of themselves through association with one another. And that one just had such a hand of God on it. We built it in 2020, 2012, and it went like 12 people, 24, 48, 100. It just kept like manifesting and it felt so authentic. And it was a lot of work, but there was that integrity of my vision with what the creator wanted to manifest. There was just an alignment. And so that one was beautiful. And it just taught me again to work hard, have a vision, and then surrender and get out of the way. Let because it could it can show up even bigger than you expect it to if you're in alignment with the right things.

SPEAKER_00 50:36

Absolutely incredible. Second question, and I could probably regurgitate every single thing you say because there's a quote in every answer, but just for efficiency's sake, I'm gonna move on to the next question. Yeah, let's do it. What what do you wish you knew? And you've said a lot today about the journey from you know 35,000, 50,000, 100,000, hiring holly, having the alcoholics, having pharmaceutical sales, you know, making different investments. But but as you think back, you're driving through Dallas, you're looking at the skyscrapers, insecurities dancing in your head. What do you wish you knew that David today could tell David, you know, 30 years ago when you were starting out?

SPEAKER_02 51:12

You know, I was always very intentional, but I wasted a lot of time. I wish I would just do what I knew I had to do instead of doing what I thought other people thought I ought to have to do. Because I spent a lot of time early in my career going to the parties, going to the Christmas party, staying up with my agents, drinking too much, going to the bars, because I thought that's what I was supposed to do. That's what a lot of people in real estate do. They live hard, play hard. And I probably did that for 10 or 12 years before I realized one day I don't even like doing that. I don't like being in a bar. I don't like drinking that much. I don't like the loud, loud noises. I don't like yelling at people to get my story heard. And and I quit doing it. And guess what? My business success got better, not worse. Nobody missed me. Wow. Um, and so I wish I'd learned earlier not to dance in the eyes of others, just to dance with the with the eyes of my my own heart and my own soul.

SPEAKER_00 52:06

Incredible answer. All right. Last question as we cap off today. When it's all said and done, you fund your last real estate deal, you and it's emotional even to say it, but you hug your grandkids for the last time, it's all said and done. What does David Osborne want to be known for when his legacy gets written?

SPEAKER_02 52:24

I think integrity and truth. Like this man lived well. He he he showed up, he served, he didn't flinch, he lived with courage, he lived with intention, and he did what needed to be done with love.

SPEAKER_00 52:38

Absolutely incredible answer. The truth shall set you free. David, thank you so much for the time today, brother. I became a better human in the last 52 minutes. So thank you for dedicating the time to share your wisdom with the high-level people audience, with myself, and excited to follow you in the decades ahead to see all that you accomplish. Thanks so much, PJ. Pleasure being with you. Thank you so much for tuning in to today's episode of the High Level People Podcast. If you've learned anything from today's content or if it made a positive impact on your life in any way, please feel free to subscribe on your favorite platform. More importantly, if you think there's somebody in your life who would benefit from today's episode, please shoot them a link. Encourage them to do the same, encourage them to subscribe because every week we're committed to adding value. I look forward to seeing you soon. Hope you guys have a blessed day, blessed week, and let's go.