1 Key Investment Principle Most People Miss: Responsibility

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People often fail to succeed in property or in life because the refuse to take full and utter responsibility for what happens to them. Are you ready to step into responsibility and the life lessons and positive change that come from that?

Hey guys, Ryan here from OnProperty.com.au. I help people find positive cash flow property and I am walking around my office today because this is an episode that I’ve wanted to create for quite a long time and I actually went for a walk a couple of years ago and did an entire rant on this but never actually published it because the audio quality wasn’t very good and I felt like I could have explained it better and I always had the intention of re-recording the episode and explaining it better.

But every time I sat down to do it I just found that it was extremely difficult to get this concept across in a way that was good for people to understand. And so I’ve just tried sitting down at my desk and recording it down there and couldn’t make it work. So I’m trying to standing up and walking around because I really want to get this episode out no matter how good the quality.

So I’ll try my best. And that’s this idea that there’s this one key principle that people forget or people miss or people choose not to care about when it comes to investing, whether that be investing in property or other investments. And that’s this idea of taking complete responsibility for yourself and your financial actions.

When I invest in something, when I put my money into something, when I start a particular business, I take full responsibility for the outcome of that investment. So if I invest it in something and it loses money, I can blame the people responsible for me losing money or I can take responsibility myself. So let me use an example. This was going on about seven years ago. I was really quite poor living in my mother-in-law’s granny flat with my wife and our baby girl who is now nearly eight years old.

So yeah, about seven years ago and we didn’t have a lot of money. I think I was working one or two days a week trying to get my online business off the ground, which didn’t work and my wife was taking care of our kid. So we did not have much money at all, like it’s ridiculous to look back and look at how much little money we lived off back in the day. But I discovered this idea of buying things from China, importing them and then selling them on Ebay and I found this opportunity in usb sticks where you could purchase them from China for a decent price and then sell them for a hefty profit on Ebay. And so I purchased some of these USB sticks.

I think I purchased a small amount and sold them and thought shivers, this is good. So I basically put all our savings at the time, which was about a thousand dollars into purchasing more of these USB sticks from this company.

And so I purchased, sent the money across and then after I had sent the money, I found out that the initial batch people were complaining and sending them back because they were actually fake. They weren’t actually, I think it was 32 Gig at the time. Um, and the USB sticks weren’t actually 32 Gig, but they were just kind of pretending to be. So you would put more data on there, it would overwrite old data, et cetera.

And so it was this whole problem basically. And so I had just put a lot of money into these USB sticks to purchase more from China and the ones that I had sent out were faulty. And so basically I was in a situation where I had been defrauded by this company and there’s nothing I can really do about that. They’re in China, I’m not going to go over there and try and catch them or anything like that.

And I was in a situation where I was out a lot of money and I decided to do the right thing. I had a couple of returns, but I think I’d send out about 30 USB sticks or something at the time and had a couple of returns but not a lot. And so I basically contacted everyone that I had sold this to and said, look, I’ve made a mistake. These fraudulent, you can have a complete refund and you don’t need to send it back. I didn’t want to deal with returns. So I thought that was the only ethical thing for me to do, knowing that I had sold something that was a dud. So I went ahead and did that out of the financial cost to myself. And yeah, I could have in that situation just blamed that company in China and thought this, this company is selling this product to me, how dare they do that?

But what I did instead was something that turned out to be completely life changing for me. And that was, I took full responsibility for my part in that. So I took full responsibility that I saw this opportunity, that I didn’t take the time to properly test the product that I was importing. I just assumed that it was quality assured and that would, it would be good. And so I got greedy and I saw the money-making opportunity in this.

I ran forward too fast and I made mistakes myself. And so rather than focusing on what was done incorrectly to me, the fact that I was being sold at dud, I decided to take responsibility myself and to say, OK, what part did I play in this? And what mistakes did I make from this? OK, I could have just done a small batch, I could’ve tested that small batch, sold a few, wait, see how it goes, and then ordered more.

I could have continued to order small batches, making sure each batch was good and slowly built up a business over time. Instead, I dumped basically everything we had at the time in terms of savings, which thousand dollars might not sound like a lot to you, but to us at the time it was. And it set us back quite a bit, into this opportunity. And so I decided to take that mistake that I made and learn absolutely as much as I could from that and to learn about doing small amounts and putting small amounts in. And basically I changed the way that I ran businesses to the point now where I started a new online business one month ago. And the same principles that I learned from the mistakes that I made with those usb sticks. I applied to the business that I started one month ago.

So very small monetary investment into this business. But something that overtime I could easily scale up easily, invest more and make more money that way. So I took those learnings, I took full responsibility myself and I basically completely forgot about the people in China, whoever sold it to me and I didn’t even know who it was, but I forgot about them entirely. I decided not to focus on them. I decided to take responsibility myself and learn all that I could from what happened and that made me smarter moving forward.

And a lot of people don’t do this when it comes to businesses or it comes to investing in property. I’ve had friends I know a lot of people who have been done by property spruikers who have sold them properties that are overpriced in value. They’ll take 5 to 10 years just to catch up to the price that they paid for it and rather than taking responsibility themselves, they put the blame and they put the focus on the company that didn’t the disservice that acted unethically towards them.

Rather than saying, what part did I play in this? Well, I didn’t do my research into the area myself. I didn’t look at how much other properties in the area were selling for or renting for. I didn’t research the vacancy rates myself, basically didn’t know research and completely took this person’s word for it.

They were offering a free service. I didn’t even think to myself, how is this person getting paid where they’re getting commissions from and how might that affect the price? So as soon as you take responsibility yourself, even if it’s not your fault, even if someone acts unethically towards you like that Chinese company did to me when I ordered the USB sticks or like your property spruiker might act towards someone even though someone acted unethically. If you take responsibility yourself and say, what part did I play it? Why was this my fault?

Then you learn from it because the problem with not taking responsibility is the fact that you don’t learn anything. So if you’re blaming someone else, if you’re putting the focus on someone else, the only thing that you’re learning from that is, OK, this person treated me unfairly. I already know that. I really know that this person defrauded me if my money. I already know they acted on ethically towards me, so I’m not learning anything by putting the blame on them.

I’m also not moving forward in my life. My life’s not getting any better because of that, because I’m blaming them. My life’s not automatically getting better. In fact, my last probably getting worse because now I’m depressed because my life sucks and it’s someone else’s fault. However, when you take responsibility, I’m taking complete responsibility for yourself and your own actions. Then you start to learn things.

Then you start to say, OK, how was I involved in this? What mistakes did I make in my decision making that led to this person being able to take advantage of me or lead to me losing this amount of money or maybe in a good situation led to me making lots of money.

When you look at your own part to play, then you can learn something from it and then you can move forward with your life and then you can make better decisions in the future and become more financially well off in the future. Because the fact is a lot of wealth does come down to knowledge and knowing how to make money in certain markets. That might be the property market and might be how to make money in business, how to make money on youtube, how to make money on the Internet.

It could be anything, but over time, as you do it more, as you take that responsibility and each time you do a transaction and each time you do something, you learn a little bit from it, and then you do better next time. So just because you lost money this time doesn’t mean you’re going to lose money next time. So whenever that happens to me, I try and pull as much learning as I can from it.

But learning doesn’t start until you take that full responsibility yourself. So how can this apply to you? Well, obviously if you’re in a situation where you purchase a property or you purchase an investment, you can take responsibility for why you purchased that. If it loses money, take responsibility for the actions that you took. The fact that you may not have educated yourself enough. There’s so many elements that go into it. Take responsibility yourself, but even right now, look at your own financial situation.

If you’re not financially free, if you’re not well off, if you’re in a job that you hate, if you’re on a job that’s not paying you enough money, take responsibility for that. If your employer is maybe underpaying you and that sucks and that employer should probably pay more, but take responsibility for your situation. Take responsibility for the fact that you’re only earning a certain amount of income because of it might be because of the education it might be because your fear to negotiate and might be the fact that you haven’t changed jobs in 10 years and you could get paid more, doing the same thing somewhere else.

It might be a myriad of different things, but take responsibility for your financial situation right now. How much you’re spending, how much you’re earning. Take full responsibility for your savings and where or at the amount of properties that you own, whether or not they’re good investment properties or not.

Take full responsibility for that and once you take responsibility for that, now you can start learning. You can say, OK, well what got me into this situation? Take responsibility for your spending and say, OK, what am I spending my money on? Take responsibility for the amount you’re earning and say, OK, what am I earning? But how can I earn more? Because once it’s your responsibility, you can start to look for solutions and create solutions in your own life.

So I hope I explained this key concept that I think a lot of people are missing out on and that’s this idea of 100% responsibility or complete an utter responsibility. No matter what happens, whether it’s someone else’s fault or not, blame yourself, it’s so releasing to be able to blame yourself and to just say, OK, this is my fault. What did I do wrong? Where did I make mistakes?

Because none of us are perfect. Then the power in doing that is the fact that that then allows you to go on and say, OK, what can I learn from this? What can I do better next time? So if you’re blaming someone else for something, stop alright! Because even though it might be true and that person did wrong by you, that’s probably not going to move you forward towards your goals, but taking responsibility for the part you played and then making sure you don’t make those mistakes next time that you learned from that and make better decisions next time.

That’s going to move you towards your financial goals faster. So I hope this has been a helpful and enlightening episode. Sorry for the way that I had to hold the camera for this episode. Just standing up for me and kind of being able to pace and move around seems to help my mind think for some reason.

I don’t know why, but thank you for sticking with me through this episode. And I hope that you will go out today and you will decide to take full responsibility for your financial situation and take full responsibility for the financial investments you’re going to make in the future. Do your research. Make sure that someone’s not conning in here and try and see ahead of time some of the mistakes that you might make as well. So that’s it from me today, guys. Best of luck out there and until next time, stay positive.

Let me pause.