SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to the Real Estate Real Life Podcast. I'm your host, Nick Stockerberg, here with my wife, Dr. Elaine Stockerberg. We are on a little road trip. We're doing a road trip podcast with you today. We're going to a baby moon staycation and also celebrating my wife's 40th birthday. And it seemed like the perfect time to talk to you about time orientation. Time orientation. I remember when Elaine and I started talking about this concept early in our relationship. We always had big plans for our life. And a fun video you might want to check out if you search on YouTube for RS Animate and the power of time. It has a great like a video infographic on different concepts of time orientation and time zones that people live in. So that could be a good primer for you to check out. And we're gonna we're gonna talk to you about a few concepts today that hopefully shift your time orientation, pull you forward into the future. Humans are incredibly powerful creatures that can live in a different time, they can time travel, but most people unfortunately they live their whole life not realizing that they have this incredible power.

SPEAKER_00 1:13

This concept of time orientation is really perfect for the podcast because we live it day to day in our real estate portfolio, and then we live it day to day in real life as well, and it's a concept that we teach quite a bit. I want to invite you to our quarterly update for the Black Swan Real Estate Portfolio that will be held on Thursday, April 16th at noon central. We do a live Zoom call where we share all of the updates on our real estate portfolio. It's about a$450 million portfolio. So as you can imagine, there's a lot of happenings each quarter, and you see there reflected in our real day-to-day decisions of how we operate the portfolio, this concept of time orientation showing up. You can learn more about our performance update webinar at blackswanteam.com forward slash update. You can sign up to attend the live call, receive the replay, take a look at our historical updates, and you'll see there the real lived work of time orientation and how it shows up in real estate. Here in this podcast, we're gonna focus more on the real life side. I think because we're driving for my trip, I'm a little too pregnant to get on a plane right now. So we're just going up to Minneapolis to spend the weekend together, celebrate my 40th birthday. We have a baby coming in five weeks, so celebrating the end of not just this pregnancy, but having had six children over the past 10 years and the end of an era, and how this concept of time orientation shows up. And we want to pass it on to you because we consider it to be one of the most crucial ingredients to not just a successful life, but a life that feels an alignment, a life that feels purposeful, that feels as though you're actually creating something. And walking this line between being excited about your goals, doing visioning, connecting with what you want, and of course wanting those things as quickly as possible. Do not confuse a long time orientation with the idea that you are lazy on your goals or you allow things to just drag out unnecessarily, or you get stuck in analysis paralysis. That's absolutely not the energy of a long time orientation. You're constantly pressing forward, you're constantly thinking about the next best step, the next move, what you need in this week, this month, this quarter, this year. But you also allow what I call tincture of time. Tincture of time. It's the best medicine, tincture of time to work in your life and to mature the things that are important to you, whether that's your real estate portfolio, your investment, your health, your spirituality, your own life. And we're in a reflective mood as we go into my 40th birthday and we've been married 15 years, and it's just a it's a natural time for us as very reflective people to reflect on, you know, well, what have we created over the last decade? What do we want to create in the coming decade? And when you're working with a time orientation of a decade or more, it can be so much more expansive than if you're working on a time orientation of a few days or a few months or even a few years.

SPEAKER_01 4:32

There's a phrase that I want to share with you, and I'd recommend just send yourself this email. I do this all the time. I send myself little emails of thoughts that I want to constantly remind myself of. Sometimes I'll snooze that email so it pops back up. You're familiar with the phrase the beginning of the end. Humans, we love to fixate on pain. Our brains are made to keep us alive. We're wired to survive, not to thrive. But I would challenge you with the idea that you are in the beginning of the beginning. So just send yourself a little email. No, no body, just a subject that just says, I am in the beginning of the beginning. And there's lots of different phrases, fun ideas, or exercises we can lead you through that we do at things like our real estate real life conference where we'll spend long, long periods of time doing guided meditations and visualizations. But just remind yourself constantly that you have such a long, beautiful journey ahead of you, and the pain and suffering of your day-to-day life is almost inevitably rooted in a belief that there is only the here and now. And if you want to travel back in time, you could send yourself an email that says, I am in the good old days right now. These are the good old days. Constantly remind yourself that one day, 20 years from now, you'll be looking back at the beautiful life that you are living today, that the challenges, the struggles of suffering. We just got five kids sending under out the door for school at a couple different campuses with lunches, and it was someone's birthday, so we celebrated a birthday, and we could easily get caught up in the toil and the poopy diapers and the unpleasantness of that. And we always remind ourselves that these are the good old days, and one day we won't have kids at home. And one day, 20 years from now, we will be leading an even more beautiful life because today we are in the beginning of the beginning. And Warren Buffett famously said, you should think of investing as having a punch card, and you get like 10 punches. If you could only make 10 good decisions in your life, what would those decisions be? How hard would you carefully consider that? And and implicit in that is a long time orientation. Warren also famously said that you should never buy something that you would not be thrilled if the market shut down for 10 years. All the worst decisions, the worst investment decisions, the worst life decisions are made from the perspective of a short-term mindset. Hey, I'm gonna buy this property, it's in not such a great area, but you know, we're just gonna fix up and flip it quick. No big deal. We aren't gonna have to hang on to this thing for a long time and manage all the headaches. And that kind of thinking is what ultimately gets you into the greatest amount of trouble. So send yourself an email right now, just I'm in the beginning of the beginning, or these are the good old days, and never stop reminding yourself that you have a long, beautiful journey ahead, and the struggles and toils and tribulations that you face today, that's what makes the journey worth it. That's what makes the journey memorable. Good things rarely come easy, and when you have a long time orientation, you tend to make much higher quality decisions from a place of confidence, clarity, and joy.

SPEAKER_00 8:07

Having a long time orientation has been so valuable to me because of the level of intentionality that it has created in my life. So, for example, you know, as Nick mentioned, we have five young children, ages 10 and under. I'm I'm pregnant with our sixth and final child. And so for the last decade, I have been in a kind of a mini long time orientation, right? Focusing on a decade-long endeavor. We knew that we wanted a large family. We knew that wouldn't just come, you know, all at once, right? That it would take a long time. The journey was longer than I anticipated with fertility struggles and many, many miscarriages and all sorts of things along the way. And yet at the same time, when you go into a big goal like I am going to build my family, it can be much easier to handle the ups and the downs with a very long time orientation, right? Going into it right from the get-go of hey, this is a 10 plus year endeavor to even get to where all of the children are born, let alone, you know, going through the process of raising them and all of that. And then that that 10-year time orientation, which is already a fairly long time orientation, is nested within a decade, a lifetime, a multi-lifetime time orientation of thinking about not just what do I want for my own self as a mother while I have these children in my home, while they're young and they actually want to spend time with us, but then what do I want life to look like when they have children? What do I want life to look like after I'm long gone? What do I want life to look like when people are commenting, oh, you know, your great grandmother or your great-grandmother, you know, you you only met her one time when you were a baby, or you know, she had passed away before you were even born. What are they saying about me then? And that flavor puts everything into context, right? You know, Nick said, like, we got all the kids out the door this morning, and you know, the the phrase is the years are short and the days are long. Yes, it can be so easy to get caught up in the day-to-day work of it, of parenting, of health, of spirituality, of real estate, of investing, of all of the things. And if it's unlinked to a worthy long time orientation, and you define what is worthy. No one else defines that. You define what is worthy, but it's if it's unlinked, then it's just struggle, it's just noise, it's just minutia, it's just like, oh, a never-ending sense of a to-do list and getting knocked off the plan or uh an unexpected problem. Like this, this is the the stuff of day-to-day life. And yet when it's linked to a very long time orientation, number one, it teaches you to really focus on what matters. I would say that's a consistent theme that I see in my coaching and in working with others is spending a lot of time and energy and focus on things that ultimately don't matter. Little squabbles, little bumps and bruises, little things. When your time orientation is very long, you naturally start to let those things go because you know they're not really gonna move the needle. Right? A little squabble with a kid today, or our 17-month-old was like fighting with getting his diaper on this morning. Like, that doesn't actually change how I will interact with his children or what Thanksgivings will look like 30 years from now. So I can allow that my minor thing in that day-to-day life to just kind of flow right through me and preserve my energy for creating the thing that really matters. So that's the first one. And then the second one is that it gives life so much meaning and purpose. When you know that you are creating something of magnificent, substantial value, and you can create that over a long time orientation. You can create something much more valuable over a long time orientation than you can over a short-time orientation. You have so much more energy to give to that thing. I'm excited for you to come to our quarterly update webinar for our portfolio, and you'll see there, we didn't create a half a billion dollar portfolio in a quarter. We've created it over 15 years. We already have the next 15, 30 years, you know, loosely sketched out in our minds toward a billion-dollar company, a multi-billion dollar company. And yet we're thinking about things on a quarterly basis. We're assessing, we're making sure that we're on target, we're, you know, always never-ending improvement, focusing on fundamentals. That was one of our earlier lessons, all within the framework that everything is building in this very long time orientation. You know, Nick shared, Warren says, like, never buy something that you wouldn't want to hold if the market shuts down. That can sound very abstract. And yet that is basically what has happened in the real estate industry over the last several years. As interest rates went up faster than anyone anticipated, that they're holding steady at higher rates longer than anyone anticipated. Many, many, many deals are struggling because they were underwritten to a one-year hold period, two-year hold period, three, four, five, you know, rate caps and all these other things. Our entire portfolio, we have always underwritten to an indefinite hold. We have never sold an asset. And I'm kind of weaving in here, you know, sort of some real estate stuff, some some real life stuff, very reflective right now in my own life as I turn 40 this weekend and thinking about what is it that I want to create in the next decade? What is it that I want to create in the next half of my life? And you're seeing that this concept of time orientation, it applies to real estate, it applies to real life.

SPEAKER_01 14:07

Something that Elaine and I do a lot is we we tend to live in the future, and I find that to be a very joyful place to live. Most people, they tend to live in the past. And you know, imagine you're driving your car and you're going, you know, 60 miles an hour down the highway, but you're you're looking in your rearview mirror, you're you're gonna be stressed out and you're gonna you're gonna have a crash. And if you think about what the future might look like, that tends to become reality. In fact, what we've figured out is there's there's a small number of people who make the bold decision to to live in the future, to to think about what they want the future to look like. And uh the present-day reality, it tends to reflect that sooner or later, my friends, 10, 20 years from now, you will surely arrive. The question is merely where, what does the world look like when you arrive? And the few people who choose to live there, those are the ones that get to shape that reality. So just as a very concrete example, let's say that you grew up in a family that had very poor economics. Both Elaine and I, we we grew up in families that did not know what uh what a budget looked like or what it was to have more than a few dollars in the bank. But we chose to live in the future where there was infinite money, where money was not a constraint on our life, and it seemed preposterous when we were younger, but because that was our expectation, our vision, our drive, our desire, our goal, whatever you want to call it, that eventually became reality today. And it it seems, frankly, just as preposterous today as it did back then, but because we chose to to live in that reality at that time, it became reality today. We imagined someone who was a person that had a big income or had a big net worth, what sort of decisions would they make? And maybe if we made those decisions, we would become that person if we spent time with people who had those things and embodied those values, we would eventually become those people.

SPEAKER_00 16:12

You see that ethos reflected in how we think about wealth. So if you haven't yet checked out our episode on wealth span, go ahead and do that. And what you'll see there is we think about wealth very differently than than most people think about. They might think about wealth in terms of net worth or a drawdown rate, 4% per year, those sorts of things. We think about wealth in terms of time. How many months or years can you live off of what you've created, both your net worth and most importantly your passive income? How many months or years can you live off of that? And so you see this concept of time orientation showing up in many different ways across what we teach and the values that we have, and it shows up in wealth span as well.

SPEAKER_01 16:58

So we hope you found this insightful, helpful, impactful. We've given you a few immediate things you can do. Send a note to yourself that you are living in the beginning of the beginning, to uh remember that these are the good old days, to know that when you choose to live in a better future today, when you imagine it, when you talk to people about it, it tends to become real and it tends to make the struggles of your day-to-day life today joyful. When you're tethered to the present, that's when suffering occurs, but when you live in a bold, better future, that's when the suffering of today becomes just fun setbacks in the journey along the way. But y'all, I gotta get this woman to her birthday here, so we're gonna we're gonna wrap it up. We dearly hope that you choose to join us for our next quarterly update, and you get to see how we have chosen to live in the future in the management of our real estate portfolio. During the pandemic, uh approximately 93% of apartment building deals were closed with variable rate debt, and so many operators got into a really difficult spot when interest rates went up quickly because we're so future oriented, we thought, you know, what will interest rates probably look like in the future? Probably be higher than they are today, and it might be a good time to get fixed rate debt. And so we've been able to survive and thrive at a time when a lot of operators are struggling. And so, this next update webinar, we're going to share some fun stuff that we've done uh with AI and some other pretty cool developments in the company. And we hope that you join us for that. You can go to blackswan team.comslash updates.