Jack Thursday – We Now Control Most Aspects of Our Own Lives (LA 1611)
Jack Thursday – We Now Control Most Aspects of Our Own Lives (LA 1611)
Transcript:
Steven Jack Butala:
Steve and Jill here.
Jill DeWit:
Hey.
Steven Jack Butala:
Welcome to the Land Academy Show, entertaining land investment talk. I’m Steven Jack Butala.
Jill DeWit:
And I’m Jill Dewitt. And we are broadcasting from the Valley of The Sun.
Steven Jack Butala:
Today is Jack Thursday, and I’m going to talk about how we now control and I mean, all of us, all, almost all aspects of our own lives. And I’ll tell what, when we were kids, Jill and I wasn’t like that at all.
Jill DeWit:
Yeah. I’m excited to talk about this.
Steven Jack Butala:
Before we get into it, let’s take a question posted by one of our members on the landinvestors.com online community. It’s free. And please don’t forget to subscribe on the land academy YouTube channel and comment on the shows you like.
Jill DeWit:
Jessica wrote, “What points of failure do you think new land investors should be looking out for? As a one person show, I don’t want to use my limited energy to create redundancy for the sake of redundancy, but there’s bound to be ways we can mitigate the typical points of failure experienced by those at this stage of our careers.”
Steven Jack Butala:
So Jessica and I in Discord, went back and forth on this. And then a lot of people came back in. I’m not in there every day or constantly or anything, but this is a topic that… A single point of failure is a topic that really sings to me because I was on the Brent end of that concept between around 2009 and 2011.
Steven Jack Butala:
Really until Jill and I had joined forces to get back in it, really get land investing back on track, or there was a recession then. And a lot of it was because of the single point of failure. We had a single point of failure sales channel. All we were doing was buying some property and selling them on eBay. It was great. I made millions and tens of millions of dollars doing it actually.
Jill DeWit:
It was great until it wasn’t.
Steven Jack Butala:
Yep. Until it turned off. And I looked around and said, “Well, it’s off like the electricity. And what can I do about it? Pretty much nothing.” And so I never want that to happen again. So Jessica and I were going back and forth on Discord. I said, you can’t have a single point of failure in your sales channel. This came up because Facebook and Instagram were down for two days this week.
Jill DeWit:
Oh yeah, that’s true.
Steven Jack Butala:
That’s why she was asking this.
Jill DeWit:
Oh.
Steven Jack Butala:
She’s, “I don’t want to get caught up in this.”
Jill DeWit:
Whatif Facebook marketplace is the only place I seem to sell property?
Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah. That’s where she [crosstalk 00:02:21].
Jill DeWit:
Well, then don’t let that happen.
Steven Jack Butala:
Really what she asked.
Jill DeWit:
Yeah.
Steven Jack Butala:
Here’s another place that I’ve been burned on a single point of failure, recently, very, very recently. When you rely too heavily on a single important employee, it’s going to bite you at some point. Now, Jill and I cross-train everybody. We don’t go in there and say, “Hey, we’re cross-training you.” What ends up happening is somebody makes some time off, another person steps in. They learn how to run some stuff or whatever division it is. They work at 020 for a couple of weeks, they go over to data, the neighbor scoop for a week or whatever. So it ends up being a inadvertent cross-training.
Steven Jack Butala:
Everybody’s in it together kind of thing. You can’t do that with everybody. There’s a lot of perfect personalities, you just want to do one thing and that’s it. And I get that, and that’s fine. To some degree, I’m like that. I just want to do one thing. And so you can’t put too much stock in one employee, in one area. If you start to do mailers and you concentrate and you only use one way and you never do any type of review. And you bring your head back up from your desk three years later and that resource is not available, that’s not good.
Jill DeWit:
We just went through stuff like that.
Steven Jack Butala:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jill DeWit:
Like Facebook, that’s a perfect example. Have other ways to do things.
Steven Jack Butala:
A classic single point of failure that no one talks about, and I don’t know why, is your job.
Jill DeWit:
That’s true.
Steven Jack Butala:
Until you don’t have your job anymore, like Jill just said. Your job’s great, and well, something happened.
Jill DeWit:
And then they close.
Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah. Or and they laid you off or they don’t need you there anymore for some reason.
Jill DeWit:
Exactly. They don’t make that, whatever it is anymore, something comes up.
Steven Jack Butala:
Yet for some reason, it’s so tragic when that happens, I lost my job. You see it in movies all the time, “You lost your job?” You should have been planning for this. Your father should have been helping you plan for this when you were 19.
Jill DeWit:
And now you are.
Steven Jack Butala:
So single point of failure is a huge thing. And so just take a look around in your whole life and look at what can fail tomorrow because somebody changed their mind. It’s a lot of stuff.
Jill DeWit:
Right. That’s between you and Jessica. I’m like, move along.
Steven Jack Butala:
Today is Jack Thursday. I’m going to talk about how we now control most aspects of our own lives. This is the meat of the show. For the last two or three weeks, Jill and I have had, because we’re now living one house, in one state. We file one state tax return and have to some degree, kind of turned a corner about, “Wow, this is.” We’re both looking at each other a lot lately going, “This is what we were hoping for.”
Jill DeWit:
You mean our cars are all in the same zip code?
Steven Jack Butala:
Before this, we had three rental houses that we were renting at different states and it was just terrible.
Jill DeWit:
Oh, yeah.
Steven Jack Butala:
So we live in our own house with our own stuff in one place. And so then I started thinking to myself, well, why am I watching the same news channel? Where the people on these news channels are not talking about anything that I’m interested in at all? Nothing. In fact, I don’t identify with these people in anymore anyway. I’m just-.
Jill DeWit:
That’s true.
Steven Jack Butala:
It’s just a habit.
Jill DeWit:
Isn’t that funny?
Steven Jack Butala:
That’s the answer. It’s just this habit. And over time, things change and progress. And either I outgrew it or the world outgrew me. Either one, it’s I have control over that. I can watch Motocross during the morning instead of watching the news. I could watch nothing. I could take a guitar lesson on YouTube. There’s a million things we can all do.
Steven Jack Butala:
So it occurred to me about a week ago, how much control, how this concept, how deep it goes into our personal lives, in our professional lives and raising children and everything else. So Land Academy just keeps coming, popping right up. I mean, talk about control.
Jill DeWit:
I know.
Steven Jack Butala:
If you’re doing great in Land Academy and you’re sending out 5,000 mailers a month and you want to double that, just send out 10,000 mailers. You have complete control over it.
Jill DeWit:
Hold on, go back to the other part. Because it really makes me think. And you talked about when we were kids or something, there’s more than one gas station, there’s more than one grocery store, there’s more than one… I went to a store, the shopping area name nameless here the other day. And I don’t think I’ve been there since COVID. And it was, I didn’t like the experience anymore. The people weren’t nice, the customers weren’t nice. I’m, “I’m not coming back here anymore.” They changed.
Steven Jack Butala:
Let’s say you don’t want to go to the grocery store ever again.
Jill DeWit:
Exactly.
Steven Jack Butala:
Amazon, whatever it’s called market. I don’t know.
Jill DeWit:
Yeah.
Steven Jack Butala:
And then there’s lots of competitors of that, Instacart.
Jill DeWit:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Steven Jack Butala:
Let’s say you don’t want to ever leave the house again. You don’t have to, if you have a Land Academy situation and all these other, these apps now that you can get stuff delivered. Let’s say you-
Jill DeWit:
You can work where you want. Live where you want.
Steven Jack Butala:
That you have complete control is my pull, the whole title is. We have control over most really all aspects of our lives now.
Jill DeWit:
It’s true. Yeah.
Steven Jack Butala:
It’s what don’t we have control over? We have complete control over our diet, completely.
Jill DeWit:
Yeah.
Steven Jack Butala:
No other citizen-
Jill DeWit:
All your health.
Steven Jack Butala:
Of another country in the world.
Jill DeWit:
Yeah. Picking your doctors, picking your insurance, all kinds of things you can do. If you’re like us and you’re your own boss, you pick your own insurance company. You pick everything about it.
Steven Jack Butala:
So my point is I caught, I’m throwing myself under the bus here a little, I caught myself being increasingly little tiny bit by bit by bit more disgusted with stuff. Jill, ask Jill.
Jill DeWit:
Here comes the rant.
Steven Jack Butala:
And I looked at myself and said, “This is stupid.”
Jill DeWit:
Yeah.
Steven Jack Butala:
This just is, I’m a victim of habit.
Jill DeWit:
Yeah.
Steven Jack Butala:
And it’s just got to, I can do anything I want for the vast majority of my life from this point forward.
Jill DeWit:
This is it. This is what this is to me. If you find yourself at a funk, you need to take a step back and realize you have control over that funk. If you think, “I can’t take it. Every time I turn on the news, it’s negative. Every time I go here, this is bad and that’s bad. And I have to wait forever. And I can’t get this.” Hold on, take a step back and realize you have control over. Like you just said, you can watch whatever you want, you can live wherever you want, you can… We have so many options about careers and what we consume.
Steven Jack Butala:
So that’s great Jack, but you don’t have two little kids, a mortgage and a job you need to show up for every day. You’re absolutely right, I don’t.
Jill DeWit:
It’s true.
Steven Jack Butala:
And you don’t need any of those things, with the exception of your children. You’re not responsible for any of that stuff.
Jill DeWit:
You can change it.
Steven Jack Butala:
If it’s so bad that you don’t want to be involved in it anymore. If the job that you have to show up for can potentially be replaced by you getting a little bit of education, if you even need it.
Jill DeWit:
Right.
Steven Jack Butala:
And getting another job. There are so many jobs right now.
Jill DeWit:
That’s true.
Steven Jack Butala:
There’s never been more jobs in the history of this country ever.
Jill DeWit:
True.
Steven Jack Butala:
And so if you can hold onto that job for. And it’s never been easier to get education because of all the stuff on the internet. So get yourself an online job and move to Southern Illinois, where houses cost 25,000 bucks.
Jill DeWit:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Something.
Steven Jack Butala:
There’s all kinds of options. You have total and complete control.
Jill DeWit:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). I agree. This is great. Thank you for bringing this up.
Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah.
Jill DeWit:
Happy you could join us today. Five days a week, you can find us right here on the Land Academy Show.
Steven Jack Butala:
Join us tomorrow. Well, it’s Jill Friday. She’s going to talk about the three relationships that you absolutely need in your land business. And one of them is not a husband. You are not alone in your real estate ambition.
Jill DeWit:
Thank you for clarifying. And another one is not a boss. Don’t need that. That’s really good. Thank you for tuning in. We hope you find our content valuable and we really appreciate your support. If you haven’t already, please check out our YouTube channel and hit that subscribe button. We are Steve and Jill.
Steven Jack Butala:
We are Steve and Jill. Information.
Jill DeWit:
And inspiration.
Steven Jack Butala:
To buy undervalued property.
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