Need More Balance in Your Life

Mike H: Hey, everybody, welcome back to the show. I’ve got a great show today. My buddy Mike Newby, actually right here in the Dallas-Fort Worth market where I’m at. And Mike is just an amazing guy. I’ve gotten to know him a lot better over the last six or eight months or so. And as a member of the Investor Fuel Mastermind, local investor as well, and just has a great character and he really cares a lot about charity and a lot of other things in his life, has a great family. And today he’s going to share something that is probably a little bit wise beyond his years even. He’s like living this balanced life.
As entrepreneurs, we all struggle with trying to live a more balanced life and kind of being present when we’re with our family and stuff. But it’s so easy for us to just keep looking at that phone and moving onto the next thing and getting sucked into social media. So he’s been able to overcome a lot of that. He’s going to share that message with us today. I think it’s going to be a great lesson. We’ll get started in just a second.
Professional real estate investors know that it’s not really about the real estate. In fact, real estate is just a vehicle to freedom. A group of over 100 of the nation’s leading real estate investors from across the country meet several times a year at the Investor Fuel Real Estate Mastermind to share ideas on how to strengthen each other’s businesses, but also to come together as friends and build more fulfilling lives for all of those around us. On today’s show, we’re going to continue our conversation of fueling our businesses and fueling our lives. I’m glad you’re here.
Mike H: Hey, Mike, welcome to the show.
Mike N: Hey, thanks for having me on. I’m excited to be here.
Mike H: Yeah, my neighbor, I don’t see you all that often in person. Sometimes I guess we run into each other locally here. It’s funny, sometimes I see people more online or . . .
Mike N: You’d think being in a big market, being in the same market we’d run into each other all the time, but no.
Mike H: Yeah, no, not often enough. So, hey man, this is a great topic. For folks that are listening, you know, we always come up with our topics right before we start recording. And for guys like Mike, I mean we could talk about 20 different things, right? So we’re just like, what are you most passionate about right now? And yeah, just kind of popped up about being present. And truthfully, it’s something that I struggle with a lot and we started talking about it.
I was like, no, I don’t want to steal your thunder. Like I’m excited to be a part of this conversation too, because I need to learn. But before we jump into that, because I think a lot of entrepreneurs struggle with that, right? Where it’s so convenient for us to say, this is my work. Like I got to go now. It’s not like a nine to five job where you can leave and you’re like, have this separation between work and life. As entrepreneurs, it’s easy for us to say that 24 hours a day I’m working if I have to. Even if we say, you know, the truth is I don’t have to work as hard as I do. Like, we travel a lot. There’s a lot of things that we can do, but I still am glued to devices all the time just because I’m an addict probably, let’s be honest.
Mike N: It’s easy to do. It’s super easy to do.
Mike H: Yeah, yeah. Hey, before we jump into that, let’s talk a little about you. Like what’s your background before you, how’d you get started in real estate investing.
Mike N: Yeah. So it’s kind of, I’ve always been interested in construction. My brother was kind of, you know, I just kind of watched him draw as I grew up. He was always interested in drawing and drawing houses and stuff like that and so I call him an architect without a stamp. I mean, the guy is incredibly smart, and he, right now he works for a company. He builds garages and designs them and design shelves for hospitals and all that stuff. So that’s kind of where I got the bug for construction and for housing and architecture and all that stuff. And so I went to school, got a construction engineering degree from UNT. It took me a while to figure out that that’s what I wanted to do, but I finally stuck to it and got through it.
And while I was doing that, I was working at Starbucks and met a guy that worked for an inspection company and so I went and worked for them right out of college and kind of went to that side of things for a while. So learned a ton about building inspection and how things are put together, how they should look and did that for about five years. But kind of on the tail end of that, I started kind of seeing the glass ceiling and I wanted more for my family.
I had big dreams, big goals, big giving goals. My wife and I are real big givers, and so about probably about year three while I was with them, we had flipped a house. This was now, and gosh, like 10 years ago. We’d flipped one house. We did it ourselves. My dad was involved, my brothers involved. My mom was involved, big family affair. My uncle even came in from Michigan and painted, you know what I mean?
It was just so we were just having fun with it, but that kind of went away for about seven years or so. And then the bug started coming back. And so, we created our company, Newbyginnings and kind of started from there. So we’re a little over two years in now from when we first purchased our first flip. And we’re about, I think we’re on deal 15 or 16 at this point. And not all of them have been straight rehabs or flips. We’ve done rental. We’ve done some duplexes out in Longview, kind of syndication deal there. We’ve got on owner finance I’m doing, so kind of some different things. Primarily we have been flippers and rehabbers though, and we’re just having a blast with it honestly.
Mike H: That’s great. Yeah, that’s great. I know you’re anxious to continue to grow. So that’s great. Awesome. Awesome. So we started talking about this idea of a balanced life and, you know, I struggle with that because I could live in more balanced. You know the problem, I think one of the big problems for entrepreneurs is we always move the goal line on ourselves. It’s like I say I want to achieve something and then when it gets closer I’m like, “Oh, that’s a dumb goal. Let me double it.”
And so, if you’re like that, not everybody listening is necessarily like that, but a lot of entrepreneurs I think are like that, it’s hard to have that balance because if you stop at that goal line and you were cool with it, you could probably find more balance or start to lay back a little bit and enjoy more of a life. I’m not saying that I don’t enjoy my life. I’ve kind of realized that I enjoy the pursuit of big goals. Like that, it’s not so much I enjoy getting to the goal line. Somewhere I enjoy moving that goal line, I guess.
Mike N: Yeah. You get to it and then you’re like, well now I’ve done this. I could do this now and you set it even further, you know, out in the distance. And I think that as entrepreneurs, you love that. You love that hustle part of it and I think that’s why we move it and keep moving it. But we got to be careful because we’ll get caught in that all the time and forget all this other stuff over here as to why we started out doing it in the first place.
Mike H: Yeah. It’s easy as you know. I think you’d agree. It’s easy to say it’s easy to fall in the trap of I’m doing this for my family, I’m doing this for the impact. Like finding ways to tie your why to something that is a little bit cloudy as to what that really is. It’s like, well, okay, well when you get to a certain point, it’s like, well, maybe your family would rather have you around more instead of like make more money that you don’t need or whatever. But you know, especially for you guys like you, like you’re really big on giving back to charity and stuff and then that drives you too like, I need these resources to help my family, to help the communities I care about, all those things. So how do you balance that?
Mike N: Yeah, so I had a really tough time especially being a first-time business owner, first time entrepreneur. I always had the bug, but I never owned my own business, never ran my own business or anything like that. I’ve always been, you know, when I was with a company last I got kind of high up on the chain. So I saw kind of how the executives ran and stuff like that, but I didn’t ever know how to do it myself.
And when I first jumped in, kind of, I left that job and even before that, when I was trying to balance both of them, I was on my phone all the time. Just like you mentioned, I felt like I had to be on 24/7. I felt like I had to answer an email at 12:00 at night, you know, and almost to the point of, so the person answering it the next day was like, “Oh wow, he was working at 12:00 p.m. or midnight.” Not 12 p.m. but midnight.
And so, it was part hustle, part starting out feeling like I had to do that, you know but in the midst of all of that, you know, my wife very candidly was, you know, you’re on your phone all the time. You’re not present. Your kids are starting to notice. My kids at that time, they were one and a half and three and a half. When she started saying stuff like that, I start to find that like, it took a while for me to, you know, yeah, but I’ve got to do this. I’m doing this for us, you know. And so I finally started realizing I had to figure out how to do it.
So a plug for Darren Hardy, but I absolutely love him and I watch, he has a morning video that you can, it’s called DarrenDaily and I watch it every single morning, but I did his course called Insane Productivity and it really opened my eyes. The second module in there had this digital assessment that you do and it’s essentially rehab, you know, not alcohol or drugs, but for your phone or for your computer or being, you know, digitally attached, you know. And because in terms of marketing, as real estate investors, we know we’re trying to follow those people. We’re trying to be in everybody’s face and at any point in time any company can just reach out, you know, and almost like touch you at any point they want, you know, if you search something like that.
And so, I did this assessment and it’s asking things like, you’ve stopped at a red light. When you’re stopped, do you pull up your phone and look at it? Do you have phantom vibrations from your pocket? Do you have to check your phone? If you leave the house and you forgot your phone, do you turn around to go get it? You feel naked without it. We’ve all done this, you know? Yes. We feel like we’ve come [inaudible 00:10:22].
Mike H: So far and they’re all yeses for me.
Mike N: Yeah, exactly. And so, there was like 50 questions and I was like 42 of them I said yes. It says I was a crack head is the actual term, you know. And so, it really opened my eyes. I didn’t even realize how much because just it becomes a part of you. You’re checking Facebook or you know, those are on Twitter and I don’t who’s on Twitter anymore, but you’re checking that, you’re checking all the different things you have. You feel like you have to open your email. Another one was, do you refresh your email even though there’s no unreads but you think you may have missed something in the last five seconds?
Mike H: Right. Is this thing even working? Like, yeah, yeah.
Mike N: Exactly. Is my internet down? What’s going on? And so, it really started me thinking of I’ve got to do something about this. And so, one of the first things I did was I turned off every notification essentially on my phone. So no longer do I get pinged when somebody’s updating Facebook, no longer do I get pinged when an email comes in.
Mike H:Yeah, that’s great.
Mike N:No longer is any random app, like the weather pinging me and it’s buzzing me and I have to look at my phone and then I check the weather real quick and then I’m on here already. I’ll check Facebook. You know what I mean?
Mike H: Exactly. Yeah. You get sucked in, right?
Mike N: One thing leads to another. So I can’t tell you. The feeling was almost euphoric after I turned off all those notifications because I felt like I got my life back. It was I didn’t realize how bad it had gotten, I guess. And so just the easy step that took me, you know, less than 30 minutes of going in and turning off. Every single Facebook group you join automatically, it will notify you when somebody posts in there. So you have to go in there and make sure you turn off all those, you know, you leave on a couple that you may want, you know, but there’s tons of them that I’m sure people have joined that they really don’t even care about but it’s going to buzz your phone every single time.
Mike H: Yeah. I hate this. I mean, I’m saying I actually did turn off. I don’t know when I did this. Maybe six months ago, I turned off all my notifications too. Like, I don’t want to see that I have an email that I haven’t looked at yet because the truth is, you’re probably the same, I get hundreds of emails a day and like 90% of them are junk. The problem is I would assume all I’ve got one unread message, like, oh, that must be important. It’s like, no, it’s like spam even, right? It’s like, what the hell is this? So it’s crazy.
It’s weird. It’s like, as an entrepreneur, you know what’s weird? We get into this business, real estate investing for us, but any business you would get into, you know, we’ll kind of speak for real estate investors here, I guess. You get into it because you want to have a more balanced life, you want to live a better life, you want more freedom over your schedule, right? We have a real good job of like making sure we fill that day up with something just so when we get done for the day, we can say, well, I worked hard today, right? It’s like, yeah, you were on Facebook and checking a bunch of emails that don’t matter. It wasn’t productive. You were busy but it wasn’t productive.
Mike N: Yup. Yup. Exactly. There’s a really good book. I’m going through it now about, I’m probably three quarters of the way through “The 12 Week Year.” You probably heard of it. And then, what else? Brendon Burchard has his high productivity habits, really good.
Mike H: “High Performance Habits.”
Mike N: “High Performance Habits.” Thank you. And then Darren Hardy talks about it. You’ve got to build in time every single week. So now I have this time. I plan my week on Sundays. Sunday nights, I plan my week ahead and those vital tasks that I come up with, and I come up with those with this quadrant system that he has where it’s got your, pick three main goals for the year. Okay. And then you put those in there, and then you have what’s called the devil’s vortex. And the devil’s vortex is essentially, so you write down all the tasks you think you have to do for the week or you know, things you need to do. And if they fall any anywhere outside of those three, it goes to the devil’s vortex, right? And those are not tasks you should be working on. They’re not getting you towards your goal.
And so, I plan my week like that, but in my week, I build in time every single week, probably a couple hours or so to sit there and just think. Literally phones off. Nobody can contact me. I go to my happy place, whether it’s Starbucks or you know, a room at my house or somewhere where I sit in my car, you know what I mean? Just wherever it is that you enjoy, I sit and think and I’ve got 10 questions or so that I ask myself. And I don’t know if I have them here or not. I do. I actually have them. They’re called my think time questions that I go through and I essentially plan this time where I’m not doing anything else except thinking about my life, thinking about my business, thinking about my family and if I’m on track, if I’ve created enough buffer, if I’m working too hard, if I’m not working hard enough, do I need a vacation, you know, that type of stuff.
And I just ask, am I happy? A simple question. Am I happy? Sometimes we don’t sit back and just think about these types of things. We’re just go, go, go, go, go. And so, I build in that time to my week, you know, and it actually goes in my calendar. It’s an appointment in my calendar, you know, that this is happening at this time. And once it’s in the calendar, it helps out to not move it around
Mike H: Right. Don’t double book it.
Mike N: Or I’ll just, I’ll get to that next week, you know?
Mike H: Yeah, yeah. That’s great. Yeah. So you’re really kind of hitting on the concept of time blocking, which is a powerful tool, right? I mean, I do that too. Sometimes I don’t stick to it, but I definitely, you know, I try to adhere. There’s some times that I block that like the one that I actually stick to the least, which I wish I did is on Fridays I tend to block the whole day and it’s just like Mike Day. I can do whatever I want.
Now the truth is, my greatest hobby is more work or thinking about work but it gives me the flexibility to like know if there’s some lunch, like, you know, this week I’m actually having lunch with Daniel Moore and he lives in Weatherford by the way. So I’m in like Lewisville. I’m like for those of you that are DFW though, so we’re meeting for lunch but he’s like an hour, hour and 20 minutes away.
I’m like, well I can do it on a Friday because that’s a lot of time. But anyway, things like that. Like I spend just block these times. Like as we’re recording the show right now, I have Thursdays are content and coaching days. So I have for my coaching program, Thursday afternoons we have coaching calls and webinars and in the morning kind of session I do shows, right? And so just kind of like make these days almost have themes, right?
And then I have like, well I have lunch with my wife almost every day. And we’ve always done that, but it used to be like, “Oh, I don’t have time today or maybe I can go at like 1:30.” It was all over the board and I just fit it in if I could make it work. But now it’s like 1 to 2 every day blocked off for lunch. What happens is, you don’t like fill those times with other stuff that might not even be pertinent, right?
Mike N: Right, right. Yup. Yeah, exactly. I mean, my workouts go in there. I even went to the extreme and I put my bedtime to my wake time in the calendar. And look, yeah, it’s never, like, it’s not an exact science, you know? Yes, we stray from it and this and that, but if it wasn’t in there at all, I would probably stray and never get back to it. I would just keep going this way and before I know it, I’m out all the way in left field and I’ve forgotten where I started. And so, it goes in there. And so, I try to get to bed by 10:30 every night. I try to get in bed by 10. It doesn’t happen all the time. Sometimes I think I just need to come home and sit on the couch and relax. And so, and that doesn’t happen until 10:30, you know, but I try to wake up at 5:30 every morning. And so, it goes into the calendar and I’ve got routines for each of those.
Mike H: Yeah. And then you start to develop those routines, right? It becomes habit. Like, especially if you’re listening to this and you’re like, “Oh, that’s a good idea. I need to start blocking some time.” And you know, I did the same thing. I was like, I literally have it in my calendar. And it’s become routine now so I don’t have it in my calendar anymore, but for the last like year, I’m like at 6:00 and I only live in a mile from my office, but like 6:00 I was like, go home. Like go home. Put a calendar in there to tell me when to go home. Notify my calendar. But it developed that routine to the point where now it’s like, there’s no question I need to be home by 6, right?
Mike N: Right. Yeah, exactly. It’s just those little things. I’ve got reminders throughout the day that just come up, you know, come up at 7 a.m. come up at 12 p.m., come up at 5 p.m. Some are just little word reminders, you know, that just, you know, one of them is embrace the struggle and it just comes up three times throughout the day. It just pops up and it reminds me and sometimes I’m sitting there like sulking and then this comes up and I’m like, okay, breathe, embrace this, figure it out. You know what I mean?
Mike H: Yeah. That’s good. Just a reminder to like be aware of where you are and know that, you know. Maybe you could tie it in to where that quote comes up and then like mama says, knock you out, starts playing or something. It’s all pumped up.
Mike N: I’m sure “Eye of the Tiger.” Exactly.
Mike H: Some pump up music.
Mike N: Exactly.
Mike H: Cool.
Mike N:That would be great.
Mike H:So, talk a little bit about kind of like this idea of booking in your day. Like you get up at a certain time. I know you said this before we started the show and I did this for a while. I’ve gotten away from it now. So a while back I was creating a new training program for our coaching students, and I just couldn’t get it done. I just wasn’t moving fast enough. It was taking way longer. And there were a bunch of people that I’m connected to on Facebook that were like, I’m getting up at 4 a.m. to like work and stuff and I’m more of a night. I stay up later than I should.
Mike N: I’m the same way.
Mike H: And so, it just got to the point where it’s like, I’m going to get up, I’m going to start getting up at 3. I want to get up at 3 every day. And I did it and it was a painful because I had to go to bed at like 9. But anyway, I was for like several weeks I got up at 3:00 and but I found between like 3 and 7 that before I have to take my son to school, like I would get more done in that. By the time I get up honestly it was a half hour by the time I’m like awake and coherent, but like that 3, 3:30 hour time spread, I would get more done than I’d ever gotten before in a normal like eight, eight- or nine-hour day. I’m not on social media. I’m like in my mind I’m like man I didn’t get up this early to check social media or email. I’m going to get some work done. It’s crazy how productive that time was for me.
Mike N: Yeah. I mean because once you know either 7 a.m. or 8 a.m., once the day kind of starts, you start getting bombarded with all these other things that take you off track. And so, yeah, if you set yourself up cliché, set yourself up for success, you know, in that first couple hours and you just go at it, you know, it’s just you and whatever work you need to get done and you’re intentional about it. You probably the night before where like, I’m going to get up and do this thing in the morning. And some people even go to the extreme like I’m going to take, you know, if this is what I’m working on, like this goes on my computer in my office and this is like, it makes it so easy. All I have to do is wake up and wake my computer and there’s my work, right? You just, you break the barrier down.
Mike H: And some of that at that time too, when you get up early, basically, I’m encouraging people if you’re listening to this and you’ve got something big you’re working on and it doesn’t require like talking to customers or whatever, like it’s a great time. Because the other thing it does is like, I didn’t like shower, I didn’t like do anything. I wasn’t getting ready for the day. I was just like roll out of bed, not worried about brushing my teeth or any of that. Like just go and crank, you know. It was just like no distractions, no opportunity to get distracted anywhere. Just like go and get shit done basically.
Mike N: Yeah. It’s just you and whatever it needs to get done, you know? And it’s amazing and there’s flow. They talk about flow, right? And every single distraction that happens, it can take up to 21 to 23 minutes for you to even get back on track. You don’t even realize it. This whole multitasking thing, I hate when people say multitasking, you know, it drives me nuts because you think you’re doing all these different things at once, but you’re just kind of starting and stopping stuff and you’re not getting in any real good state, you know, mental state. And so, if you’re doing something anywhere from 45 minutes or more in a row, like if that’s all it is you’re doing, you get into this total other mental flow where stuff just starts to piecing together and it just makes it so much easier, you know?
So if you can get those chunks. So like my morning I wake up at 5:30 and if you have trouble with that, here’s how I fixed it. I’m a night person. I absolutely love the evening. I would stay up all night long if I could. I love it. And I hate the mornings. I’m not a morning person like, and so I had to trick myself. I had to find ways to get around this. And so I found two of my buddies and I convinced them to also wake up with me. That might take some time too. One of them actually loves waking up early, so that actually worked for me. So find your friend that loves waking up early and have him call you at whatever time you want to get up, okay?
So my buddy calls me at 5:30 every single morning during the week. I give myself a break on the weekends. But during the week he calls me and that I have to be awake for that call. Like mentally if I miss my friend’s call, like it’s a whole other ball game. You know, like I feel like I’ve let him down now. It’s not only letting myself down, I’ve let somebody else down. And we chat for five minutes. Sometimes we don’t have anything to say. Sometimes we chat, you know, for a little bit. And we do that thing and that gets me up. I eat a quick breakfast, I read my Bible every morning, I watch my DarrenDaily and then I get to work. So probably about 6:00, you know, I’m working and I work for a couple hours straight there. And I get so much done in those first couple of hours, you know, before I’ve got to get the kids going and get them just to, you know, daycare, you know, upstairs working or whatnot.
Mike H: Awesome.
Mike N:That’s my morning. It’s a routine and now it has become, you know, routine. I didn’t even mention I drink a cup or a glass of water every morning because you get dehydrated over the evening, you need a glass of water in the morning. It’ll help you wake up. Maybe not instantly, but it’ll help you get up. And I have that prepped the night before. Okay. So all I do is wake up, get out of bed, go drink that glass of water. I don’t have to pour it, just spill it all over the ground or drop the glass or whatever and then I stretch for seven minutes also. But that’s my morning booking.
Mike H: Yeah, that’s awesome.
Mike N: And a lot of people talk about yeah, I get up at 3 a.m. Yeah, I get up at 4:30, I get up at 5, but nobody talks about the night before. Like, you know, and it’s like, well, yeah, but how are you, how are you doing that? How are you getting prepared for that night before?
I just read “The Sleep Revolution” by Arianna Huffington. Great book. A really, really good read. It’s a long book. And I do everything on Audible but I’ve read more books on Audible in the past two years of my life and I’ve ever read my entire life. I’m probably at 40 or 50 books at this point probably. And I try to take notes and all that stuff, but I read this book and it’s based on, you know, years of research and evidence and all this stuff.
Seven to eight hours, that’s what an adult, you know, needs. As kids you need more but let’s get to an adult stage of your life. Seven to eight hours. Seven is fine so I chose seven. I was like, there’s no way I’m getting eight. Like how? How is that possible with everything we got going on? And so I start winding down, I try to wind down around 9:30, 10:00. I start mentally shutting my brain down and mentally starting preparing for bed. I may be doing some kind of, you know, tasks like washing the dishes or doing some laundry or stuff that, you know, mindless, you know, kind of stuff but my mentally getting ready for bed already. And I try to get in bed by 10. Like I said, it doesn’t always happen, but I try to and then I try to have myself asleep by 10:30. I’m either reading, you know, or journaling or something like that, you know?
Mike H: Yeah. So that time blocking, having those routines, man, it can make a difference, no doubt. I think even during the day, like I’ve, we got to a point, we went through an EOS implementation, entrepreneurial operating system 18 month . . . maybe about two years ago now, almost two years ago, year and a half ago let’s say. And then we, you know, my whole team, we started being aware of like, because we’ve moved to a new office now, but we had a pretty open working area. Never shut our doors. It was always, and you know who several people on my team are and we’re the type of people who like to talk to each other all day long. So just like, “Hey, you have a second, you have a second, you have a second,” all day long. And it was like, okay, we can’t do this.
What I started and we didn’t really stick to this, I’m trying to get back to it now is three days a week I had, what I call a stump meeting. Just a 15-minute meeting. Like, what do you need me to approve or what is it you need me to do? Instead of the little emails, like, “Hey, what do you think about this picture? What do you think about this logo? What do you think about if we decide this?” Little decisions, but those little bitty decisions, like you said, can derail you for 15, 20 minutes and us like, do you have a sec? It’s never a second. It’s like, it’s 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes. Next thing you know, we’ve been talking for an hour and I didn’t even get the stuff done that needed to get down.
And so, having times in your, you know, we have our a level 10 meeting, which is part of the EOS process. Every Wednesday 10:30 to 12, we have our level 10 meeting. We have very specific times that our team has needs. Everybody knows what it is. If you have a bunch of questions, store them up and let’s like tackle them during these times. And so there’s lots of ways to take this kind of time blocking idea and move it to your team too, not just like individually or personally, right?
Mike N: Right, right. Oh yeah. I mean, you apply it to personal life, your business life, your team. I mean, there’s so many. It’s so good. I mean, and look, I’ve started it and stopped it and started it and stopped it, but I’ll come back to it. And once you’ve just actually commit to do it, you know, and actually start putting it in your calendar like, and getting it done, like it changes things. It really does.
Mike H: It can definitely make you more productive. I mean when you start to think about, there’s this like, this has become kind of a cliché now, but you know, a guy like Bill Gates or Warren Buffett or Jeff Bezos, any of those guys, they have the same 24 hours in a day that we do. And they’re like light years more productive. Of course, they have a team and resources, but they didn’t start that way. Like how can I be as productive in my day as they are? And it’s through some of the things we’re talking about here, it’s through obviously building a team and all that, but this is how you move forward and progress in your life and your business.
Mike N: Yeah, definitely. There’s a couple of, do we have a couple of minutes for two more little tactics?
Mike H: Sure.
Mike N: So I don’t look at email before 10 a.m., and I don’t look at email after 8 p.m. And as far as social media goes, I don’t get on, I don’t look at social media at all before 8 a.m. and I don’t look at it at all after 8 p.m. So I’ve set those kind of boundaries so I’m not distracted whatsoever. That’s kind of like rule.
Mike H: That’s great. I don’t know what they are, but I know there’s apps you can use now to like set those timers too on your phone. Yeah.
Mike N: Yeah. I haven’t used any of those, but it was just kind of a mental thing. And that’s something that’s also helped with separating business and family too because I felt like I always had to be on my email. I felt like I always had to be checking Facebook for networking or whatever, but that’s helped me kind of disconnect that like literally 8:00 comes and I’ll pick up my phone to go check something and no, you got to put it down, you know? And so, it helps me stay present. That was a big thing for me.
Mike H: Awesome. Awesome. Well, Mike, so you’re a member of the Investor Fuel Mastermind. Would you mind just taking a minute and kind of share. You’ve been in the group for probably about . . .
Mike N: We’ve had two meetings, so a little over six months I think.
Mike H: About half a year. So would you mind sharing just a testimonial on how the group has helped you and you know what your thoughts are on it?
Mike N: Yeah, definitely. It’s been game changing for us really. It’s something about, you know, they always talk about surrounding yourself with likeminded individuals. And you know, when you do something like Investor Fuel, no matter whether you’re the guy that’s doing a couple of deals, you know, here or the a hundred plus guy, you know, getting around people on all ends of that spectrum, you know, and just brainstorming, talking through things, the accountability part of it. So, you know, we do the quick hot seat presentations that really like some people get up there and they had no idea what a KPI was, you know, they weren’t tracking it. And then so it forces you to look at your business from a different perspective. And the connections we’ve made, the friendships we’ve made, we’ve absolutely loved it.
And I couldn’t recommend it more to somebody who, maybe they’re stagnant, maybe they’re stuck, maybe they’re trying to get to that next level, maybe they’re trying to find that missing piece. We’re always connected on the Facebook group. There’s so many nuggets, gold nuggets that go through that Facebook group. Any question if I hit it during the day, I just go and post in there and it’s answered within the hour, you know, and multiple people posting. And so we just love it for so many different reasons. It’s been great.
Mike H: Awesome. We appreciate you and glad to have you as a member, my friend. So, awesome. Well, hey, thanks for spending some time with us today. If folks wanted to reach out to you or connect with you, where would they go to learn more?
Mike N: It’s funny we say that social media piece we’ve been talking about.
Mike H: Don’t try to contact you after 8 p.m. We know that.
Mike N: Don’t contact me before or after 8. I won’t respond. But no, I mean if you want to friend me on Facebook, that’s good. We’ve got our company Instagram page is Newbyginningshomes and that’s spelled with a Y, but I’m sure you probably put a link in there for that. Those are probably the two easiest things or my email is [email protected]. It’s any N-E-W-B-Y-G -I-N-N-I-N-G-S.com
Mike H: Awesome. We’ll have links down below here in the show notes for those ways to contact you and some of the other stuff that we talked about today, some book references and DarrenDaily and stuff like that. So yeah, appreciate you a ton, my friend.
Mike N: No, thank you. It is awesome to be on. It was a pleasure.
Mike H: Yep. Always good to see you. Everybody, hey, thanks for joining us today. If you’ve been listening to the Investor Fuel Mastermind podcast and you haven’t really subscribed yet on iTunes, Stitcher Radio, Google Play, YouTube, if you do, we’d love it if you subscribe. It gives us a little bit of indication of our kind of our pulse, how we’re doing, whether we’re serving you well or not. So hope you got some value out of this. If you could subscribe and leave some positive reviews, we’d appreciate it. Of course, you can watch all of our shows, you can access them by going to investorfuel.com. Appreciate you a ton. See you on the next show.
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