Motivation Is for Amateurs: How Real Estate Investors Build Discipline and Execute

Dre Baldwin (00:00)
Optionality. That’s the biggest threat to any professional or amateur when they’re trying to do anything, whether they’re scaling, starting, or retiring, doesn’t matter. Optionality is the biggest threat. What does optionality mean? It means giving yourself options other than the main thing that should be being executed on in the present moment. So optionality would be scrolling through your phone when you’re supposed to be returning calls from prospects. Optionality is checking your email when you’re supposed to be out prospecting.

Optionality is ⁓ sleeping in for 15 minutes when the alarm just went off at five in the morning. So when you remove options, what happens is that constraint limits your choices.

Scott Bursey (02:09)
Welcome back to the Real Estate Pros podcast powered by Investor Fuel. I’m your host, Scott Bursey And today we are delighted to have Dre Baldwin with us. Dre is the founder of the Work on Your Game Framework, a system dedicated to execution, reliability, strategic discipline, and leadership performance. And he’s a 43-time author who has spent his career helping high-level executives and organizations operate with absolute clarity, authority,

and measurable results. Dre, welcome to the show.

Dre Baldwin (02:40)
⁓ I’m excited to be here, Scott. Thanks for having me on.

Scott Bursey (02:43)
It is just a pleasure to have you here, Dre, and to help our listeners get up to speed. Please give us the front row seat and how your career ignited and where you’re pouring your fuel now.

Dre Baldwin (02:53)
Sure, I get a 90 second background, backgrounds in sports. ⁓ played sports always growing up, got to basketball around age 14, which is pretty late if you’re trying to play in college or pro. One year of high school playing, ⁓ walked on to play division three college ball, then marketed and sold my way into professional opportunities, which led to a nearly decade-long career, mostly played in Europe, ⁓ professional basketball.

At that same time, started building my brand online through YouTube videos that were targeted specifically to athletes for just playing basketball. Eventually they started asking me questions about mindset. I started talking about mindset as I understood it for athletes. That’s where the athletes appreciated it, but also the non-athlete audience, people similar to the listeners of this show, started finding those mindset videos and they liked hearing an athlete talk about mindset from

an athletic angle, but applied to everyday life. And that’s how I knew what my transition would be after sports. And I continued to do that mindset talk along with the basketball stuff till 2015, which is when I stopped playing basketball, at which point I already had an audience who liked the mindset material, non-athlete audience. I’d already been writing books, making courses. People were asking me about coaching. I started professional speaking at that point, eventually started a coaching and consulting firm and

In twenty twenty six. Those are our our main focuses now, or what you said, my introduction, helping people with that mindset slash executive presence is what we call it, or power presence is the name of our that wing. And then the other wing is the execution reliability, making sure people show up and do what they said they were gonna do, turning their decisions into actual results. So that’s where we are today.

Scott Bursey (04:24)
Absolutely. Well, that’s fantastic, Trey. It’s all about execution and that is amazing your journey. What really caught my attention about you is the way you’ve been able to organize high performance habits into a scalable framework that works just as well for a solo entrepreneur as it does for a massive organization. That is pure gold.

Dre Baldwin (04:45)
Yes, thank you. I agree.

Scott Bursey (04:47)
And I’m curious to know, Dre, regarding strengths. When you look at the work on your game framework, what is the strongest muscle that most real estate investors are failing to to flex?

Dre Baldwin (04:58)
Strongest muscle with regards to our framework is gonna be the execution. And execution is where discipline comes from. So a lot of people talk about discipline, Scott, as if as a personality trait or a personal attribute, i.e., some people have it and some people don’t. But discipline is behavioral, meaning it’s something that anybody can choose to do. You can choose behavior, even if you it may not be your natural inclination, but doesn’t mean that you can’t do it at all, unlike let’s say

basketball player, if you’re not six five, you’re five two, you might not make it in the NBA, but you can always be you can always change your behavior when it comes to discipline. And execution is all about following a structure. When the proper structure is in place, as long as the person is able to understand the instructions of that structure, if they are willing to follow that structure consistently, then the behavior that comes out is disciplined and that’s a result of their execution of the structure.

The biggest challenge for most people at the professional level, whether it be an investor, someone in real estate, a real estate investor, or any other professional, is not that they don’t have a structure or process to follow. Almost all do. The issue is their noncompliance to that structure or process. And that noncompliance is what leads to inconsistent habits and inconsistent outcomes. And that’s the part that people get frustrated about, or it eventually becomes an issue for them when they see that their results are inconsistent, but that’s

as a byproduct, those are downstream from the rip main issue, which is a lack of execution or just a lack of compliance to a structure.

Scott Bursey (06:26)
Understood. But Drew, how can someone identify if they’re ignoring execution in their daily routine?

Dre Baldwin (07:20)
Very simple. What is the structure that you’re telling yourself to follow or that you have signed up to follow, you volunteered to follow, or committed to following? And then ⁓ how consistently are you actually following it? So if you tell yourself I’m gonna wake up at five in the morning, then I’m gonna work out, then I’m gonna eat breakfast, then gonna ⁓ shower and get dressed, I’m gonna be in the office by seven thirty, okay. Let’s take a look at each one of those steps and see how well you did with them. Are you actually complying to what you said you were gonna do? And that makes it a lot easier than dealing with a

human, let’s say, is telling you you didn’t do it when you can look at a let’s say list or a checkbox that says, okay, did you wake up at five o’clock? No running off at five, what time did you actually get out of bed? All right, you’re supposed to work out for 45 minutes. How much did you actually work out? Did you work out? Did you shower and get dressed? You’re supposed to be at the office at 7 30. What time did you actually get to the office? And then when you get to the office, what are the things you’re supposed to do? In what order? So all of those things can be looked at in a in an objective way that any human can look at rationally and see

Here’s what I was supposed to execute on. Here’s what I actually executed on. Let’s notice if there’s a delta between the expectations and the outcomes, or the expectations and the executions, because we can’t always control the outcomes, but the expectations and the executions, and if there is very little variance, then the outcome should be expected. Again, as a professional, we have a process for a reason because we have a reasonable reason, Scott, to believe that these executions will lead to this outcome. And if

the outcome is not being hit or we’re not even getting close, there’s probably a failure in execution.

Scott Bursey (08:46)
It’s all about the mindset, isn’t it?

Dre Baldwin (08:50)
On many levels, yes. It was the mindset leads to action set, for lack of a better term.

Scott Bursey (08:55)
That was ⁓ well said. Andre, where do you see the biggest blind spot in a real estate professional’s execution reliability?

Dre Baldwin (09:04)
Well, it’s in making sure that they’re consistently following through even when there’s the option of not following through, which is often the case with someone who’s in real estate, because you’re a real estate investor, you’re in charge. So nobody can tell you what to do or what not to do. Nobody can tell you when, where, and how to do it. So there needs to be something within that person or within the system, even better than within the person, because that becomes a personality thing, even better if it’s system driven, because the system can be duplicated.

And you can apply that to multiple people, regardless of their skill sets or their personal attributes or talents. So there’s something in the system that removes consequence and removes optionality, removes, removes, actually adds in consequence, removes optionality, removes hedges so that a person is moved to execute as necessary. That’s what is duplicatable. That’s what’s scalable.

Scott Bursey (09:54)
I love that perspective. And looking at the landscape right now, I love your take on what is the one strategic discipline that real estate investors are overlooking that could immediately increase their deal flow quality.

Dre Baldwin (10:08)
That’d be the execution on whatever leads to the deal flow. So if you’re in real estate, then you already know your business. You know what the job is. And if you don’t, you probably know somebody who knows. That’s how you got in it. So what is the process that needs to be followed consistently that puts possible deals into your pipeline? Every business has a process for getting possible deals into the pipeline. McDonald’s has that process. Real estate has that process. So what is that process? And how much are you adhering to that process?

Scott Bursey (10:33)
Absolutely. It’s often about sharpening the blade we already have rather than buying a new one.

Dre Baldwin (10:38)
Yeah, that’s right.

Scott Bursey (10:39)
And let’s ⁓ go down this road here. If you could ⁓ share some perspective on what is the biggest threat to consistency that you see successful investors face once they actually start scaling.

Dre Baldwin (11:27)
Optionality. That’s the biggest threat to any professional or amateur when they’re trying to do anything, whether they’re scaling, starting, or retiring, doesn’t matter. Optionality is the biggest threat. What does optionality mean? It means giving yourself options other than the main thing that should be being executed on in the present moment. So optionality would be scrolling through your phone when you’re supposed to be returning calls from prospects. Optionality is checking your email when you’re supposed to be out prospecting.

Optionality is ⁓ sleeping in for 15 minutes when the alarm just went off at five in the morning. So when you remove options, what happens is that constraint limits your choices. And when you have a human being has limited choices, and there is only one thing that they can do, magic formula, they do that one thing.

And when you put all of your resources into the singular thing you are focused on, you get the most results that you can get relative to your abilities.

out of yourself because you have nothing else to focus on and nothing else to do. So that constraint, which is what a lot of human beings try to fight against, is actually the very thing that you need.

Scott Bursey (12:28)
That is spot on. Thank you for that, Dre. And really interested on your philosophy in regards to this. How do you keep the work on your game mentality fresh for long-term play rather than just a short burst of intensity?

Dre Baldwin (12:42)
Well, this is not we’re not playing a motivation game here, Scott. Motivation is for amateurs. And I tell this to professional audiences all the time. Motivation is a nice to have because sometimes it does show up. And when you have it, it provides an extra, extra burst of energy. The challenge is motivation shows up when it feels like it. And sometimes it just doesn’t show up at all, or it shows up, but it doesn’t stay long. So you can’t build a professional career in which you’re doing something that’s your main paid occupation.

And you’re expected to deliver on a consistent basis because you want to get paid on a consistent basis. You can’t build that based on something that is not consistently reliable in terms of showing up, i.e., motivation. So instead, you want to build on structure, which produces the behavior that most people call as a personal attribute, discipline. But I already explained that’s not a personal attribute. But discipline behavior is what you can build on because discipline is discipline does not care about feelings, discipline is not an emotion.

Discipline is the byproduct of following structure, and structure is available all the time, regardless of how one feels.

Scott Bursey (13:41)
Dre, that is some powerful stuff right there. What is the one piece of advice you’d give to a high level executive who feels they’ve hit the ceiling in their business and can’t seem to break through to the next level of authority?

Dre Baldwin (13:55)
Well, we’re talking breaking through next level of authority. The first thing I would ask that executive is tell me exactly what you mean by that. Because next level of authority means they’re looking for a certain response or a certain ⁓ feeling or to have a certain maybe they’re talking about getting a certain result. But the first thing I would do is dive into what exactly they mean by that. So, as a coach and consultant, whenever someone comes to me with a challenge, the first thing I need to find out, I need to find out two things. Number one, what’s the goal? Number two, what’s the problem?

So when they say breakthrough to the next level of authority, I need more clarity on what exactly they mean by that. Because if you ask 10 people that question, Scott, you’re gonna get 10 different answers. What does the next level of authority mean? Some people it means just with themselves. So some people it means to these hundred people working for me. For other people, it means I wanna be, I wanna be on more podcasts and get more followers on LinkedIn. So what exactly do they mean? That’s the first thing I gotta find out. And then once I know that answer, then I’ve asked them, okay, what’s the problem? What’s in the way of you doing this? Why is it not happening? What’s stopping you?

And from there I could go into helping them, but I wouldn’t go straight into helping them with ⁓ out that information.

Scott Bursey (14:56)
That’s a huge distinction. Thank you for clarifying. And is in regards to your business, work on your game, ⁓ where would you like to see it the next, let’s say, twelve to twenty-four months?

Dre Baldwin (15:50)
That’s a great question. It’s getting into the enterprise space more. So I’ve done a good amount with individuals, with individual leaders and ⁓ smaller size businesses, let’s say fewer than 10 to 15 employees. But the next level is really getting ⁓ execution reliability and even a power presence into enterprise level organizations, larger organizations with more people. And yes, different businesses can have different levels of revenue. Yes. But I’m really talking about making sure that this works at scale.

With different size organizations of more heads, because the more people it can help, then of course if they can help this company, it can help that one. But twenty, it can help fifty, it can help a hundred. So it’s just making sure that it works as it’s duplicated to multiple individuals and I’m not individually talking to each person. Can our system still work? That’s the thing that we’re looking to prove.

Scott Bursey (16:37)
That is some great vision right there, Dre. And you have given our listeners, our pros, a tremendous amount of value today. But is there any additional words of wisdom, golden nuggets, anything of that variety that you you can leave with our pros?

Dre Baldwin (16:51)
the biggest thing is that everybody has a game. That’s why our company’s called work on your game. It originated in sports, but it applies in everything. And the job of the professional is to first of all understand what game you’re in. And a lot of professionals misdiagnose what game they’re in. They think they’re in one game, but they’re actually in another game. The people in the real estate investing industry may think they’re in the real estate business, but you’re really not. You’re really in the people business. You’re in the relationship business. You’re in the communication business, you’re in the sales business. That’s the business that you’re actually in. Real estate just happens to be the product.

Excuse me. So it’s knowing what game you’re in and then finding out what are the rules of that game. That’s when some of the real estate stuff can start to come in. What are the rules of that game? And how do you best prepare your personal game to best perform in the game that you’re in? And best perform is a subjective term. What does that mean for you? Again, it goes back to my previous question. What’s the goal and what’s problem? So when you can answer all of those, then you would know now you can deconstruct, now you know where to start.

Scott Bursey (17:46)
What a breakdown. And Dre, if our listeners want to follow your journey or collaborate with you, what’s the best way for them to reach out to you?

Dre Baldwin (17:53)
Well, you can go to WorkOnYourGame.com WorkOnYourGame.com This is where you can find out about ⁓ both the programs I talked about, the power presence and execution reliability. Also on social medias from LinkedIn to Facebook to Instagram to whatever you like. I’m on all of those. My profiles are public. So just look up my name, Dre Baldwin.

Scott Bursey (18:12)
Ray, this has been an absolute pleasure. Thank you for joining us today on the Real Estate Pros podcast.

Dre Baldwin (18:19)
Thank you for having me on, Scott. I appreciate you sharing your platform.

Scott Bursey (18:21)
And to our listeners, we appreciate you. If you receive value from today’s episode, please subscribe. We’ll be filling your tanks with a lineup of elite guests, just like Dre Baldwin, who are accelerating and setting the pace for the rest of the industry. Until next time, keep your standards high and your vision clear. We’ll see you in the next episode, everyone.