Surround Yourself With Knowledge

It’s incredibly powerful to find people that can physically and digitally mentor you. Trying to sit in an empty room and wait for divine inspiration can be an overwhelming task, whereas researching the path others have taken in your field and then putting your thumbprint on it — making it yours — is something that I have certainly done over the years.

Mentorship is something that I am incredibly passionate about. Now, finding people to mentor you can be a challenge.

Why should you have a mentor? 

Success isn’t something that I created. Success is me following the footsteps of people that have achieved what I’m hoping to achieve. I learn from their mistakes, and then I make my own mistakes, but nevertheless, having someone go before you is incredibly valuable. There is a whole myriad of people that you can have as an inspiration.

I have a personal insatiable appetite to learn. I have to learn. It’s ironic because I dropped out of high school, and I wasn’t a particularly good student. But I have this insatiable desire to know more from people I admire — I just kind of drink it up. I drink from the fire hose of life because this is all we have. We have one shot at this. A lot of people say that. A friend of mine, I’m not going to get too morbid, but a friend of mine just passed away. A young fellow, 44-years-old, and he won’t have any more days in his life. So as far as I’m concerned, every day is gravy. I’m a very, very lucky man. I have three beautiful children, a great wife, a great business, and I have you guys.

I feel like it’s my duty to learn. Education is something that I just gulp down. I’m going to get into exactly what I mean in a second.

Some People Just Get It

One of the problems with mentorship or finding a mentor is physically actually finding them, but I believe there are some things that we need to do first. In order to move towards the light, we have to do something that’s very, very difficult. In my experience, most people tend to have not the most optimistic outlook on life. They tend to play in the middle, thinking that it won’t work. 

I’ve been sober for a long time. I’m very active. There’s mentoring in that program as well, and the only way that I could get sober was to surround myself with other men who they had something I wanted — sobriety. In some of their cases, they had families. Some of them had success. This is an extreme case, but I had to stop spending time with all my boys that I used to go clubbing and drinking with. I knew that if I spent time with them, I wouldn’t be successful at staying sober — which is super important to me at that point. I’m happy to say that 17 years later, I’m still sober.

In business, when you are taking a risk and going for it, a lot of people will become naysayers. Some people do this out of envy and some people do it out of insecurity. It can stop us dead in our tracks. I’ve talked about the debating society a lot. In my case, I have a very active debating society that tells me that none of my ideas will work. However, the very first voice that’s a very quiet voice — when I come up with an idea, it says, “Yeah, that’s great, Pete, go for it,” and then the rest of them will go, “No. Failure. It’s awful. I hate it. It’ll never work.” I don’t really bounce ideas off too many people. I just go with my gut. I listen to my heart, and I go for it. 

 Now, naturally, in real estate, you can’t join a brokerage where everybody is successful. But hopefully, there are one or two people at your company that you rub shoulders with and that you can learn and be inspired by.

The other part of this is you have to lose all the negative chatter. If people are bringing you down, you just have to love them from afar. Negative chatter begins to permeate.

Here are my tips to find mentors.

Tip Number One: Ask one person out a week for coffee. The fear is that they won’t want to spend time with you. (This fear is the number one reason why people fail. They feel like they’re intruding.)

Tip Number Two: Once a month, or more if you can, take someone you admire out for lunch. Now, here is the thing. If you’re in sales, getting shut down is part of the gig. If people say no, move on to someone else. Make sure you are finding a steady stream of people that you admire that you can invite out. You will be amazed at what you can pick up in five minutes with someone. You could read 10 books and not pick up the information you could get from someone in person.

Tip Number Three: When I was back in the record industry in the 90s, I was a young, hungry electronic record producer. I was the lowest of the low. There were these guys that came into the studio, and they were called programmers. This was at the birth of electronic music when all sounds were held on floppy disks. That’s how long ago this is. They used to walk in with these silver photography cases full of floppy disks. They were what we call samples — which are like drumbeats and trumpet samples and vocal samples. All of the stuff that made those crazy records in the 90s. I would literally be drooling as I looked at these photography cases full of sounds because I needed those them.

There were two types of programmers. Type number one wouldn’t let anyone touch their shit. They kept everything close to the chest. Then there were other programmers that could see that we were all drooling over the sounds. They would leave their cases open at night, and they would say, “Copy whatever you want, and then just make sure you put the disks back in the same order.” Fair play.

I don’t remember the names of the first group of producers. But the ones that gave it all away? They went on to become some of Britain’s biggest record producers in the 90s. They were free with whatever they learned. That made such an impression on me. It’s something that I have carried with me throughout my entire career. At PLG, we share everything. We give everything away. There is camaraderie. There is love. There is autonomy.

Tip Number Four: Good mentors are generally busy, so you need more than one. Hopefully, you’ve got one or two in your life that can be that lunch date. But let’s talk about mentors that you don’t even know. I’ve built my business on this. My thirst for knowledge is satiated by websites, books, podcasts, and a whole bunch of people that have no idea I exist. 

It has navigated how I do business to the point that (and I’m going to risk sounding crazy here) when I have had to make business decisions, I imagine that Richard Branson is sitting across the table from me slurping on a latte. I shut my eyes, and because I’ve read his books, and I sort of know how he thinks. 

I hear Richard Branson say, “Well, have you thought about it? Do you think it makes sense? How far have you gotten with your thought process?” The answer is always the same for me. It’s 65%. When Richard hears me say, “65%,” he says, “Screw it, let’s do it.” That was his famous phrase. Conversely, I have been talked out of stuff by some of my mentors that live in my head. (Yep, I’m sounding crazy.) Nevertheless, I want to give you some of the information that I digest on a daily basis. These are people that could be mentors and they freely give their stuff away. Who gives their stuff away so freely? You would be amazed. There are a million of them.

Here are 7 mentors that anyone can listen to. That’s one mentor for each day of the week.

1. Reid Hoffman’s podcast called “Masters of Scale”. The creator of LinkedIn. He interviews the giants of the industry.

2. Tim Ferriss. His podcasts are badass, and he also interviews the giants of industry.

3. There’s another one by Jon Nastor called Hack the Entrepreneur.

4. Seth Godin. If you want to have your mind melded and changed, just look up the Seth Godin podcast or Seth Godin videos. (On that note, Gary Vee is another wonderful mentor.)

5. Casey Neistat. If you are wanting to do videos, go on YouTube and watch. I learned how to vlog by watching him.

6. Peter McKinnon is another great YouTube mentor.

7. Bigger Pockets. This podcast is mind-blowing. It’s about anything and everything real estate. 

I remember sitting, and I’m not going to mention any company names, but I remember sitting in classes when I was a new agent at this company that I first worked for, and thinking they were in the dark ages. I went hunting around and found stuff that really resonated with me.

I will finish with this. The only way I managed to stay sober was by helping other guys. That’s kind of the gig. You help people to help yourself. I think it’s exactly the same in life. It’s exactly the same in business. Knowledge is never owned, it is just borrowed, and it is our duty to pass it on. Don’t pass it on, and you’re going to live a sad, little, horrid life and fade out at the end. Sure, that’s brutal. But if you give it all away, you get it back tenfold.