The Biggest Mistake I Ever Made...And How You Can Overcome It

"No problem can be solved until it is reduced to some simple form" J.P. Morgan

Let me tell you a story and hopefully impart some life and business wisdom. I’ve been on this earth awhile--I like to think I can impart some wisdom :) When I was a young man in my early thirties I made a huge mistake. Here’s how it happened: I published a book about investing in real estate calledNothing Down. It went on to become a #1 New York Timesbestseller and launch my career. Nothing Down did so well because I had broken down a complicated and confusing subject--real state investing--into a simple system. There were steps to follow and even a point system for rating properties. If a property didn’t score high enough, then I wasn’t going to invest in it. Simple as that. The system in Nothing Down took all “impulse buys” and sentimental decisions totally out of the equation. It was a very effective system. That’s what I do best, I make systems. I work to understand complex and confusing fields, and then I simplify them into systems. Systems are easy to follow...until we forget to! The biggest mistake I ever made in my career was forgetting my Nothing Down system and making a sentimental purchase of a huge property. I bought Academy Square near BYU campus in Provo, Utah, where my father had attended college in the roaring 20’s. It’s now the beautiful Provo Academy Library. I bought it alone in 1984 hoping to turn it into a high-end office complex. But, if I had scored it on the Nothing Down points system, I never would have bought it. It was a sentimental purchase. I made a couple other mistakes along those lines and they ended up leading to a very painful and public bankruptcy. You have to commit to a system and stick to it. I learned that the hard way. Here’s some good news: Today there are thousands of systems for whatever you want to achieve. Yes, Modern life is so astoundingly complex, but hundreds of brilliant people are doing what I did way back with Nothing Down—they are taking complex subjects and simplifying or “curating” them into step-by-step systems. My advice is to decide what you want to achieve in your life, choose a proven system to help you get there, and then STICK TO IT. That’s how I rebounded from my bankruptcy, and how you can overcome whatever problem you are facing. Of course, we humans tend to only do things that are fun, so pick a fun system! It so happens that my son and I recently created a fun, visual, and highly effective system in our new book The Four Maps of Happy Successful People.  I’ve taken the extremely complex fields of personal growth, time efficiency and goal setting, and simplified them into four diagrams.