What I’m thinking about: Where I’m putting nearly every dollar, hour, and mental rep right now, and why I think these four buckets will separate the operators who compound through the next decade from the ones who quietly fade out.
The question on most people’s minds is some version of: “With the macro this uncertain and AI moving this fast, where should I actually put my time and money right now?” (for parents of college-age kids, this is a major dilemma.)
Most folks (especially knowledge workers) in the labor force are trying to reconcile what value they’ll keep bringing to the marketplace, with real tension between short-term survival and long-term positioning.
Here are my four buckets, three are directly business-related, and a fourth too important to leave out (…there’s also a common thread between each bucket, one handle for carrying four buckets, if you will.)
1. Business strategies and tactics
This is the broadest bucket, and where I’ve invested the most accumulated dollars, and time, over the past decade of building.
From the nuts and bolts of business building (think marketing, sales, ops, money models a la Hormozi or ‘The Ask Method’ with Ryan Levesque)…
To real estate/land education (cutting our teeth with the RETipster blog back in 2019, or Travis King’s mastermind, or live events like the Land UnConference)…
To personal finance and wealth strategy (Tony Robbins’ Money Master The Game was the turning point for me ~10 years ago, from which I first internalized the #1 rule for investment: DON’T LOSE MONEY).
More recently, Sharran Srivatsaa’s frameworks (CEO of Acquisition.com, multiple billion-dollar real estate exits) have become the backbone of how I think about managing the actual pile, separate from just earning it. (Download the ‘Sharran Money Coach’ Claude Skill I built here, updated a few days ago).
The real lesson in this bucket (truthfully all the buckets, but especially this one) is not what I studied. It’s how. Be the best student of one person or one company at a time. Apply their framework all the way through, to the letter, at least once. Then evaluate whether it fits your situation, and adapt accordingly. 90%+ of business owners quit after a couple of speed bumps and chase the next shiny object, never sticking with anything long enough to see compounding kick in (*raises hand*).
As my coach, Trevor McGregor, routinely says, “Education without application is merely entertainment.”
Generally you can get to where you want faster if you pay up to learn from, and with, the best, but the true alpha here is time paired with focus. For example, for years now, I have spent a meaningful chunk of every week reviewing real estate and macro data to gather every edge possible in historically competitive conditions (think proactive vs. reactive).
2. AI
I’ve written (and will continue to write) about AI here ad nauseam (check the newsletter archive), so I’ll keep the setup short.
Critically, since this bucket is still in a relative infancy, it’s both EASIER to build up a lead in this area…but HARDER to maintain a gap. Constant attention and progress is required.
Callan Faulkner and the Uncommon Business team are my primary AI coaches. We’ve invested thousands of dollars with them directly (we put our money where our mouth is, and the results speak for themselves).
My team is on Claude Cowork constantly, routinely hitting usage limits because we keep pushing Cowork harder, and asking it to DO MORE.
The framing I keep coming back to: right now is the worst AI will ever be.
From here, the cost of intelligence (and eventually labor through hardware integrations) trends toward the cost of the energy it takes to produce it. Everything we’ve ever learned has a rapidly diminishing shelf life as a standalone moat.
Hormozi was pounding the table on this in a recent video. For ANY current member of the labor force, upskilling in AI should be priority 1 through 10 (we landed on the same conclusion a year ago, but it’s always nice to hear it echoed by one of the most effective entrepreneurs of our generation).
As this relates to my continued bullish bet on real estate (not easy to do right now…cue many heads nodding):
Even in a world where AI gets dramatically better and cheaper, it’s likely that people will still have bodies. We need food, shelter, and energy infrastructure at a minimum…and gathering places or entertainment venues to occupy our time (and to maintain our collective sanity). Every single one of those categories requires real estate in some form. Very few industries can make that claim over the next 30+ years.
Second point (credit to Naval Ravikant and Hormozi on this framing): AI has no innate desire. It doesn’t want anything. It has no incentive to take or underwrite risk. Risk-taking is still a human endeavor, whether through sweat equity or capital, and that is a durable moat for anyone willing to build it.
The combo of the above two points gives as much a chance as any for our business model to stand the test of time.
Without a doubt, the shiny objects are shinier than ever (vibe-coding startups with explosive growth, AI arbitrage plays, ten-figure solopreneur GLP-1 empires). Some of those bets will be huge. Most of them collapse the moment the arbitrage window closes, or zero-sum environments result in one category winner.
Pick your lane and stay in it. No one cares what the score is at halftime.
3. Mindset
Generally, I reserve one larger monetary investment to make annually, usually primarily focused on one of my chosen buckets.
I don’t make these investments lightly, especially during a period of temporary business contraction, market uncertainty, and a new kid on the way, to boot.
This year, I wrote a $20K check to join the XALT Alliance because I believe it is the right time, and right opportunity, to maximally invest into mindset coaching, taught by some of the best in the world.
Let me dispense with any ‘woo-woo’ definitions associated with mindset (e.g. The Secret-style manifestation stuff). Personally, I think that approach is a load of bunk, but if it fits your vibe, all the more power to you.
Mindset is the actual thinking you repeatedly run, which produces the behaviors that either pull you forward or slowly erode you. It is the engine underneath every other bucket on this list.
The pattern I’ve consistently seen: the people who deliberately invest in mindset tend to be the highest performers in any arena. Not always the fastest out of the gate. But in a world where the ground shifts every couple of weeks (or days), the operators with the strongest mindset are the ones who keep showing up, keep adapting, keep a beginner’s mindset, and compound for decades.
(And while I believe the other buckets will see a leveling of the playing field over the coming years with mathematically AI-optimized approaches, differences in mindset capabilities may become THE differentiator between long-term success and failure.)
Talent without the mindset to keep pushing through hard cycles eventually taps out (or they tap out at an arbitrary point of ‘winning’, instead of seeing how far they can go).
As real estate operators, we are squarely within one of those hard cycles, with no clear end in sight. The leaders who come out of it will be the ones who continue to decide, and act, daily on conquering every learning curve, and doing whatever is required.
4. Physical and mental health (with relationships woven through)
This is the bucket I currently feel best about, and it’s built on the boring basics (more nuance to each of these in reality):
- 6 workouts per week (I’ve worked with the same trainer for almost a decade).
- Eating basically the same thing every day, for years (protein and fiber dialed in, with targeted supplementation).
- Quality sleep, for which I’ve invested thousands on a mattress and Eight Sleep Pod cover (arguably the single best performance purchase I’ve made in the last several years).
- Daily sunlight exposure (per the extensive research popularized by Huberman and others)
- Routine, disciplined bouts of critical thinking (writing these newsletters is HARD, even when I’m usually using a recent ‘Get Serious’ podcast transcript, with AI draft assistance. I force myself to carefully consider every word, partially for the sake of my audience, partly for my own brain health.)
- Just like gyms didn’t exist 100 years ago because most jobs incorporated physical labor, we will need to ‘train’ our minds to remain ‘in shape’ as AI offloads an increasing share of our cognitive load.)
None of it is clever. All of it is consistent.
(Again, definitions are key here. Mental health I view more from a therapeutic lens, such as states of depression or anxiety. Related, but not identical to mindset. And often what improves physical health, betters mental health too…but your mindset could be constrained by limiting beliefs.)
Most people want the shortcut, but as one of my mentors says, “Shortcuts are just long-cuts in disguise.”
Take GLP-1’s (e.g. Ozempic), one of the greatest triumphs for health and longevity over the last century. But if you take them without performing weight-bearing exercise, your lean mass will disintegrate, opening up another can of worms negatively affecting health.
The reality is that the boring blocks are what most people refuse to move (and modern life does everything in its power to distract us from them).
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The bonus ‘connective handle’ across all four buckets I teased earlier is…relationships, of course. The longevity research is clear that close, positive social ties are the #1 predictor of a long, satisfying life. Whatever else you invest in, keep that one front and center.
(As isolated and independent as our society has trended, for obvious reasons, particularly over the last 15-20 years, I don’t know anyone who doesn’t eventually get burnt out from being by themselves, particularly in front of a screen. Look back on your life. I’d bet that almost none of your top 5 (…or top 100) most memorable moments involved you solo in front of a screen, not interacting with anyone. The data tracks with most lived experience.)
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Pull those four threads (and connective handle) together and you get what I think the next decade actually rewards: operators who sharpen real-world business fundamentals, get aggressively good at AI, build the mindset to keep going, and take care of the body that has to show up every day.
If you’re an experienced operator looking for a capital partner who’s reinvesting across every one of those four buckets, to position ourselves as well as anyone over the next 50+ years, we should be talking. We write checks from $50K+. We close 100% of deals we commit to. And we bring national underwriting experience built across the full spectrum of market conditions.
P.S. Our SLC Chat project is evolving rapidly. We’ve now built in our ENTIRE Land Pricer AI underwriting and mathematical pricing process (representing hundreds of videos and thousands of calculations), something I didn’t think would be feasible a week ago, but Cowork continues to amaze. If you want early access, hit reply and let me know.
P.P.S. Last call on this one. Callan Faulkner’s Effortless Boot Camp cart closes Tuesday at 10am Central. If you’ve been on the fence after the last few editions, this is genuinely it.
Three sessions. Hours of live AI builds personalized to YOUR business. The exact skillset I just described in Bucket #2 above, coached by the same team we’ve invested thousands into to learn from.
Anyone who signs up with my link still gets my private Claude Cowork training session on April 30 (just opened 3 final slots based on recent demand, and I want as many people as possible to learn how to take advantage of these capabilities). I’ll walk you through the same builds our SLC team uses daily, hand you plug-and-play custom instructions, and save you weeks of trial-and-error on your own.
Putting my money where my mouth is: I will personally refund your Bootcamp payment if you don’t build something useful within a week.
One more reason the timing matters: Opus 4.7 just dropped, and Claude is better than ever (it was already the best). What you’ll be able to build in the Bootcamp this week genuinely was not possible even a month ago. The gap is accelerating, and the operators who get inside the tooling now are the ones who stay ahead.
