This episode reflects on the three-plus year journey to genuinely love the land funding business, contrasting society’s three-minute attention spans with the deep commitment required to develop true mastery and satisfaction in any endeavor, from skiing to parenting to entrepreneurship.
Key Takeaways:
- Three Years to Love It Real love for the business took 3+ years to develop—far longer than most people give themselves to determine if they love anything in today’s ADHD culture.
- Love Correlates with Skill Affection for the work grows proportionally with competence gained month-over-month and year-over-year, making persistence through the skill-building phase essential.
- Regret Minimization at 85 Using Bezos’s framework, imagining running this business for 50 years brings genuine excitement and confirms alignment—if that thought doesn’t make you smile, you’re in the wrong business.
Listen to the full episode for a brutally honest reflection on commitment, fulfillment, and the long game in entrepreneurship.
(Podcast transcript below)
Welcome to get serious. Today I wanted to basically do an audio pick version of the newsletter that just came out this week. Again, I continue to get so many heartfelt and appreciative responses for the newsletter. If you haven’t signed up to that,
subscribe via the SiriusLang.Capitol website. It’s once a week. It’s free. So if you want to take a look, you can always take that option. I really love the way this one turned out and I kind of want to perform it with the requisite emotion here. So this one was titled three plus years to love this business. What I’m thinking about the steep cost of love.
coupled with the infinite gain it will grant you. Whoa, heady start, right? Let’s weave this together. I’ve had some incredible opportunities thrown my way over the past couple of weeks, potentially life-changing. The more skilled and knowledgeable we become as entrepreneurs, it’s inevitable that we either discover other avenues or are presented with other options for making money.
There are nearly unlimited pathways to making money and even more paths to losing money, but no one wants to talk about that. But the core decision I keep coming back to is do I love this business? And perhaps more importantly at the start, can I love this business? Will I love this business once the honeymoon phase is over? The problem is it can take a long time to answer those questions.
So it’s something you need to keep your antenna up for on a daily, weekly, monthly, even yearly basis. And it’s impossible to tell whether you love something or not until you fully commit to it and discover every slimy slug hiding under the surface. Or conversely, every hidden golden ray of warm sunshine. Catch 22, right? Commit before discovering your love.
seems like a fool’s errand, and yet that’s where the greatest rewards in life reside. Is it any wonder why so many people feel empty in their lives even if they won’t admit it? One foot in, one foot out of various businesses, relationships, hobbies, etc. If things get hard, and they will, and you lose your motivation? Well, must not love it slash him slash her.
then let’s try something slash someone else. But what if you committed instead, giving the opportunity breathing room and discovered and built a deep love that made your soul sing? Some personal examples, skiing. My mom introduced my brother and I to downhill skiing when I was around 10 years old. My first time on skis, I kept falling over even on flat ground.
Throwing a fit, I cried to my mom, I hate this. I quit. Let’s go home. Mom said, nope, we paid for lessons. You need to stick through this. Within a couple of ski trips, I was traversing down Black Diamonds. Now it’s a sibling bonding activity where my brother and I weave in and out of trees on some of the most difficult runs on the mountain. True freedom. It’s unlike anything on earth.
Thanks for the push, Mom. And yet, love has to be rediscovered. Usually, the first half day on the slopes, when I’m sucking wind in the altitude and my legs are burning, my first thoughts are, why am I out here? Let’s pack up and go home. But I know those feelings will pass and my deep love and joy returns. Parenting. The first few months my daughter was born were some of the hardest of my life.
Cue fellow parents solemnly nodding. Compounded that my personal health and land business were enduring their darkest days at the same time. I hate it. Before you raise your pitchforks, to be clear, I didn’t hate my little newborn child. I hated the crazy life shift of being a parent. But I was committed. And it’s not my place to judge any other parent.
I don’t know your situation and you don’t know mine, but there was a 0 % chance that I’d give up and run away. I remember going through the motions, staring at my calendar, tallying up mental check marks for each day passing by, like a prisoner etching lines into the walls of their cell, telling myself, it’s going to get better one day. It just has to. And it did. I grew to develop a deeper love for my dear daughter
and vice versa. Shout out to all the dads taking second place to mommy. And came to love the ongoing process of being a parent. Most of the time, of course. There’s so many other examples I could name. I try to fill my life with love. And I’m sure you’re recalling examples in your own life. But let’s get down to business. My partners and I had early success in the land space. And we liked it just fine.
But it took three plus years to really come to love it, particularly when we pivoted to a funding model. Let that sit with you for a moment. Three plus years to realize our love for this business. When most folks are trying to figure out if they love something within three weeks, three days, three hours, maybe even three minutes within our ADHD culture.
My love for this business just keeps growing, positively correlated with how much better we continue to get at it. Month over month, year over year, eventually decade over decade. Funny how that works, right? The better we get at something, the more we usually love it. The problem is, it takes time to get good at things. See the skiing and parenting examples that I just mentioned.
And if you put the time in to get good at things and you still don’t find or you still find that you don’t love it, then that’s okay too. That happens in my life plenty of times as well. Knowing when you need to eat short term pain to make a long term beneficial change is one of the most critical skills in life and one that few people home. The regret minimization framework that Bezos made famous is a great exercise here.
Just imagine if you continue to do what you’re doing until you’re 85 years old. Does that excite you? Does it fill you with future satisfaction? When I imagine this scenario of running our land funding business for the next 50 years, I can’t help but smile. No matter how much money we make from value we create, I know I’m always going to want to be in the mix in some form or fashion.
I see a multi-billion dollar roadmap for us as the US population is expected to double over the next 75 years. Imagine the opportunity in the land space. We’re just getting started. I love diving into macro reports of the US housing market and how it links to job reports, interest rates, and AI’s impact. I love rapidly texting back and forth with my business partner on creative.
on creative capital restructuring to handle a new deal that’s outside our comfort zone, but necessary for our growth. I love the relationships I’ve built with other land crazed entrepreneurs. I love spacing out during walks in my neighborhood and mentally restructuring how we’re going to leverage AI to optimize pricing land as the models keep improving, which is what we’re doing in land price or AI, FYI.
I love writing this newsletter, or in this case, reciting it to you, on weekends just for you. Even though, like most writers, I routinely procrastinate, but doing what you love is rarely easy. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be satisfying. I love how after driving three hours to get home after a long day at Ajay’s Land Scaling Summit, at 10pm on a Friday, I felt the thrill.
diving into initial due diligence for a waterfront lot that could gross almost $500K in profit. And by the way, at that land scaling summit, a common theme amongst the speakers is that you could sense their love for the business, either explicitly or implicitly. I used to listen to Patrick O’Shaughnessy’s Invest Like the Best podcast, and he’d remark how the alternative name for the pod would be
This is who you’re up against. You have to assume that you’re up against folks who love the business, regardless of market cycle or hard times. And if you don’t love the business, eventually you’re going to run out of steam, or you’re going to be out competed by someone who will go the extra mile out of love. Like I said at the top, there’s a steep cost to love, but the only cost steeper is either never giving love a shot to develop.
or sticking with something you don’t or no longer love.
A lot of folks already consider us to be the top tier in this industry. Check our receipts, as I’ve mentioned, 41 % operating margins in the toughest real estate market since the GFC. And we’re only six years into our journey. Imagine how good we’ll be 50 years from now. Hope you continue to journey alongside of us. For the love of
the game.
Hope you enjoyed that. I really like to recite this one actually. It even tunes me into the emotions I’m trying to convey over the writing, so might even help. Some of you hear this again, try to invoke a lot of power into what I was trying to do here. And of course, if you want funding from a team who loves what they do, Sirius Land Capital, and we’re setting up for sustainable path to success for the next 50 years.
or more, hopefully. Who knows where technology is going to be at that day. You can submit your deal. SeriousLand.Capital, again, we’re looking at huge ones right now, probably 350k purchase over the next couple of weeks here with a ton of profit baked in. There’s actually a handful of those around that price point. So that is what we’re maintaining our liquidity for. That’s what excites us the most. Land Daily Diligence Facebook group, as mentioned, Mondays and Thursdays. And LandPricer.ai, most reliable land pricing tool on the market. By the way,
I know I’ve mentioned Kellyn’s effortless bootcamp for businesses here. It is only $97. You can sign up with the link below. Again, I would have paid personally $1,000 the last time I was through her bootcamp earlier this year. The offering has only improved since then. I continue to double down in AI. I can’t understate enough or rather.
Overstate, right? How important it is for every single entrepreneur to understand sooner rather than later. The tools are getting more powerful by the day and Callan is the best AI coach in the industry, at least by my estimation. So if you want to sign up for that, you know, take 100, well, it’s a hundred dollar swing to see whether it’s a fit or not for you. It could change your life, could change your entire business. So highly recommend.
Please give it a shot. Hope you enjoyed this one. If you want to hear me do more of these, you know, reciting of articles, I kind of like this. Let me know in the comments, subscribe and share. Take care everybody. Bye.
