The Wealth Mindset

Developing the wealth mindset can revolutionize your life. Without hyperbole it is the key to get what you want out of life. You cannot achieve abundance through a poor mindset.

Today I will share with you the story of someone who refined this mindset in his early 30’s through struggle and hardship. He has since achieved monumental success.

This is one of the most personal and powerful stories I have shared on this platform. What I love is just how real, raw, and relatable Clint is. Many of us can relate to the feeling of, “Coming back home as a failure”.

Read the principles he implemented, the pathway he pursued, and power he has embodied. This guy is one of a kind.

No further rambling, let’s sit down with Clint.

Hey Clint, mind giving a quick intro?

I am a husband and father to two young boys, now 10 and 13. By day, I’m a chief financial officer and in the evenings, I read, write a fantasy novel series and host the Pursuit of Learning Podcast.

Over the last decade, I’ve gone from out of shape couch potato with no investments to someone who does a lot of hard shit and has a multi-million dollar portfolio:

Ultramarathon
Ironman Canada
Running every day for 1.5 years
Real estate portfolio with a market value of $9 million

The wealth mindset I have developed enabled all of this.

Image Caption: Success is a team sport; no win comes alone.

Take us back to where this all started

My journey to wealth starts from a job failure back in 2007. The result of which made us decide to move back to Vancouver and get a fresh start. However, upon return, we realized just how bad of shape we were in.

Vancouver house prices were sky high, I was overweight because of my previous commute, and I wasn’t finding fulfillment in my chosen career.

It meant we couldn’t return to the city and we had to move out to the burbs.

The combination of all this hurt deeply.

What gave you the resolve to not give up and to make up for the losses?

There were two things that worked for me, one physical and one mental. First let’s cover the physical.

Physical

A friend was telling me about a 10km race she’d done and I was congratulating her. Another friend told me that I couldn’t ever complete a race like that. Being competitive, it led to a bet. However, that race never happened as it snowed on the race day. I wasn’t going to let this stop me – only delay me.

That week, I saw an ad for Ironman Calgary 70.3 and told my wife I am doing this next year and signed up. She sighed and said whatever because I never finished things. This time was different. I completed the race and one year later took the next step and completed Ironman Canada. This was the start of realizing that I could accomplish anything

Victories like this make real differences.

Now let’s cover the mental side

I had an overactive mind and it wasn’t serving me in my career. An industrial psychologist gave me a Mantra I live by now, which is Slow Down. Listen. Be more patient and reflective. They also gave me a list of books that changed my life, most notably Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy by Dr. Burns.

This book introduced me to cognitive behavioral therapy, and through it, to Stoicism, which was life changing. Within one year, I was writing a fantasy novel with my sister and had landed my dream job on the path to becoming a CFO.

Image Caption: Man cave for me and my sons. Books, Weights, TV.

How did these changes bear fruit financially?

With these under my belt, I took the view that real estate was my best way to build wealth. This is how it played out.

Olympic Village

The Olympic Village for those who don’t know is an area in Vancouver that is just outside of Downtown and is on the water with beautiful views.

I thought that this would become the best location in our city over time. No doubt. For some crazy reasons, it was a Ghost Town, which is what it was being called. A developer was attempting to pre-sell homes at below market price. With this, we were able to buy the largest townhome in the building at a terrific price. In fact, we bought it for the same price we paid for our home in the burbs.

Over the next few years, we bought three more properties and ended up assigning one of them for a profit before it was even completed.

The wins we had on these properties made it so that we had cash available. In 2018 there was a downturn in Vancouver Real Estate and what jumped out at me was that if there was a time to buy, it was when the blood was running in the streets.

I had made a decision that I would switch from acquiring in the core to townhomes in the suburbs. With the market in a downturn, we pulled the trigger and purchased four pre-sale townhomes. Two closed last November and two close next March.

With the market activity through COVID, it has been crazy. The rents are up 30% from when we bought them and so is the property value.

What can we do to increase our conviction when investing? Especially with leveraged real estate?

The most important thing is to start small and learn to have conviction.

None of my conviction has been without research. I have worked in real estate development for 10+ years. I’ve been involved with development, private ownership, public REITs and mortgage lending companies. It has given me a level of exposure to real estate that few see.

I’ve used that to create an investment approach, which has changed and developed over time. After we close on homes, we examine our approach, compare results to expectations and adjust if needed.

But more than this, I have put my money where my mouth is time and time again and tested whether I was able to choose the right area and the right product type.

Like most anything in life, when you’ve had success multiple times, you gain confidence in what you are doing.

I often discuss my approach and adjustments with people who have 30+ years experience in real estate at multiple levels or my peers within my company.

I seek the opinions of those who know or have what I want.

Let’s refocus on the mental framework you use

Earlier I had mentioned the mantra, “Slow Down. Listen. Be more patient and reflective.”

This alone has impacted many areas of my life.

You may not know that I’m currently enrolled in a two year Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification Process, which I believe is demonstrative of how large of an impact that quote had on me.

It was mostly centered around my mind. I was diagnosed with ADHD in my 20s and never medicated it, because there are certain superpowers that it’s given me. For example, I operate at a pace that few individuals can operate and I do it consistently year in, year out. That, I never want to lose. The downsides include an overactive mind that was constantly telling me lies. However, through meditation, I’ve learned how to ignore these voices.

Internal audit

What this quote, and the books they recommended to me, taught me to do was to audit that voice. To give a pause before reacting and ask “is the voice right?” “is what I am hearing true”. I became a much calmer person. A more reasoned person who could accept criticism for the first time. Someone who people would want at the C-Suite table and someone who a team would look up to.

It is why my number one principle for anyone who wants to learn to get shit done and be a high performer is this: You are what you think. Your thinking is flawed. Fix your thinking.

Once you fix your thinking, you are fixing your future and setting yourself up for success.

How do you control your thoughts, your emotions, and therefore your future?

The first step is recognizing that you can do it. Until you believe you can control your thoughts and emotions, you cannot.

The second step is to learn how to audit your thoughts before you give assent to them, as the Stoics said. I view this as accepting them.

The easiest way to do this is with thought auditing. When you’re starting, write down any thought that you have that’s negative on the left side of a page. On the right side of a page write down three to five logical thoughts that are more likely. Now, take a deep breath for ten seconds and then read the negative thought and the logical thoughts and choose accordingly.

You control your fate

That brings us to the last part of this equation that I’ve been working on for the past few years, which ties to one of the most oft used quotes on the Pursuit of Learning Podcasts from Carl Jung: “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” To address this, you need to do the work and that work can be meditation, inner child work, shadow work or therapy. Once you understand what makes you tick, you can learn how to control it and you can learn how to consciously make decisions.

Improve your thoughts

A large part of what I do with my life is learn how to do hard shit and how to think better. This is the core of the wealth mindset – think better. How to make logical decisions from a place of my choosing without the impact of my subconscious. It will take my whole life and I won’t have nailed it, but each and every day my thinking is better than it was yesterday.

Image Caption: Clint’s castle and fortress.

How does all of this interweave and deliver?

I know we have had some early successes, but we are just getting started.

I know, that sounds crazy, but it isn’t.

I have a five year plan that will see me retire from my full time job to focus on my Ikigai. My purpose in life.

Today, our net worth is sitting at ~$3.7 million and I estimate it will increase conservatively at ~$500,000 per year. This would have us at $6.2 million when we retire.

The key Steve is that if I’ve been able to achieve what I have over the last ten years there is fucking nothing stopping any of us, we simply have to:

Know what we want
Understand what it takes
Do the work. Day in. Day out

Sure, when I write that, it may seem cliché or trite, but this recipe has allowed me to achieve certain things in life that most will never accomplish.

I’ve heard it said that if someone isn’t successful multiple times then their advice isn’t worth anything. It clearly could be luck. At this stage, I have bought real estate in the path of progress 6+ times, completed an Ironman, completed ultra marathons, run every day for 1.5 years, achieved a powerlifting total > 1,000 lbs, written a book, become a C-suite executive and achieved a net worth greater than $3 million.

I’ve become a resilient man.

Let’s stop calling it luck.

The Wealth Mindset: Getting Wealthy Starts in Your Mind