3 Degrees of Freedom

Ep 162 - How Defining Success and Failure Changes Mindset at the Fundamental Level with Saket Jain

• Derek Clifford • Season 3 • Episode 162

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Welcome to another captivating episode of 3 Degrees of Freedom! In this installment, we have the privilege of hosting Saket Jain, an exceptional individual whose accomplishments span from being a bestselling author to the esteemed role of founder and CEO at Impact Wealth Builders. With a remarkable career spanning over 15 years, Saket's expertise in the real estate domain shines brilliantly. Particularly, his focus on Class B/C multifamily apartments and a profound understanding of marketing fundamentals have propelled him to unparalleled success.

In this episode, titled "How Defining Success and Failure Changes Mindset at the Fundamental Level," Saket delves deep into his philosophy of success and failure. He expounds on how these concepts can reshape one's mindset, and he shares his personal journey to achieving time, financial, and location independence. With a rich tapestry of experiences, Saket offers insights on leveraging technological skills for independence and blending his W-2 world wisdom seamlessly into both his professional and personal spheres.

Don't miss the wisdom he imparts as he extends tailored advice to aspiring real estate enthusiasts. If you're passionate about attaining financial freedom through real estate, Saket's sagacity serves as your ultimate coaching guide. Join us for an enriching conversation that's bound to leave you inspired and informed.


Connect with Saket thru the social links below and learn more about his business:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/impactwealthbuilders/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/impactwealthbuilders/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/impact_wealthbuilders/
Website: https://impactwealthbuilders.com/

Unlock 3+1 degrees of freedom (time, location, financial + health) with our 5-Point Blueprint! https://elevateequity.org/podcastgift

If you really enjoyed this content and are looking for more, you can continue to learn more about us in several different places for free!

If you'd like to have

Unlock 3+1 degrees of freedom (time, location, financial + health) with our 5-Point Blueprint! https://elevateequity.org/podcastgift

If you really enjoyed this content and are looking for more, you can continue to learn more about us in several different places for free!

If you'd like to have a FREE copy of our 7 Ways Commercial Real Estate Syndications Protect and Build Wealth, simply click the link below. We are here and vested in your long-term success! elevateequity.org/7waysEbook

Welcome to the Three Degrees of Freedom Podcast, where we explore lifestyle engineering with our expert guests to bring you in alignment with your own three degrees of freedom, location, time, and financial independence. All right. Welcome back everyone. Today we've got Mr. Saket Jain on the show today. How are you, sir? Oh, I'm phenomenal man. Thank you. I know we've been looking forward to speaking, since you're back from your travels, our schedules are much better now. That's right. Yeah. I think we both have been, in the middle of the grinder working away and keeping ourselves busy. But you know what, we jump in, I wanna make sure that people know who you are. so I'm gonna go ahead and take just a minute here to read your introduction and then we'll just jump right in. Does that sound good? Let's do it. All right, so for those who don't know Ette Jain, he is a number one bestselling author, investor, philanthropist, and passionate about achieving financial freedom through real estate. He's got over 15 years of experience and he is the founder and c e O of Impact Wealth Builders. And his focus on BC class multifamily apartments in strong market fundamentals has resulted in his remarkable portfolio of over 2000 units. And 200 million in assets from many markets across the United States, always delivering double digit annual returns, which is amazing. And beyond his, real estate success, he's held a key role as a business operations leader at Airbnb headquarters. And prior to that, his expertise as a business consultant led him to build, launch, and lead profitable ventures in technology and financial sectors, and outside of his professional endeavors. He cherishes quality time with his wife of 19 years and their two daughters together. Dude, amazing to have you on. Let's just go ahead and jump right in as you, let's do it right now. We are dialed in to the three degrees of freedom, which is your time freedom, financial freedom, location, freedom. How are one of these degrees of freedom looking for you? Each at a time? maybe we can start with all of them. All of them, buddy. So for me, for me, it's actually phenomenal, phenomenal, phenomenal. I think I could say that I didn't plan my life this way. Consciously. I started thinking about, it's about five or six years ago, and going back in the story a little bit, then we'll go forward. It's that, I had that dreaded layoff. Somebody laid me off, right? Kind of like, you know, one day you walk into the office and you're like, your entire team is wiped off. When you start questioning a lot of things like, you know, why me? Why didn't it happen to this person? Why did it happen to me? And this person is much more dumber than me. I'm much more smarter than anybody. You know, it's kinda like the random stuff, the self pity. And what that, once I got through that and the question I changed was instead of why me? To, why not me, right? What is the lesson there is. The world of freedom just opened up. And when we talk about, I think depending on who you talk to, there are three degrees, five degrees. You can talk about freedom in so many different ways, but it's really, to me, is freedom of choices. Right? And, that, that one decision that was not, I. I didn't necessarily consciously chose was made for me was probably the defining moment for me, because from that onwards, I realized 95 is not it because I could work my butt off for the next 30 years. For no fault of mine, somebody in the boardroom could sit there and make a decision for me. and I have kids. I have five. I'm like, you know, who's not working at that time? Like, you know what, this, this can't be, this can't be happening to me. Let me figure out another way. And of course, I started looking at creating multiple streams of income. And last December I quit Airbnb. Loved my job at Airbnb, but it was time to time to say goodbye, because it served its purpose in the season of my life. And since then, I quit. And I'm telling you this story to come to a point, a question that you were talking about is, I left Airbnb on December 3rd. I was in Hawaii for 22 days on December 8th. And no computer, no phone. That was the best vacation I had, but where the really rubber meets the road is two or few months later when we came back, I was asking my daughters what was the best vacation they had? They said, Hawaii. I'm like, yeah, of course Hawaii, because it's recent. But I had the sense to ask them one more question, like, why was it the best vacation, today because you were not working. Right. Their moment in time for the kids was most important was I was not working. That I was actually first time I was present in their seven and nine year old, worth of life. This is the only time I've been present fully. And that gave me the glimpse of that freedom of time, right? That my time is mine. We're actually going back to Maui, in September now this time for 15 days. And again, no computer, no phone. completely going to be off. And I'm planning my life I've built my life in such a way that when I want freedom, I have it. Because I control my schedule, I control my time. And if I don't, if I, if the meetings are very important and my, if the meeting cannot be organized around my travel schedule, the meeting is gonna be canceled, period. Right? So I've built my life around it. So, freedom of time is definitely there. Freedom of location. My wife's struggling with that piece because she likes security. But for me it's really, we could pack our bags and go anywhere we want, anytime we want. Nothing's holding us down forcefully. The only reason why we'd be in a place is if we choose to be in a place so we can li we, we'll literally travel for next, two to three years, before the kids come to a certain age where we won't be able to travel. That's debatable. let's talk about the common as for today, but six years down the road, who knows what's gonna happen and then really the money pad off is also, is there is, I work less hours now and I, and we're sitting in August right now, we are recording this in August. I quit in December about 9, 8, 9 months into it. I've already exceeded my base salary from Airbnb. That's amazing. And I'm working way less and I'm enjoying my work. I get up in the morning and have fun. I go take walks with my wife so that financial freedom is also there, and if I stop working today, To the investments we have made over the last 6, 7, 8 years, money's gonna keep coming in. The lifestyle is gonna change. Of course, we're not gonna take$50,000 vacations, every year. Not that we're taking it, but if we were to, but we're gonna, we're gonna be fine, right? We're, our expenses are gonna be paid. We're gonna have a roof, we're gonna be fed, we're gonna have clothes, we're gonna enjoy life, and we're gonna be perfectly fine. So in my perspective, the way I didn't envision it, but the way it has translated for me is I really believe that I'm blessed to have both, all three time, location, and money freedom. That's amazing. You know, normally I was going to ask, most of our guests, Which one of the three degrees of freedom they would like to explore more of or to try to get more of. But you know, in hearing your story and how each of the three layers kind of fed into each other and whether they happened all at the same time or not, I don't think that matters too much in this case, uh, because I have a feeling that they were probably all pretty close together. I was gonna ask you, is there any of these three degrees of freedom that are more important to you? Like maybe it was the underpinning as to why you worked so hard? Because let's face it, no one gets as successful as you are to create the same level of income that comes in from your full-time Airbnb tech job than with your passive income. Like that doesn't happen overnight. That takes planning and purpose, and usually when there's planning and purpose, there's a vision or there's a reason why you're doing all this. Which one of those three was the primary driver for you? The location freedom, I understand was part of the Airbnb situation anyway, right? You could go whenever you wanted to. You always Definitely at the beginning. But between time and financial, which one of those was the main driver for your working so hard to the passive income goal? Think it was, it, it's actually. Neither of those. I think it's really, if I answer that question genuinely, it was, drawn by for a very different reason. So it all started with financial freedom, right?'cause of the layoff that happened, it triggered it all. But very quickly the motivations changed. It was more about when you start, when I started asking the question, what's next? How much? And, there's. Answer to how much it's right. So I had to figure out what's a different question. The different question was to what reason? To what extent, right. Why am I doing all this stuff? And all of that came down to I wanted to build memories of my girls and tell you one story, which, it's not a sad one. I mean, it is sad, but it has a point. That's what I'm sharing with you, is we're in the whole covid timeframe. Perfect man. During the covid time I left, I lost about seven, no, five of my family members, including my sister and my mom and my sister was two years older than me. And of course my mom, left about three or four months right after that. And however hard it was emotionally, it was again one of those things which glimpse, which gave me an experiential feeling that all of us are times limited and we don't know how much. Hopefully we'll lift to 200. Or we could also be gone tomorrow, right? So if the time is so short, how do I wanna spend that time working like a dog in anyone at a nine to five or in my business or wherever, or actually doing something that I enjoy doing and figure out how to make, how to monetize it. Right. So it just changed the question and that question, once it changed, it actually simplified a lot of things in my life because what I, and you probably, I think we've talked about this story and if not, my first deal that I bought myself was a 262 unit portfolio deal. Separated across five different buildings in a place where I wouldn't have never seen the property and I lost five months of my life. I say that in a sense that I literally lost five months because I was full-time at Airbnb. I didn't see my kids. I was traveling. I basically moved to Alabama for five months, and I lived there and the deal didn't work out. Again, a blessing. Right. Wow. So when you talk about that, the blessing was, it didn't work out because had it worked out, I would not have the family. I wanted to because they would not have kept up with it. I needed to be there if I needed to make that deal work. So, again, great thing that didn't work out, but I lost five months of my life. So the question at that point I was asking is, what do I really wanna do? To what extent and what price I'm willing to pay? And everything came down to, I just want freedom. Freedom from everything. Like I just want, of course I need some shackles, like my family, one could argue why do I have a family? No, that's not even, that's not even negotiable freedom, that I enjoy because I think that's, for me it's very important. But everything else I would wanna be free from, right? I would rather just make a little bit less, live a little bit more humbly, right? And to my surprise, both, I didn't have to. But I was okay with that. And once I made that choice direct, everything else became so simple okay, because now I have a new lens to look at. Do I wanna go do this? Okay. How does that affect that decision? It doesn't gel with that. So my notes started, became, is it making me more free or is it tying me down? And the answer always was, for me, the choices I made was, is giving me more freedom. Maybe in the short term it'll put, it'll restrict me a little bit, but the goal for that exercise is to gain more freedom. You know, one thing about all of this, and thank you for sharing such a, you know, a vulnerable story as well, because I actually don't remember hearing about this, but it does make sense. You've had so many challenges, right? Like losing family members. Having this five month disappearing magic trick, of your life. I know. Seriously, man. And yet you still persisted through all of this, right? I wanted to ask you like, how has your mindset evolved and changed you and your family to enable you to continue to keep going? Because you mentioned this in passing, but there are so many people that are looking up the mountain towards you. They're saying, man, I really want to have that. I wanna be able to have a life where I can pick and choose what I want to do. But yet, When you're climbing a mountain, there's obstacles, there's, crevices that you have to avoid. You have to ropes across bridges, you know, you or across like these giant, you know, open gorges and things like that. You gotta run from the tigers and, you know, do all of this stuff right. And go through that. And I imagine you as running into all these obstacles is running past them and getting to. The top of the mountain where there's water, clean air, and an amazing view. Right? And then everything is downhill from there. Right. But I just wanted to ask what kept you going and how has my, like, kind of evolved you as you were working your tech job and doing all these amazing things and going through these hardships? Mm-hmm. So it wasn't easy. I think, I think you, you've dealt with that. And a lot of, a lot of our, ecosystem is dealing with that or has dealt with that. The biggest challenge is especially when you're in your, all your life, you've been trained to do something which is nine to five. Conform, comply, right? Stay within your lane and you'll be fine. Right? Your entire life, you've been trained 'cause that's what school is. School is teaching you how to conform. It's not about teaching you how to evolve. It's really teaching you how to conform. And within the conformity you can be innovative, but if you move past those control lines, you're screwed. You get an F or you'll get demerit or you get disciplinary action or whatever, right? So now I think the biggest challenge was when you are trying to make a decision of not staying in those control lines and doing something which, with which it's not uncommon, but within your ecosystem, your current ecosystem is unheard of. What are you gonna do? Are you going to go become professional investor? What does that even mean? Yeah. Did you go to Columbia Business School to do that? Did you go to i i t to do that? no. Go find a Java at the next best startup. Right? Why don't you start a new product or whatever? It's just is to clean that noise, to stop that noise and just sit in silence and think about where's your life's path. I'm not saying starting an Airbnb was bad because of course it's worked for, donate and, donator O'Brien has worked amazingly, there're all billionaires, so it works. But for every successful Airbnb, there's also thousands of failed Airbnbs. Right? So I think you have to be, you have to be willing to take that bet, saying I'm okay with the repercussions, the consequences that may not be working in my favor. There's no guaranteed success, right? Just like there's no guaranteed job out, right? Coming outta college, you go to college because the probability of you landing a job is pretty high. That's exactly what you have to think about. But for somehow, when you're now moving into the entrepreneurship world, you want the probability of your successful entrepreneur, endeavors pretty high. Why is that? Those are the questions that you start asking. You took a big risk in college. Why are you not able to carve out four years of your life to take risk on you, which probably is gonna result in a much better, outcomes, if not monetarily. It'll change the person who you are. Yeah. So you are set for more success than after four years, you can revisit the decision, right? That was direct, the hardest decision to make, and I've been very, very, very lucky. To have my mentors, to have my coaches to basically guide me through that process. If I was in a black hole and just shut everything off and sat in a room, I would go. I would've gone crazy because I didn't know how to look at this world, right?'cause I didn't have that. I didn't have that lens. I did not have that lens. So I'll be fooling and I'll be lying to people saying that. And I was not smart enough to listen to podcasts. I was just trying to find the answers because all my life, that's how I found the answers, by digging deeper. But this time I needed something else because I need to have a new teacher. I need to have a new framework. So I changed the approach of finding solutions by finding people who have done similar things. Maybe not the same thing, but similar things. I started seeking out people who have left their jobs and launched their own ventures. It could be a startup tech in technology world. It could be an investor, it could be, and I also started talking to people who have become full-time investors, because the people that I was listening to before, they were not qualified. They were well wishes, but they were not qualified. Their concerns, their opinions were coming from fear. That you may fail, right? But if I'm talking to Derek who's living a life, maybe looking, maybe living a life different than somebody else, it may not be the exact life that I want. I'm like, Derek, how did you make that switch? He is gonna give me a few insights and I'm gonna talk to somebody else. They're gonna give a few insights. So I collected a lot of insights, man. And then more questions I asked, the more confused I got initially. Then again, I sat down. Now I have probably scripts of over a hundred people of what they have done. I started mapping the dots and there's common theme that step coming up, which is the only way you're gonna figure out is to make a decision and move. Right? And the moment you do that, you are thousand steps ahead of you're, one step forward is a thou will take you a thousand step ahead from where you were, from where you were before, and it may not work out. That doesn't mean the decision is not reversible. You come back and figure out if this path didn't work, what else could work? Right? So that's really what the change in the mindset has been. Derek is the mindset of relentless perseverance, which is, it's going to work. Maybe not the activity. Maybe I need to change the activities or what I'm trying to achieve is going to work. Freedom is going to happen. I may have to change the definition of freedom. I may have to change the path for freedom, but it's going to happen. There's no reason why it won't happen because I'm no special. You're no special. Your guests are no special. Your audience is no special. So if it has worked for one person, it has to work for others too. I think that this is very timely, in the fact that here's the thread that I pulled out from all those green, those gold nuggets. There is that. Failure is really only temporary unless you'd let it be permanent completely. And you only have to like, as soon as you're on the path right of, of like you said, stepping forward with that first step. Eventually you're gonna get to a thousand steps down the road and you're gonna look back and you're gonna say, wow, look at all that amazing distance I just covered. Yeah. Like, look at the difference between where I am now and where I was. I think that the people that can develop a mindset of not necessarily craving failure, but knowing that cra that failure is the edge of your capacity Mm-hmm. And it's the place where you've gotta go to find out what you're made of. And you can't listen to people that say, oh, that's wrong. Right? Because we've been conditioned. That's why it hurts so much, is when you know the word failure, even itself has a huge and it's the place where you've gotta go to find out what you're made of. And you can't listen to people that say, oh, that's wrong. Right? Because we've been conditioned. That's why it hurts so much, is when you know the word failure, even itself has a huge connotation to it, right? Because it is synonymous with fail, which is synonymous with an F, at least in the North American school system, right? Yeah. Which is something that you cannot, you just can't do. Your parents will ground you, you know? At least, at least that's what it was for me. And you know, There's such a strong stigma against failure that we have to unlearn those things and you know, I can't help but listen to what you just said and understand that it seems to me the mindset you realize is that you learned to not let fear and failure control who you are as an individual anymore. Somewhere along the way you must have said to yourself, I'm looking for an alternate path. Why does it have to be the way that everyone is say it's supposed to be done? I'm willing to take some risk and explore the unexplored and that shows, especially with your five month trip out to, you know, a place where the thing didn't even, it didn't even materialize, but you learned a whole bunch. That's the whole point of failures. You are, you learn the edge of where you're capable of achieving I'll just add one few things there. Right to the few things is, I think failure is, failure only happens when you quit. That's the only time you've failed because otherwise, what is failure? So I think let's actually take, go deeper, into this topic because it's a very important topic. What is success and what is failure? if you think about it, is success a dollar figure or is success the attempt to try to make something and continue doing it until it happens? Right. And if you just start thinking about that and reflecting on these two words, because I think that's really, really, really most important. If you have kids, I would love, I would highly recommend doing that exercise. We were listening to, we were in the car, me, my girls, and my wife, and there's a word came out, character, right? And, we actually stopped the whole, audio at that point and we're like, what is character? It's not an easy term, right? But it's a commonly used term. So what is really a character, and I'm using that as an example, but also take deeper into every single word that you use. What is success for you and what is failure for you? Do you even have a definition of those two? Because most people will say failures or it didn't work well, how do you know it didn't work? Because until you quit making it work, it does it, it'll continue to work, right? Those are the definitions. They're very important. There's very subtle things, but it's very important, I would say, is that define your definition of success and failure before you start something. Not while you are in it. Right. So, because when, what's happens is like, I'll tell you about my deal now. I did not accept that deal to not go through. That's not, if I had ex, if my expected outcome was it's not gonna work, I wouldn't have put the amount of effort and sacrifice I did. Of course. Right. So you're going to start something with a hope that it's gonna work with the trust that it's gonna work, but then along the way, when things are not working, If you haven't built that, that, that muscle already, you probably, I would say, is that before you start, define what failure means and you'll get an answer, which is gonna be very different, which is going to be, why am I one thinking about a failure? It's not going to happen. Right. So, so then stick with that and when things are not working for you, because there will be moments in your, in whatever you're trying to do.'cause not everything's gonna work the way you wanna work. And maybe it does great, but chances are it won't. And if it won't, you wanna go back to that failure framework saying, okay, did I fail already? Did I fail already? Did I fade already? Chances are you gonna say no because you built that in a mindset, the failure framework and the mindset when you were not in, in a downward spiral. You were pretty high up at that point, right? So think about that for a second and reflect on that. I think the other thing really is more, or more about is figure out your priorities, right? Like you said that, and you also said that it's uphill, uphill, uphill. Then from there, it's all downhill. Now it's not. It's uphill, uphill, uphill. There is a very small moment of being down, and then you, then you hit a, then you go climb another mountain back the next, then you go down, then you go climb another mountain, then you go down. Then you go climb another mountain. Right? It's going to happen, and that's what you want it to be. If it's too easy, you're not pushing yourself, you're not going outta your comfort zone, right? You're not. All of us. I think, you and I were talking Derek, about what's our next steps, where we were taking it. I think both of us, interestingly, are doing something very different for our businesses. Right. Which five years, five years before we would not have even thought about. No, it's very different. It's a new hill to climb now all of a sudden, right? Because we've figured out the first hill. It's easier now and it's not that much fun now. So let's go climb another hill and if we're gonna cross that hill, then that's gonna become very easy and then we're gonna do something else. I think it's just, that's what life is about, man. It's more when it's too easy, change something. You know what I think it is? I think we like pain. I think that's what, that's what my friends tell me. That's exactly what my friends tell me. Saki, you like pain, you like to inflict pain on you. I'm like, not really, but that's okay. That's an interesting way of looking at it, but not really. You know, funny though, like I gotta keep pointing this back to like, you know, the relationship between success and failure, right? Gonna bring it another analogy in which is when you're working out and you're working your muscles, there is a point in which your muscles will fail. They will tear. Yeah. And you are in pain because these puzzles are tearing and you're also pushing yourself to the mental and physical limit with that, right? Yeah. But ultimately what happens, you grow bigger than you do before. Like you become stronger, faster, more mobile. And so that's, just another analogy here, if the mountain one didn't do it for you, so awesome, man. This is great stuff. Now what I want to do is I wanna shift the conversation slightly, and I want to go back into the world of. Current tech workers right now because what I'd like you to do, mm-hmm. Is I'd like you to channel your inner person going back many years where, yeah, you're in the tech industry and let's try to help some people who are perhaps in the tech industry trying to get to where you are. I wanted to ask you, do you feel that tech workers actually have to start a great advantage? To get location and time independence and even financial independence. I won't try to take stock for those individuals working their tech jobs. Where do you think that they are to start, like starting out? What do you think they need to be aware of? Yeah, so I think it all depends upon where you are in the tech journey itself, right? So let's say you are 22 years old, just graduated, or in that timeframe, you're starting out, you joined Airbnb back in 2008. Right. That's a pretty risky move, right? Doesn't mean it won't pay pan out. It's a pretty risky move. So if somebody is in that position, they may not have the financial independence, financial freedom, because everything is tied into a stock and everything is tied into the hope and the trust that you have in that business to become something big, right? So for those you may not, that financial piece may not be there. The time piece may not be there either, because you know, when you are starting at a five 10 person company, you're working a lot, right? Because that's all you have.'cause you're trying to build something that does not exist, right? So I think there's, we gotta figure out who are we talking to. If you're talking to that individual that's joined a two or 5% company that's really, really, really grinding hard to even do a product market fit, and they're developing an M V P. They're in that phase of their life where the base salary is just to survive for them. If we say that, Hey, you have the financial freedom unless you come from money, right? You may, you may have other sources of income, you may have, made some money before you moved into the tech world. So all of that could be possible, so we're over generalizing it. But if you're in that phase and you don't necessarily have a whole lot of capital to depend on, financial freedom may not be the first freedom you wanna attack because it won't be there. So, to, not to want. I don't wanna give people false hopes. Yeah. But let's follow that. Let's follow that path. But let's say now you're working at a Google and Airbnb or, or a Yahoo or Microsoft or these companies that, did I say Yahoo? Let's leave Yahoo. Yahoo out. Not to say that people are working. Yeah, let's do that. For one of those companies, when you're working at, now, you have a lot more income coming in, right.'cause your, your stock's more ca more liquid. Now you can go sell in the public market, maybe some restrictions, but overall, you are able to depend, dip into some capital that coming outta your hard work right now, you can start thinking about financial freedom for sure, because now you have a capital to dip into. Now you have to do it smartly because. There's capital gains, depending upon how you got it. They could be ISOs, they could be RSUs. You have to be really careful how you deploy it, what you deploy, which aspect you deploy. There's tons of resources available for doing that, but it's definitely possible there to see how to get somebody, financial independence, financial freedom. Also, at that same point, financial freedom has two layers to it, right? The biggest one is expenses. Mm-hmm. Of course there's income and minus expenses. So that's really what the financial freedom is. The your income has to exceed the fin, exceed your expenses, and there's degrees of expenses. You're talking about basic life. Then you're talking about luxuries, then you're talking about ultimate, right? There's multiple levels of that. We don't have to go deeper into that. There's an, there's only two components you can move. You can either increase your income or you can decrease your expenses. Mm-hmm. Right. I always tend to tell people is focus on income because beyond a certain point in time, you cannot reduce your expenses. That's right. But income has no limit. Right. So now how to think about the income now. A logical question is, but sot I work at a job, my income is limited.'cause I can only go so up. Yeah. So then we are gonna, we are gonna, we're gonna add more perspectives to it. That's one source of income does not mean you can't have multiple. Oh. But I can't, I'm not allowed to do multiple jobs. Again, we're thinking too narrowly. We're not talking about finding more jobs. We're talking about finding sources of income. And the income will even change that word and we'll start calling it sources of cash flow. So now your income, your job is one source of cash flow. Your rental properties could be another. Your investments could be another. Your dividend stocks could be another. Your f you participating in a franchise could be another. Now, if you start thinking about it, you could start an online program, right? You could start coaching, you could start mentoring people. There's so many ways when you start thinking about it, that literally it's endless and that's where the mental growth is gonna happen. Yeah. Does not mean that you're nine to five and you're stuck. And some jobs to answer, other degrees of freedom, time, and time and your location. To a certain extent, location, you can get the location freedom while you're working at a company. Like I was very fortunate because of Airbnb. I could be anywhere in the world. They didn't care, right? As long as I show up, as long as my manager agrees it, it was very easy. So one could argue I had the location freedom. I didn't necessarily need the, need, need any, need, any issue of that. But if you're working at companies that require you to be there in person, Two to three days a week or once a month or whatever, you may be a little bit more constrained there, but that doesn't mean you can't answer jobs, right? You can find a tech company. If tech is, your tech, is your, safe haven. You can find a tech company that allows you to work from wherever. I mean, during covid, it was pretty common. Yep. Time is probably the most important one that we haven't talked at all about, right? You should ask yourself the question, to what extent why are you making money? Right. And, if you go back to, yeah, you're working at a, an Airbnb in 2008. To what extent to why? And the question is gonna be, I wanna make a lot of money. Why do you wanna make a lot of money? So I have choices. So I can, I can live in the house. I wanna live, take a vacation. I wanna live, spend, whatever I have, whatever, right? Why it's all that comes down to, because nobody controls my time. That's right. So if you're talking about ultimate freedom of time, I personally, this is my opinion, I don't think you can get that while working at a job. You just can't. You can get glimpse of it, right? You can say that, Hey, I've made it, now I'm gonna take a sabbatical for six months. You can do that. It's still not freedom of time for the six months, it's freedom of time, but the, as soon as a fifth month hit, you are gonna say, oh shoot, it's gonna end and I have to go back, right? Yeah. Then you work for another four years and you take another six months sabbatical. So you can get the glimpse of it, but I really don't think you can get freedom of time until you control your time and the only way to control your time is to do something that you really wanna do, not for money. Because you enjoy doing it because then your time is yours, right? Because now you're not stuck working and chances of that happening, if you have the financial freedom is much higher. So the financial freedom can buy you location and time freedom. It usually doesn't work the other way if you have location and time freedom. It may not get you to financial freedom right away, it'd be a longer journey. Mm-hmm. Excellent. Yeah, that's great. I think that all three of these layers or these degrees of freedom, they come in in different times of life and each person has a different weight to how much it's important to each, to, to them. Completely. Right? Completely. And so what we encourage people to do is to figure out what that why is so that you can live in alignment with your degrees of freedom, right? Like, Why are you working so hard at your full-time job? Are you trying to save up enough money so that you can retire and be financially independent? I don't recommend doing that because that's the traditional approach of going like, Hey, I'm gonna delay my life until Yeah, a certain amount of money that's not, I don't think that's right. And de and Derek, let's talk about why is it not right. Sorry to interrupt you, but it was an important moment.'cause you may not have that time. It's not because you'll not make it there. You may make it there. We are not talking when we have No, I think Derek and I will probably have no reason to doubt that you'll never make it there. The problem is you may not have that much life. Yeah, that's right. You never know and you never know what's around the corner as you've mentioned in that story before. It's absolutely true. And how do you know what you're capable of? How do you know that you won't fall on your feet? Right. Because a lot of people assume that when you try to do something out on your own, it's you're gonna, you're gonna fall flat on your face. But if you watch a video of cats or squirrels Right, it's pretty amazing. They have an internal system. Yeah. Where they always land on their feet no matter what height you drop them. Right. And I have a feeling that human beings have something similar. Unless it's something that's a huge, like, you know, something that just completely sweeps you away. Right. And that happens in life. But I think we overestimate how difficult things are, and I think human beings, we have in internal system, we're very smart in individual organisms. Right. We figure stuff out, especially if we're under pressure. We have to, if we have to do it, we will. You've heard stories of, yeah. You know, parents who see their babies trapped under cars and they'll lift a car up to get their baby out, right? Correct. Correct, correct, correct. We have the capacity to solve all these problems. You just have to put yourself in the right condition to think about it, and so, Um, mm-hmm. That's, that's all I wanted to say. I wanted to head into our rapid round here, but I want to give you a chance. Let's do it. Anything else? But, I wanna make sure we honor your time commitment as well.'cause we're past our original time slot 'cause we've been chatting and just having some great here. Oh, this is great conversation, man. Yeah, this has been great. Let's go into the rapid round. It's five questions that we ask every one of our guests. And they're meant to be in about a 32nd or less timeframe. So if you're ready, we're gonna, let's do it. Get you in it. Alright, let's do it. Number one. Name any resource that was or is essential in your journey to pursue your freedoms Meditation. Oh, beautiful. Love that, love it, love it. Number two, if you woke up and your business was gone, gone, gone, and you had $500 a laptop. A place to live and some food and your family, of course. What would you do first? That's an interesting one. Where am I at that point? Anywhere you want to be. If you're at home, I, the first thing I really would do is to figure out who do I need to be? To utilize that $500, right?'cause if that's all I have, I wanna be very careful. I'm realizing at that point I have skills that nobody can take it away from me. Impossible. I have built the business before so I know I can do it, right? So the starting points have all gone. Now it's more about where can I deploy that $500 and turn that into $50 million of using the skills I have and where's potentially some gap, right? Because I have the resources, because I'm not starting out fresh. I have the contacts, I have the skills, right? I just don't have the financial resources. Right. So enough figure out how to be more resourceful on those financial resources. I love it, man. That's great. That's what you gotta do. And honestly, we face those decisions every day. At least that's me. Yeah. I ask that question because that's pretty much what I use to help determine what I'm gonna do in the middle of the day. Alright? Yeah. Number three, what does your self-reflection and goal setting practice look like? I. If you have one, yeah, every morning. Every morning. Reflect on, is what I'm, what I did yesterday. Did it serve my goal? What am I going to today to do today intentionally to make sure it's aligning me better towards my goal? That's on a day-to-day basis, and on an annual basis. I actually hide out for five days. Nobody knows where I am, including my wife. Nobody knows I have a notebook and I have me and I have three pens, three colored pens, and I go somewhere where nobody bothers me. And and that's my way of making sure I'm reconnecting with me because if I'm not connecting with me, I'm not connecting with anybody. Amazing. And I assume that happens right in between or around your meditation time as well. Right? Correct. Great. I mean, that's really, I don't look it as an active meditation, active goal setting during meditation. And because I have no idea what happens during the meditation. so I don't have the science behind it, but it gives me so much clarity, so my goal setting becomes easier. Number four, what are the core work habits that you attribute most to your success that's unique to you? I get bored very easily. Truly. And I think the second one, which is very tied together, is I love chaos. As crazy as it may sound, I thrive in chaos to an extent where I remember distinctly having these conversations with my bosses at my jobs. I'm like, Can we do something crazy in this project? It's too simple. It's too simple. Everything's going too easy. I'm not connected. He's like, what do you want? I'm like, let's do something to stir it up so that I get more with it, because I can't produce if I'm not in a chaos and somehow the way it could be. Growing up in India, I have no idea. But if I see chaos there, something gets triggered in me. I. I was just, I just wanna solve it and I'm fairly good at it. That is really cool. I really love that. I'm gonna take that away for myself as well, because so many people crave to not be in chaos. But I understand that maybe you understand that you grow in chaos and it's exciting. Oh, definitely. And see what you're made of. And, it's in full alignment with what we, that it was funny, my wife was telling me this today. She wanted to get something. She's like, let's just get it. I'm like, what do you mean? She's like, If you buy it, you'll figure it out how to make it work.'cause otherwise you'll keep telling me we shouldn't buy it, we shouldn't do this, we shouldn't do that. Let's just buy it. Your mind's gonna figure it out. I'm like, this is crazy. But that's true. That's awesome. Alright, last question I have for you today. Number five. What is one tool or process that's become one of your most important time, money, or energy? Ninja. Saving. Sorry. Saving. Ninja magic tricks that you use every single day. So what's throw a to throw, throw to-do list. And only work with calendar. That's it. If it's not in the calendar, it's not getting done. Yeah. You can have a repo, a brain dump of to-do, which is perfectly fine. But if the to-do is not in the calendar, no matter how small or big it is, it's not happening. Yeah. Never. So that's been my engine. I tell people, never trust your memory. Never say, oh, I'll just do that later. Right. Never ever do that. Never. No. You have something to do that's important enough. Immediately put it into a to-do list or a time block on your calendar. I recommend the to-do list.'cause I have a time block for my to-do list. So that's, oh, there you go. See, that's good. As long as you have some reminder and you are very religious about it. Yes. You don't skip it, nothing gets done. Except that then it's okay. Yeah, absolutely. Well, hey, this has been fantastic, man. I've had a great time talking with you about tech failure, which is only temporary for, for people who are, advancing in their careers, and everything around, growing wealth and becoming a great, a bigger person, someone of more capacity, and speaking that. If people want to learn more about you and what you have going on in your world, where would you recommend that they reach out to you or find more about you? Definitely. So I'm on all social media platforms. They handle is pretty simple. The sock Jane. I was lucky enough to get that. Nice. I was trying to get sock in, but I had to add the, I hated it, but I did. So it's there. I have a podcast which is migrate to Wealth. You see that on the, on my logo itself? On the screen. If you're watching the show. And last but not the least, we're actually having a conference, a four day virtual conference, which is built around how to bring balance in the five dimensions of your life, your mind, your body, your relationship, your money, and your impact, right? I live my life trying to bring balance. I'd be lying if I say, The balance exists. The balance does not exist, but it's the intentional habit, intentionality behind bringing life in balance. We're gonna be talking about those four days, over 40 plus speakers. So you can, I would love to have, your audience come and join us. It's free four days of a lot of fun. It's virtual, so you have no reason not to attend it. It's, you can find more information of migrate to wealth summit.com. Excellent. Saket, it was a pleasure to have you on. The call today, and to do this amazing podcast. I had so much fun and I'm glad that we got to do it 'cause we, we had to delay so many times. But I'm glad I know. No, thank you. Thank you., it was my pleasure man. I really enjoyed the conversation. You are good at asking the questions. Some of the questions I've never been asked before, which is great. So this is why you add volume. I love it, man. Thank you so much, sake, and for you. Thank you buddy. Who have listened all the way to the end of the show. I wanna thank you guys also for all of your, energy and attention here. And please, wherever you're listening or watching it, please interact with us somehow. If, whether you're you, leave a, like a comment, a thumbs up, subscribe, I. We just really appreciate that because as you engage with the show, we'll be able to engage the algorithm, which then, you know, helps push our media out to more and more people to attract incredible guests, just like Saket, and more, amazing listeners just like you as well. So thank/ you guys for listening. Saket once again. Thanks again buddy. This was an amazing show, had so much fun. Thank you for having me. Thank you for following me. Alright, we'll talk to you guys soon. Have a good week.