The Truth Behind Every Success...

What's up you guys? It's Graham here. So I want to talk about what you don't really see behind the scenes of every success story you see, myself included. What a lot of you guys see is someone successful. You see someone who has, you know, the cars, you see someone who has, you know, the houses and the properties, the money, and you know, all the cool things that you see from the outside. But it's not very often that you see what's going on behind the scenes and what a lot of people had to go through in order to have made it to that point or to have gotten to that point.

Because I could assure you, with every success, there's almost always some sort of sacrifice that had to be made along the way. There were always these things that would come up that would be devastating along the way and struggles that you don't always see. A lot of it is internal. A lot of these things that I've been through, nobody would ever know. I mean, if you get very good at, like, hovering things up, you know, not sharing them. Plus, nobody really digs deep enough to really know how, like, you really are feeling most of the time. So it's very easy for these things to go unnoticed.

But I want to share a few of these things with you guys and just so you know what's going on behind the scenes of really almost everybody. I'm sure it's not just me. I'm going to be sharing these just from my own experiences, but I'm sure we've all been through them too. Now we're all human. We all go through the same thing, so it's not like I'm the one unique person out there.

So anyway, these are a few of the things that I thought I would mention. You guys haven't seen behind the scenes. The first, probably one of the biggest ones, is the loneliness. Again, when I first started selling real estate, I was the only eighteen-year-old kid who was selling real estate. All my friends went off to college, and it was just little ol' Graham. At that point, I had a very hard time relating to other people because I was in an office pretty much every single day with people much older than me that were in their mid-30s, late-30s, 40s, 50s, 60s.

I was surrounded by these people all day long as an 18-year-old kid and during the days I was busy working. I was trying to hustle, I was trying to like, you know, make a name for myself in real estate. I was trying to make money in real estate and be successful and prove everyone else wrong that an 18-year-old kid can't sell real estate. That's where my focus was.

Now all my friends were off in, you know, college having a great time, partying, doing whatever they were doing while I was at work. And when I would go see my friends again, I felt like such an adult. It's really weird when you're surrounded by all of these, like, 50-year-olds and 60-year-olds and 40-year-olds and you’re 18. You feel like you've just grown up 10 years in a matter of, like, maybe a few months.

So I would go and see all my friends, and they'd be back from college and I would have such a hard time relating to them. I would see everybody just going, like, doing keg stands and stupid stuff like that. I'd be like, "Guys, what are we doing? We should be working!" You know, no one at my work would ever be doing this stuff. This is stupid.

And it took your head a little bit because you're a kid. You're an 18-year-old kid; you should be doing those things. This should be fun, but you get stuck in this, like, old person mentality that, like, you're above that and that's stupid and that's pointless. You should be working instead. So, there was a period for really, I would say, 3–4 years where I had very few friends. Very few friends. I think I maybe had like one, maybe two, maybe.

And I just filled my time with work instead. It was a really, really lonely time for me. That was tough. And you know, I forgot about the toughness just by working so hard. When you're that busy and that focused and you work yourself to the bone and then you get home, all you want to do is sleep because you've worked all day. You know, even I was happy with work. At the same time, like, I wasn't that fulfilled in terms of friendships and stuff like that.

So it took me a while to eventually start meeting new friends, and it's so hard to meet friends as an adult. You don't even think about it. Like in school, it's so easy in high school to make these friends because you see each other every day. But when you're out in the real world making a friend, it's really hard. I spent a lot of time trying to develop friendships and I always felt super awkward.

Because, like, when you haven't hung out with someone for that long of a time and then you start trying to hang out with people again, it's like uneasy and you feel weird and, like, anxious and awkward and stuff like that. So it took me a while to learn to cultivate the friendships that I have now and get to the point where, like, now it's easy again. Now you've got friends again.

So that was one of the things that, you know, not a lot of people see and I'm sure I can't be the only one who's felt like this. I know I post in these videos and I read some of the comments down below and people that have been through the same thing as me. So that's one of those things. The big one for me is loneliness.

Now, the second thing are all the sacrifices that go along with that. Now, you know, I didn't really sacrifice college because that was something that I didn't really get into to begin with, and I never went to college. But that is something that, you know, I look back and part of me kind of wants a little bit of that college experience. And I'm sure this is always the grass is always greener, you know, on the other side.

That I'm sure this is one of those experiences because had I gone to college, I'd be like, "What would it be like to not have any college debt or to be working instead?" But, you know, it seems like a lot of my friends had such a great time in college, you know, and building those friendships and those connections. And, you know, I didn't get to do that. So I might call that a little bit of a sacrifice that I had to go through to get to where I am.

But it's also a sacrifice on, you know, I didn't really go on many vacations in the beginning of my career. I had to give up a lot of that. I didn't really have weekends because I'd be working instead. Now, granted, this is something I had a lot of fun doing, but at the same time, I was not a very well-rounded person. I wasn't a person that you can go and, like, hang out with on weekends or something. I was a person that was just like a hundred percent in real estate. And maybe that's how I had to be. Like, I had no regrets over this.

Maybe I had to be 100% focused on real estate in order to have gotten what I’d have gotten. But, you know, at the same time, I was a pretty narrow-focused person. Everything was just real estate. If you talked to me about anything else, I didn't know anything. I had no idea what was going on; it was just real estate.

So the worst sacrifices along the way that I had to make, especially even when it came to investing, I spent very little money. I wouldn't spend money unless I absolutely had to spend money. I wouldn't really go out. When I would go out to dinner maybe with like a friend or something, I'd get an appetizer instead of the entrée because I'd rather save the money instead. So, I made a lot of little sacrifices throughout the way.

And again, you know, I don't regret these decisions because I wouldn't be here today if it weren't for those decisions, but at the same time, there were sacrifices that I had to make at the time in order to get what I wanted in the future.

The thing is the stress, and I can't tell you how stressed out I've been in the past with certain deals where I wasn't sure if they were going to close or not. And I can't express how invested I am in my clients getting a house. First of all, when somebody trusts me with something, I am immediately just like, "I want to make sure they're satisfied and taken care of." If a client gives me a listing, I'm like, "Oh, I have to deliver!" The last thing I'd ever want to do is disappoint somebody, and that for me is probably the biggest thing is I don't want to disappoint anybody.

The stress associated with that is huge. Now again, this is my own problem. You know, it's I'm stressing myself out, but I place such an importance on meeting or exceeding someone's expectations that I want it to be perfect. So when I get the listing, I'm like, "They trusted me enough to give me the listing, and I have to make sure they're happy with it."

And sometimes, I've had deals that getting really close to not closing or something comes up and I'm like freaking out just because I don't know what's going to happen. Same thing with the stress of even buying my first property. I was super nervous about buying my first rental property, even though it's an agent who had assisted, and, you know, a few dozen people buying a home.

I was buying my first home for like $60,000. I was freaking out, thinking like, "Is this a mistake? Am I doing the right thing? I don't know what I'm doing!" I actually had the agent who was working with me at the time helping me find one of these real estate listings. She quit on me midway through to escrow. She was in escrow with me for two places.

She quit on me because she couldn't take that I was just, like, freaking out all the time. I was calling her all the time and, like, asking if she's done certain things or then telling her she's not doing something fast enough and it needs to be done, like, immediately because I was freaking out, worrying. I was scared, and she quit on me! Like, that's how bad it is.

Even the stress of just sometimes, like, not knowing if you're making the right decisions. You know, half the time, I have no idea what I'm doing. I just make the best decision that I think I can make. But in the back of my mind, I'm always thinking, "Is this the right decision?" You don't really know until it pans out, and there's a lot of stress involved in that.

And a lot of stress involved in the liability, you know? Working in real estate, maybe saying the wrong thing, or doing the wrong thing, or encroaching on someone else's, you know, listing in a way that, you know, you don't want to ruin any relationships. There's a lot of stresses that's involved in this.

Now, I'm sure too, on the flip side, there's a lot of stress in any industry. A lot of stress in being forced to wake up on Monday, it's exam to go to your job that you hate. I get it; it's a different type of stress. But there are a lot of things to go in the background that obviously I think a lot of you guys don't necessarily see what's going on.

But, well, I am, you know, stressed and worried every now and then about certain deals and certain things and I don't know if I'm making the right choice. And then you just, you have to make a decision and stick to it and hope that's the right one, and that's what I do most of the time.

And the fourth thing is the doubt. I mean, we've all been there. I doubt myself all the time. I doubt what I'm doing. I doubt if what I'm doing is working. I doubt if I'm making the right decisions. I doubt myself all the time. And, you know, I think this is a universal thing for everybody.

Sometimes, when I think of something, even a property that I'm going to be buying, even though I've been doing this for such a long time, and, you know, I can look objectively at other people's deals and be like, "To me, that's perfect." But when you're doing it yourself, I just end up doubting myself all the time just because it's me.

If I see someone else doing it and someone else asks me what I think of a property, I have no problem with that. But because it's me, for myself, I'm always doubting. It happens all the time. It happens with homes I'm investing in; it happens with remodeling I'm doing; it happens with things that I'm picking out. There's a lot of, like, Snapchat. Half the time, like, "Which one should I pick, A or B?" I do that, like, Snapchat helped pick out this desk here.

Dude, like that's how I couldn’t pick between two desks: this one and a glass one. Snapchat screenshotted this guy the most, so I bought that desk. But there's a lot of doubt that goes into it. Same when I started selling real estate when I was 18. I had a lot of doubt whether or not I'd actually be able to do it, whether or not I'd actually be successful doing that because my alternative was that if I didn't do well in real estate, I had a high school diploma, no college degree, no real skills.

I can play the drums, you know. But I didn't want to be one of these, like, street performers playing the drums in front of everybody, making no money, living in a van out in front of the Roxy Theater on Sunset. I didn't want to be, you know, that dude. But it's a lot of doubt that goes into it too, so it's a constant, just like, you see the doubt and you just have to, like, break past it all the time.

It happens all the time and it's just, you know, conquering that doubt and that fear that you have and just going forward. And then again, second-guessing yourself all the time and then looking back and be like, "Alright, I made the right decision. I came out okay. Alright, let's keep going."

And with that, also comes the uncertainty of not knowing what's going to happen. And there's a lot of things to that. I just don't know how things are going to pan out. There are a lot of different, you know, forks in the road as you go throughout your career where sometimes you get to a fork and you're not sure if you go right or left, but you feel like right may be the better way, so you go right. But you always wonder, like, "Should I have gone left instead?"

So there's always a little bit of uncertainty in that too. Even with me in my career, I, you know, I'm not sure how the market is going to be doing next year, if I'm going to be able to meet the goals that I've set for next year, if I'm not going to be able to do the things that I want to do. If I want to start, you know, doing XYZ, I've taken on a few coaching clients, by the way, if I want to pursue it, like how is that going to go?

If I go down that route, is it going to be something I want to do? Is it going to be helpful with other people? Are people going to enjoy it? It's a lot of uncertainty in that. And I think that is just a lot of my online games, but again, I feel like this is something we all tend to go through. It's a universal truth of just being a person and, you know, going through all of these things and these struggles.

So all of these things I would say are just the struggles that go behind any person's success. I think it's something that when you start becoming successful, you end up going through these things and I don't think anybody is immune to it. I don't think there's ever been a person who became successful and was just like, "Yeah, man, I'm caught in every step of the way, man. I knew it, I got it!" You know? Either that person is lying or they're just delusional.

But I believe that we've all been there and I believe these are all things that we're going through. I just, I would like to normalize these things and share with you guys that, like, we all go through it. All of us are exactly the same. There's very little that separates me from all of you watching. It's, you know, we're all the same. You know? Well, the same! That's the way I see it.

And it's just about understanding these things, realizing they're totally normal, realizing the truth, not the only one that feels this way, and then moving past it and understanding that 90% of all this stuff is just in your head anyway. I hope you guys can relate to it, and I hope that I'm not the only one.

So, as always, you guys, thank you so much for watching. I really appreciate it. Haven't subscribed? Put a wait, wait five seconds for you to click that subscribe button. Four, three, two, one. Okay, you clicked subscribe. Now you're going to go to that notification bell. Smash that notification bell so YouTube can sometimes let you know when I post a video. They've been good about it lately, by the way.

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