Sure Fire Plan To Financial Independence For Doctors With Dr. Tom Burns

If you want to know how to do something or what it's like down the end of the road, you'd really like to ask somebody that's coming back from already being at that destination or at least somebody that's on their way there with you.

Welcome to Truly Passive Income. I'm Neil Henderson.

And I'm Clint Harris. And our guest this week is orthopedic surgeon turned real estate mogul, Dr. Tom Burns.

He's parlayed 30 years of investing into half a billion dollar portfolio spanning multifam family office land and industrial assets.

He co founded and sold a full service hospital, wrote the best seller why Doctors Don't Get Rich and now mentors high net worth professionals through his rich life mastermind.

Today we'll unpack how we went from the OR to financial independence and why passive income, not a higher paycheck, is the real prescription for freedom. Dr. Burns, thank you so much for being with us today. How are you, sir?

I am doing great. Thanks Neil. Thanks, Clint. Appreciate you having me on.

Absolutely.

Yep. We're excited to have you here.

Anytime I can talk to a white coat professional physician, surgeon, something like that, it brings up a lot of fond memories for me. And, and I love seeing people that have parlayed that experience into, to breaking free from that lifestyle into, into doing something else.

So tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, your medical career and how you, you blossom that into a whole second act. Sure.

I was, you know, Texas boy, so I went to, went to college and med school in Texas and then went away to learn and decided to orthopedic surgeon, sports guy. You know, I was in, I was into sports and nobody was going to pay me for it, so I just had to be an orthopedic sports guy.

So I was in my training and for those that don't know, doctors train kind of through an apprentice, apprentice program. And so it was five years of this apprenticeship and the people that are training you are the Doctors that are 10, 20, 30 years ahead of you.

And so that's in, in some manner of speaking, that's you in 10, 20 or 30 years.

So now the reason I mentioned that is that I was about halfway through that training and that's when I saw that the doctors that were training me did not necessarily have the life that I wanted. They were a bit unhappy. They were on their second or third marriages.

They were working hard at night, late at night in the hospital when we knew we had to be there. But you know, why were there so late? And they Were complaining about insurance and not having control.

And so at some point I finally realized that I didn't necessarily want their money if I had to have their life. They all did drive some fancy cars and have really nice houses, but they weren't happy guys.

So that was the genesis of me looking for something else that just wasn't correlated to medicine. It was not real estate or investing to start with because I didn't know what to look for.

I just looked landed on real estate just because of its slow speed, ability to use partners, and ability to do it part time, full time. So I came out of my doctor training and my real estate training at the same time and kind of built them both at the same time in parallel.

So burnt the candle at both ends a little bit. But over time, the real estate started creating a little bit of passive income.

And that little bit, you know, stacked one on top of the other, began to compound. And over a decade or so allowed me to have enough passive income to retire if I wanted to. I just didn't. I kept going, so I'll stop there.

I love that. It's so funny how a lot of times we. We learn from other people about what they did right that we want to emulate.

And sometimes what we learn is what we don't want to be right. One of my first bosses, I learned a ton of things that really helped me. Work ethic, drive, connecting with people, emotional intelligence.

But I also learned a lot of things that I didn't want to be right. And I think that sometimes those carry just as much weight. And I think that was. That's a lot of wisdom.

And being that young and early in your career and being like, well, I can see what I don't want to turn out to be right. And when you can see where that road leads to, you start realizing at some point you got to make an off ramp, right?

If you want to off ramp from that lifestyle.

And you see where it's going when you figure that out, the sooner you realize that, the more room you give yourself to build that and to create that off ramp for yourself. So talk to us about burning the candle at both ends. You're doing real estate, you're doing medicine.

It's a very laborious line of work, especially orthopedics. Now, were most of your procedures elective? Were you doing emergent stuff? Were you on call and things like that?

Or were they mostly scheduled procedures?

Well, you got to think back, you know, when you're the new guy in town, you're dirt, right? So I was taking call.

And, you know, for those that don't know, that means that they can call you at a moment's notice, anytime during the night and say, we have something in the emergency room that you have to take care of. And that's what we did.

So I can tell you, for a number of years, I remember vividly squatting to sit down at the table for Thanksgiving dinner and having the pager go off with a hip fracture. So, yes, I took call, I worked hard, I took whatever somebody would bring in. And so, you know, and I was, I was working hard during that time.

I was the new guy in town, but also working hard to kind of learn and understand the real estate.

So essentially early in the game, I worked all day in orthopedics, and then in the evening, if I had in the evening and weekends, that's where I had to muster the energy to go look at a property and maybe purchase it or not. So it was truly, you know, I did job number one and then jumped into job number two in the evenings and the weekends.

Well, from what I know about you, you got half a billion dollar portfolio of multifamily office land, industrial to me, syndication and general partners, limited partners, capital raising, and at some point, a shift towards a more passive investment strategy. And that makes sense, especially for a lot of successful medical professionals. What you typically don't have is time.

You do have capital and you can put that money to work, but it's really hard to get the time aspect of things, especially young in your career. You're doing the grunt work, you're taking call. So I'm curious to know your journey through real estate investing.

Did you start off with passive strategies or did you start off single family homes and then house flipping and then small multifamily?

Did you follow that traditional career trajectory in terms of real estate, or did you somehow jump forward towards more impassive strategies earlier on?

I think it was pretty traditional. And of course, I didn't know what was traditional back then because everybody told me I was crazy. You know, why don't you focus on medicine, Tom?

That's literally what I was told. And so back then, I mean, this was a long time ago. This was, this was mid-90s, so there weren't syndications necessarily available for me.

I didn't, I didn't. I wasn't in those circles. Right. That was more in the private equity world, a little higher net worth. I was just a doctor.

And so all we knew back then is if you wanted to be in real Estate, you bought something. So I learned how to buy stuff.

And so the first one was scary as hell, but, you know, I did it and made a little bit of money and was a little less scared on the next one.

And you know, before I bought another, bought another, bought another, and before you knew it, I, I knew, I knew that particular market like the back of my hand.

I bought a property side unseen and I bought another one with no money down, which I don't recommend, but I just knew more than the selling broker and the seller himself. So that was kind of organic, right?

And so it just, you know, it was small properties and went into slightly larger properties and then partners started knocking on the door and we did slightly larger properties and, and then at one point we did start calling some friends and family and saying, hey, would you like to get in on this deal? That was probably the genesis of our first investors. You know, I built that hospital.

I talked to a jillion doctors about investing in the hospital and got a handful of them that eventually did.

So it was slow and organic and, you know, pretty much I bought my own stuff occasionally and relatively rarely would invest in other people's deals but still do that, and then ended up being on the general partner side most of the time.

I've heard you say that you just wanted money coming in that wasn't connected to medicine.

For listeners that are new to alternative assets like real estate and syndications, how do you explain that core mindset difference between trading time for dollars and building true cash flowing assets?

Yeah, it's, I mean, you mentioned it right there. You know, we're all, most of us are trading our time for money in one way or another. A lot of us do that.

You know, you're either trading your, your time hourly or per service.

And you know, the thought process is, is that no matter how much somebody pays you for that hour or for that service, if you get ill or you want to take a vacation or you get hit by a bus, the music stops, the income stops when your ability to trade that time stops.

And so what you're referring to and what I was referring to is creating assets, which is a little harder to do than just working for dollars and trading your time. But you create assets that will perpetually and perennially produce some degree of cash flow for you no matter what you're doing.

So it kind of gets to that definition of wealth. And there's a number of definitions. This is just one of the financial ones.

Basically, you know, financially wealthy, if you either have a big giant bucket of money or you've got assets that are producing golden eggs for you. And so that's the difference is you've got something out there working for you 24, 7.

It's never going to complain, never going to take a vacation, never going to get pregnant or get jealous of the other dollars. And that dollar's out there working for you and wants to work for you forever.

If you've got that happening, then you don't necessarily have to trade your time as much for, for that money and you can spend it with your family and your loved ones.

I love that. You know, I, I often talk about, you know, there's two schools of thoughts where it comes to building financial independence.

There's sort of the nest egg approach, which is more the traditional, you know, spending less than you're making and funneling that money into equities like stocks.

And then at some point down the road, you know, you hit a certain age and you go, all right, I've got a big enough nest egg that I can start drawing that down and I'm financially independent versus buying those cash flowing assets that you can leave, be and let grow and, and produce cash flow. But if they're also have the ability to say, all right, I'm going to start, maybe even I'm not financially independent, this is sort of my journey.

I didn't reach financial independence, but I was able to say, all right, I'm going to change directions, I'm going to choose a different career because I have enough cash flowing assets that I can take that chance. And that's what I one things I love about real estate syndication and the whole idea of cash flowing assets.

Was that sort of the journey that you went on, was that the mindset shift at all?

Absolutely. And what you described is basically passive income gives you choice, gives you choices and control that you control your time.

So you chose to go do something different because you could take that risk because you had some passive income coming in. You know, people think they, well, gosh, how can I replace my whole salary? You don't have to do that.

You know, a little bit of passive income to take care of part of your obligations puts a smile on your face and makes you not think about the utility bill or the mortgage or the car payment or whatever it is that you want to compartmentalize that. So if you've got a little bit of passive income coming in, it gives you some choices. So your choice was to do something different?

My choice was to stay in medicine and just enjoy it more. I worked 12 and a half years. Years beyond the time when my passive income eclipsed my salary.

And so I didn't have to make as much money as an orthopedic surgeon. I made less and less and less, but enjoyed myself more and more and more so. And it was really rewarding. So it gives you choices.

That was a long soliloquy for the fact that passive income gives you choices and control over parts of your life.

Isn't it so funny when you can have the same job, but when it's a choice that you get, decide to get up and do it, it can be so much more enjoyable than when you were forced to. It's that. That one, that small little mental shift is such a. Can be so powerful. Let me ask you this, Dr. Burns.

So I know from my limited personal experience that surgeons are typically men of action, especially orthopedic surgeons, right? Like to get in, get it done, you kind of grab the bull by the horns. And it obviously appears to me that you've done the same thing.

And starting this in the 90s. I'm curious.

One of the things that's popular with physicians now is the depreciation aspect and the ability to offset a lot of your income, especially if you can get rep status, real estate, professional status, you or your spouse, you can write off a lot of that. But I don't think that that was something that was certainly common knowledge back then.

So a lot of times in the way I look at it is that sometimes imperfect action is better than perfect inaction in terms of just jumping in and getting started. But back then, what was it like? As you learn of, you know, you talk about the four pillars, right?

Cash flow, depreciation, amortization, and appreciation. But like, when you jumped in, most people are just thinking about cash flow, right?

I just want to replace my income so that I can go hunt or golf or hike or fish or. Or do community charity work or whatever it may be. Everybody's going to have their thing, but everybody starts off just focused on cash flow.

What was it like for you in the 90s, figuring this out with. There's no Facebook groups to go to. You know, when I started, I was. I was renting CDs and DVDs from the library and just listening to them.

They weren't even DVDs, they were CDs at the time. And I was listening to them over and over because there was like six of them. So what was it like in the 90s, figuring this out on your own?

And how did you learn and network with people?

So, yeah, and, and, you know, it always makes us look smart when we look backwards. It's all just lucky that I found some of this stuff.

So, you know, I was, you know, back then, first of all, nobody was thinking about buying any kind of real estate, at least in my world. You know, like I said, I was truly said, you should focus on medicine. You'll be a better doctor if you focus on medicine.

I got a whole, I got a whole argument for that, that I was a better doctor because I focused on passive income.

But so, and most people, the way they were thinking about if they even thought about real estate, which was really rare in the hospital or surgeon's lounge or at the cocktail parties, when talking to non doctors, their thought was, I'll buy it low and sell it high. It was still that stock market thought process.

They really weren't even thinking cash flow because, you know, what's a hundred bucks a month, it's not going to change the life of a lot of people, at least, you know, a surgeon. But a hundred bucks a month on 10 properties is going to be a little bit better.

And then you give that 4, 5, 10 years to compound and grow, and all of a sudden this, you start adding zeros and you start adding to your education. So the way I thought about it was that anything I could put in my asset column.

Y' all remember a guy named Robert Kiyosaki, wrote the book Rich dad, Poor Dad. Robert and I were good friends. And he's got this little.

He's got this little graphic that shows the asset and the liability column and the income and the expense column. It truly all I could think of was putting stuff in the asset column so it would bring money up to the income column.

I didn't care what it was, if it was discount notes or mobile home lots or some, or some kind of. I didn't care what loan. I didn't care what it was. So that was my thought process, was that I was going to create this income.

Didn't think about the taxes. But what I started noticing was that, you know, I made this money as an orthopedist.

Then I was starting to make a little extra money from the real estate. When you add those two incomes together and blend the tax rate over time, it started coming down because that real estate money was sheltered.

My doctor money was not sheltered. You know, repeat status wasn't there. I didn't have any oil and gas. It was just a blended tax rate.

So if I was getting taxed on normal rates orthopedically, you know, But I made $100,000 last year in real estate. That hundred grand is probably fully, you know, mostly fully sheltered. So my blended tax rate came down.

That's how I explained it in my book is slowly it came down into the 20s and teens and single digits, and it was just a slow process and that's how it worked. So I know I rambled on you, but that's what happened because I didn't really know what I was doing. I was just learning.

I was just learning what was around the next corner.

Each day I talk about my real estate journey is when I started off, I sort of sat at the buffet table of real estate strategies.

I drove my family insane talking about, God, oh, there's these things called lease option sandwiches and live in flips and self storage and multi family, you know, but you, so you. One of the things you did early on is you work for a developer for 18 months for free just to learn.

So what's the most undervalued form of sweat equity someone can use who has capital but little time?

Who has capital asset?

Again, okay, so what's the most undervalued form of sweat equity, which is what you did with this developer for someone who has capital but little time?

Ooh, boy, I don't know how to answer that question because in my case, I didn't necessarily have the time. I paid for that.

You know, I worked for him for free, but I had to take, I had to cancel office, you know, and it's expensive to cancel your office, so. But the, the value was tremendous. You know, we ended up being partners on a pretty nice deal.

And so I think people, I think to answer your question, people, people truly don't value mentorship.

You know, if you want to know how to do something or what it's like down the end of the road, you'd really like to ask somebody that's coming back from already being at that destination, or at least somebody that's on their way there with you. So, you know, folks that have been out there and had some success at anything have typically made some mistakes along the way.

And boy, those things have tremendous value. And I don't think a lot of the world values them that much.

I believe that, you know, a mentor or a coach can help you avoid some of the mistakes that have plagued us. And certainly I've had a lot of those mistakes that have really derailed things for me.

So I think the sweat equity of learning from a mentor, whether it's physically working in the, in the job with them or just spending the time and cutting out the time and paying for it to get their wisdom. So I hope that answered your question.

I want to lean into that a little bit more because I've, I've got you here. You can't go anywhere for another 30 minutes without looking rude. I can ask you anything I want and you're recorded.

And I can go back and listen to this for years. Right.

The most valuable thing that I think you have to offer here is experience and the ability to share that in a meaningful way to anybody that's listening.

So you've been through, if you start investing in the 90s, you've been through three down cycles, some would argue five, depending on what your definition is. We're in a very tricky time right now.

But with what you've learned throughout your career in this space, specifically going through those downturns, what are some of the things that those bad times specifically taught you and how has it affected the way that you look at deals now?

Oh, that's a good question. A couple of things.

One, people go crazy when they lose or think they're going to lose money, sanity leaves the planet and certainly leaves their head. It is really good to have dry powder when these bad times start to end.

And I found ways to even one time kind of predicting that bad times were coming and being prepared to have dry powder. And the world found a way for me not to have the dry powder when the time came.

So always try to have some good conservative investments, be very diligent and say no more than you say yes. Been a few yeses that have caused me some anguish because every time you say yes to one thing, you're saying no to some other things. So.

And I guess the last thing that's really helped as each downturn has happened is that the reason there's multiple downturns is because we come out of them. We always come out of them. How long does it take to come out of them? I don't know. They're all different, so it's hard for me to tell.

But what goes up must come down. Life is waves. And so things are down, they're going to go up and that gives you hope.

And then the other side is, you know, if you're flying and you think you're brilliant, that's just about when things are about to Turn down. So never be too impressed with yourself. It's usually the market that's making you look smart.

Yeah. Wow. What was it like co founding and selling a full service hospital? How did that come about?

It is not something I would recommend.

Well, there goes my weekend plans.

Absolutely. So it was part, you know, I. I'm part owner of a. We built a medical complex.

You know, it fit well, I had a developer, developer mentor, so to speak, and guy in medicine that knew a little bit of real estate. So we built a medical center, phase one, so to speak. And then came phase two. And we decided we wanted to make things full circle.

So it was going to be a surgery center. Well, enough people called that it became a hospital.

And so we went down the rabbit hole of actually building a full service hospital in order to make the center a really good one, sir. You know, one stop shop. It was in a very nice area, but there wasn't this kind of service available. And so we did it.

Despite the two big hospital systems that did not want us to do that. They actually sent spies and did everything they could to derail our progress. But we got it. We did it. Helped run it for 15 years, eventually sold it.

Sold the operating business. Still on the real estate underneath it. We did a good job. At least on the one end. We did a good job.

We got awards as one of the, you know, one of the best places in the state for patient satisfaction.

Our prices were staggeringly low compared to the nonprofit hospitals, and I should put those in air quotes, the nonprofit hospitals down the road, we were literally, you know, and a seventh or an eighth of the cost of those hospitals. And the investors, the original doctor investors, they ended up getting their money back or a good portion of their money back.

And I got nothing and still own the dirt underneath. The people we sold it to and would like to sell it again or I would like for them to move out,.

I'm sure.

But I learned a lot. I learned.

Yeah, I'm sure you did that.

Don't do it.

That's it. Don't do it. I'm glad I did it. Don't do it. Do what I say, not what I do.

Right.

What was it you wrote? A bestseller. Why Doctors Don't Get Rich. In terms of, you know, your career outside of medicine.

Before that book and after that book, did that open doors for you or was it just a stepping stone along the way?

It was just one of the stepping stones. I didn't want to do it, but Kiyosaki is the one that Kind of encouraged me to write something. So I wrote it.

I wrote it to give hope and guidance to people that wanted to, you know, create a little control of their time, have some choice. Right. We talked about that a little earlier in this segment. So, you know, I just wrote, didn't have any business plan at all.

Kiyosaki came up with the title. He said you can call it why Doctors Don't Get Rich. You know, kind of that gruff voice of his.

But I tested that for a couple of years and it's really a metaphor for what I talked about before. You don't have passive income and you're trading your time for money. If you can't do that, music stops and you're not going to have that money.

So it's all about assets and passive income. What did it change? Well, I wasn't expecting much, but, you know, had to create a website, of course, because every book has to have a website.

I, I put the book up, I self published the book. I turned down a publisher that I didn't like their deal. Self published it, went to Turkey to go on vacation and never even promoted the book.

And we're in 15 countries now. It's done really well. It's not just for doctors.

It's basically just a mindset book about how to think about passive income and how it might help you in your life. So it did change things a lot more people contacted me and wanted a little help here and there. And so I try to do what I can.

In the book, you, you warn high earners about lifestyle creep, what practical guardrails help you keep expanding investments instead of your expenses.

You bet. I appreciate it. Y' all read, y' all know more about my book than I do. So my wife was one helpful thing. We actually split things up.

You know, I took care of the, I took care of the investment side, she took care of the living side. So we budgeted and we had a real budget even when there was lots of money. There was a time when I was living on about 30% of my income.

I was pretty proud of myself. About a year later, I was living on about 105% of my income. So, you know, that happens.

So we've always, we both stayed pretty grounded and you know, I mean, people are, people are. There's a lot of heterogeneity in people. You know, I'm really, I'm pretty, I'm pretty simple.

I don't spend a whole lot of money unless there's something I really like. And then I spend Too much money, right? And so we all do that. So we separated that money.

Anything that came from investments did not go to the personal accounts. It stayed in the investment accounts and they just grew and compounded over time. So we kept them separate.

I want to shift a little bit. I know you're pretty well rounded guy.

I know you've been the, the physician for the US Ski Team and I know that you've also been involved with charity and, and I believe you're building houses in Mexico and I'm not sure where else, but Neil and I talk about this a decent amount. And one of the things that gets a little bit tiresome is you talk about money a lot. I mean, don't get me wrong, like we're in the business that the.

The podcast is called Truly Passive Income, which is a little bit of a joke because nothing's truly passive. It's all on a scale, right? We spend our days like raising capital for these projects and talking about Money and our IRRs.

But the reality is, we believe is what you said earlier, money is for the purpose of creating options and choice about how we spend our lives and what we want to do with that. I've got a five year old and a two year old, two little boys.

Neil's got a ten year old son, our partners that founded the original founder, he's got six kids. His oldest son is our CEO. He just had his fourth.

Everything that we do is about these assets that we can hold long term that create generational wealth. That's why the name our group is called Nomad Capital. Because a nomad goes where they want, when they want, and does what they want.

The purpose of money, in our opinion, is to create choice, that you're not trading away the best years of your life to pay for somebody else's days off. Right? It creates options.

And hopefully with those options, you choose to do something that's going to do more for your children than just giving them money at the end of your life. Right? Because if you just give them money, two generations later, the money's probably gone and they're probably bad people. Right?

And versus using the money to create options and choice so that we can spend our time going places that we love and hopefully doing things that have a positive impact on our kids, on our community, on the people around us.

So with the options and the choice that you've created for your life, what are some of the things that you and your family focus on that you think are more important than money that, that you pour into the Things that give you energy.

That's great. I learned a lot there just listening to you. But, and, and you know, it brings up the fact that money is a tool. It is.

When we talk about being wealthy, you know, I talk about a rich life. Well, there's sort of seven pillars that hold up the, that hold up a rich life. One of those tools, one of those pillars is money.

The rest is your, you know, other forms of wealth. Intellectual, social, spiritual, physical, you know, that there's, there's just certain things.

So that's all the stuff you want to, you want to work on. With money being one of the things that's helpful. The way I used it.

I never, you know, I tell you, I like having some money, but my, my goal was never to be the richest guy around. I just wanted to be somebody that, you know, I just didn't want anybody telling me what to do. I wanted to have fun.

We, we truly actually had the conversation, my wife and I, before we had kids. No matter what situation we're in, we're going to try to figure out how to have fun. That's, that is a true statement.

We did when we were, gosh, we were living in Dallas, Texas and moving to Cincinnati, Ohio before we had any kids. That's what spurred me to want to do this other stuff because I wasn't having those odd docs, didn't look like they were having fun.

So what did I do when I got a little extra money? Well, I tell you, I did it before I had the extra money. I wanted to enjoy my kids.

I had a partner who did, who wanted to build a practice and thought he could create a, a relationship with his kids. After he built that practice, well, he missed the boat.

So when I watched him go to tears, and I'm a brand new doctor that already wanted to hang out with my kids. I decided to cancel offices to go read.

You know, I mean I was, I was the guy that read to the first graders on Tuesday afternoons and that's because I canceled my office to go do that. So I would meet the kids at 3:30 in the afternoon when they got off the bus. I was the dad that jumped on the trampoline.

Now early on I was losing money to do that. Later on I had enough passive income that was helping me do that. Now I started at 6 or 6:30 in the morning, which was earlier than most other docs.

So I'm rambling around this question, but that was what was vitally important to me and I think my investment has paid off.

Because I have two adult kids that have fabulous hearts and they're all, and they're productive and they know that their parents love them and they know that we want to spend a lot of time with them. So you only do that with action, not with words. And, and you, you don't want to give that up when the kids are your age, Clint.

I mean, that's the most important time. So. Sorry, I got a little pumped up on that, but that's what I did with my time.

18 Red, 10 white. And the 10 white roses were for. When he added up all the time that he was gone was 10 years. And so my dad wasn't, you know, he was a great dad.

And when he was there, he was there and he was, but he was gone. I mean, I grew up, you know, crawling into bed with my mom. My dad wasn't there. You know, he was, he was off wherever.

And, and it was something that I, it was a real focus of what I was doing when I made the shift to what I'm doing now because I, I got to the point where I hated my job, and that affected who I was when I came home from work every day. And now I love my job and I have a little more flexibility, not 100% flexibility to spend that time with my son because you don't get it back.

And, and I often think there's a, there's a great quote about if you're having a bad day, try and imagine yourself at age 80 and what you would give to come back and be in this moment right now. And I think about that with my son all the time when I'm having a tough time with my son and, and he's driving a little crazy.

And, you know, and I think, all right, at 80, how much would I, what would I give to come back to this moment?

Yeah, I love that. This is the, my favorite part of the conversation. So I appreciate, I appreciate the vulnerability. I love that. Well, Dr. Burns, let me ask you this.

There's, this is a question we ask everybody. It doesn't even have to be something that a book that you necessarily like, and it can't be your own. I will tout your own.

I've read your book, but it's why Doctors don't get rich by Dr. Tom Burns. Highly recommend it.

Outside of that, is there a book about Life, real estate in whatever it may be that you find yourself recommending to friends and family more than any other.

Yeah, I, John, now I'm blanking on the title. Let me think about. Oh, yeah, you know, I, I'm, I'm, I'm, I like to read a lot of personal development books.

And so because success in real estate, it's all in the mind anyway, you know, the math is really easy. You can do it on a napkin.

I suggest Dan Hardy and Ben Hardy and Dan Sullivan's book the Gap in the Gain a lot, just because that's a, that's an exercise in perspective. And I speak a lot about perspective when I give, when I give talks, because it all depends on how we look at things, right?

And so life is not always going to be a bed of roses. It's not always going to be good, and it's not always going to be bad. Like we said, life, life is waves.

It's going to go up, it's going to go down, things are going to change, but you know, we're always moving forward.

And so, you know, if you're, if your goal is to make it to a 10 and you only make it to a 6 and you complain about that, then that's an attitude that's gonna, it's actually gonna leak over to your kids.

You know, you wanna show your kids that you're, that you're proud of yourself and that you're willing to keep working and you're willing to change your goals because you should be proud to have gone from a zero to a six rather than not making a ten and only making it to six. That's the, that's the premise of the gap in the game. Pretty simple stuff. But be proud of what you've done. Keep, keep setting your goals.

Bruce Lee said, a goal is only a target that's not ever meant to be hit. That's kind of what they're saying. Use that. Use gain thinking, not gap thinking. Don't think about what you're missing. Think about what you've gained.

And that kind of helps, helps level set people and helps you keep moving forward. Because, you know, one of my personal values is growth.

And so we all got to be focused a little bit on growth and getting better at something every day.

Well, Dr. Burns, I have, I know Clint and I have both thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. We could go on for another hour, easy. But in interest of your time and our listeners time, we'll wrap it up here.

If any of our listeners want to find out more about you, maybe get in touch with you. What would be the best way for them to do that?

Sure, you can email me@hellorichdoctor.com r I c h d o c t o r.com and then the website is richdoctor.com we've got a lot of, a lot of resources for those of y' all that are in the real, in the real estate space and some other investing resources. And I put out a newsletter every week that's got some thoughts on it. So it'll give you a chance to get that if you want it.

If you got the website richdoctor.com you know, you started doing it before it was cool because that would be a hard, impossible URL to get these days. Well, well, listen, Dr. Burns, I'll just say it for myself, I'm sure, for Neil, for the crowd. I really appreciate you being here.

Thank you so much for your willingness to share your experience, your expertise and everything else. So thank you so much for coming on and spending time with us today. We really appreciate it.

Oh, you bet. Thanks for what you guys do. I'm sure your audience is getting a lot out of this, so yeah, kudos to you guys.

Thank you so much for listening and watching the Truly Passive Income podcast.

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