The Power of Intention, Action, & Cycling across the USA w/ Taylor Doolittle

All right,

Taylor, do little what's up, buddy?

Hello, Mr. Brian, thanks for having me on I'm super pumped to be on the show. I'm

glad man, because , you're a pretty lazy cat I'm sure. I just woke you up from your nap. You don't like doing anything outdoors. You're not very physically active, a couch potato,

right? Oh, my last name is Doolittle. I try to live up to.

All right, everyone. That's been the action academy podcast. Thanks for tuning in. We're not talking that joke. That was a perfect segue. No, man. That was a just alley. Oop, that one. That was perfect. But anyways, man, I'm so excited to have you on this show. You have a lot of value to offer both in the terms of what you've done with your real estate team and what you've done with your investing. And then also with your path, with all these ultra marathons ultra races that you do, you have this knack for just figuring out what the most outlandish physical activity to do is, and then you just feel like being the white chocolate David Goggins, basically. . So I want to start you off on a journey of talking about your cycling. So you have done some wild things in the world of cycling, and I really want to talk about like the Genesis behind this and what you ended up doing, share with the people, what you did and why.

Sure. So I graduated from college in North Carolina, small little liberal arts college called Gardner-Webb university. Middle of nowhere, North Carolina. And I graduated in 2011 and in 2009, my big brother through hiked the Appalachian trail. It's from Springer mountain, Georgia, all the way up to Maine. Over 2000 miles of water. And I thought that was so cool and inspirational to me, but I said, Hey, Dani, like when, whenever you, whenever I graduate, let's do a brother trip. He said, I've already, I've walked too much. I don't want to walk anymore. Let's ride on let's do a bike ride. So we were trying to figure out what do we want to do? What route do we want to do? How far do we want to go? And as we were doing this route planning, we figured, Hey, let's let's just go all the way across all the way across the United States. Which seems. If you're going to do it, that seems like a pretty good goal to have. Yeah, so it started off as just a selfish brother trip. Just wanted to hang out with my big brother for a couple of months on the road. And then we thought, Hey, since we're already planning on doing this, we might as well. For a good cause. So one of my good buddies in colleges, a family ran a orphanage down in Brazil. And so we ended up turning out our brother trip into a fundraiser for this orphanage down in Brazil and ended up raising like five or $6,000 to do this bike ride, which is a really cool. Oh man. I

didn't know. It was an orphanage in Brazil. Yeah, we've been down there.

I'm not. I was trying

to save, I'll say fella, Portuguese, man. That's a Brazilian household over here. Yeah. Up in our people

So yeah, it w what turned it from a selfish endeavor just to spend time with my brother, to be able to flip that into something that was a worthy cause as well was really cool.

And tell people what you're doing for this weekend.

You and I were speaking right before we started recording, I really love signing up for hard physical things to do for a couple of reasons. One, it motivates me to get up and train as too early in the morning when otherwise probably wouldn't have that motivation. But to most of the time when I'm signing up for these things, I'm tr I'm a sales person. Sells friends on doing these things with me. And so it's a selfish way for me to be in community with some of my closest people in a way where, Hey, you can't have your cell phone, you can't be distracted. You can't be doing what. So for riding a bike for three hours or cross country skiing for a couple hours, all you can do is be in community. This weekend I'll be going to cable, Wisconsin, and then participating in the largest cross country ski marathon in north America called the American burka binder. So it will be skiing 50 kilometers with 4,500 feet in elevation gain, which that's the hard part. The mountain

house to do the opposite.

A lot of people have fun going up mountains on stair, down mountains on skis. I have fun going up now and since he's

yeah, why not? And then what causes this for this is for something too, isn't it?

Yup. Yup. So this is for something. If I'm signing up for something it's for a greater cause. And so this is for a good friend of mine who runs a nonprofit ministry all around creating a program of mentorship for high school students to gather a community of people around them to help launch them into their life purpose into college. It's pretty cool.

And that's so cool because yeah, I don't understand. America's fascination with having 18 year olds, have it all figured out.

Yeah. And mentorship and having your tribe of people around you, and I know the value of that because of GoBundance the awesome organization. We're a part of, but having some sort of structure around surrounding, Hey, adults, around someone that's going through adolescents to help encourage them into this really important transition in life. This is a really cool.

Let's sit on that for a bit. Let's set a little bit about that, about building community, and especially as adults, we're really crappy about making friends with each other.

No, and that's, I can honestly say that community, the people that you surround yourself is a make or break of whether or not you achieve big things in your life. And now people without community can. Can achieve big things, but it's so much more effort. So kudos to those people that have broken out of that. But so as we chat, I'm going to use a lot of faith based words and metaphors because my faith is the most important rewarding. So I'm going to use a couple of Bible references. So I'm a huge, I'm a huge advocate of having. Silas's and Timothy's in your life. And what that means is Paul, the Paul's in your life are your mentors. So people that are further down the path from you that you can learn from in that are pulling you up, right? You need those people in your life. You also need your silences in your life. And those are your peers, people that are in the trenches with you that are around the same stage in life. They're on the same path in the journey. And you can feed off of each other's motivations and you can relate on the trials, the tribulations, the successes, and then you need your Timothy's. And those are people that are maybe just starting out the journey, those people that are just starting on that path, that maybe you're ahead and you can reach back a hand and pull them up. I think a lot of people that are. That get very motivated and they're starting this new thing. They only focus on, Hey, I need my mentors. Gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme. And it's really easy at that point to say Hey person, that's just starting out. I don't have time for you. I'm busy growing over here, but that's such, such a bad mindset and such so counterintuitive to exactly what you're trying to do, because it's easy for me to hang out with a lot of guys and GoBundance and say, they're the ones that bring the value. They're doing, I need to spend time with them, whereas people that are maybe just starting the journey can maybe look at me and say Hey, you're like, you're crushing it. You're killing it. Let me learn. Let's hang out together. Community is so important.

I'm guilty. I'm guilty of that. I love the analogy to such an interesting point. Cause I. That I was not able to create this podcast without a hundred doors of a rental portfolio, which was no, there's no law that says that it's not, there's nobody that even told me that it was just like a self-imposed metric of made it in my mind that I wasn't worthy of being able to offer any value to anybody until I was at that point. Obviously false and DJ Savoy gave me a quote that honestly changed my life and how I view things. And that is, you have your cup of life, and you have to make sure that your cup is full before you pour into others. And if you're pouring from an empty cup, that's where you have people that just give, and they never focus on themselves. And so they have this hole in them, because all they do is give and they never received, and they don't focus on them. So I'm like, Hey, you need to fill your cup up before you pour into others. DJ's advice was to cut the bottom off. He's like you cut the bottom off the cup, the universe pours into you, God, to your example, pours into you and it pours through you instead of in and out, he pours through you. And then, so that's how you get awarded with all this abundance in life, by being a vessel and being a channel for it to pass through, because then it's you're going to get that 10 times out of 10, as opposed to the guy that's going to hold it all to them. Yeah. So I absolutely love what you said there. I did not know this about you about your Australian Odyssey here. So take us take us on a journey here about you. What'd you say you graduated and then,

so good question. So from North Carolina, I'll just do quick history, run it from North Carolina, met a girl. Dated for four years in college, graduated in 2011. She's from Minnesota, all medicine. Go home. So after graduating, she said, Hey, let's go back to Minnesota. And I said, I still want to date you. I still like you I'll move up to Minnesota to so got up to Minnesota 2011 after my bike ride that I did. And then got a job just in the retail space. I worked at apple just helping grandmas, make photo albums on there. Which taught me wholesome tips taught me so much about patience. It's not even funny. Got to a point in my job at apple where I said, Hey, next steps are retail management. To me. That's not what I want to do longterm. So we just had an opportunity to say, Hey, I'll quit. We'll quit our job. And let's go do a trip. My little sister was living in England at the time with her husband who's British. So we, our thought was, let's go to, let's go live with my sister for a couple of months, do the kind of the European backpacking thing. And then on this trip, I'll have had an epiphany. I'll have my mountain top moment. I'll know exactly what I want to do when I go, come back. It doesn't work that way. So tell me that. I know I'm sorry. Quit my job or quit our jobs, but our stuff in storage moved to the UK. Traveled around for two or three months while we were there. It was in touch with some good friends of ours, who I had worked with at apple who had recently moved to Sydney, Australia. They said, Hey, we have an extra room. Come move down here with us and we'll get you a job at apple down here. So instead of going home, ended up going to one way, tickets to Sydney, Australia with the thought of Hey, we'll work here for two or three months. I'll make some money and we'll go home. Not as broke as we are. And so move there. God put me in some super cool situations at work very quickly, just to be able to show the value that I could bring. And so they ended up sponsoring us for a visa and we ended up being in Australia for almost two years. So what we thought was going to be a two, two month trip abroad ended up being two years away from the United. . Bill Murray has a really awesome quote where he talks about Hey. If you don't know about your relationship with this person, go travel the world. And if you're still together, when you're on your way, home in the airport, marry them all. Good. Yeah.

That makes sense. Yeah, that makes sense. . So walk us through. So you go to Sydney, Australia. That makes sense for Minnesota. That's obvious. That's the obvious second destination instead of Minnesota. So you come back, you've got all this apple experience. How the heck did you get in real.

So good question. I, what I thought I would just going to do when we got back to the states was I thought that I would get a job at any number of the great Corporate tech companies that are based in the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. So I had some lunch meetings set up with friends who were working at a couple of those different companies just to learn more and see where I wanted, what direction I wanted to go. But right, as we transitioned back, this was summer of 2017. We'd been gone since 2015 from the states got back and my. Brother-in-law so my wife's brother at that point had been selling real estate for about a year and a half and was at a point in his career where he was on a team. He wanted to start his own team and he actually approached my wife and said, Hey, I think Taylor would be good at this real estate thing. You should chat with him about it. So it honestly was never anything that I have. Consider doing, because I never had anyone super close in my life that was really active in real estate. But it was just an opportunity that popped up. And I talked to all my friends, closest friends and family prayed about it a ton, and it was just like, Doors are opening right now. I'm going to start sprinting through these doors and please slam one in my face. If it's not what I'm meant to do and have. Insane support from friends and family, basically saying what for my in-laws and you can live with us in our basement for as long as you need to see if this real estate thing works, which without that type of support, there's no way we could be where we're at right now.

Yeah. So I'm curious. So before it's normally, so this whole journey thing, so let's back up a little bit, how did you go from apple to being like, oh yeah, let's casually go travel. Did you have money saved up? Did you have any kind of passive income at that point?

No passive income. We just saved for probably six to eight months. And when we left the United States quit our jobs to travel. Our intention was only to be gone for two or three months. So we left the U S with about $13,000 in a checking account. And at that point, the only debt that we had was my student loans, which was probably at that point around $15,000 at that point. So as about a net worth zero, and we decided to to go travel yeah. And then got a job at apple and really just lived in Australia, at Sydney for a year and a half and worked a job. Full time, job there. And so was able to then move back with a decent amount of savings. But at that point had never even considered owning rental property or investment property and was really just on that normal track that we all learned about in college. Go get a job, put money in a 401k retire when you're 65. So what was the shift? So whenever we made the decision to come back, To the United States, we still had about four months left in Australia. And my mindset was, I'm not going to just check out now. I want to sprint to the finish. I want to finish with. Excellent. See, I want to make sure that I get my job done here in Sydney before going back. And at that point I started this crazy journey of stuff. Self-develop. Where just reading a ton of books, listening to a ton of podcasts and just getting a lot of inspiration from people. And one of the big things that I was trying to figure out was like, Hey, what am I meant to do? What job do I choose? I go to this job recruiter page and there's 2000 jobs. Do I just pick one? And something that I stumbled across, which was a huge mindset shift for me was, Hey, at the end of the day, I there's many jobs that I could have done a really good job at. But it doesn't always work where you wake up and you're just like, this is what I'm meant to do. So the mindset that I shifted to was like, Hey, pick one, you've got two or three great options, pick one, and then just run after it. Because worst case scenarios, you get 90% to the finish line and you find that. This isn't what I want to do. So the benefit is you checked that one off the list. You don't want to do that, but you probably learned a ton along the way. And most importantly, you learned that's not what you want to pursue. So it was just this mindset of Hey, choose something, take action. God cannot steer a parked car. You gotta be moving in order for God to steer you. And so just taking that action, no matter what action it is. Worst case scenario. You could just revert back to exactly where you're at right now and then try the next thing.

That's what people, so as funny to bounce back to that, because it's like we have all these fears, which are, what's your self-imposed 99% of the time. They're not actuality. And that's anxiety too. Anxiety is literally just making, made up stories in your head just for the heck of it, just because you're. No, but say somebody once the dare greatly and go try a business and go do real estate and invest in all this different stuff and travel the world and move to Australia for two years. What's the worst case scenario it's going to happen? What you go broke, moving to your grandma's basement. Mom's basement, have to get a job. Oh, my God. That's the worst case scenario. Yeah,

especially now. Companies are having such a hard time finding people willing to work that if you go and try something new, You come back, apply for any number of jobs that people are just fighting over for people that will literally just show up and meet expectations. I'm a big believer of I'm going to do whatever I need to do to support my family. I can always dig a ditch, so if I go try a venture and it doesn't as long as it's calculated risk and I try it out and it doesn't mean. And I need a new thing. Hey, I'm not above, listen, I'll go work on a construction site. It's I'm going to do whatever I need to do. You just got to take action, right?

Yeah. And it's like the worst case scenario is getting a job. Which is exactly what you're doing right now. So my worst case scenario is like your existence and like my previous existence, that's the worst case scenario. And honestly, Hey guys it's not that bad of an existence. Like we're all rocking and rolling here. So take now. Okay. So we've got our basis laid here and we've got our, we've got our foundation board. So you come back, you go into this real estate thing. How do we jump from the. Two seven figure entrepreneur right here. How do we make that jump? Yep. So

I'll take you over what's happened in the past four and a half years since then. So I joined my brother-in-law. We started a team. He poured into me, mentored me, coached me and turns out that the success that he was having. He had figured real estate out. And what I mean by that is in order to be a successful real estate sales person, there's a couple of secrets, work hard, add value to people follow up, put in the time. It's all simple stuff. And so since then, we've been able to grow our team to 14 full-time agents. Which are all incredible people and something that is really important to us and foundational to our team is we want to be able to teach guys that joined the team. Create active income through the real estate sales to use that money to then pour it into real estate investments to create long-term wealth. So whenever I started real estate, one of the first things that my brother-in-law said to do was, Hey, here's this podcast it's called bigger pockets. Listen to every episode. Listen to two or three episodes. And then I was an addict like so many people. So in 2018 was able to buy our first multi-family bought a duplex, moved into it, renovated each unit since then have about 15 doors at this point. The latest purchase was a 10 unit apartment building. But being able to jump in and be in this industry where, Hey, you're out. Is directly related to the input that you put into it. And if you're willing to live your life for a couple years, like most people won't you'll have the option to live the rest of your life. Like most people can't. And so I just front-loaded the, my first two or three years with massive amount of work in that.

Yeah, I love that. I love the Dave Ramsey quote. That's actually one of the ones that I agree with that he does. Yeah, no, I love it. And no that's fantastic. So in you and you work actively with your agents to make them like financially literate and financially savvy as well to correct?

Yup. Yup. So I'm still very active in my sales. Role. So I have my own clients with buying and selling, and we work a lot with first-time investors and experienced investors, but then another big part of my role as being able to really pour into the guys that join our team, teaching them one, how to operate a successful real estate sales business, but two how to use that income be a good steward of those finances to pour them into good investments. So at that point they can become. Great impact players in their families to be better husbands, to be better friends, to be super active in their church community. So it's all with that purpose in mind.

I love it because it's is this is like a mirror of the conversation I just had with Daniel Del real and his team, because he's got the fourth largest team in the state of California. And he was saying the exact same things as you. It just shows success, leaves clues like this. It's not all in the shadows. I think people always look for the short. To the end destination, but the shortcut doesn't exist. It doesn't exist. Like you have to do the intangibles. We have to do, you have to get the base hits. You have to get the foundation for, to be able to build the skyscraper on top of it. Yeah. Yeah.

It's like that the, that visual of the iceberg, people only see what's above why. Now we are actually just talking about this as a team this week, where it's really easy to see someone that's maybe five years into their career or 10 years into their career and just get the hot takes and say, oh my gosh, that guy's so lucky that those, that business came out of nowhere. Yeah, but they're not seeing the new guys right now. I'm looking at guys right now that are in the office. We're in the basement of a building and they're grinding on the phones right now calling rental property owners, trying to drum up listings. So it's really easy to see the guys that have that, that are at a point where it's easy to put them on a pedestal, but man, I've been able to meet so many people and everyone in bed is. Man they put in the work and you just haven't seen it.

Yeah. It's all beneath the surface. Yeah. Yep. So what's the vision for the next five years?

So that's a really good question. I love that I get to lead this team and be able to teach guys that joined the team. How to become impact players in their lives and in their community. So really pouring into the guys on the team. That's one of my, one of my greatest purposes. I feel like because if I can pour into them, the amount of people and ripples that they can make to their communities and to their friends and their clients. But man, it's a. We can make some noise, which is really cool. Probably in the next five years, probably step a little maybe out of the active sales of real estate. So maybe less day-to-day and focusing more on building the team and pouring into the team while at the same time growing our investment portfolio of really.

Awesome. And then what's some advice that you would give to someone that's beginning their wealth building journey, or maybe they're in the intermediate stage to take it to the next level.

Yeah. My biggest piece of advice and we touched on this a little earlier is it's really easy to suffer from analysis paralysis where it's like, Hey, I've got a couple options. I'm just going to sit back and wait for one of those options to reach out and choose. That ain't going to happen. You got to just choose one dial in, buckle up and take massive action. And if that ends up not being the right thing for you, Hey, great. You figured out that one's not it now that you've just reduced your options to a couple more pick the next one and go for it. So I think. Being very clear on what you want or what your goals are pivotal. You can't be intentional on accident, so you kinda gotta, you gotta know your destination in order to know what action you need to take.

I love that you can't be intentional on accident. Nah, that's so good. No, I love that.

As you get older, you're able to look back and have perspective and be able to say, Hey that thing that happened 10 years ago, I was upset about that. I was asking God why didn't you let this happen? And now fast forward 10 years, I can look back and see, I know what he was trying to teach me there. And I know, and I am a product. I am a result of those experiences that I had something that can I give you just a quick tidbit of advice on your travel that you do run it? Absolutely. So when we first got to Australia, we thought we'd be there for two or three months. So every decision that we made, whether it was, Hey, buy this blender for the apartment you're living in or. Pouring into this friendship or really learning how to do this or that we never dove in. And our first couple of months in Australia, honestly were pretty crappy because we were half, one foot in one foot out. And then there was the opportunity to stay longer. And we said, okay, we're going to commit to be here for another year. And as soon as we made that commitment to be there, our entire experience changed. We were able to find community. Find people to pour into us and really enjoy our experience so much more. And one of my mentors that I was able to make while I was there had this really important thing that, that he told me, he said, don't put an amount of time that God needs to make an impact on your life. Whether it's two months or two years. And he doesn't need that. He doesn't need any time at all to make a huge impact on your life. So for you guys, it would be very easy to go to Greece and be like, all right, we're here for six months. I'm not going to do that thing. Cause I'm only here for six months. Oh, five months left. Oh, we're not going to do that experience or say yes to that opportunity because we're only here for five months now. So having that mindset of. We're just ticking it off. We're just doing this thing because we said we're going to do it. And now my mind is set on whatever's next after that can really limit your experience. So I'd encourage you guys. Hey, have a plan, but make it a rough draft and allow. To be changeable and workable as you go, because the best experiences that you'll have in life and the biggest learning opportunities that you have in your life are likely going to be opportunities that you never knew were going to pop up. But when they popped up, you had the courage to say, let's go

and we're talking about traveling. Tire rent. You just do, it was about travel, but I think that's a little bit about life today,

Taylor. That's exactly. It's exactly

there, buddy. That's a little segue there. That was beautiful. That was beautiful. So Taylor, where can people find you and plug your real estate team as well? What areas are you servicing?

Yep. So we're in just the greater Metro area of Minneapolis and St. Paul. We do really do stuff all over Minnesota. And man, if anybody ever wants to reach out and talk about real estate sales, want to talk about just getting into investments, wants to talk about goal setting or anything at all. Please reach out let's chat would love to talk. You can find me on Facebook, just Taylor do little D O L I T L E a. I'm also on Instagram at Taylor dot Doolittle. But man if I'm reaching out to people that I want to learn from. I can't say no to people that want to reach out to me and chat. So always open for conversation, phone, call, coffee, things like that,

man. You're just an awesome human being, man. I'm glad. I'm glad to be your friend. I'm glad we randomly met hiking a mountain. Now that I know you I'm like, that's the only way for us to have met we're just hiking a mountain it's we're just hiking up to devil's Causeway in Colorado, which is you hike up this mountain. And at the top is like this really craggy, Rocky Ridge. And it's super narrow. Maybe a yard or two, wide, and then you just walk across it and it's just way up in the sky and it's, oh, it's just looking back and Taylor's Hey man, it's all about the journey. Not the end destination. I'm like this guy. No, I love it. And then this podcast was, born birth from. 'cause I golfed with Mike I Allah the next day. And he was like, Hey man, you need to do a podcast. So anyways, brother, I appreciate you, my friend, thank you for everything and all the wisdom that you've shared with us today on this episode. And without any further ado, I think that we'll call it right there. So this has been Brian and Taylor. With the action academy podcast signing off.