From the outside, real estate investing looks passive — and the numbers alone, often in the millions, can feel intimidating. What you don’t see is everything that happens in between:
- The investor making plenty of mistakes on their first property 15 years ago
- Building a multimillion-dollar portfolio one dollar at a time, over years
- Making an uncomfortably low offer and sitting through the silence that follows
- Carrying eight figures of mortgages under your own name
- Calling a tenant about late rent, or telling a property manager their performance isn’t good enough
None of that shows up on a proforma. But all of it is the actual job — the returns you earn as an investor are downstream of your willingness to be uncomfortable.
"If you want to get to the next level, get comfortable being uncomfortable"
— GRANT CARDONE
We’ve felt this firsthand across many of our own properties.
- A lender’s lawyer asking for last-minute insurance changes that cost us thousands in extra interest
- Holding a hard line through delicate negotiations to get a troublesome tenant to move out
- Going months, sometimes years, without finding a deal that worked — and watching good ones slip away anyway
- A mortgage that funded four months after the bank’s original commitment date
With grit, you push through the hard conversations and the problems. Without it, a great investment can quietly turn into a stressful, underperforming property. When you invest with a joint venture partner, you’re not just buying into a building — you’re buying into someone else’s willingness to do the uncomfortable parts so you don’t have to.