Episode 110: Stepping Out Of The Comfort Zone With James Prendamano

In this episode of the Prereal Podcast, James Prendamano talks about the importance of stepping out of your comfort zone and leveraging as much as you can your presence on social media. He also annonces some new content coming up that will help you grow as an investor and as a human being. After the positive response we had from his solo episodes, James decided to start doing more episodes in the same format.
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Are you ready to bring your real estate game to the next level? My name is James Prendamano. I'm the CEO and founder of Prereal. And over the past 25 years I've closed over a billion dollars in transactional real estate. Each week I'm meeting with outstanding and investors, highperforming individuals and visionaries operating in the real estate space. These are the people that are actually out there in the real estate game right now getting it done. This podcast aims at bringing anyone's game to the next level. This is the prereal podcast. Welcome everyone to the Prereal podcast. I'm going to be rolling solo today. I wanted to introduce a bit of a different feel to the show. I'm going to try and do this as often as I can. I'm going to try to do it once a week, but schedules are crazy, so I'll do my best to be consistent with it. And essentially what I want to do, folks, is first of all, let me say thank you. The show has really taken off so far beyond any expectations we ever had here. We started this candidly as a way for me to push my limits. For those of you who know me personally, I'm not someone that likes to have the spotlight on me. I'm not one that goes out and likes to have all the attention, if you will. I tend to operate, kind of head down and grind my way through. And I recognized as a leader that's something that I really needed to change. I felt that I had the ability and the power to communicate and to reach folks in mass. And it was something that for a long time has bothered me, that I have not kind of taken those next steps and really reached out in a scalable way to people to share my knowledge on real estate. Over the last 20 plus years, 20 plus years, I've amassed a lot of knowledge in the real estate game and all different technologies. And when I'm talking about my subject matter, I can go right. It's second nature to me. It's easy for me to speak to groups and to communicate in mass when it's just about real estate, but certainly nothing along these lines. We started it during Covet and we wanted to give people an opportunity to get their thoughts and their feelings out about what was happening. Get the word out what was happening. And to provide folks a sense of connectivity during a really difficult time when we were all isolated and we were all feeling a lot of different things. But we were certainly feeling disconnected from what was the norm up until that point. We were feeling disconnected from friends and family and it was a really challenging time. So we said, let's use technology to give us an opportunity to connect with folks and to connect folks together and give them a sense of community. Since then it's again unbelievably thankful we're in over 60 countries now.
We've got thousands and thousands and thousands of hours that have been listened to and watched and it's been shared and commented and liked and really appreciate it from the bottom of my heart. Just wanted to say thank you to the audience and talk to you about this new format where I want to get on and pick a topic. Sometimes it'll be solo, sometimes it'll be with guests. But I wanted to go beyond real estate. I wanted to start connecting with people and trying to create change. I'm going to share a story that really has brought this to the forefront for me and was the inspiration for me to actually start doing these. I've thought about it for a while, but recently I was driving with one of my children and they're young, ins, yet we were driving through a neighborhood that's seen its challenges over the years, a lot of economic hardships, and it shows. And my child had said to me, dad, why is this like this? I said, what do you mean? And he said, well, why is it that people here have to live this way? Now, that's a heavy asked question. And I tried to explain the best way I could and they kept pressing me. But why? Well, these things and these factors and this happens and that happens, but why? And at the end of the day, it's just been a failure of leadership. And leadership across the board, not elected officials, not community leaders. All of us have failed our fellow man. And as we started to talk through solutions because of course, to my kids, I'm a superhero. I'm Daddy. And they started to press me on, well, what can you do to fix it? And as I started to walk through some of the things that I thought we can do to fix it, they wanted to know why I wasn't doing it, which was very difficult to answer and far more complicated than a child, I think, could understand at this stage of the game. But it begged the question, why am I not fixing it? Why am I not doing more? Why am I not engaging in a number of different topics that are pressing and on everyone's mind, often thought of, seldom discussed? And I wanted to take the first step. I wanted to start to talk about it openly. I wanted to start taking these challenging topics. And the topics are far and wide. As covet hit, the country unfortunately became even more polarized than it was leading into it. We all have experienced this, right? There are friends and family that it almost seems orchestrated how divided we've become and how polarized we become. Friends and family that you can't have civil discussions with on certain topics and discussions and communicating and discourses. It's everything. And there are certain topics now that we can't even broach with our most trusted people in our lives. And if we can't do that at that intimate level, they're sure as hell aren't doing it up at the elected level and the community level. So I wanted to take, again, maybe it's one segment a week, and pick a topic and kind of grip it and rip it and start doing more and start connecting dots and start talking about solutions. And it's okay to have disagreements. It's okay to have passionate disagreements as long as we respect each other. And at the end of the day, we hear and we listen what our counterparts are saying. Over the years, I have drastically changed my position on things, things that I was entrenched in, that I thought I knew in my core and my soul and my DNA I had figured out. And as time has wore on, I have come to really change my position on a lot of things. So I want to use the platform as something more than just real estate. As important as that is, and as passionate as I am about it, I want to talk about these pressing issues in our community. I want to talk about why there are so many people that are struggling and there are so many answers. I was reading a book on leadership, one of many books on leadership that I read from John Maxwell, and this was a collaboration, I believe it was Maxwell and another author called Change your World. And one of the things they talk about as a kind of hedge against poverty, one of the things they can do that is like the number one or it's one of the top things that if a child receives this, they have a really significant chance of getting out of poverty as they get older. And don't hang me on the nuance of the percentage or what exactly it was, but essentially, if a child has a higher level of comprehension in reading, it was reading specifically at a third grade level. If a child has competency in reading at a third grade level, this was one of the main major factors in determining whether or not that child could get out of, stay out of, or not be in poverty. And it seemed like a simple stat, simple thing to read and discuss. But then I started to question, like, why have I never heard that before? If this really is the case. And I certainly respect John Maxwell and his amazing accomplishments in the leadership field. Why isn't this a program that is like part of the core curriculum to make god damn sure that every kid in the third grade is hitting that benchmark. Whatever it is. Whatever level of competency that it is. So that they have the best shot possible to change their lives? And it's not talked about. I've never seen any programs about it, I've never seen anything focused on it, but that seems pretty damn simple, yet it's absent from our dialogue. There's a number of things that tie in here, but I think it's important we start asking those questions. Why isn't financial literacy part of core curriculum? Rich dad poor dad. So many of us in the audience have read the book, had a huge impact on my life. And not too long ago in my life, I didn't read this when I was 14 or 15 years old. I read this a few years ago, literally, and it had a massive impact in perspective, in how I treat my profession, my clients, my family.
Yet financial literacy ominously missing from core curriculum. Certainly when our kids are in school ten months out of the year, five days a week, for seven or 8 hours a day, we can't carve out some core requirements to teach children financial literacy, to understand how money works, to understand the game that so few of us ever even understand is being played. Never mind how it's played. It seems criminal to me. We have the ability, folks, to change something we don't like. The tools that are available to us today through technology. It's remarkable. I'm going to sit here in my office and record this, and a few days from now, this will be played in over 60 countries. That's unbelievable. Let's start using these tools to help change some of the things we don't like. I'm working with Dr. Jamil Sayegh. He's one of the people who I've met on this podcast, which has been a transformative thing for me, this podcast. I've met so many amazing people. I have picked up so many tips and tricks to help refine my investment strategy, my sales strategy, how to lead, how to run the brokerage. And Dr. Jamil is someone who I currently work with. He's a coach and a remarkable man. One of the things we were talking about, he had pressed me on, and I said, it's just the way she is, or It's just the way he is, or It's just the way I am. And he said, James, that is the greatest line of bullshit you can ever tell yourself. There's no such thing as that's just the way it is, or that's just the way he or she or whatever the pronoun is, is. That doesn't exist. That's our interpretation. That's how we choose to react. But it's not reality. We can change. We can change things on a massive scale. We can change things on a micro scale. We can change things that are external. We can change things that are internal. But that's just the way it is isn't good enough for me anymore. And as my career, God willing, continues to take off and I continue to have success, I'm getting more and more passionate about looking back and seeing what could I have done differently? What can I do differently now to help impact more lives? As I kind of hit my stride here, if you will, and I'm going to commit to doing that, and I'm going to pick these different topics and we're going to run them down. And if you guys out in the audience, have some ideas, thoughts, suggestions, if you want to be a guest and talk about a topic, any topic, anything is going to be on the table and everything, nothing will be out of bounds as long as we're respectful. I want to start tackling these issues. Climate change is another one of these kind of hot button things that you can't even have a goddamn conversation about it anymore. You can't even have a civil, reasonable discussion about it anymore. The planet's warming. No, it's not. It's just a trend. Who gives a damn? Who cares if it's a trend or if it's not? Who cares if we did the damage or we didn't? The point is, we want to be good stewards of our planet, right? That should be that the baseline, not whether my camp or your camp is right. That should be completely irrelevant. Where it should be relevant is we want to be good stewards of our planet. So where can we start being better stewards of our planet? Doesn't matter if you're on the right. It doesn't matter if you're on the left. It doesn't matter if you're in the middle. That's why I had said it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter in the context of how we can start changing. And once people take a position, it's over. They're entrenched. And no matter what is said, no matter how many facts, no matter how much science you pour on it, this side and this side are absolutely entrenched, and they're not going to move off their mark. So it's up to us. It's up to us to have these civil discussions. It's up to us to make these topics get slid right up in the spotlight, folks. Because if we have it on the spotlight, I assure you the leaders will have it in the spotlight, and they'll start taking these things more seriously and will start to change these incredible things that are so important. We talk about it all the time in the public domain, but not a whole hell of a lot happens. I'm kind of sick and tired of things not happening. With that said, here we are, and here we go. I'm going to try and do it once a week again, folks. If you're interested or you have a topic, please shoot it my way. If not, I'm just going to get up here and babble solo every so often and hit some of these topics in depth, in a passionate way on how we could be better, how we could be better. Neighbors, leaders, members of our community, stewards of one another. We have a short, short time on this planet, folks. Life is so damn precious. Let's start making a change. Let's start making a difference. All right, guys. Love you all. Stay safe. See you soon.