Jaclyn Strominger 0:22

Hello, everybody, and welcome to another amazing episode of Unstoppable Success. This is the podcast where we get to hear from amazing individuals, leaders, professionals. They share their tips, their tricks, their insights on how they have had unstoppable success. I'm your host, Jacqueline Strominger, and today I am so grateful to introduce to you Ari Rostiger. And let me tell you a little bit about Ari. He is a real estate investor, he's an author, he's an entrepreneur. He is known for turning failure into long-term leverage. So you know he knows about unstoppable success. He started with a $3,500 loan while in law school, and he went on to build a multi-million dollar real estate portfolio. Awesome. And along the way, he learned about real success isn't about capital, but clarity, resilience, and health. I could not have said that any better. Like so true. I said that to somebody the other day. Clarity is the thing that allows you to say the most powerful word. Anyway, welcome, Ari.

SPEAKER_00 1:28

Thanks for having me, Jacqueline.

Jaclyn Strominger 1:30

All right, so Ari, seriously, you got the you know, the $3,500 loan. I also was reading that you went from you you flipped burgers at one point. So what is it that gave you, you know, that said, oh, I can do this. And what is unstoppable success? Like, how did you do this?

SPEAKER_00 1:50

Well, I think the first part of there's a great book called From Good to Great to Unstoppable by a guy named Tim Grober. Tim Grover was Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant's personal trainer. And anybody that is really into this concept, it's actually called Relentless, from good to great to unstoppable. That's the sub the subheadline. And when you start to study greatness for a living, which I've really, which I've really done, like I'm not a huge sports fan, but when I see somebody that's doing something extraordinary, I watch them, whether it's Serena Williams, whether it's Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, you know, Mark Twain. Sorry, I'm um whoever, but it in in whatever, in whatever modality. And I think the most important thing that I've realized about that concept along the way, about being unstoppable, is recognizing with a level of vulnerability that you are stoppable. And when you realize that you you are stoppable, you recognize your innate humanity. You recognize your innate, you know, physical limitations. You need oxygen to breathe, you need a certain amount of time to sleep, you have to eat, you have these other things. So when you recognize that vulnerability with a level of clarity, in that vulnerability lies the power to figure out what that term actually means. Because you go and you do something, if you're an athlete, and you're not going to win every single game. That's just what happens. Or if you look at Michael Jordan's an easy example, you know, he lost, you know, 48% of the games that you know he ever played. Look, tennis is a great example too of how many sets you lose, how many points you lose, and then you become Nadal, or you become, you know, pick one of the names. But the important part is what's called the refractory period, which is basically the time that you go from doing something and you're in flow, and inevitably you get hit with something because anybody can keep going if they don't get hit. Like Mike Tyson used to say, everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face. And so, and so when you go and you're doing something, you're in flow, you're winning, you're winning, then inevitably a roadblock comes. Well, early in my career, that roadblock or that challenge would take days or weeks, or if not years, to be able to emotionally get over. And over time, if you can shorten, not become a robot and not feel what the pain is, because pain is when you get hit with something like a baseball bat hits your arm. That's pain. It's it's carnal, it's it's neurological. But suffering is choosing to continue to dwell in it of why me, this kept happening, my arm is broken, I can't go to the store, I'm not gonna be able to play basketball anymore, whatever that is. And that's a choice. And recognizing these parameters to where when that thing happens, the roadblock happens, how long does it take you to recover to get back into flow? And the timeline of how quickly you can do that is what separates amateurs from professionals. What separates good to great to truly unstoppable is you get hit, you feel it, you're innately human, but instantly, what do you do to get yourself back in that state to keep moving? And over the long term, the more that you can shorten the refractory period, um, the quicker you can be on your journey to true, true elemental greatness.

Jaclyn Strominger 5:16

You know, I I I absolutely, absolutely love that. And it's it is, it's it's you know, you've you've heard it, we've all heard it thousands of times. Like, you know, you know, Roger Federer has said it, you know, he missed, you know, yeah. I love that speech.

SPEAKER_00 5:30

The one he did at Stanford is incredible.

Jaclyn Strominger 5:32

You know, really great speech. Like he missed, you know, but you can't you can't focus on those. So it is, it's about that recovery. And listeners, this is really an important thing to note. Like, think about, you know, when you, you know, life is and business is not a straight line up. It it's it's a high and low.

SPEAKER_00 5:51

So how do you no look at the market, look at the trading markets? So if you look at the stock market on a daily basis, it looks like this. Okay. If you look at it on a weekly, yearly, it still kind of looks like this. But if you zoom out 50 years, it's a hockey stick straight up. And and this is the same point. One of the biggest lies we were ever told is that we're not supposed to have problems. And and honestly, if you actually pray for patience, you don't all of a sudden become a you know a monk. You have something that challenges your patience because problems inevitably are the gifts that we grow from. When the problem comes, you're then the hero has to emerge. You know, that's the way I look at it. Like you need something where the hero, when you see the greatest people in the world, in no matter thing, the greatest parents, the greatest athletes, the greatest business people, a calamity has to come so that hero can come out. And so if you want to go to a place of being called unstoppable or relentless, you can't be relentless unless something was relenting you. Like you can't, like you don't have courage unless you were scared. Like it's not called courage if you're not scared. And so, and so those underlying principles of recognizing the parameters of the game, the game that you're playing and recognizing those vulnerabilities. Brene Brown says it very beautifully in the power of vulnerability in one of her TED Talks is that true power exists when you recognize what those finite limitations are. But if you don't recognize them, you don't have the wisdom or the maturity to really understand the game or really understanding your opponent that sits between these two ears. Because so much of this game is actually, you know, is this is the psychology that comes that comes along with it and whatever mechanisms that you can use, because recovery early in my career felt like laziness. Rest equated to me as as as laziness, as not doing until it dawned on me that patience is actually active. Recovery is an action. Rest is an action so that you have preparation for activity. And, you know, one of my uh initial meditation teachers, and I've been a meditation has been a huge part of my life for over a decade. Um, I attend, you know, seven-day meditation retreats with Dr. Joe Dispenza multiple times a year. I think I've done seven of seven-day retreats in the past 12 months, you know, to work on that internal physical calibration, that heart rate variability, that meant that brain level coherence, which is now physical because you know, miss, you know, science has become the language of mysticism. So to deal with these types of stresses that we have, we need to have both physical, spiritual, you know, in my opinion, tools to be able to deal with what these what these issues, what these issues actually are, but there has to be a fierce level of realism. And I call it like delusional realism, because you know, you have to have a level of delusion to think that you can accomplish something noteworthy, but you also have to have a consciousness about what the physical limitations are, what the hyper-realism is about it. When you balance those things, you start to have the ingredients in place to do something very special.

Jaclyn Strominger 9:12

So I I love that. So what as you as you are growing your business and you hit some of these, you know, you mentioned meditation, you know, you mentioned obviously like you know, obviously, rest. What were some of the things or other tools that you could share that almost, you know helped you get out of the you know, recover from the hit, so to speak?

SPEAKER_00 9:37

No, well, recovery, well, those you're you nailed them. These are these are recovery. The word meditation means to become aware. By the way, I looked it up. It means to become aware. That's all. And and if you can become aware, it's like if my tie was crooked like this, and I walked around all day with a crooked tie, I didn't know. If I looked in the mirror, I would just straighten it really quickly. And so, so much about this game of anything that we're talking about is becoming more aware of our subconscious behavior, of our attitudes, of you know, our appearance, our the way we treat um our colleagues. But that's one of the big parts. The more awareness creates more consciousness, and more consciousness allows you to have more tools to be able to have some kind of progress. But for me, the single most important thing, and it seems so glaringly obvious in a sense, and it, you know, but the problem with common sense is it's not so common, right? To where to where you can't do any of the things we're talking about, anything without health. Like you, you, you, you have one physical body until you know Elon figures out how to get us another one, which I'm looking forward to, or downloading our consciousness, you know, into some something, which I'm all for, which is fine. But I have this one thing. This is my most important asset, not money, not anything else. This this avatar that was given to me, this physical, this physical body, and to where if I don't care for it, I can't do anything else. And so when I was working those founder hours of sleeping in the office and, you know, working just phonetic, frenetic hours, you know, taking, you know, ADD medication to be able to stay up, and then doctor telling me I have anxiety and giving me a pill to wake up, a pill to go to sleep, uh, you know, whatever those things are, um, which I don't do any of that shit anymore. I don't drink alcohol. But but my point is until I started to manage my blood work, the way I would manage a balance sheet, the way I manage my investments with that level of diligence and getting my hormones calibrated, really getting deep into food sensitivity tests, all the things that I thought were psychological issues, let's say, anxiety is a great one. I come to realize for me, it was about having too much sugar. And the minute the sugar went away, all of a sudden, miraculously, my anxiety disappeared. And then all of a sudden I could sleep better. And then I was drinking too much caffeine, and then my rest. So when I started to take my health, my physical health, more seriously, it started to unlock potentials in my emotional well-being and my psychological well-being, which gave me the physical resilience needed to deal with those issues. Because if you're no animal can live in a state of stress for long periods of time, you die. Do you need adrenaline to run from the bear when it's chasing you or the really mean comment they wrote about you on Instagram? Because that's the new bear that's chasing you. Yeah, but if you're in a constant state of stress there, one little thing will knock you off the scale. But if you're in a coherent calibration, and I've tested my own heart rate variability, you know, my own brainwave coherence to see when a stress hits you and you're in a place of coherence, just a fucking blip. It's just nothing. And so I focused on what I can control when things were going the worst, quote unquote, where every seeming crisis turned out to be a blessing. That's another discussion, and learning that life was happening for me, not to me, literally. But all of it came down to is in calibrating this machine that I have to live in. And when I calibrated that machine, it was a it was a cornerstone opening to a thousand other things that just work themselves out like this.

Jaclyn Strominger 13:20

Right. That's that it our health is everything, and we say that, and it's so it's so true. And something you that just said, I think is i I want I really want to make sure people also listen because having success is you know, you said it's like life happening to you. You make your life things that you do because it's a choice. It's a choice.

SPEAKER_00 13:45

I I believe I believe that I'm the creator, I am a co-creator of my life. Let me put it that way. I don't know what people's spiritual beliefs are. And my my belief at this point in my life, I can walk into any holy place of any tribe, any religion in the world, and I can find God. Doesn't matter where it is, it's a church, a temple, a mosque, a Buddhist sanctuary, a you know, a tribe in Africa, if they're finding, finding, you know, that you know, single place, I can find it too. So I don't ascribe to any particular, but as a co-creator of my life, if I don't give myself some seeming level of control to create my life, then inherently I'm a victim. And anybody that is looking to be unstoppable by nature cannot see themselves as a victim because they're giving the control to somebody else. So when you take the control back, the number one thing that happens, which is very daunting, is full responsibility. It might not be, you know, you're, you know, you're caused it or this or that, but it is your responsibility of what happens between your ears, the conversations that you react to, the that refractory period that we spoke about. Because, like I said, pain and suffering are not the same thing. And they're so used synonymously, and it's such a dangerous thing to compare them because, again, as a physical being, you you have certain pain. You're not a robot. I am not a robot. I am not perfect. I am a I wrote a book about failure. The name of my book is The Gift of Failure. And the first line of the book is, I hope you fail. I hope you fail a lot, because failure is feedback at the end of the day. I say all that to where if you're attempting to do anything great in this world, you have to be radically responsible. Radically, to a point of, you know, and again to the point of being a custodian and being a steward first of yourself. Because if you don't have the dignity to be a steward of your own being, you don't deserve the privilege of being the steward of anybody else.

Jaclyn Strominger 15:49

And, you know, it's so I'm so glad that you said that because I feel like I talk about this a lot in the sense of, you know, I say it from the standpoint of you have to be the CEO of you first.

SPEAKER_00 15:58

Yeah, that's right. That's a beautiful way to put it. I think that's a that's a very accurate, that's a very that resonates. You can visualize that, you can make that tangible, it's not esoteric. And that's right. And if you don't do that, and I learned something from one of the many kind of business life coaches I've had over the years, and I'm a huge proponent of self of self-help, personal development, whatever phraseology you want to use. I've been going to Tony Robbins seminars, you know, for 15 years, doing stuff with Dr. Joe, reading every book. I was an English major and I'm a lawyer by trade. So reading is in my DNA. So just anything, I'll just read the pamphlet at the airport if I can. But but the thing that you that you come away from is what is, you know, what are you gonna focus on? Like that's the that's the main takeaway from all these things. Like, what are you gonna actually focus on? And one of the coaches said to me about focus was as a founder, okay, if you think of a great founder, and I'm sure a lot of people that listen to your podcast are founders or entrepreneurs or or aspiring to be. If you look at a great founder, if we list out the traits, okay, you would say hardworking, right? You'd say grit, vision, wears a lot of hats, you know, right? Relentless, you know, any of these words would make a great founder, right? Well, all of those traits make a terrible CEO. A CEO is patient, they're calculated, they train people. And my point in saying that is so when you move that mode, you start to look at the picture, you start to look at the game at a different vantage point when you try to be the CEO of yourself. Because if you're the CEO of yourself, you're not supposed to micromanage everything and think you're supposed to look at the landscape, look at your family or dealer, look at your colleagues, look at your social friends, look at your interaction friends, look at your kids, look at your and figure out how you can be the architect of that. Because if you're wildly focused just on yourself, there's only so much push energy and you'll burn yourself out. I've been there, bought that t-shirt, wore it out, you know, and now you know we've invested in 38 cities, 13 states, seven different asset classes, and we're just getting warmed up. But that would not have been possible if I was about I, I had to turn into we, and being a great CEO is about we, it's not about you.

Jaclyn Strominger 18:22

And and it's and it's that's a very interesting, it's and it's very difficult, I think, for a lot of founders to go from founder.

SPEAKER_00 18:31

That's right. Well, it's a fundamental human shift. It's like this is why founders get fired. This is why founders get fired. And it's not a like if you look at tra uh Travis Kalinick from Uber, who's obviously brilliant. I'm sure they've said bad things about worse things have been said about me. Fine. But what took from him what he did as a person to will himself to creating, you know, a company that changed the world, it wasn't until Dara Husrashahi from you know Expedia came in to look at it, who's a seasoned CEO and took it from losing $4 billion a year to making $13 billion a year. Steve Jobs was fired from Apple. Like, just keep going. It's almost a cliche that that great founders get fired. Elon Musk had a big problem with PayPal and Peter Thiel. And and then the ones that stay as founders and become CEO, there's like three of them. One is Bezos, one is Zuckerberg, you know, Bill Gates. But if you look at the amount of shareholder value, you know, Steve Ballmer created versus Bill Gates, it's not even close. Look what Tim Cook did after Steve Jobs died. He took it to trillions of dollars. My point is saying that it's not a knock on the founders. That is one characteristic of genius that it takes to create as an inventor. It's another level of genius that it takes to operate and grow as a CEO. And very few people have the introspection or the desire to fundamentally shift their inner, their inner circuitry to go from founder to CEO and alchemize into a totally different person because that's what it really requires.

Jaclyn Strominger 20:04

Right. It's it's so true. It requ it's so different. So if you're listeners, if you're a founding company and you're growing, no, at some point you should fire yourself and hire a CEO. Yeah. I mean, and it's and it's and and I, you know, it's it was interesting. I had a there was another gentleman on on the podcast, and one of the things that he said is that he did bring in a CEO and he took over the part of the business that he actually really liked. He, you know, the one that the thing that he that you know was his superpower, which was like biz dev or whatever it was, you know, can't but that was the whole thing. He's like he knew that at some point he was I reached my limit, and you have to know what that is. So let's talk about your business and the growth of it because you've you've grown a business. You you you you had you went to law school and you built a portfolio, a real estate portfolio. So I'm curious about building uh building something and you know where you started and then you know, where where were those steps that you were like, oh I I I can take one more step and and I can see the growth.

SPEAKER_00 21:10

By the way, the only reason people grow or change is is for two reasons. One is inspiration, the other is desperation. And desperation is a far greater motivating trait than inspiration. Inspiration is fleeting, it's like adrenaline, it you can get high in your own supply, but desperation is the mother of all invention. Desperation is the mother of all, and it wasn't until I became comfortable being scared that things started to really grow. Because when I'm scared, my senses are heightened. I'm at my best because I can see things, I'm wildly present, I'm in the moment, there's no retreat, and everything just has to happen. And every single growth milestone from going from three. thousand bucks to a hundred to a million to a hundred million to a billion to our whole you know if you build out everything we own today that's in our pipeline I don't even know how many billions of dollars it is but it's billions not millions and that's just the tip of the iceberg but my point is they all coincided with something devastating COVID as an example COVID happened and shut down so much of the business and then we kicked into gear and did 16 major deals when everybody was asleep. And so so my my point in saying that is and interest rates hiked and crushed the mathematics on a bunch of different apartment deals. And by doing that we had to prune our portfolio and focus on the trophy assets and refine our portfolio and see that you know real estate as it's been done for the last 50 years is blockbuster video. But that level of change in the world forced us to pivot to a more AI native concept and diversifying beyond real estate, just going beyond the things we're doing in the investment business. But every hyper moment of growth as a human being and as a business person was directly coincided with something that was a seeming crisis or a devastating obstacle that forced us to evolve and change you know it made you actually measure monitor and adjust right sure well that that's a very that's a very beautiful way to put something that when you know when the tornado is hitting the house hitting the hitting the house and things are running everywhere it doesn't have that level of elegance elegance comes later but in the meanwhile it's it's absolute chaos when it's happening and that's the moment where faith conviction and as I said the hero has to arise like the hero has to come out and heroes don't come from easy circumstances and heroes don't measure optimize and refine heroes are like Nike. Right yeah they just do it they get it done they get done so as you you know when you're you're looking at your portfolio during COVID right and you have you know as you just said you know did deals you know when other people were sleeping you know what was the thing that was making you scared I mean losing money losing money for our clients like look our investors are public pension funds insurance companies firefighters you know hardworking people that you know have entrusted us to you know to grow their nest egg to to to you know create you know more wealth for them in whatever modality that is and that's a wild responsibility that is a profound responsibility that we don't take lightly and I'm as I'm an attorney by trade and an attorney is a custodian of the law you know and and how and and taking that responsibility and that privilege to be able to do the work that we do is a profound weight. And when you take that weight that seriously look I've been rich I've been poor I'm gonna eat the same cheeseburger like there's only so many houses and yachts and planes and you know I've been I flipped burgers delivered pizzas and I've run a multi-billion dollar business and everything in between but the the responsibility and the contribution that comes and the impact that you're looking to have and I'm not Mother Teresa by the way you know but having that responsibility that impact is the pull that keeps you going because if it's just about you that gets you to a certain place. But when it ends up being about something else you get pulled out of bed.

Jaclyn Strominger 25:48

You know what but I think that's also the thing that that listeners I want you to really hear that that's unstoppable success. Unstoppable success is actually where where you're pulled to do something greater for not yourself but for others.

SPEAKER_00 26:02

You only you run out of steam dude if it's just about you you run out everybody has push energy you have a lot of push energy I think I have a good amount of it as well but pushing runs out at one point the universe has to grab you and pull you out of bed to a thing and that is what's unstoppable the inertia and the gravity that accelerates you to your purpose that is the unstoppable element. It's not the individual that's unstoppable it's catching that wave and letting the wave take you to a place that you could never fucking dream to have gone.

unknown 26:37

Right.

Jaclyn Strominger 26:38

Yeah and I think that's the beauty it's it's being able to and I as you were talking it was like you and this is the part that I feel that is you know with your business with growth it's it's because you you can feel the the empathy you have for the people that are your clients and the people that you're serving. And that's the part that you know as you said it's that pull it's going to get you out of bed. You're like you know I get to I get up in the morning and I can say who can I help and who can I who is going to be able to be impacted by something that something that you do like and that's so important.

SPEAKER_00 27:19

No it's the only thing right nothing else the rest of it it doesn't matter the only thing and and when people talk about they use the word million and the word billion interchangeable like we use pain and suffering. And I want to put that in perspective for a second if you take a million dollars okay and you convert it into seconds okay a million seconds is 13 days okay following me a million seconds 13 a billion dollars or a billion seconds is 31 years quite a bit different you think so when you want to scale from a million from zero to a hundred thousand to a million to ten million to fifty million to a billion and multiple billions imagine the change that would happen in an individual over 31 years. Imagine how time takes the test your kids grow up you're you know you're you start to see wrinkles in places that whatever and have a lot more gray hair than I once did. But my point is that evolution of time and you look at it through time as money you start to appreciate the differences so how much could evolve in 31 years. If a business evolves from that number to that number imagine how much evolution has to exist during that time and when you focus on those elements and you find something that you can that you can obsess over that's beyond you then you start to have the ingredients in place to do something truly unstoppable.

Jaclyn Strominger 28:59

That's absolutely fantastic. So all right I could talk to you about this forever what is the best way for our listeners to connect with you because you are so amazing and you know and you know and I think one of the biggest things about what I love sharing with our our listeners is all the greatness and and great wisdom. So how can our listeners get more of your wisdom?

SPEAKER_00 29:24

Sure I don't know I don't know about all that wisdom but but you can you can go to Rastagar on Instagram our team does a really good job of uh putting things out that we think are valuable for people you can buy my book it's called The Gift of Failure as I mentioned on Amazon. It's certainly not the great American novel but I think you'll get the $9 of value out of it maybe and you can find us just in general a simple Google search you can go to rastigarcapital.com you know it's pretty public what we've done and what we're doing and yeah it's out there.

Jaclyn Strominger 29:56

Well that's awesome and I will put all of that in the show notes so listeners you can just go right to the show notes you can grab the book you'll have all the links to Instagram so it'll make it super easy for you to find Ari. Listeners please do me a favor there's a lot of wisdom in this podcast. Please share it with your friends, your business colleagues and please make sure that you've hit subscribe and if you're not part of our school community please go over to school and join our unstoppable success community where we share other tips, insights and wisdom. Ari, thank you for being an amazing guest. Listeners, thank you for listening I'm Jaclyn Stromager your host and our goal is to help you be unstoppable and leap to your greatest success. Thanks Jacqueline here's to your unstoppable success you've been listening to the unstoppable success podcast with Jaclyn Strawinger. Subscribe share and keep building your unstoppable life see you at the top