Are you an entrepreneur, independent sales rep, or anyone whose income isn’t the function of a consistent salary?  If so, you’ve got the makings of a great investor… and there are some things about you that could doom you to failure.  Today you get the knowledge you need to succeed BIG TIME as an investor.  I’m Bryan Ellis.  This is Episode #183.----Hello SDI Nation!  Welcome to the podcast of record for savvy self-directed investors like you!  Get ready for another dose of PREDICTABLY PROFITABLE thinking!We’re at the end of the first week of the new year.  How’d you do?  Is your year off to a great start?I’m feeling pretty good.  My private equity firm bought two more houses this week – both EXCELLENT deals – and I signed the closing papers on a resale we did just yesterday.  Made about 28% on that one in 22 days, so it was a slam dunk!  In fact, I’ll likely give a case study of that deal this coming Tuesday on the next edition of Self Directed Investor Success Stories, the sister show to this one.  But the private equity firm is off to a roaring start, and that’s really gratifying.Hey a quick note – this coming Monday night, I’m the featured speaker for the Georgia Real Estate Investor Association.  This is pretty rare.  I don’t do a lot of public speaking these days, so if you’d like to meet me, stop by, because I’d love to meet you too!  I’ll be talking about how individual investors and affluent investors can work together to fund and finish deals in a way that’s very safe and profitable for both.  If you have a goal of doing more deals this year… either as a real estate entrepreneur or as a passive investor and you’re in the Atlanta area, come on by.  This is a topic I know well, both from having done it very, very effectively and also very, very badly in the past.  This meeting officially starts at 6:30, I’m on at 7:30, but I’d not risk waiting until 7:30 to arrive.  There’s a $25 fee to come to the meeting but later today I’m going to send an email to the private SDI email list with a code to get in for free.  To be sure you’re on that list, text the word SDIRADIO to 33444 with no spaces or periods.  And when you come, please be sure to stop by and introduce yourself to me as an SDI Radio listener… I’d love to meet you.  Again, text SDIRADIO to 33444 to be sure you get that code.So my friends… are you an entrepreneur, independent sales person or anyone who doesn’t have the luxury of a salary to depend upon?  Hey, note – this isn’t a slam against those of you who are salaried employees.  Not at all.  This is a recognition of the different type of personality, the different type of person – not better or worse, just different – that it takes to live the entrepreneur’s life.Here’s the thing:  There’s a lot about the entrepreneurial nature that means you already have some of the best and most important traits for success as an investor.For example:  Entrepreneurs have an innate sense of the distinction between “price” and “value”.  They’re not the same thing, but are easy to confuse.  As an entrepreneur, you live or die by this distinction, because your price must always be equal to or below the value of your offer to your customer, otherwise there will be no sale.  You know that, you get it, it’s obvious to you.  And that thinking transfers well to investing.  For example:  Yesterday, Apple traded from a high of $100 per share down to a little above $96 per share.  That was it’s PRICE.  But what’s it’s VALUE?  You may not think that $4 swing is much… but that accounts for a $22 BILLION drop in value for that company.  Not trivial.Similarly, in real estate… there’s a difference between price and value.  Great example:  Yesterday, my private equity firm bought a house for $178,000.  Why’d we do that?  We know that after spending a max of $20,000 to fix it, we can sell it for $270,000… I expect we’ll profit by about $50,000 on that deal in a very, very short time frame.  So, value here is $270K… price was only $178K.  A clea