Struggles From Our Past Can Help Us Today! Real Estate Investor Leadership
December 16, 2014
Leadership in real estate and for investors is paramount. Often, when flipping houses or learning how to make money in real estate one finds themselves in the middle of a struggle. One must learn to use the lessons of struggle in our past and apply it to our business today. Learning from past struggles will help every investor be a better leader and make more money flipping houses!
Mark Morey operates a survival training school called Vermont Wilderness Survival School in Brattleboro, Vermont. His focus is teaching children ancient native skills of survival. Author Laurence Gonzales writes, “Morey is one of the few people I’ve ever met who would survive being dropped naked into the woods”. Morey makes an interesting observation about children. “Inner-city children did better in survival training than ones from the suburbs, because the suburban children have no predators“. Inner-city kids learn the secret routes, the shortcuts that keep them safe from the tough crowd.
Our challenges in life are often bigger than we are, but if we buckle and run from every large problem, we’ll be running the rest of our lives. Sometimes you gotta man-up and face the challenge. Survival doesn’t depend on the size of your resources; it depends on the size of your heart!
Too often, a mature adult finds himself in either a treacherous divorce that reduces him to zero assets or in a financial loss that burdens him with a mountain of debt. Maybe some may find themselves imprisoned as a fall guy for the “untouchable bosses” who deflected their wrong doing. Or even as a convicted criminal for a genuine mistake in judgment. Unfortunately, survival is not well-taught in our homes and schools. We have grown up soft, spoiled and with the feelings of entitlement. We consider ourselves to be “roughing it” if the television doesn’t operate properly during the big game. If our air conditioning unit fails on a hot humid night. Even if our power goes out for more than a few hours from a major storm. We have not been well-schooled in the practice of surviving or of enduring hardship.
Regardless of how technologically advanced we become or how secure and safe we feel with insurance and home alarms, we have yet to find a way to avoid the emotional jungles of loss, death, pain, and rejection. GPS, compasses, MRE’s (meals ready to eat), modern clothing and footwear. All are super to have outdoors. Yet what does one do when the back pack with all the techno-gizmos and food falls over the ledge. If it’s carried away downstream when the canoe overturns? We don’t call them accidents for nothing.
They are not planned, they just happen. The hand loses its grip or the foot slips on a ledge. Marriages implode, markets collapse, the housing industry plummets and your loan is called by the bank. All unplanned “accidents” that thrust you into the “deep woods” of being lost. That is when your survival background kicks in. If your survival background consists of calling AAA Roadside Service, then your chances of surviving a major tragedy are likely alarmingly grim.
This is why it is wise to be fully engaged in physical and competitive fitness and sporting activities. Certainly, taking survival-type courses can teach one a measure of self-reliance. Learning to make a fire in a rainstorm without matches may not seem relevant to surviving an IRS audit on your business and personal finances. Both the principle of prioritization and resourcefulness can be of immense help. For example, wet and cold equals hypothermia, which is a leading killer outdoors.
Fire is the cure. That’s prioritization. Knowing how to make a fire is resourcefulness and those same principal skills can be applied to any survival situation. Those of you who have questioned why your childhood or early growth years had loss or hardship in them will better understand when your day of “woods shock” occurs. No one escapes life without being lost at some point! All the previous hardships can give one a remarkable advantage when the bottom drops out.
Can you calm down, relax and focus in the midst of the storm? Or do you cry out in shock, fear and terror, running blindly or lying down in paralysis? If you’ve been in the treacherous “jungle of life” before, you may be called upon to lead others. Others who are not as prepared as you when their time comes to enter it. If you’ve been in some perilous storms and found your way out, you stand a better chance of surviving this present one.
That’s the power of failure! If one is prone to only expect success, failure can be debilitating. If one views failure as an excellent though uncomfortable teacher, he can learn what only failure can teach. That is crucial to long-term success! This brings me to my final thought in this article. Failures, loss and pain are both very uncomfortable. There may need to be a significant adjustment in your comfort level in order to survive. This has nothing to do with how good your “good life” should be. It has to do with what level of discomfort you can sustain comfortably.
Every struggle in our past is an advantage for your next survival escapade. In the words of a former motivational speaker, “You can fail and not be a failure.” Whatever you overcame to get where you are can be used to get you out of whatever deep woods life places you!
