FIND OUT WHAT'S IMPORTANT TO YOU

If you had all the money you ever needed, what would you do with your time? Seriously.... answer the question, what would you do with your time? If you would travel and tour every castle in England great! If going to the Professional Wrestling Hall of Fame is your thing then so be it (I know, I couldn't believe it either but it's real). Just think about what you would do if you could do whatever you wanted. It's real telling when we look deep within ourselves and figure out who we really are.

What I would recommend is that we all find what's really important to us and work on making that a bigger part of our lives. If your family is the most important thing to you, figure out how you can spend more time with them. Don't let your life pass you by without letting what's truly important to you influence you for the better. I'll leave you with a quote from John Greenleaf Whittier (turns out there's a museum for this guy too) "For all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are these 'It might have been'.

THE TRUE DEFINITION OF DILIGENCE

"Diligence is a learnable skill that combines: creative persistence, a smart-working effort rightly planned and rightly performed in a timely, efficient, and effective manner to attain a result that is pure and of the highest quality of excellence."
-Steven K Scott

I read Steven Scott's book "The Richest Man Who Ever Lived" a couple of years ago and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It reminded me of... well the Book of Proverbs; a bunch of little nuggets of wisdom. I decided to pick the book off the shelf and start reading it again and the very first chapter speaks of diligence, but not as it's known today. Our American slang tends to change definitions over time, I blame Dr. Seuss, but what do I know. True diligence is much more than hard work. Scott gives a lengthy definition which I've provided above, but he also boils it down to two words in his book, "smart-working".

I've seen so many people in this generation, which has welcomed the "Generation Me" label with open arms, *lower head in shame here* think that they are above hard work because of the technology they were raised with. "How quickly the world owes (them) something." -Louis CK. The original definition of diligence is a combination of working smarter AND working harder.

I've started several businesses and worked just as hard in each one. The part that I was missing in the beginning was the "smart" part of working. I have learned the hard way that most of the time it's not enough to just work hard. You really have to be smart about the time and effort you're putting into something. If a transaction is going to take months to complete and consume hours of my time, I need to weigh my compensation verses the labor I put into it. I read a study recently that said the average executive makes $75/hr. When you get into business look at the end goal first, usually the compensation. Figure out how many hours it will take you to reach that goal and calculate how much you will make per hour. Then it's up to you to decide if it is worth the time and effort. The goal is to have you determine how much you make and not someone else.

JUST BE YOURSELF

I couldn't go too long with a picture of the team that bounced my Dodgers out of the Playoffs the past couple of years. So why not put one up of the man responsible for beating my Lakers in the '93 playoffs (yes I did have to look that one up, but I only looked up the year if that counts for anything). When Charles Barkley signed on with TNT I thought to myself 'well this ought to be good.' But the more I listened to him and the more I heard from Kenny Smith and Ernie Johnson, I realized that Barkley is the only one that brings any valuable insight into what's going on in a game. So I've grown to love what he says and his candid ability to say what's on his mind.

There is a quote from Charles Barkley that goes like this, "Half the people in this world are going to hate you and half are going to like you, so you might as well be yourself." I've heard him use this quote several times over the past couple of years in different radio interviews, Jim Rome, Dan Patrick, etc. and it has come to grow on me. There's no sense in letting other people control who you are and how you react to a situation so do yourself and everyone else a favor and just be yourself.

If I lose a business deal because someone doesn't like how I interact with them or what I say, no big deal. There will be plenty of other deals to get done and it's not going to be the end of the world. I try my best to be professional and respectful in a transaction because that's who I am and that's the type of clients that I target and want in return. Don't be afraid to walk away from a deal if you can't be yourself in it.

DON'T GET NERVOUS

"It’s been a long time since I’ve been nervous playing this game. It’s what I’ve been doing my whole life. I put all the work in. You do everything you need to do to prepare, and I try not to leave anything to chance. So what’s the point in being nervous? I’ve already done the work. It’s game time. Time to go out there and have fun and execute and let your skills take over." -Cliff Lee on if he was nervous during his first World Series appearance.


I recognize that I'm a couple of months away from when this quote actually took place, but it's had such a profound impact on my life that I just had to write about it. Let me be the first so say that as a Dodger fan *sigh* I wasn't happy that they didn't pull the trigger to get Cliff Lee. The Indians sold him at a discount and the guy is a stud. I'll stop myself before I stray too far from the topic... the point I wanted to make is that there is some very valuable content here in this little nugget of wisdom Cliff provides. In essence if you put in the work and do everything that you can do you are leaving very little to chance. You are controlling your own destiny.

I am in Real Estate and though it's a hard market right now, I've been preparing for this job for the past 5-10 years. Not necessarily this particular job, but my job as a provider. I know what it takes to make sure that I have deals in place to pay for our food, shelter, clothing, etc. so even though the it may be hard to do, I've prepared, I've done all the necessary work before hand and I'm taking very little to chance. I'm not nervous about the future because I know that I've done all that I can do to put myself in a position to be successful.

The part that is left out in the quote is what happens if you haven't prepared. He touches on it, but if you don't prepare you leave much of what happens in your life to chance and there's a reason casinos are as successful as they are, every game they have is left to chance and the house always wins. My suggestion to you would be to prepare as much as possible to succeed in whatever it is you want to do so nothing in your life is left to chance.

MONEY AND HAPPINESS

The phrase has already been coined that "money does not buy happiness," and I believe that to be true. I've heard both sides of the argument, and actually some really good arguments on the subject, but ultimately I have to say that a persons happiness should not relate directly to how much money they have. Truehappiness, the kind that you thought of for as long as you can remember, when you really think about it does not require possessions at all. You may feel happy after purchasing something but that is temporary. The true happiness I speak of lasts forever. Do a little exercise right now. Make sure that you are in a place where you won't be interrupted, somewhere quiet. Now pause... close your eyes... and think about a time in your life when you were truly happy.... just sit and ponder that time for 30 seconds. I did this exercise today and thought about when my wife and I were dating before we were married, before we had kids, a mortgage, careers, etc. I just think about how happy we were, mind you we are still happy today, but during that time it was an excited happy. Excited about the possibilities, the unknown, the potential that we had as a young couple who were ready to take on the world.

That time in our life didn't require money. It didn't require possessions. I was working at a warehouse and she had just gotten her real estate license. We had no money, I remember sometimes being sad that I couldn't buy her things that I felt she deserved. When I was down on myself because of that, she would always come to me and say "It doesn't matter. All I care about is that I have you." Instantly I would feel better and know that the memory of something as small as walking together in the park would last longer than any possession I could have bought for her.

Now that's not to disregard gifts, because I do think they are valuable, but do something different. For example, I remember one Christmas, we really had no money. Our children were 3 and 16 months old. We had saved some money and gotten our kids a couple of things and my wife and I knowing our financial situation only got 1 or 2 small gifts for each other. I remember on Dec. 24th going to bed with my wife and I waited for her to fall asleep. Once I knew she was out, I slipped out of our bed and stayed up until 3am cleaning the house and doing laundry. We were going to our parents house to visit for the day and I knew that she would want to get the house clean before leaving. I didn't want to see her cleaning on Christmas Day! I wanted her to relax and enjoy herself with the kids. When she woke up she was so happy to find out that the house was spotless because she knew that I had to have been up all night to accomplish what I had done. It was really sacrificing something temporal that I love (sleep) to make my wife happy.

I lived in the Philippines for a little while, sometimes amongst the worst of economic conditions. I remember seeing a family of 7 eating nothing but rice and squash for dinner. The worst part was that they split the squash into 7 equal pieces. The thing that I gained the most from that experience is that the family was perfectly happy and content with what they had, offering a prayer of thanksgiving to God for giving them food to eat that day. That just blew me away! They were so happy! During this recession hard times are upon us, but one thing I can hold to and I will swear by is that if we're not happy or don't find a way to be happy during the trying times in our lives we will never be truly happy. That I know to be true.

EVERY DECISION CHANGES THE FUTURE

Earlier I wrote about recent events in my life that led me to start this blog. For one it's almost 2am and I'm still up! I actually don't feel all that tired but feel the need to write about this. For every decision that we make there is a consequence, an outcome, a result of that decision. Some of those decisions can be as simple as turning left at a certain intersection when you always turn right on the ride home. Others can be as major as taking a job in a city that would require you to uproot your family and start a new life elsewhere. Decisions, decisions, decisions. I think about how different my life would be if I thought about a decision and its consequence before I actually acted upon it. Acting as opposed to reacting in some cases. Even the most minute aspect of my life can have such an impact on my future for the better or for the worse. An example I would give would be the decision to strike up a conversation with a total stranger. People interest me. A phenomenon that I have always thought of is that an individual can have a life so separate from mine and yet we could have very similar interests to the point where if I knew that person, it would literally change my life. Though too much pondering of the past can be detrimental, reflection of earlier events in one's life can produce powerful actions for the future.

JUST ANOTHER BLOG

I know that there are millions of blogs out there and why not? With the way technology has shaped our lives there should be! I've been thinking about doing this for quite some time now, but it wasn't until today, or tonight rather, that I finally decided to actually set one of these up and make it public. There have been many recent events in my life that have pushed me to doing this and I can't sit on those feelings any longer without it really affecting my day to day interactions with those around me. My hope and desire is that this communication with the world will help in some way or another. I've always thought that if I can change just one person's life for the better my existence will have all been worth it. I do not profess to be some incredible wizard with words (I'm actually more of a math and science guy) and because of that, if there is anything that you as the reader sees that needs correcting, please don't hesitate to let me know. I can only get better from corrections, especially from an audience that actually thinks that what I have to say is of some value to them.