Zen and the art of real estate investing part 1
Ok, so maybe I am not that smart.
Anyway, I have always found the topic of success a very interesting one.
From my experience we all have a very good chance at being successful, except we get in our own way ALOT.
Most of us live in America, America is the only country on the planet that is followed by the word dream, there is no French dream, chinese dream, just the good old American Dream yet somehow many of us stop dreaming by the time we get to our 20's or many times even ealier.
So why do we many of us fall so short on our potential?
From my experience, our greatest gift, is also our greatest detriment. Humans are the only living creatures that can think about the future. This is a gift in that it allows us to think about what is going to happen when we do something before we do it. The danger is that we often over think, and "what if" ourselves to death. Even worse than death, a vast majority of people simply become couch weights, passing their time here on earth making sure that our couches don't get up and run away.
If you stop for a moment and evaluate why it is that you have such a hard time with life, most people say that their life is stressful. Stress, Have you ever looked out your window and seen a stress? Probably not because stress is something that we create. Regardless of who or what we try to shift the blame to stress can only be caused by one person. Yes, that person is you.
Stress is simply just an outcome from the gift of future thinking. Stress comes when we try to see what is going to happen in the future, and we don't like what we "think" we will see. More often then not things dont end up nearly as badly as what our minds lead us to believe that it will. Simply put stress is nothing more than thought.
Practically every bad thing in our life comes from thought. If you want to feel bad think bad thoughts, if you want to feel good think good thoughts. Yet our schools, our parents, and our employers never teach us about the intracacies of our minds. We all go through life under this illusion of struggle. When in reality most struggle is created by our minds.
People fail to realize the power that their thoughts. Think for a moment about a white collar worker who has a "stressful job". My guess is thier actual job is to show up at work, type something, talk into a phone, and write some stuff. I think you will agree that is what most white collar employees do in a physical sense. The part that everyone seems to struggle with is the inner game. The stress game. "Oh, I make alot of money but my job is very stressful", I have heard it a million times. Ok, why the stress? Well its my boss, its a huge workload, etc, etc. The real reason that anything including real estate investing is stressful is because we think that our future happenings are not going to meet our satisfaction thereby creating this illusion of stress.
Newbie real estate investors could double and even quadruple there rate of success if they could learn to control their minds. The doubt, the worry, the fear, can all be banished if you recognize that ALL of those things are created solely by you, in your mind.
I have alot more to say on the subject, and hope that at least one person finds this helpful.
Eric Medemar