Finding That Passion for Living

Last week I started telling you the story of my life. I wanted you to see how setting big goals started me off on the path that I am on even today. So here is the rest of my story with a little bit more about what I’ve done and how having big goals that keep me excited and challenged led to much of my success.

For one, I worked on bigger and bigger real estate investment deals. My work in the development side of real estate has been among my most profitable endeavors. I successfully developed large condominium complexes in Pennsylvania and Mississippi. I completed a 13-acre commercial development in the south part of the Salt Lake valley and a very successful condominium project on the beautiful North Shore of Kauai. Although I am less involved in real estate development today, I still have a few projects going with much of the work handed off to my children.

After finding success in real estate, I knew I wanted to something else big and something that could help others find the kind of success I did. So, I eventually developed and successfully ran a real estate investing seminar company that would set the standard for real estate investing seminars, conventions, and educational retreats throughout the world.

I not only became extremely successful in my seminar business and as a real estate investor, but I also got into writing books. I am now the author of four books on real estate investing including the book titled, How to Wake Up the Financial Genius Inside You, which has sold over two million copies. I also published the Financial Freedom Report, a real estate investing magazine, for over 20 years. Then after my so-called retirement, I published another book called, How to IGNITE Your Passion for Living. It wasn’t about real estate but instead I wrote about what keeps us chasing those dreams and those big goals.

You see, after I tried to retire, I felt very lost and depressed. It was then that I realized we human beings need to do more than just have one or two big goals to go after and to succeed at to be happy. We need to have something to work towards, something to keep us challenged and purposeful. So, I wrote that book and started this blog and I keep creating big goals like keeping myself super healthy and active.  

I have also learned to balance my life with my many passions. I love to travel, having visited well over 100 countries. I still love to write which is why I keep this blog going. I also love tennis and getting out to see my friends. All these passions are surpassed only by my devotion to my wonderful wife, Kimberly, and to my children and grandchildren.

So, as you see, I have kept my life full of things that I can work on and challenge myself with as well as enjoy. We need to always have a goal and a purpose and, especially, a passion for living.

The White Hot Motivator

I really do think that most of us know that we have the power to decide what we want to do with our lives. So, we can dream and set goals to bring about exactly that. We decide what is true and what works for us. Once you have set your course, don’t let someone else talk you out of your life’s passion because that is your truth and if you let it, it will drive your life.

I love the plaque on the wall of tennis champion Tracy Austin. It reads, “The world will step aside for the person who knows where they’re going.”

Why don’t you and I be that person? Believe in your dreams, believe in your goals, believe in your destiny. Yes, be a true believer! Don’t get caught in the trap that so many people step into that is summarized by the old saying, “If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.”

When I was 27, I turned my dream of making a million dollars by the time I was 30 into a real solid focused goal. It was my “true belief” that I could do it. Yes, many of my friends and family said it was impossible. But, you see, it wasn’t their truth. It was mine and no one could prove me wrong.

So, what happened? Well, they were right. I didn’t make it! My truth was not true, but so what? I did make it at age 31. My goal was only off by one year. I can live with that.

It took three years before they proved me wrong. But even being wrong, I turned that goal into one million dollars only a year later. I like that kind of not quite right truth.

The bottom line is you just need to work hard on your reasons for setting goals. Setting up those goals with hard work and determination is the ultimate motivator.

So, as you think about and set goals, take time to think through the reasons behind your goal. Consider the “why” behind her goal setting. Because your reasons behind your goals can be the supercharger, the white-hot motivator, that pushes you beyond what you even thought was possible.

A List for Hard Days

In the last couple of posts, I talked about some of the essential components needed to reach your goals including taking action and writing out your goal. Without doing that, you can’t even get started. But what will keep you going once you do get started? All the best intentions in the world are not going to help you when things get really challenging. The things I’ve mentioned do help but I have one more thing to make it even more likely that you’ll reach your goal.

Let’s start with an example such as dieting. You go out to eat with all the best intentions to stick to a healthy, low-calorie diet. Then you find yourself there with a salad in front of you while your companions are enjoying prime rib and pizza and suddenly, your mouth is salivating nonstop. You begin to wonder, Why in the world am I dieting when I could just be enjoying myself? Somehow, maybe because your friends know you are on a diet, you stay strong and dig into your salad.

The next day, you see yourself in the mirror and can smile at yourself, knowing you stuck to your goal. In the afternoon, you are out playing ball with the kids for an hour instead of just ten minutes which had been your limit in previous times. It’s times like those that make it easy to remember why you’re changing the way you eat. In those moments, you can honestly say you don’t miss those grande mochas with whipped cream or the bowl of ice cream after dinner.

Unfortunately, your day isn’t filled with those reminders and maybe the next day you’re at work, a co-worker walks in with donuts for everyone and you hear your inner voice asking you why you are torturing yourself, making all the reasons you wanted to diet a little fuzzy all of a sudden. That’s when the idea of just one donut doesn’t seem like a truly bad thing and there’s no one at work that knows about your diet goal to help keep you on track. It’s then that you need a true will power tool.

The tool I think that works the best for this is something I call B-RAM. You can read about it in Chapter 7 of my book, How to Ignite Your Passion for Living. B-RAM stands for Benefits, Reasons, and Motivations. This B-RAM is a list of the real end goals you’re after. Losing weight isn’t just about looking good, it’s about feeling better, getting off medication, reducing your risk of disease, and increasing your energy so you can do more for yourself and your family. You know this is why you do it but in those really trying moments, they are just hard to remember clearly.

With a B-RAM list though, all you do is write down the list of the reason you are chasing this goal, then you can pull the list out and read it over to remind yourself. You’ll want to keep that list as handy as possible. Maybe put it on your phone, on an index card in your wallet, or on sticky notes posted on your glove compartment and bathroom mirror.

To make this B-RAM list really effective, you must list every single benefit, reason, and motivation that will make this goal worth working so hard for. The longer the list, the easier it will be to keep on track because you can see, just by looking at your big, long list, that those trying moments are really worth getting through. Then when you read it, you’re reminded of all the good things you can look forward to when you reach that goal.

If you can just read your lists and keep yourself going, soon you won’t spend any time wondering why you work so hard or why you don’t just give up. How come? Because soon enough, you’ll be living with those benefits, not just reading about them!

Seek Great People

Many years ago, I read about a guy who started with nothing. He was extremely poor, but his father told him that he could become and accomplish anything he wanted, if he wanted it bad enough. He also discovered a lot about setting goals and keeping motivated, so he really grabbed a hold of what he was observing and pushed himself in all he did. He set goals for himself and put a timeframe on those goals and wrote them down.

Eventually, he turned his life around and later became one of the world’s most influential people in the personal achievement industry. He condensed those hard-learned lessons of life into books from which many people taught others. Seeing this, he also put his knowledge on 12-inch LPs and then on 8-track tapes and then, as technology progressed, onto cassettes, CDs and DVDs. He sold more than 2 billion dollars’ worth of those great reprinted and rerecorded motivational and goal setting directions and information.

In my younger years, I followed this man’s work and got very interested in him as a person, so I went after him. Yes, eventually, I got to meet him and know him very well. We even took trips together to places like the Grand Cayman Islands. He came to Salt Lake City and met my wife and me at our home. During that time, I followed his example and what I learned from his tapes helped me make a huge financial leap in my income, up into the millions. This wonderful man was Paul J. Meyer.

Yes, there were other people who have done astounding stuff in the financial arena who also helped me. That was because I would seek out and find those people who have accomplished big things in my field. So, in my personal experience, you should go out and get to know the people who have hit it big time in your area of interest by reading any written works or stories of theirs and, yes, push and push until you get to meet them. Then spend all the time you can with them and pick their brains. Most of these super successful people do like to share and help others do what they did. Yes, I’m saying just go do it!

There is so much more I want to share with you about Paul J. Meyer that I learned through his book Fortune, Family, and Faith. He gave me a copy of that book and signed it with a very nice note back on August 4th, 2008, the year before he passed away.

Next week I want to share more of what I learned from this great man, like his list of 13 ways of how to keep your priorities, which is just one of many treasured lessons he has to teach us all.

Hard Working Spies

My dear wife Kimberly read a very fascinating book which she then talked me into reading. The book’s title is The Spy and the Traitor written by Ben Macintyre. It’s a true story about spies and counter spies in Russia, England, Denmark, France, and the Netherlands. I was not too interested, at least not at first, but with her request and gentle prodding, I picked it up while on vacation in Kauai and began to read.

Wow, what a book it is! Now, I’m only 100 pages in out of 335, but it’s really got me hooked. It’s a very fascinating read about some very dangerous spy and counter spy activity that I’m pretty sure is still going on. But the thing that really impressed me was the lengths these spies would go to accomplish their objectives.

The main character is a guy by the name of Oleg Gordievsky who is working for the Russian KGB, but the more he sees the western world of Denmark and England with its free market, freedom of speech, and all those things that go with Western and free enterprise countries, the more he realizes that communism is not the best way to go for human beings. So, Oleg is drawn towards the free enterprise cultures but as a top Russian spy he has to hide his thoughts and beliefs so as not to be sent back to Moscow where he could be imprisoned or even put to death.

Reading this great book about the true story of Oleg and so many of his friends and enemies certainly made me stop and think of how good we have it living in a great free country that allows us to think our own thoughts, write about them, and publish them without fear of being arrested or put to death. Plus, we have this amazing freedom to make a terrific living, maybe even making millions of dollars without bribing anyone or dodging the law.

The spies on both sides in this book were pushed to lengths that were almost unbelievable. They worked, studied, and spent unbelievable amounts of time planning what they were told to do and accomplish. It made me think that if we, as free men and women in America, were pushed half as hard by others or by ourselves, it would almost be a certainty that our success would be astronomical. So many of us could be making millions, or even billions, as well as helping others to do the same thing or to chase other great and noble causes that don’t involve money.

Our problem is that so many times we have it way too easy and we just move along at a normal, or even slow pace, depending on where we live and what our friends and relatives around us are doing. For the most part, it seems like we follow our family, friends, and neighbors rather than push ourselves to great new heights. But it doesn’t have to be that way. It’s all up to you and me. Think about how hard you push yourself and whether you can push yourself further to gain even more in your life.

 

 

The Benefits List

In these tough times of COVID it’s easy to become very negative about so many things. In the book Letting Go, David R. Hawkins talks about choosing the positive thoughts to push out negative thoughts. He says, “There is an inner reality that we can term our ‘inner greatness’ or ‘higher self’. It has much more power than the inner negativity. In return for letting go of the payoffs that we were getting from the negative position, we are now surprised by the positive payoff. We are subject only to what we hold in mind…The body will respond to what we believe.”

Years ago, I came up with a simple trick that keeps my mind on a positive track. I know how easy it is to let goals slip away from me so I take time to write down, not only the goal, but all of the benefits that sticking with and achieving my objective will bring me. And then when I think of more benefits, I add those to my benefit list. I called this B-RAM, which is short for Benefits, Rewards and Motivation. I also call it my “Big Brain Booster”.

I would strongly suggest that you try it out. Take time to write down all the benefits that sticking with your goals will give you. We certainly have enough time in these COVID days to think these through and come up with lots of benefits we’ll get from reaching our goals.

Now, we may not be able to get out and about to pursue all our goals, at least right now. But given time, this pandemic will be over and we can be so very ready to go after our preset goals and find ourselves glued to them because we can see all of the benefits as we review our list.

Here’s how I came up with this B-RAM concept. Years ago, I had been reading a great book called Beyond the 120-Year Diet by Dr. Roy Walford, a leading expert on longevity. As I read the book and saw how difficult some of the calorie restrictions were on the diet he recommended, I began writing down the benefits that would help me stick with this tough calorie restricted diet. I needed extra motivation so my list made it much easier to stick with the diet. After that, any time I got discouraged, got weak, or got diverted on this diet, I looked at my list and it remotivated me and reminded me of why I set the goal in the first place.

It can be easy to forget why you set certain goals but when you go back to your list of benefits, it’s easy to remember why and it keeps you on track to achieve your goals. And believe me, it’s not easy to stay on a very restricted calorie diet as you probably can understand, especially if you’ve ever been down that road.

As I’m sure you know, if you have followed my posts or read my books, writing down your goals and objectives, putting a timeline on those goals, and revisiting what you wrote increases the chance of you reaching them. It doesn’t matter whether your goals are health or wealth. It works for those goals and many more.

So, now, in these COVID times, let’s all spend more time making benefit lists for our goals. And don’t forget to put your list of goals and benefits in a very convenient place so you can visit them often and easily!

Missing the Small Things

So, this past week, I got a little bit of a taste of what it might be like to be in prison. Now, this is only a 10 day sentence and I got to share my “cell” with my wife Kimberly, so it wasn’t all that bad. It did, however, give me a very small taste of what it would feel like to be locked up.

Okay, I know that sounds dramatic. It really wasn’t all that terrible. But what was this all about? Well, there’s some new (for me) rules in place if you travel to Hawaii right now thanks to COVID. When you arrive from outside the islands, you have to spend 10 days in quarantine. Luckily, you can at least spend those 10 days in your house or condo.

The hard part is, for those 10 days you cannot leave your property. The penalty, if you do leave your place and get caught, is a $5,000 dollar fine plus one year in jail. Ouch! That seems severe but, then again, so is COVID-19.

We humans really don’t totally appreciate all that we have and how we live our lives but can’t do until it’s taken away. On the other hand, this time locked up has given my wife and I lots of time to think, read, and even doing a little bit of writing. Plus, we now have tons of time to talk to each other. Still, after 8 days of this, I am going a bit stir crazy.

You would think, with tons of time on my hands, that I could do lots of planning. I do keep thinking about that and yet, to be quite honest, I have not done much planning at all. We humans get so used to our schedules and habits that when they get disrupted, it can make your mind go in all kinds of different directions. It sure has done that for me.

It’s one more thing that you don’t realize you depend on until it’s not there. It’s crazy that now, with all this time on my hands, time I might have really wished for when I was super busy, I just really want my old schedule and routine back.

It is the small things or the everyday things that you start to really miss when you can’t have them anymore. I guess I’ll be ok but I do really look forward to next week. At least, I imagine, I will really appreciate my routine and the many other small things I took for granted every day. A new appreciation for the old and ordinary things may be one of the real silver linings of this time in lock down.

A New Goal, a New Habit, a New Year

Since we’ve just started a new year, I must say something about renewing and re-dedicating ourselves to our life goals. And there is one super powerful and time proven aid I would strongly suggest you use to increase your odds of hitting your goals. It’s something I talk about in my book, How to Ignite Your Passion for Living, but I have another source to show you how powerful it can be.

Years ago, my son David gave me a book called The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg and, wow, what a great book I found it to be. I have re-read it many times. Duhigg relies on scientific studies to dissect what it takes to form a new habit or dump a habit that you don’t like but he also discusses this aid to reaching your goals that I want to share with you.

In the book, he talks about a Scottish study by a psychologist who recruited 60 patients that just had hip or knee replacement surgery. Having personally experienced a double hip replacement, I know just how painful this kind of surgery can be. Most people don’t even want to move afterward, let alone start walking as their rehabilitation requires.

After their surgeries, this psychologist gave each patient a booklet that detailed their rehab schedule and, in the back, there were 13 additional pages, one for each week, with blank spaces and these instructions:

“My goals for this week are _________________________. Write down exactly what you are going to do. For example, if you are going to go for a long walk or hike this week, write down where and when you are going to do it.”

Patients were asked to fill in each of those pages with specific plans. After their rehabilitation period, the psychologist compared the recovery results of those that filled out the pages and those that did not. Duhigg notes that, “It seems absurd to think that giving people a few pieces of blank paper might make a difference in how quickly they recover from surgery.”

But it did! Those patients that wrote down their goals recovered much faster than those who didn’t write down a thing.

The great lesson here, a lesson that I’ve preached to myself and others for years, is that we greatly improve our chance of success many times over if we simply write our goals down! And I mean all our goals: financial, physical, family, social etc. I also suggest that you put down the dates and/or times by which you want to accomplish your goals.

This isn’t only for long-term goals. I’ve found it extremely useful to write down my next day’s goals the night before as well. It’s far more likely that I will get those tasks done if they are written out and ready for me when I awake.

So, if you don’t already have the habit of writing down what you are going to do, this would be a great time to start. As a matter fact, write down this one now – that you are going to always write down your plans and goals! That’s a perfect start towards accomplishing your goals in this new year.

 

Something New, Near or Far

The human mind is an incredible machine. Our brain can remember tons of facts, experiences, feelings, and more. I find it so very interesting and exciting that, after struggling to remember some situation, name, or fact and giving up, later that day or even the next day, like magic, while I’m not even trying, the answer will suddenly pop into my head. I’m pretty sure you’ve experienced the same phenomena.

Yes, our brains are amazing but they do need to be fed. There is this super great thing we can do for our brains when we are feeling down in the dumps. It’s a simple little thing called “novelty”. Our brains crave novelty! Being exposed to something new and totally different than we’ve ever seen or experienced before does amazing things for our brains.

Today I was very bored and a bit down (Thanks COVID for picking on me and, well, pretty much everybody!) That bad ole virus has kicked our social life in the face and it wiped out the wife’s and my travel plans this year. Nearly every year we fly to Paris and from there go on to visit new countries, seeing so many new sights and faces. We are missing the novelty that we get when we travel to new places and meet new and different people.

With my brain being a bit down, I have certainly had the urge to see something novel lately and a few days ago, I knew that I was going to need that very, very soon. So, I did a very simple thing that didn’t take an airplane or a lot of time. We just jumped in my car and started driving.

I drove to places, neighborhoods, and business districts that I had never seen and it worked! Yes, we found novelty in places nearby. Seeing pretty much anything that is new to your eyes and brain can lift your feelings and attitude. It was only a one-hour drive but, wow, it was a great lift for my brain and mood and it was such a simple thing to do.

In today’s COVID world, and especially around Christmas and New Year times, we need to push ourselves to seek out and find those new sights, sounds, people, and experiences that stimulate our brains. Yes, it may take some thinking and planning but that’s not hard to do.

So, I am going to challenge myself, my family, friends, and, yes, you the reader to look for and find things to see, do, and experience, especially now as we start a new year. Let’s all go do it and make 2021 and great new and exciting year!

A Sterling Mentorship

A couple of days ago I was re-reading one of my old journals and came across a truly inspiring and motivating letter I had tucked in there from 1978 from one of my mentors. He was so helpful to me, both personally and through some of the 22 books that he wrote. This mentor was Sterling W. Sill, a great thinker and motivator.

Here are a few of the things he said in the letter he sent me back in 1978 which I just loved.

“I appreciate very much your thoughtful letter of October 1. I think you have the attitude of a winner.” He went on to write, “I think you are a great person, Mark, and I think you are about a dozen times greater now than before.” I was so amazed that he appreciated one of my letters as he was my idol.

Sterling also quoted something that Shakespeare once said that I thought was very enlightening: “The best men are sometimes molded out of faults.”

He went on to say, “Someone who never made a mistake isn’t likely to be going any place very important. And sometimes, I think, somebody needs somebody to help lift him up outside of himself. He needs some assurances from someone who can take a position of precedence over the arguments of his own self-accusation.”

It was so strange and wonderful that one of my idols had given me so much credit and so many complements. In re-reading his letter, it struck me that any of us can not only learn great lessons from great people but we can also pay it forward and help other people. Believe me, they will thank you for the rest of their lives just like I thank Sterling and so many other mentors. I owe him so much and will remember him for the rest of my life.

 

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