Always Living Large

So, I’ve been having a bit of a stressful but exciting week as I work on a big real estate deal. Yes, sometimes, even though I’ve been doing this for decades, making deals can be a little taxing but as Mitt Romney, former GOP candidate for President once said to the graduating students at Utah Valley University about experiencing a fulfilling and purposeful life,  “One thing you’re going to have to do is live a ‘large life’”. What great advice. That is something all of us need to pay attention to. We need to go out and do it and do it our entire lives.  I wrote about this some 4 years ago, but I think it’s worth a rerun. So, here’s basically what I wrote in May of 2015:

So many times, we hesitate to “live large”. Why? Because most of the time we fear that we will fail. “Failures don’t have to define who you are,” Romney had gone on to say in that Utah Valley University speech. “Through all my occupations, I have experienced successes and failures. I am asked what it felt like to lose to President Obama. Well, not as good as winning. Failures aren’t fun, but they are inevitable.”

How about you?  Have you racked up a lot of failures or just a few?  It seems to me, from my experience, that the number of failures I’ve had is in direct proportion to how large I’ve tried to live.  So, yes, I’ve had a ton of failures but some of those have led to some huge successes. And the reason for those successes was that I learned so much from my failures.

I remember one huge loss that I learned a valuable lesson from which lead me to some very, very large successes.  What happened was I decided to lend a large amount of money with a restaurant as collateral.  Big mistake on my part! Why? Because I don’t know much about that kind of business so if it failed, I certainly wouldn’t know how to run it. And guess what? It did fail and I lost almost all of what I had loaned.

What did I learn?  Well first I found out that restaurants have a very high rate of failure and second, I learned that I shouldn’t stray from what I know best.  Not that I shouldn’t ever loan money but if I do, I should loan it on assets that I understand as well as being on improved real estate which, ideally, would also be income producing.

I forged ahead and made many millions of dollars’ worth of loans that were backed up by real estate and was very successful.  Later I discovered that I could do even better by owning the right kind of income producing properties. I also, very successfully ventured into the development of condos and warehouses, where the profits were even bigger although they did come with increased risks but in that case, those were risks I was willing to take.  And much, if not most of that success, came from lessons learned from my failures and my trying to “live large”.

Romney’s words are not just for graduating students. They are wise words for us at any age!

Measuring a Country’s Greatness

The subjects of my blogs are mainly about Health and Wealth but this week I’ve just got to say something about the race for the White House.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone that seems more non-presidential than the guy with the bad hair who never talks with any specifics and who acts like a child.  Have you noticed how Mr. Donald Trump loves to call people names and constantly tells people how great he is?

Yes, we all did that when we were kids, but that’s what kids do and most of us grow up and stop doing those kind of juvenile things. He reminds me of Vladimir Putin who also just can’t seem to get over himself and how wonderful he thinks he is. Most of us, as we age, realize that we are not near as important as we once thought we were.

And how about Trump’s big slogan for his campaign: I’m going to make American great again”. I would love to ask Trump a few questions if he would agree to give me a yes or no answer.  The first question would be, “Mr. Trump, do you think America is a good country?” The next question would be, “Do you think America is a VERY good country?” And lastly, “Don’t you think America is a great country?”

Personally, I don’t think America ever stopped being “great”.  In fact, it seems to me that our country gets better every year.  I’ve been to 84 countries in my life and lived a couple years in the Middle East in Ankara and Turkey and a couple years in England and Wales, and from my distant and far observations, it has always been a pretty great country.

Are we perfect? Of course not. Are we the best country in the world?  That is a pretty broad question. Admittedly, we are not the best in everything but we do excel in quite a number of important areas—our firms are at or near the forefront in technological advances, especially in computers and in medical, aerospace, and military equipment.*But just like a normal human being, we need to keep working at it to make us and our country better.

Some people would disagree with me when I say our country gets better every year and might point out the many terrible things they see every day and night on the news.  My response to that is pretty simple.  The news, especially the cable news that runs 24 hours a day, is in the business of making money and they need to fill up those 24 hours and they know they get a much higher viewership when their news stories are sensational.  Watching the news gives us the impression that things are much worse than they really are.

Since 1980, our murder rate has dropped by more than half and our gross domestic product, a primary indicator of economic health, is 6 times what it was. The US is recognized as having the largest and most technologically powerful economy in the world and we are second in the world only to Switzerland in quality of life indexes.* So I say to my readers and to Mr. Donald Trump, “America is already great and I am proud to be an American!”

*Statistics and quotes from Nation Master/www.nationmaster.com