“Pain don’t hurt” or so says Dalton in the movie Road House. I loved that movie and I love that quote. The truth is pain does hurt, but sometimes the temporary and manageable hurt creates success!
Over the years I have focused my energy on teaching skills, techniques, and strategies to help real estate investors get rich in real estate. I gave my first presentation to a live audience in 2006 and have since taught thousands of investors how to make money. I have written countless articles, reports, and a book. I love getting notes in the mail, emails, or people approaching me telling me how I helped change their life. Someone recently told me that my book helped them make $40,000 on their very first deal and that they would never have done that deal without the book. You can probably tell that I have a passion and am driven to help people reach their goals, but there was a very important piece I was missing when it comes to helping people succeed.
Most investors cannot get rich with skills, techniques, and strategies alone. There are many broke investors with all the information they need to make a fortune–what most people need is the understanding of what it ACTUALLY takes to be successful. So, what truly separates the doers from the non-doers?
Managing Fear
The reality to success is that fear, or the lack of controlling fear, brings defeat. Success comes after you learn how to manage fear. I gave a presentation years ago where I focused on techniques and strategies to manage fear. To this day, it is the presentation I am most proud of. I spent time discussing how decisions are made based on pursuit of pleasure, or the attempt to avoid pain. Pain, even when it is not physical, is a stronger motivator than pleasure, which is why so many choose to avoid it.
The fear that you feel before you make a decision is your body telling you to avoid pain. This presentation, which I gave twice, brought up a lot of emotion in me and the audience. I think one of the reasons I had several people approach me in tears is because they know they have not been taking action towards their success in an effort to avoid pain. They realized that what they have done by avoiding pain is creating more pain because of their lack of success. That is a hard thing for someone to realize. My guess is people left that presentation being hard on themselves or annoyed at me for pointing it out. What I care about is that I was able to help someone in that crowd understand what was holding them back so that they can implement strategies to propel themselves forward. The past is the past and serves only as an educator for the greatness that is about to come.
Pain Don’t Hurt
What is important to understand is that pain supports us. Success is developed by experiencing pain. If you look back through time you will see that all successful people had to endure pain before their triumph and that all people experience what could be considered large amounts of pain. No one is immune to this. What makes successful people successful is they can embrace it and learn from it. I also believe that once you start to embrace psychological pain and you’re able to reflect on it, you will have no choice but to grow and become more and more successful. Things that scare most of us like being embarrassed or being rejected are things that make us stronger, smarter, and better equipped to succeed.
Pursuing Success in 2022
As we move through 2022, I would love for you to understand the reason you make the decisions you make. One way to do this is to think about a decision you made and go through the thought process you had before you made the decision. Many times, the thought process is in your subconscious mind and can take a little effort to expose, but going through this exercise will help you recognize why decisions were made so you can help yourself make different decisions going forward. Thinking through a specific thought process you have had, can you see that fear dominated your thoughts and that the fear was your mind attempting to avoid pain? Could you have thought through the worst-case outcome of that pain and get comfortable living with it if it occurred? Could you have focused your thoughts on the pleasure that was possible? Obviously, you can mess this up and create pain through failure, disappointment, and rejection, but none of that is that bad. In fact, it is necessary. Successful people fail and successful people focus on the pursuit of pleasure over the desire to avoid pain. Making that shift virtually guarantees your success. And you never know, if you try something… it just might work.