Simple Concept – Not So Simple To Execute – Grow a Pair

by Jeff Brown

Real Estate Investments Broker

Author website

As if it happened yesterday, I remember having just began seriously bodybuilding with a (understatement) stern trainer, a world champ who had no patience for anything less than all-out effort. One day my partner and I were following the workout he’d given us, when our trainer, Gene, walked up without preamble. “This is a man’s gym. If you girls are gonna keep playin’ around, get outa here!” What? Huh?

From that day forward, my workout partner and I never gave less than 100% again, at least if Gene was in the same hemisphere. He was that scary, and we were, well, 16. Gene wouldn’t let us fail. Our goal was to end up competing — which we did about 30 months later. In that time we became the more or less adopted sons of nearly the entire gym population. Our growth musta been fun to watch. What I thought would take a few months though, took over two years to accomplish. The goal was met though, as we both competed, and credibly so.

One might think I’d of learned my lesson about goals through that experience.

Much is made of setting and achieving goals. Dad was a crazy-ass goal setter. The guy had the ability to set a goal, become Stephen King obsessed, yet without anyone knowing about it. Try that sometime. One day after his third Jack on the rocks at the Club, his friends got him to share with them the 10 year goal he’d set for his real estate company over five years earlier. They were dumbfounded, and proceeded to ‘let him down gently’ by explaining how he’d maybe been a mite too optimistic.

It wasn’t ’till almost a year later that he told them he’d already accomplished that 10 year goal a few months before the first conversation. He’d done what they told him was impossible to accomplish in a decade, in just over half the time.

Setting goals and achieving them are entirely different things, an understatement of which I’m sure you’re painfully aware. We’ve all learned that one the hard way, right? I sure did.

I’m putting the finishing touches on a six month goal I set almost two years ago. 🙂 Part of that was me overreaching a bit, but mostly it was due to too much real life insinuating itself into the process. Could I have done it in the six month period? Probably — but it woulda been a Pyrrhic victory. Nevertheless, it’s done.

Our goals’ successful attainment — how long it takes — is contingent upon so many outside forces. But in the end their ultimate attainment, time notwithstanding, is up to us.

In my experience there have been two approaches. The first is how Dad almost always checked off goal after goal. Big, small, it didn’t matter to him. His way was to crush the goal’s spirit. 🙂 If he couldn’t devote massive and continuous effort, he wouldn’t set the goal. It was his makeup. Me? Like many of you, I’ve done my time serving the sentence of the seven day weeks, 12+ hours a day workload. But not for five consecutive years. Who the hell does that?

Someone who wants something very badly, that’s who. At the beginning when money was, um, tight, he’d eat peanut butter and onion sandwiches for lunch. You can’t make that up.

The second approach is simply to be remorselessly ruthless in the daily pursuit of our various Holy Grails Goals — even though we’re unable to spend every waking hour in the crusade to reach them. Whether it takes six months or a couple years, you’re gonna be that much older anyway, right? 🙂 Might as well do what it takes.

Dad once told me unrealized goals illustrate without pity, how little they mattered to us. In a particularly brutal conversation in my mid-20’s, he told me my goals in real estate would never become reality, as it was clear to him I hated the business. He was, of course, right. I was in the house side then, and detested almost everything about it. Shortly thereafter I switched to the investment side, and the rest is history.

We tend to reach the goals for which we carry wickedly naked desire — the kinda desire that brings with it the willingness to plow the same south 40 day after day ’till harvest time — whenever that is.

Goals should be inevitable, a matter of when, never if.

The fat girl whose goal has been to get in shape for the last 20 years? She’s fine with being fat. Feedin’ her face is more important than her so-called goal. I’ve been there myself. The real estate agent who wants to make more than his part time workin’ wife will do just that when he makes the decision to do so. Same with us and our business goals. Not happy with where you are? Been settin’ goals and missin’ ’em by a mile? Try starin’ at the clueless moron in the mirror to figure out who’s to blame. Sometimes it’s another person who acts as your mirror. With me it was Dad, one brutal son-of-bitch.

The bastard was right though.