The Art of Knowing Thyself

by Mike Farmer

Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’ve just finished a morning of settng up showings and dealing with the small fires of an upcoming closing. I’ve had a hectic last two weeks and it’s making my head swirl trying to balance online and offline. I think it’s important to maintain the discipline of online efforts but I realize why some people give it up after a few weeks of dwindling excitement.

I’ve been going at the online deal gradually now for five years. I’m still not a top notch nerd, but I get the basics and know how to fnd what I need and hire out what I refuse to do. I’m not good at design and that’s the next hurdle I have to hop over. I’m ok with simple and ugly if it’s functional, but I realize the need for style and form to go along with function.

This is not at all what I wanted to write about; I just swerved a bit and I’ll try to work it in — I’m in free-association mode here lately. Recently, I wrote on Bigger Pockets about “information” and ended with the transformation to “knowledge sharing”.

I’m grateful to all the online players who have gained knowledge and who share their knowledge freely, it’s truly a new world of learning processes that we’re entering. Those who are eager to learn have resources galore at their fingertips. The problem is time management and discipline. Time management and discipline have never been so important. It’s a huge challenge to find time to develop all the plans of business and still find time for entertainment, family and socializing.

So much is being thrown at us that filters are necessary to sift the wheat from the chaff. I never knew there were so many blogs and social media avenues (I just got a “personal” invitation from one this morning I’d never heard of – Apsense.)

Trying to keep up with two business blogs and whatever Bonzai is (a playpen), running a brick and mortar busines, plus dealing with clients and closings, maintaining friendships, spending time with my wife, checking in with my grown kids, spending time on hobbies, on and on, gets overwhelming at times, but you just reach down and gather a little more juice and go at it.

“Never trust any thought you have while sitting down” — Friedrich Nietzsche

I don’t have much to add to the technical conversation that goes on online — I listen and learn, although I don’t naturally gravitate toward the technical. I know a little about marketing (one of my positions in my other life was Marketing Director of a regional hospital, and I once worked under a marketing genius who was the youngest Vice President Ford Motor Co. had ever had – he was there when Iacocca was there.) I know quite a bit about management — I once managed 200 people as General Manager of a third party distibution center for Wal-Mart.

But this is not my resume, I have a point. The most important knowledge for anyone, regardless of what they do in business or life in general, is knowledge of self. Know thyself, Socrates advised. Abraham Maslow called it self actualization. Whatever it’s called, it’s the process of continually designing, creating, molding our life.  This is what gets lost in the daily Grand Hoopla and requires the most discipline, for without it the whole structure is compromised. Peter Senge calls it personal mastery and talked about holding creative tension between where we are and where we want to be. He said many people have trouble talking anout their vision because they feel helpless and hopeless in the attainment of the vision.

However, he said a part of personal mastery is creating creative energy in the tension so that we are pulled toward our vision, rather than giving up to relieve the tension. Too many people give up before the miracle happens. The stress of trying to achieve sucess and happiness can wear a person down who hasn’t built the confidence and discipline to continue in the face of difficulty.

That’s why I think working on ourselves and our mindsets, our spirit, if you will, is at least as important, if not moreso, as working on our websites, marketing strategies and business networks. Being able to turn anxious goals into a creative process builds patience in us so that we can gradually work toward accomplishment as a way of life, one goal at a time.

For many people it takes a total psychic change before they can begin putting techiques and strategies to work in a productive way, because their old mindset creeps in and all the doubts and fears continue to lead them to accept something less. The tension of living with unresloved problems and unrealized dreams is painful rather than joyful, draining rather than energizing. These things I know as well as the greatest experts alive because I wrestled with them for years. 

I believe the reason most people fail is not because they don’t have enough information, or enough skills, or enough knowledge of technolgy, but because they don’t have enough knowledge of themselves and what it takes internally, mentally and emotionally and spiritually, to succeed. How do you you change this?

It’s my belief that the main network a person must build is a learning network built on honesty and openness and mutual caring. A person doesn’t need back-slappers, false self-esteem builders, unrealistic positive-thinking goons, but a true netwwork of honest individuals who will speak the truth and care about the real psychic change that needs to happen, and who understand the process of true learning and the art of personal mastery, or self-actualization. Where do you find this?

You search (I’m talking to myself and anyone who needs it). Perhaps these individuals can be found at work, or in social clubs you belong to. Perhaps you can find some of the answers in books. Perhaps you can find groups online dedicated to true learning and not superficial “friendships”. All I know is that it’s up to the individual to find it — a coach maybe, or just a good honest friend with the same interests.

Too many people overlook this basic, fundamental prerequisite for success and excellence and go straight to the techniques, strategies and gadgets. And too many people, like I’ve done in the past, mistakenly think they have arrived and have “mastered” the self. Senge, when talking about mastery, made it clear he was not talking about dominance over something, rather he was talking about an art that is continously practiced lest you lose it.