There are many things which give pleasure in this life. Few of them, though, rival the pleasure which can be gained from seemingly small things that take up little space in our lives. I want to highlight one of these recent small pleasures in my own life: expanding your field of view to find that the solution you were looking for was just outside of your old frame.
Recently, I have been doing a lot of puzzle-solving to figure out what works in this new real estate market. As rates went up and more deals started to fall through, I knew that a shift needed to be made. For months now, I have been working long hours to uncover what the solution is. There’s always a solution. I know this to be 100% true. There’s always a right product for any given market, and there’s always a market willing to buy.
For months, though, the solution did not come to me. The long nights and early mornings got harder and harder to bear over time without any visible progression. All of this frustration builds and spills into other parts of your life as it goes on. I’ve quickly realized that you need to be on your A-game with every other category in your life to survive this. It’s far too easy to let frustration turn into bad habits. This requires you to treat your good habits like treasures; you have to polish them and keep them close.
Among your habits, you have to watch the habit of complaining the closest. It is so easy to turn problem-solving into complaining. When you’re in the thick of things and you lose track of your short term goal for even a moment, you soon find yourself solving a problem for which there is no solution. When this happens, all of the variables become points of complaint. You will shamefully catch yourself twenty minutes into a rant to your wife and realize that you have completely lost the momentum of execution. I know this from personal experience.
All of a sudden, ‘eureka!’ After months of trials, I realized something: I am operating off of rules of business that are not immutable. I might be wrong! In fact, the odds are so good that I would bet all I have on it!
Never before have I thought such a realization could be so liberating and advantageous. You may laugh, but realizing that I have been operating under a binding notion of how I can/need to provide value to the market is awesome. Because I do not know all things, and the statistical chances of me being wrong are high, this means that this is very likely the factor which has been holding me back. If you had been driving based on a speed limit that you thought applied to every road, everywhere, all the time, you would be absolutely thrilled to find out that it only applies on some of the roads some of the time.
The joy of this realization is immense, and it is a good lesson for the future. Sometimes, the problem is best solved by a negative solution, the taking away of something, rather than a positive solution, the addition of something. Often, the addition of dead weight is just as fatal as the subtraction of a vital function. We would all do well to remember this when faced with similar problems. Guiding principles are only helpful insofar as they help us win and no farther.