CHAPTER 7: LIVE, LIVE AND KEEP LIVING
Don’t spend money you don’t have, to buy things you don’t need to impress people you don’t like!
(Excerpt from my book “Same Same but Different” age 16)………
Because I had expenses and did not receive my family allowance, I had to again enter the ‘slave market’ (work force).
I found my first job about four days after arriving in the 'Big City,' which ironically was about a week after being told that I could not just go to the city and find a job. Well, I did. I was employed pumping gas and propane at the Husky Station where Save-on-Foods is now located at Metrotown in Burnaby.
I was forced to work weekday graveyard shifts, which made life difficult because I was attending junior high school. I would go to school until 4 p.m., run home, do homework, sleep about two hours, and then work from midnight to 8 a.m. I immediately had to rush back to school for another day. After two months of working every third day, I felt myself becoming emotionally and physically undone. I forced myself to quit after getting a job as a bus-boy at the Spaghetti Factory on Water St. in Vancouver. This time the hours were much better: I would work weekends and some weeknights until midnight.
As time past my rent increased, which forced my reserve funds down, and in turn forced me to increase my income. The only way I knew to increase income was to get another job. I did not only get one job, but five new jobs to total six. Besides the Spaghetti Factory, I cooked chicken at Kentucky Fried Chicken, I became a custodian for Blanche Macdonald Modeling School, a stage manager for The Bay fashion shows, and I danced on the streets wearing a sign for Waterhouse Waterbeds and Elite Dry Cleaning. I also appeared in my first professional television commercial in April.
I held on to most of these jobs until I found I was killing myself. On June 1, 1985 I quit all my jobs except for Kentucky Fried Chicken and moved into a Volkswagen Bug.
My manager at Kentucky Fried Chicken offered to let me stay in her husband's Volkswagen car because I was planning to live in a large moveable garbage container. (This probably sounds crazy but believe it or not I was given the idea from my junior high school librarian.)
I had a few things I had to do before calling a 1968 Volkswagen Bug my home. I parked it in a safe place - outside the owner's apartment and across from a fire hall on Marlborough Street seemed to be the best. This location was very convenient because the car was one-and-a-half blocks from where I worked.
The hard task lay ahead after I removed the front seats. I found a wooden pallet in the debris discarded in the early construction of Metrotown Shopping Centre. I wanted a base to level the driver's side floor to make a bed. I did not have a saw to cut the pallet to size so I bought a hand saw for about $10 at Sears, carefully used it, and returned it to get my money back.
I soaped the windows for privacy and put up a shelf for extra comfort. I was now set!
Living in this car saved money, but also had drawbacks: try showering or going to the washroom in a car. I used a nearby service station washroom to wash, brush my teeth, comb my hair, and use the toilet. I usually did my laundry at work in the bathroom sinks and showered at school before classes.
Another major problem was doing homework by the dull beam of a borrowed flashlight late at night. I did not eat very luxuriously. I was always scrimping and saving for "tomorrow." My manager's husband brought bran muffins, blueberry pies, and bread for me regularly for three months.
I was lucky enough to meet a very lovely girl, Janice Partridge, at the end of June of that year. She not only rid me of my loneliness, but her family, especially her mother, nourished me with wonderful meals, allowed me to shower there and cleaned my laundry. Mrs. Partridge also permitted me to stay at their home when the weather was bad and when my back was in terrible condition due to the small sleeping area I had in the car.
My back would get so sore sometimes that I would go sleep in the nearby tennis court so I could straighten my back and body by lying full out. I would often jog early in the mornings to stretch my body and because at about 5 a.m. the city would come to life, making sleep only a dream. I regularly went to bed late and got up early each day.
Believe it or not, I managed to survive one-quarter of a year in that car and lived to tell about my experiences. I would like to say this may not have been the average experience, but I think I have gained a great deal. I only wish other people my age could and would try something out of the ordinary to gain a better and more provocative view of life and their general existence. I am presently working on my first book describing a 'poor boy' from the country, who goes to the city in search of ...Life. Another reason for experiencing these things is to gain a better understanding of how 'poorer' people in Canada live and hopefully, someday work toward solving some of the problems.
I spend 90% of my time at my home office or on a laptop in another country that we may be travelling in at the time. What I don’t do is warm an office chair in a ‘main street’ office somewhere as most realtors do. 90% of my time is planning and 10% of the time is execution. Most of the time I am targeting leads and incoming requests for information. I will establish a relationship with my contacts who become clients before ever going to meet them and/or show them a property. I am not a tour service and I certainly don’t have the time nor the inclination to chauffer people around to see properties. This system seems to work for some but it seems like a poor return of the time spend. If I don’t have a solid lead yet I would rather be playing with our children or helping out a widower, or whatever.
Several years ago now a young man that I had been mentoring and meeting with encouraged me to get back into Real Estate as a way of helping people. During my first stint in real estate I was like everyone else except I was successful because I was prepared to work longer and harder than anyone else. If you asked me what my objective as a realtor was I would have said it was to contact as many people as possible and sell and list as many homes as possible and not stop until I was the number one agent in the area. This objective exhausted me and so I had retired from this way of doing real estate and trained to become a pastor at a local church.
It was what this young man said about helping people that helped me develop my career into what it is today. I have years of experience in business, read dozens of books on doing business successfully, and have a business degree that has given me all the tools to execute all the business practices necessary to be successful. However, my new perspective on life had put much of my knowledge and experience aside and allowed tremendous freedom in the fact that I was just going to focus on helping people. Although I don’t advertise and share this fact, I am now in Real Estate NOT to sell houses but to build relationships. Please don’t misunderstand; I really enjoy buying and selling real estate for people. Since I have adopted this style of looking to serve and help my efforts have always been ‘fulfilling’. If I help someone get what they want and they are happy then I am pleased and will be rewarded. Even if someone was not happy it does not matter to me now because I was successful because my intent was to help them get what they wanted and was not to make money or sell them something.
Advice: In order to live and live well don’t spend money you don’t have, to buy things you don’t need to impress people you don’t like. Find your passion and purpose and live it to the fullest. If you have to set an alarm clock to get yourself up in the morning or go to sleep at night because you are bored then you are not doing what you love. Sleep and food should just be fuel for you to be who God designed you to be.
No comments:
Post a Comment