CHAPTER 1: SUCCESS VERSUS HAPPINESS
Success is getting what you want; happiness is wanting what you get.
Looking back, it feels like two life times ago that I got started in this business called Real Estate. I was 27 years old when my wife and I moved to the small town of Summerland, BC to begin the next stage of our life together. We had just returned from traveling around the world for a year and were anxious to ‘plant some roots’ and start a family and career.
Now 12 years later I look and see that our family went from the two of us to 6, I worked for four national Real Estate franchises, started my own Company – South Okanagan Realty, shut it down to retire and go back to learning (earned a degree in Theology) and teaching (homeschooled our two oldest girls) only to get back in the ‘game’ by opening up HomeStar Realty.
It may have been only 12 years and now I am writing a book about how to make money, save time and have fun in Real Estate but it has been ‘full’ of good times, bad times and ‘in between’ times. I have made lots of money in real estate; only to lose it elsewhere. I have learned what works and doesn’t and can multi-task the most important things to get the most out of a day; yet have wasted precious time ‘spinning my wheels’. I have taken 5 times more time off than the average Realtor but would like to live more outside of Real Estate.
It has been in this ‘struggle’ between extremes that I have been able to come to conclusion as to what ‘works’ and what does not. I had got making money down to a ‘process’. I made lots of money, had a beautiful home, kept spending but all the time was seeking something that seemed to be missing. I got to the point that I had to find out what that missing ‘part’ was. In my search my life was turned upside down and round and round. I share that ‘trip’ in this Chapter with you……….
Why are people afraid to make the decisions necessary to bring ‘balance’ to their lives? Whether it’s at home, on the job or just in life itself, we all want to be successful and happy because that is what we have always heard growing up. We have also come to believe that success and happiness are the same. Generally speaking when I ask for definitions of the two I hear: making lots of money in a short period of time and having fun while doing it. Or I hear, aren’t they the same? Happiness is success and success is happiness.
As children when we are asked what we want to be when we grow up we say ‘rich’. Yet, as an adult I have never heard any grown-up say “I am rich” yet we live in the richest part of the world by far. Is it because as adults we spend money we don’t have to buy things we don’t need to impress people we don’t like? I would say YES!! Yes because we don’t know the difference to being successful and being happy. In my life, I have come to know that there is a very important difference to the two. Success is getting what you want; happiness is wanting what you get. Just sit and think about this for awhile. Don’t let me skew what you need to understand here with me feeding your mind what you need to know. What do you want? Think very carefully because whatever that is, you then apply the question of do you want what you get?
Let me hopefully exaggerate things for you to illustrate my point. Success is making enough money to allow yourself, family etc. to do the things you/they want. To do this you work most of the time and can’t really enjoy yourself because you are too focused on succeeding. Well, by all accounts you are succeeding because you are making more money than you ever thought possible (for someone like you) yet your marriage is on the ‘rocks’, your kids don’t like you and to make things worse you don’t even like yourself that much now that you think about it.
You begin thinking to yourself, “why didn’t I think about this sooner”. I’m screwed!! This book is about how you can bring balance into your life so that you can be successful by getting what you want and be happy by wanting what you get. Ultimately what we are seeking is joy and peace. At this stage (joy and peace) we are satisfied where we are and with what we have. That doesn’t mean we quit and never lift a finger again but rather we continuously move forward but at the same time enjoying and being satisfied with what we have now. The now is the most important of anytime. It really is the only time we have control over.
Most of us spend our lives trying to succeed so that we can gain the respect we think we deserve. I have played this game too and have always lost. I now know that the only respect I need is ‘self respect’. If I don’t like and respect myself, nobody else can or will.
Let’s go deeper for awhile so that we get the most out of our time here. Look at it this way, if I go ‘too deep’ and you think I have gone off the ‘deep end’ then your time wasted on this book has been minimized. However, if not then we can both get something of value out of this book.
I hope you can see the difference between success and happiness. To really dig down we really have to go back one further step to understand and formulate our understanding and definition of success and happiness. I need to tell you at the outset that neither of these really holds much relevance unless you have a framework in which to measure and understand them. Ultimately, we can never be happy or successful unless we understand our purpose in life and for life.
To even begin to understand our purpose in life we must ask the $64,000 question: What is my purpose? Unfortunately, too few of us ask this very important question I think in part because we are afraid of the answer and partly because we are never taught to do so. So because we don’t ask we don’t know. What I mean is that if we don’t ask and seek what we are here for we never really feel complete. We believe we are just an attachment of a larger movement known as popular culture.
Everyone’s exploration and ultimately conclusion of who they are and what they are culminates in a life long journey of trials and tribulation. I wish I could advise you that this step is as easy as visiting a palm reader or discovering it on a late night infomercial – but I can’t. For me this process took a long time but at the time seemed very quick. This is my story to give you an idea how tough this part can be.
My father brought me to finally know and accept that life is about choices. We all must make choices and most of the time they are not easy but necessary nonetheless. The 15 years or so leading up to my 30th birthday had been very painful for me. During this time my father had a stroke that hurtled an already upside down life into total chaos. My family is not healthy as a result of my father’s attitude.
The single most difficult choice I have ever had to make was on July 29th, 1998 one day after my 30th birthday. I will never forget the call I received from my brother telling me that he had just found our father lying out by the barn with his head blown off by his favorite high powered shot gun. My father had committed suicide.
I was raised on a small farm in a village of 20-30 people. My father ruled our home with a heavy hand but no heart. He considered himself to be the center of the universe. I was a witness to years and years of hypocrisy, hurt and selfishness. Looking back, my father greatly influenced my life. But now I know that there was a greater influence at play. Amazingly I was permitted to leave home at age 16 to stake out my future in the big city (Vancouver, BC). It was God who orchestrated my destiny and for that I can be nothing but forever thankful.
It was the Grace of God that kept me safe as a 16-year-old in a Big City. I saw Drugs, crime and immoral activities at every turn and the consequences of those ‘poisons’. I am thankful that I was saved from those evil experiences.
While trying to make sense of everything that was going on around me I could not take it anymore. I consider myself a rational, logical and educated individual capable of reasoning through problems and finding solutions. After all, that is what I had always done in the past and it SEEMED to work. But I had reached the point in my life that I discovered that I was not the center of the Universe (sound familiar?). The strangest sensation for me when my father died was that I didn’t feel a sense of loss nor did others closest to him because of how he treated us. It took me a long time to forgive my father and learn to love him; unfortunately it was not in his life but later after his death.
40 minutes after my father’s death on July 29th 1998 while driving on the Coquihalla Hwy I asked Jesus into my life. The instant I did I broke down and cried harder than ever before. I was such a wreck that it was unsafe to drive so I pulled over. Only minutes later, the burden of my past was lifted from my shoulders. From that moment on I put God in the “Drivers seat’ of my Life.
I prayed that afternoon that God would use me and my life to better the world. I also prayed that whether I live 80 more years or eight more days that I would not take life for granted and thank God for each day. I realized that day that Life is a Gift given to each and every one of us from God. It is how we live our life “God’s way” that is the ultimate ‘thank you’ card. It was this painful understanding that becomes necessary to know the difference between success and happiness. It is also this understanding that equates your ultimate purpose in life with love.
Advice: Whatever you do in life you should be able to line it up with your purpose and if it lines up you pursue it and if not you let it go………………
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