I wanted to share with you for a moment one of the insights, the ahas, something that I’ve known was there, but it was really brought home to me last week during my personal retreat. One of the things that I do and I’ll admit kind of haphazardly off and on, it’s not as consistent as it should be, is I journal. And so I was going back through some journals from five years ago while I was on my retreat and I made the comment on this live that everyone starts somewhere, and I just want to bring these out because it really was kind of insightful to go, wow, it wasn’t that long ago that things were not as easy and things were much more challenging. So I’m going to read you two quick journal entries out of that journal.
One is from December 2nd of 2013. My wife had been given a $20 gift card to go shopping at a clothing store at the mall and they wouldn’t accept the gift card because the items she was going to buy had been already down. Now because we couldn’t use the gift card, we couldn’t even afford to buy those $20 or less than $20 worth of clothing. Okay. That was five years ago, a little over five years ago. Come up here to January 6th of 2014 and one of the things that I note in here is today I’m looking for business breakthroughs. Our cashflow is very bound up at the moment. I have even been unable to clear a $4.95 per month subscription. So I hope you follow that. A $20 clothing purchase at the mall we couldn’t swing because the gift card couldn’t be used, and I couldn’t clear a $4.95 per month monthly subscription.
And when you look back, that’s five years ago, wasn’t that long ago. And here’s the thing. So many entrepreneurs give up when things get tough. They give up when they meet those challenges. Now what you don’t see in there is I began to really work on personal development in the fall of 2013 and continuing on into 2014 and I made some serious investments into having others teach me to think differently. And so when you get to the fall of 2014, we were buying our first real estate properties. And so a lot of things changed very rapidly for us and have continued to do so.
But sometimes people look at where we’re at today and they think, gosh, it must be nice to be you or how lucky are you? What they don’t see is that struggle. They don’t see when I couldn’t pay a $4.95 subscription bill. They don’t see when I didn’t have the money to buy $20 worth of clothes at the mall. So I want to leave you with that today. And I also want to encourage you, if you’re not doing it already, journal, even if you’re not always consistent with it, just seeing those, if you will, footprints along your journey are helpful. I use an application called Penzu. It’s free and Penzu will sync up across all of your devices. So anyway, a couple of thoughts for you today. Hope you have an amazing day and I’ll talk to you again soon.
