How To Rise Above The Chaos as a Real Estate Investor

Improve Yourself Daily

I think we all want to be the best.  Of course, if we’re honest with ourselves, we know we’ll never be the best at everything we do.  If we’re brutally honest with ourselves, we know that we may never be the best at anything we do.  But the desire is still there.  And if we can harness it effectively, we can use it to drive ourselves to ever greater heights, constantly improving ourselves every single day in a never-ending cycle.

The key, as I mentioned above, is effectively harnessing our drive to be the best.  We can’t go into every day telling ourselves we have to be the best.  It won’t work.  We’ll burn ourselves out almost immediately from the constant frustration and disappointment of reflecting on our day and realizing that we weren’t, in fact, the best at anything we did that day.  Instead, we must approach each day with the attitude that we want to be better than we were the day before in some way.  Even if it’s something small, we should still take note and congratulate ourselves for making even a small improvement.  If we do that, we can easily keep up this cycle – remember that it’s a never-ending cycle – throughout our lives, rise above the chaos that surrounds us and become better and better.

I’ll give you a personal example.  I decided about a year ago that I really wanted to learn a programming language.  I’m not sure why.  I guess maybe it seemed like such a mysterious, forbidden world to be able to bend a computer to my will just by writing some lines of code.  Maybe it was all the pop culture references that make programmers seem cool in a nerdy way.  Whatever it was, it seemed like such an insurmountable goal that I would never achieve.  I mean, come on.  Have you ever tried to read code?  It’s not even Greek; it barely looks human sometimes.

After false-starting a few times in pursuit of this goal, I recently had an interesting task come across my desk.  One of my team members approached me with an Excel spreadsheet that several other team members need to fill out each week as a sort of progress report on what they’ve accomplished that week.  They then need to save it with a specific file name and the current date and send it over to a specific person who then processes each spreadsheet into a master spreadsheet that ultimately gets shared with me as part of our weekly meeting.  It’s taken several weeks, but by breaking this task into a series of small steps, Googling the crap out of it and putting some time in every day to work on it, I’ve been able to start learning VBA and using it to automate this relatively boring weekly report.

So, take your goals, break them into small milestones, commit to making a small improvement every day, stay positive and never give up.  You can rise above the chaos.  You can improve.  You can be better tomorrow than you were today.