Balance is Bullshit

What’s up, everybody? Hey, Mike Hambright here with FlipNerd. Welcome back to the show. Hey, today I want to talk to you about why balance is bullshit, right? We kind of look at people and we assume that life is great and life is grand and we expect that for ourselves. We put that burden on ourselves that everything should just be kind of smooth sailing and easy, and it’s bull crap. And that’s what I want to talk about today.
Welcome to “Real Estate Investing Secrets.” We are all looking for freedom and the opportunity to live better, more fulfilling lives, but most of us were trained our entire lives to work for someone else and chase their dreams. How can we use real estate investing as a vehicle to achieve financial freedom? My life is dedicated to answering your real estate investing questions and helping you build an investing business that allows you to change your life and the world around you, and to enable you to turn your dreams of financial freedom into a reality. My name is Mike Hambright from flipnerd.com and your questions get answered here on “The Real Estate Investing Secrets” show.
What’s up, everybody. Hey, I want to talk today about some things I’ve been on my mind, which is really around balance in your life. And I’ll kind of start off by saying, if I had to give this a title here, I would say, “Balance is Bullshit.” And I’d love to have your, kind of, feedback on what you think about this as well. So, some things that I’ve been kind of personally struggling with or I see other people struggling with, and I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately, truthfully because I’ve been out of balance, which is what’s caused some of the issues that I’m having right now.
And I think there’s this kind of myth out there that things are perfect or should be perfect or, you know, a lot of movies that we watch, if you don’t know, there are some people that have talked about, about this topic before about how most successful movies have this kind of common structure, right? Where everything works out or it doesn’t, but it’s kind of just flows, right? And our personal lives don’t really work that way. And, of course, you know, we’re not . . . our personal lives are not being orchestrated by a director, right? Necessarily.
We’re the director, but we’re all kind of novices in our own lives. And so, anyway, what I wanted to talk about is that I think being out of balance is what makes us stronger. What makes us stronger people, stronger humans, better parents, better fathers, better businesspeople, better mothers, all those things, right? And so, you know, sometimes . . . And I do a lot of stuff on social media. I do obviously crapload of content on FlipNerd and I have a lot of other friends that do too.
And a lot of these people in the industry that you may follow are friends of mine, right? And I’ve gotten to know a lot of them personally, and they’ve gotten to know me personally. And I think, you know, when you get to know people a little more real, I’m not saying that anybody is misleading anyone, but we tend to get on social media and talk about, “What’s working well, things are great, things are awesome, I just did this big deal,” things like that, right? And we don’t talk so much about the negative side and I think actually, there’s a little bit of an evolution going on there where people are sharing more of that. Maybe that’s part of what I’m talking about today.
But if you think about how things get stronger in life, if you are . . . if you go to the gym and you work out, I mean, you’re honestly . . . you’re tearing your muscles and stuff and reshaping them and making them stronger, right? If you get cut or you get in an accident or something happens, you get scar tissue and it makes that area stronger. It doesn’t mean that it looks prettier necessarily, right? There might be some scars there, but that part of your body is now stronger and more resilient probably to future damages, right?
And so, our personal life is like that. So, anyway, my example right now is I feel like I have a bunch of stuff kind of falling through the cracks really more on the personal side of my life than the business side, but probably because I’ve taken on so much on the business side, I’m kind of a glutton for punishment that way. But anyway, just kind of been feeling the past couple of days that there’s some things that are falling down and reflecting on how to get better at that.
And that’s kind of where this topic came up is like if you have absolute balance, you’re not gaining that scar tissue. You’re not gaining those tears that make you stronger, right? You’re just kind of there and you’re not more resilient when something bad does happen. And so, I think kind of going back and forth in this pendulum and constantly being out of balance but looking to go back to balance and moving back and forth is what makes us stronger. And I’m hopeful for that because I’ve been out of balance for a while and I’m anxious to kind of start moving back the other way or get in balance.
And part of it is I was just gone on a trip for over a month. I’m actually going on another trip, a vacation next week, and then I have Investor Fuel shortly after that where I’ll be gone for about 10 days. And so, you know, sometimes people see that on social media, they see things like that and, “Wow, you get to travel, you get to do all these things.” And it is true, but I’ll tell you stuff falls through the cracks when that happens. And I will say that the goal really is to not get too far out of balance. Right?
And so, whenever . . . we do travel a lot, I’m not saying these things to brag, I’m telling you that it’s not all the land of milk and honey, when you see things on social media, even with me, I’m not trying to lie. I am doing these things, right? But when I go on a vacation or a trip, a lot of the stuff is business travel and I’m gone for a week or two, it doesn’t really throw me out of balance that far. A little bit, right? But I can recover from it.
When I was gone for over a month and we were bouncing all over the place, which made things even more complicated, I’m much further out of balance than I should be. And that’s what’s causing the pendulum swing back the other way and trying to find that balance again. But you can’t stay at balance. It’s a constant struggle, right? Like, to get to balance is a journey. It’s a journey of constantly being out of balance and that’s okay. That’s okay. That’s what I’m here to tell you is that it’s okay. Things are going to seem crazy sometimes, but that’s what makes us stronger. Those experiences, that discomfort, whatever it is, just don’t get too far out of balance where you can’t come back. Right? If you think of this pendulum that’s swinging back and forth, if you go upside down, well, that’s not good, right? So, we have to prepare for that.
One of the other things that has really been on my mind in this regard is that I’ve noticed this about myself. And it’s something, getting a little personal here, that I don’t like about myself or what I allow to happen. And that is that . . . and I know other entrepreneurs struggle from this as well, is that we say we’re doing these things for our family or we’re working hard to, you know, do things for our family. That’s our why, is my family. Everything is for my family. I do believe that. But I also have this weird thing where sometimes I will allow my family or my health, things that should be the most important to me, my health, my family, to take a backstage pass to all the other stuff that I have going on, right?
So, I’ll address other issues in my business first. And not just when I’m out of balance, but in the course of normal things. I’ll give you a couple of examples. You know, I’m in a lot of circles of successful entrepreneurs. Of course, in our mastermind Investor Fuel or people that I coach and mentor, advise, just a bunch of personal friends. It’s very common for us to talk about, “We’re following EOS, we have a level 10 meeting.” In fact, I have a level 10 meeting with my team this morning, and we have scorecards, we’re looking at P&Ls, like, we’re managing our business through scorecards and reports and processes and stuff.
But I never do that with my personal life. Like, why don’t I have a scorecard for my personal life? I’ve actually tried it a couple of times and gave up kind of quickly and be like, “Eh, everything’s fine,” right? But the things that are the most important, right? That could be on that scorecard, “How am I doing as a husband? How am I doing as a father? How am I doing on my health? How am I doing on this and that?” Things that are much more important than my business or our businesses. Why aren’t we keeping scorecards for that? Right?
And so, I’m kind of committed at this point to get back to that because, you know, like I said, I’m out of balance and I’m more out of balance in some personal areas. I’m not having . . . I don’t want to give you guys that . . . starting rumors. I don’t have any health issues or anything like that, but I certainly could focus more on my health. There’s no doubt. And my family, I’ve been thinking about it a lot because I have a son that’s turning 12 next week and it’s just like, “Man, time is going by so fast,” and I tend to, you know, if I could go back in time, which I can’t, I would do things differently.
I would spend more time with . . . I spend a lot of time with my family, but sometimes it’s not focused time. I’m there, but I’m not present. And so, anyway, just wanted to kind of share some things that are on my mind today. This, actually, is a podcast episode. I’m going to upload it to Facebook as well. And in the podcast, we’ll add a link to the Facebook post. I’d love to get your feedback on it. So, if you haven’t noticed on the podcast, I’m sharing more and more of my thoughts and stuff, not just interviews and tips and stuff like that, but, you know, I just feel like . . . I just had a birthday myself, so maybe there’s a little bit of Yoda coming out of me like I’m getting more wise and trying to think more about why I make these decisions or why I do these things and how to prevent myself.
And so, the problem is that sometimes we find joy in the struggle and I think that that’s okay if it improves us professionally, but some people, and I find this about myself, thrive in the chaos sometimes. Like, I feel like I like to overcome challenges and problems, so like a cat kind of batting a ball around because it’s bored. Sometimes I find that I do that in my personal life or my business life. I’ll go stir the pot up just so I have some problem to solve. And that, when I hear myself say that, it sounds freaking ridiculous, honestly.
So, depending on where you are in your journey, if you’re new or getting started, then it’s okay to be out of balance. You have to be out of balance because that’s going to give you some scar tissue. It’s going to tear those muscles. It’s going to make you stronger and be able to overcome problems. If you’re an experienced investor and you’re batting the ball around because you’re bored or because you feel like you need to stir the pot, that’s probably a problem. Welcome to the club by the way, but let’s find a way to get out of that club.
So, that’s what I got. I appreciate you guys. I’ll add a link to the showdown below. If you’re not listening to our “Real Estate Investing Secrets” show, we’ve been doing this show, it’s changed names and formats and stuff a little bit, a few times but five and a half years. Five and a half years I’ve been doing this show. I’d love for you to subscribe to that and give us a positive review if you like the show.
And, of course, we have the other show now, “The Investor Fuel Mastermind Show.” I’ll add a link down in the comments for that too. Would love for you to listen and subscribe. That’s a new show. We’ve been just doing that for about six or eight weeks now, and that one is really powerful. A lot of great guests on their sharing their information. So, I appreciate you guys a bunch. Hope you have a great day. Let me know in the comments down below in the Facebook post what your thoughts are on this. I’d love to hear back. I’d love to kind of solve some of my issues together with you. So, have a great day. See you soon.
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