One Shining Goal
mowing it took me many hours every Saturday. So one day I hired someone for $50 to do it for me. That same day my dad happened to stop by to say hi, and when he saw someone else mowing the lawn and found out I’d paid $50 for this service, he completely flipped his lid. He said, “I can’t believe you, paying someone to do something you could do yourself! You are going to go broke! You are not too good to mow your own lawn.” Given that this was my father’s “story” at the time, his response makes perfect sense. Being born during the Depres- sion and raised amid lots of scarcity had fostered this way of thinking. He didn’t like borrowing money. He did everything he could himself and managed his affairs the old-school way, which unfortunately hindered his opportunity to make great money. He is smart as heck and a hard worker, but that wasn’t enough. His story kept him anchored to an income that never rose above $30,000 a year no matter how hard he worked. He was on a treadmill for many years. Luckily I got him off of it. He has changed in a massive way since then, but at that moment he was darn mad. He left so fast in his car that the tires spun gravel all over the yard as he peeled out, not even saying good-bye. I was upset my dad was mad at me, but I realized how wrong he was. That lawn at that big old apartment complex used to take me a half a day to mow. At that period of my life, I was fixing wrecked cars and selling them, while also looking for and negotiating my next real estate deal, and in that same half day that I paid $50 for someone to mow the lawn I could fix or even sell a car or I could put together a real estate deal that would make me far more than $50. My time for that half day fixing and selling cars was worth $500 to $1,000, maybe even more. So when you can pay someone to do something that you are not good at, or pay for something to be done by someone else and create a return on investment on what you pay, then you can concentrate on the things that make you the most money.
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