Personal and business growth can be accelerated by one thing… listen today to find out how!
Matt Henderson (00:05):
Everyone, welcome back to a Friday edition of The Business Mind Podcast. This is Matt. Today we’re going to discuss the fastest way to accelerate your personal and business growth. I’m sure a lot of you are thinking how could it possibly cross over into both areas of my life? My business and my personal, how is that possible? Well, I’ll explain. See, the fastest way there is to go through the most uncomfortable times, and I know we’ve had discussions before in the past about getting uncomfortable in life, getting uncomfortable with where you’re at and what you’re trying to achieve and where you’re trying to go.
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Now let me further explain that. It’s not just being uncomfortable for the sake of being uncomfortable. It’s uncomfortable because you’re stepping outside of what is normal for you. What are the days that are comfortable for you? A lot of us come home and we spend time sitting on the couch, right? And we’ll watch TV, and I think that they’re saying the average American is sitting around and watching TV for somewhere around, I’ll say, I think it was four hours a day, and I heard this may have been even an older quote, so it could possibly be even more than that. I would assume it’s actually more than that now. But they come home and they sit on the couch and they watch TV for four hours a day, right? Now over the course of your lifetime, that’s going to equate to somewhere around 12 years of your life, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 12 years of your life have gone away for you to be “comfortable”.
Well, how comfortable were you during that time? Did you have all the things that you’re looking for? Do you have the income you want? Do you have the house you want? Do you have the actual level of comfort you’re looking for? Or are you still stressing your life a lot? Are you stressing paying the next month’s bills? Are you not happy with your job? These are the things that I’m here to discuss with you, because if you want to accelerate your growth personally and in business, there’s only one way to get there, and it’s by heading into an uncomfortable position.
Brendan Burchard always says it best, “Watch when you knock on the door of opportunity because the only one that is going to answer is work.” And I think we’ve discussed that before, and I think it’s one of the greatest quotes I’ve heard in a long time and it’s an older one from Brendan. But the point is when you’re just sitting on the couch, there is no opportunity. When you’re just watching TV, what is your opportunity? How are you going to get to where you want to get? How are you going to feel better about your life? Are you going to have the things that you want or in 20 or 30 years, are you going to say, “Wow, I can’t believe that life has turned out this crappy for me.” And be the one who’s complaining about what you have put into your own life.
And that being said, I found that this uncomfortable position that I’ve put myself in all the time in order to learn more and gain more clients and grow a business and grow personally and grow my marriage. And in doing all of that, I’ve had a certain level of excitement and happiness and success that seems to be coming from doing these things. And that’s why I wanted to bring it to you guys, because if you’re here listening, the sole purpose of listening to this is to help you grow in your business. And in my opinion, I only feel people grow in their businesses when they also grow personally. Now that shouldn’t sound crazy. In order to continue growing in business, do you have to grow personally? Sure, I think it’s almost going to be inevitable, but that might not be the path to start out on, but it sure might be the one that you end up on.
So how did this all even come up? Well, my wife and I have been … I’ll tell you my story and then maybe it relates to some of you. My wife and I bought a house a long time ago. 21 years ago, I bought a house. And my initial goal as a young man was to purchase this house and make an investment into it because I got what I felt was a good price at the time. And I was going to stay there for about seven, eight years, maybe maximum, and I was going to move to another house, and by then I’d probably be married and be having children. And you know the story, right?
And reality hit, as year 21 came up and I’m in the same house. The same house. Now some of it was in my control, some of it was not. I bought my house in 2000, so it was not a bad time to purchase homes. I actually did all right there, but when it was time to sell in 2006 and I just finished putting a little more money into the house, I didn’t sell because I felt wow, for the first time, time I feel comfortable. See what I just said there, it was the first time I felt comfortable because I had this little home and it’s in a nice little neighborhood and things had just been upgraded a little bit.
And my contractor at the time, when he finished the work for us, well, for me, he said, “Listen, I’m going to tell you something, Matt. Today is the day to put your house on the market.” I looked at him. I said, “Man, I just want to live in the house for a little bit and just be comfortable with the fact that I finally have a piece of the world that I can enjoy when I come home from work.” And he said, “Hey, listen, it’s just my suggestion. As a contractor who’s a little bit older than you, that would be my suggestion.” And I said, “No, thanks. I got this.”
And then 2008 happened and my house, if I had sold it, I would have broke even, and I would’ve gone with no money to go and invest into a new home and I would’ve just had to start over with a larger mortgage. And at the time I had sold my company and I had no business, so I had no current new income and jobs became very scarce because of the great recession that happened and at that point I kind of wound up stuck, and I was stuck being “because I was comfortable”. Comfortable.
Now let me tell you how uncomfortable things got over the next ten years. Extremely. I went into foreclosure. I almost lost everything. I had no job to the point that I was trying to figure out how to pay my bills, feed myself, and feed my dog. And I’ll tell you, my dog won out all of the time because, well, he was my dog. So of course, he got fed first, the bills got paid second, and then everything else came after that. And whatever was left over was all I had. And typically, what was left over was debt.
I would go further into a credit card debt because I now had no money to buy myself food and yet, I needed to eat and I had no more money to fix problems at the home because I didn’t have a job and my business was sold and the economy was terrible. So you know what? I sat around and got real comfortable for way too long and then realized that holy cow, I’ve actually, by being what I thought was comfortable, I actually dug myself into a massive hole, and the only way out was to start getting uncomfortable. And that’s what I did a few years ago like we’ve talked about. I started educating myself. I started learning new things. I began starting new businesses and pushing towards them, failing at them. I failed at businesses. So when I didn’t even have money to lose, I was losing money, but it didn’t matter because I was getting uncomfortable in order to grow myself.
Now today, let’s fast forward, today I’m currently emptying out that house of 21 years because I’m going to sell it. My wife and I have hit the point where it’s time to sell, and since that time we had also purchased an investment property with some of our money and guess what? We decided we’re going to sell that too. So we decided, my wife and I decided, we’re going to get really uncomfortable, and what we’re going to do is we’re going to get rid of everything. We’re going to let it all go. And you know what? It’s about the most uncomfortable thing I’ve ever felt, but in all of my years of educating myself and trying to figure out exactly what to do in life, I realize that the only way I’m getting to the next level here is by being uncomfortable. And when I’m a little uncomfortable, it goes really well.
So I’m excited to see what happens when I’m really uncomfortable because I just sold homes and I have no place to live. Sounds crazy, right? Yeah, it’s a little bit crazy, and that’s fine. But I wanted to let you guys know it’s time. Get uncomfortable. Life isn’t going to change because you just want to do something different. It isn’t going to change because you’re sitting in a place and you’re not stepping outside your comfort zone. Never going to change. As soon as you get uncomfortable, and the further you go into raising that level of uncomfort, the more success you’re going to see, the more great things are going to happen, and the better off you’re going to be.
All right, everyone, I couldn’t miss that today, and I had to let you guys know what’s going on and why I’ve been kind of MIA the last week or so, because I actually had to travel and go and start … I packed up one house and I’m currently in the midst of packing up another one, and I’m about to get real uncomfortable so I hope you guys are going to join me and we’ll see how we can take this to another level. All right, everyone, I hope you really have a great weekend and go get uncomfortable this weekend, start making a list, make some decisions. My wife and I started this whole process by putting together a Google sheet of all of our expenses, every single penny we owe in life and what’s going out and what’s coming in. Maybe just start there. It’s pretty uncomfortable.
All right. Matt from The Business Mind Podcast. Have a great weekend, everyone, and I will talk to you again soon.