Dear Warriors,
Here is some more inspiration from Souza and Jason Potash. After reading the quote from Souza and Jason’s lowest moment, I realized that life is filled with problems and difficulties…every day. It is the attitude we choose that determines or happiness, how we respond to the obstacles. Either we are proactive and determine our destiny or get crushed by the mistakes, errors, tragedies, cataclysms and sorrows.
Biorhythm Awareness have been one of the most valuable tools I have ever discovered to help me understand and plan for the ups and downs of life. This knowledge really helped me give my mom and dad the best care during their final days, especially knowing when they needed more love and encouragement on the emotionally down days.
“For a long time it seemed to me that life was about to begin – real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way, something to be gotten through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, a debt to be paid. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life. This perspective has helped me to see there is no way to happiness. Happiness is the way. So treasure every moment you have and remember that time waits for no one. Happiness is a journey, not a destination…” Souza
Jason Potash: “It’s a business, but what sticks out in my mind is one of the most difficult challenges I’ve had would be going back just after I got married, about ten years ago now. I was working in a deadbeat job and not making very much money.
I basically decided to send my wife back to college to fulfill her life long dream of becoming a teacher. She’d held that dream for years and years. When we got married I said, “You know what? We’re young, now is the time. Let’s just sacrifice it and get a line of credit, send you back to school and of course, have a big fat loan, a student loan on our bank record.”
We had just gotten married and were looking to buy furniture so it was not a good situation. I moved into a small, basically one bedroom apartment. The joke was that you could take a marble and drop it on the floor in the kitchen. It would roll real fast to the other side of the kitchen.
The floors were slanted; we had raccoons living in the rafters. I’m not making this stuff up, there were raccoons living in our rafters and they were fighting at night. It was just a run down place. You get to that point in your life where you are like, “I just hope to God that it’s only going to go up from here because how much lower can we go here.”
Driving a beat up car and my wife wasn’t there for support and at that point in my life, my parents had been split up for many years and my mom decided to go back with my brother to live in Germany where her family was.
My family was gone and my wife was away, I had huge debt piled up, I was barely making ends meet, I had this crappy car that I was driving, and living in this run down apartment. That was basically rock bottom.
You know, I think that basically through my attitude and perseverance and knowing, believing in myself and just studying like crazy about all the things that would help me to succeed in business, and having a goal and some focus, that really helped me just to never lose sight of my goal, to know that this is a temporary situation.
If I was 85 years old and this had been my life for the past 85 years, you might want to get depressed and upset because you’ve done nothing. You haven’t changed anything, you’ve lived the same life you had when you were 20, 30 or 40.
That can be pretty sad but the fact that I was young, intelligent, had a lot of motivation, able bodied, able minded, what could stand in my way and stop me?
My driving persistence and desire to want to succeed was what really kept me going. It’s hard to give yourself a kick in the butt to keep going and to constantly tell yourself that things will get better. I’m going to succeed some day and this is just a test, it’s just temporary and I can change these circumstances with the power of will that I have.
That really kept me going, and it didn’t take me a year to get me out of that situation, it took me several years, probably at least three years. As I slowly built things up, each new month became a little bit better, and I knew I was just stoking my mental fire with information and knowledge to help me break the shackles of poverty and succeed.
I did, I faced the brink of bankruptcy. At one point I was willing to throw in the towel. A lot of my friends did who were in similar situations and I said, “No, I’m not going to give in.” I know I can just hang on to this bowl, and even though it’s throwing me around and I’m getting kicked back and forth, I know I can ride this thing out. I’m going to be a better person having gone through this again, this “test” that I’m being put through here.
Obviously, there is a happy ending to this story and my wife is still with me and she has been a driving force in my life and has really been one of my coaches to get me back on the saddle and give me a kick in the butt and say, “Keep going. You can do this, keep plugging away.”
It’s easy to give up, to crash and burn and throw my hands in the air and say, “This is not worth it, and I can’t take it any more.” There has been a lot of life lessons learned in that process as well.
I guess you’ve heard this before, but anybody listening today who is in that situation today, I’m here to tell you that it’s all up to you. It all depends on how badly you want to get out of that situation.
I remember even having jobs where I just hated, hated the environment I was in. My boss was a jerk, I hated the way I was treated, and the money was just garbage. I was being taken advantage of and it wasn’t a good feeling.
Many people go through that in life and they are not willing to make the change. They just go through that for 30 or 40 years and it’s sad. As opposed to people who say, “You know what? I hate this job so bad, I’m going to do whatever it takes to get myself the heck out of here. I don’t care what it takes. If it means I have to stay up five hours a night studying marketing or studying real estate or studying investment planning, I don’t care. I’m going to do whatever it takes to get myself out of this hellhole.
That’s exactly what I did. You have to reach that point in life, I think, where you say to yourself, “Am I willing to do whatever it takes to get myself out of this situation?” Whatever that situation might be.
When you come to that point, and you’ve really just entirely had it, I think that’s when amazing things happen and breakthroughs happen. It happened for me because at that point I just said, “That’s it. There is no turning back. I’m just going to rock and roll, buckle down, do what I have to do. Keep my nose to the grindstone, not complain, not whine and not moan but just do this and make it happen and not finish until I’m done and I’m satisfied and I’m living the life that I want to live.”
That’s what happened to me, as I said when I sort of was in financial ruins and so forth. It became the driving force to achieving the success that I have today.”
take care,
ralph