Archive for mindset
Getting what we work for
Posted by: | CommentsI watched the mens marathon last night and the commentary was as interesting as the race. I had a UK feed where both announcers were former marathon champions. They spent the whole race saying why one of the 2 favourites would probably win or not win. Especially after the favuorite took off in the second 10K and left the field behind tales of his impending doom became common.
But the real story I guess was the Ugandan runner who won.
Ugandas first gold medal in 40 years!!
Stephen Kiprotich was out of school for 3 years with illness. HE stopped running in his early teens to concentrate on school, then at 17 told his impoverished parents he was moving to Kenya to become an athlete. And yesterday, as they say, the rest became history.
The part of the story I picked up on was that he went to where the best runners in the world were and lived and trained with them. In fact teh commentator said that maybe Kenya should shut it’s training facility to overseas athletes as they are losing too many medals now that their training secrets are being handed out to too many others.
Isn’t that an interesting attitude that as success spreads we should think about keeping it to ourselves? When I say interesting I mean terrible of course but interesting never the less.
I took 2 main lessons last night from that race. Sometimes the supposed professionals have no idea what they are talking about and to become the best it helps to hang around with the best.
And that is going to be true for every area of our lives. You may never win a medal but if you want to be the best husband/wife/investor/preacher/tinker or tailor you can be…………
read the books, attend the conferences and listen to the podcasts absolutely but then find someone who has achieved the results you want and find a way into their world.
For me this is primarily about becoming the best person I can be spiritually and relationally so I look for those men who have the marriages and relationships with God I admire and hang around them.
This was something I didn’t do enough of in my earlier investing days and I paid a big price for it. Now in the USA I have surrounded myself with top shelf people and can get top shelf results with much less of a learning curve than I experienced in New Zealand.
It simply works no matter what your goals, find someone to learn from today!
If your vision doesn’t make you laugh, cry AND change, then it’s nothing ~ Dean
PS: The next Cashflow Tour is happening in October, check it out HERE
Milestone?
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They say that certain birthdays are milestones. Today I am 50 and I am not sure whether it’s a milestone or a millstone 
.
However it happens whether we like it or not doesn’t it. There are things about aging that are kind of funny. Your eyebrows try to become pubic hair and your ear lobes decide they are cold and start sprouting small trees. It is sad to think that so many of my cells already have Alzheimers and that their default position is “if you’re on his face become a hair”.
There are things that are simply bad like your body starting to tell you things you don’t like. Mine reminds me everyady that I am no longer a weightlifter or swimmer and if I don’t sit down soon it is going to spit me out of my own mouth!
But then there are the good things that only time gives you. I have 5 of the most amazing kids in the world and they are now grown/growing up and I get to see them become amazing parents and husbands and musicians and photographers and who knows what else. I wouldn’t roll the clock back on that for anything.
I am married to the most gorgeous creature on the planet and I am only just starting ot really get to know her and love her even more. I know as we get older the best is yet to come. I wouldn’t exchange that for anything.
I have been in business long enough to know that being in business is not what makes me tick, being with people I love and serving the God I love is what makes me get up every day and it has taken nearly 50 years to figure that out well.
And probably even more importantly than all of that I have real purpose in my life now that I didn’t have at 20, 30 or 40. I woke up this morning and my first thought was: “God, the next 30 years of my life need to count for a lot more than the first 50. Help me make a difference in the lives of more people, help me be You to them and build up those who are weak, bring peace to those who are tormented and freedom to those in chains”.
So Happy Birthday to me and I pray YOU have a great day today full of love, passion and purpose!
Dean
Whatcha want?
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It was a few years ago that I watched my wife teach at an early event of ours. She made a statement that stuck with me and impacted many attendees at the time. Because it was contrary to what all the gurus teach it took a while to sink in but then the truth of it was more in your face.
She said: “You can have anything you want but you can’t have everything you want”. And you know most of us don’t understand that. In fact society as a whole doesn’t understand it.
If I try to get everything I want I will probably get none of it because my vision and energy are scattered all over the place. And in truth it is just a silly concept. Many single things require all our energy to achieve so all other things would need to be sacrificed.
But if I decide what I really want and go after that then I can have anything I want.
It just takes planning and execution.
So if you are feeling scattered today decide what you really want, what you have to give up to get what you really want and start moving towards it. But accept that many dreams will have to die or be postponed if you ever want to get to what is really important.
If your vision doesn’t make you laugh, cry AND change, then it’s nothing ~ Dean
How’s your hattitiude?
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I had a pommy boss years ago who talked about hattitude.
It was funny at the time but in a warped way he was quite right. Our attitude quite literally sits on top of us affecting everything we see and do. Rather like a large hat.
All of us suffer circumstances that we don’t like or wish we could avoid. Goodness I have had my fair share of those in the last 4 years.
But ones hattitude determines what happens next. At my lowest ebbs I had choices:
1. Kill myself
2. Drink myself to oblivion
3. Get angry and attack those who were causing the problems
4. Find some dishonest means of solving the situation
5. Have a nervous breakdown
And all of those would come to hover over me looking for a place to land. But instead I decided to look for the good in the bad, learn all I could and find a way to rebuild again better, smarter and much wiser.
That hat stuck because I had enough years of deciding that was who I would be before the pressure came on. It’s often the hardest road but it bears the most fruit and creates the head space to enable you to keep going.
My experience has been that by being as transparent as possible and refusing to go to the negative my friends and clients have stayed with me and supported me and in turn I have been able to stand up again, serve them again and actually end up better, stronger and more in love with God, my wife, kids and life.
And that is 150% about what hat I put on and nothing to do with what was going on.
The choice is always yours!
If your vision doesn’t make you laugh, cry AND change, then it’s nothing ~ Dean
Dean Letfus, Dean Leftus
Is everybody leaping
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So it is the end of February already and a leap year at that.
Maybe as one gets older the years get shorter, certainly seems that way anyway.
Interesting reading in the papers today. Apparently, if they are to be believed, the property markets in NZ, OZ and the USA are recovering.
Now how even a bad journalist can say that with a straight face is beyond me but maybe it is simply after 4 years of hell we are trying to talk ourselves into a recovery in spite of the facts. Any piece of positive data, no matter how flawed, gets paraded around like the Hope Diamond.
So the tricky part here is where is the line. It is true that we possess what we confess so it is good to talk positively before we see it. This is what hope and faith are about. But the flip side is that reality is reality and sometimes we have to look at the big picture and find our own hope without needing all the circumstances to change. I tended to live in the first camp but age and wisdom forces me to meet more in the middle these days.
The world is in a mess. That is going ot take probably a decade to fix, if not longer. So waiting for the market to change is a bad strategy. However finding good markets and opportunities in the midst of this global nightmare is a good strategy.
Maybe you have been like I was, sitting on stock waiting for the numbers to come right. I realised after 3 years they may not come right for another ten years, so you bite the bullet, feel the pain, take the loss but start to be able to breathe again. And suddenly an option like the USA market or a business opportunity or whatever appears that you couldn’t have considered before because you were in so much pain.
I hope this makes sense, it was very liberating for me to stop hanging on to stuff and on the other side of the pain there was life again! So let it go and make a note to think about again next Feb 29th
Stay Inspired ~ Dean
PS: Only 24 hours to go CASHFLOW CITY
Perspective
Posted by: | CommentsI have always been fascinated with perspective in art and life.
Whether it’s something like this:
which is funny and clever, well brilliant actually, right through to people’s perspective on life and how that affects them.
For example it has taken me 2 years to change my perspective fully on property investing because I had to reframe my world view to allow for the US market. Even though I have done a lot of investing in New Zealand it has taken me a lot of “work” to stop being surprised at being able to buy houses for only 50K instead of 300K. And to stop looking at 10 to 15% net returns with a “too good to be true” attitude.
I have been amazed at how long it has taken me and just how hard it was to reprogramme myself so that I could look at this new market and learn to benefit from it without being starry eyed. And what I also learned was that cliche’s can be dangerous programming also.
I have often said and heard it quoted ten gazillion times: “If it sounds too good to be true it probably is”.
And in many ways that statement is absolutely true. HOWEVER it is true positionally but not situationally. What do I mean? Well avoiding shonky deals by applying this principle will keep you out of a lot of trouble, but if you uplift a set of rules from one country and drop them down in another country, change the situation in other words, then this principle itself becomes silly.
For example if you were offered a twenty five percent return property today in Auckland you would know immediately that there was an error in somebody’s numbers or there was something seriously weird/dodgy going on. But that very level of return is on offer every day of the week in the USA so it is no longer too good to be true, it is situation normal.
I have used the US example because it has been my recent journey but you will have mindsets and stories embedded in your mind that affect/protect and limit you everyday.
My encouragement to you this morning is to stretch yourself mentally. What is your biggest worry or daily issue, your reprogramming needs to start right there. What are you believing about yourself that is a lie??
Discover it, expose it, and then start changing it!!
Get Going and Stay Safe ~ Dean Letfus!!
What we need is a great big melting pot…..
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Or so goes the song. Certainly as we look at what is happening in the world we are indeed all in a great big melting pot of uncertainty, natural disaster and strangely, opportunity.
In New Zealand, USA and many other countries there are people going under and people going over. Trouble and opportunity all wrapped up in the same package.
So the important question is why? How come some people do well in difficult times and some fold. Obviously ones starting position and circumstances affect our ability to move forward but it is never as simple as that.
For example I have a client who is ten seconds from bankruptcy, however he saw the opportunity in the USA and begged and borrowed enough to purchase a property there. That cash flow is now helping him to stay afloat and he is very close to his second purchase.
So what makes one person take action in the midst of adversity while another rants at the sky?
I have concluded that it is all about our internal principles. These come to the fore when things are tough. For me personally I keep looking for solutions no matter how bad things get. The worst thing that can happen is I will fail but at least I know I have done my best. I have successfully turned terrible investments into good ones, learned form mistakes and viewed them positively as a growth opportunity many times and the fruit of that is that I am a happier, wiser person.
Some people conversely go looking for someone to balame and hunker down waiting for something to happen. And what happens is they get bitter, old and somehow “smaller”.
Man I have seen a lot of this in the last 12 months. One person going gang busters, another pursuing enormous energy on a no win situation.
So what about you my friends. Where does your internal clock sit. Are you looking for answers or looking for justice in your situation? And whichever way you answer ask yourself: “Is this working for me? Is this making me a bigger, better person?”
Get Going and Stay Safe ~ Dean Letfus
