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I have found it impossible to educate investors without also having to help them understand their spiritual, emotional and “thinking” selves.  And the reason is simply that investing in property is not that hard.  There are lots of strategies and techniques that can help us succeed but the fundamentals are …….. well fundamental.

But how our heads and hearts affect our investing is another story.  The impact of our beliefs and attitudes not only influences us but generally speaking controls us completely.  You may have heard the stories of lottery winners who end up broke a short time after winning millions of dollars.  Until I understood the things I now teach I always used to think how stupid they must have been to end up there.  But now I feel tragically sorry for them because they were set up for failure.  They were living someone elses life, probably their parents.

You see I spent the first 40 years of my life living my parents financial lives.  My parents both worked very hard and they trained me, by the way they lived, to believe that the answer to success was “get a good education, work really, really, really hard and you will be successful”.  This is the post depression generation mantra that most of us were raised on.  The only problem is it isn’t true.  Ingesting this belief without any real financial literacy is doing one thing.  It teaches us to fulfill the dreams of another man or woman, not our own.

If you work really hard in a job you will make your boss far wealthier than you will ever become.  IF you pursue education without purpose you end up educated, but poor. Go to most universities and cars in the students car parks are way more impressive than the faculties

So for me I discovered that years and years of hard work had made me a highly skilled employee, who worked 60 to 80 hours a week and managed to look after a wife and 5 kids but I had no ability to give generously, something which I was passionate about.  So by subconsciously living my parents life I replicated their results.  And their results were all I was equipped to achieve. If I had a windfall of any kind it vanished pretty quickly to charity or a something “special”.  Like the lottery winner I didn’t have any way to handle anything outside of what I had seen modelled to me.

Then I met property and the wealth creation industry and suddenly started hearing another story.  This story was far more appealing, this was basically the “do almost nothing and be rich, it’s almost like magic” life.  It took enormous courage and emotional angst to enter into this world.  It would take way more than a blog to tell you how hard it was to change, but change I did.  Suddenly I found that this life seemed to work as well.  There was a different set of rules that I had never heard before and when I followed them I got different results.

However what I have found is that simply jumping off my parents back onto the back of another is still a recipe for disaster.  I was still living someone elses life.  My financial situation changed and became more volatile as I took more risks but whose life was I living?

I eventually realised, NOT MINE!!

So more recently I made a decision.  I am going to live my own life.  I am going to learn the things that will help me and really understand them, not just parrot what others say.  I am not going to abide by the so called rules without understand why they are rules.  I am an adult, not a child.  If something is right or wrong I should know why.

I avoid sticking my hand in fires, for example, not because my parents taught me “Burny, burny”, but because I have seen people scarred by burn damage. I know it will permanently damage me physically and the pain is unbearable.  So as an adult I do things for a reason, not because I am told to, if that makes sense.

So what about you. Are you living your parents life, your bosses life, your therapists life, your gurus life??  It is unlikely that you are living your own life yet, we nearly all get trained to be somebody else.  Coming home to start living our own lives is hard work baby, hard work.  We have to learn to strip off years of conditioning and think about what we really want out of life.  It can be terrifying but is more satisfying that I can express in words.  I feel alive in ways I never thought possible.

To relate this back to money let me finish with a story that underlines this:

A young man tragically lost his parents when he was under 20.  He hod no financial education or training to know how to live his own life, so when his parents died leaving him a fortune he entered the drug world.

He quickly became an addict and as he had so much money he would check himself into therapy and get cleaned up, only to be released and go back to the drugs again.

Within a remarkably short space of time the money ran out and then his life really started to feel pain.  Shortly afterwards this 21 year old committed suicide as his only way out.  Wealth and money killed that young man.  His parents might as well have given him a loaded gun.

I heard recently that Bill Gates told his kids he wasn’t leaving them much of his fortune because it would destroy them. He’d leave them enough and then they could make their own.  In other words he was going to let them live their own lives

Whose life are you going to live today??

Stay Inspired and Stay Safe ~ Dean Letfus @ www.MassiveAction.tv

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