I met with a new client today and it made the simple words of my 32-year broker ring in my head: “I love real estate because you meet the most interesting people.” Her thought is especially true here at Tahoe because you don’t get pigeonholed into a certain demographic or business vertical that you ‘work’ as a client base. You get all the walks of life who want to live or vacation in Tahoe.
Today’s client is considerably young and he’s looking to relocate to Tahoe. He went to a competitive boarding school and university Back East then went on to labor in NYC. During this time he saw a discrepancy in his field where locating to a different country and starting fresh could conceivably make for huge business growth in a short period of time. He went for it – alone. As the business grew he faced all the usual challenges but one of the surprising things was that none of the old colleagues from the States would join him. All of them wanted to stay in the familiar network and not take the big risk. Long story short, within 5 years his bet paid off and the company was bought by a competitor.
While his business story is interesting and impressive, his outlook on life is even more so. Within 3 minutes of sitting down together he was telling me about what he thinks of as the internal battle between the heart and the brain. You’ve heard or thought something like this before but it was so interesting to me that he chose to focus on this so soon after starting our meeting – it told me a lot about his priorities.
It went something like this: “The brain says, ‘we’re going to keep our head down and work all the time because I want [substitute material possession here].’ But the heart mutters, ‘wait, what about those things we thought were pretty cool and interesting that we were going to try and do.’ Brain: ‘we’ll get to those…later. 6 months. When this other stuff is done we’ll get to that.’ Well once the 6 months comes and goes, then another half a year does the same, the heart voice starts to disappear. The material possessions start to pile up, bank accounts increase but is that the goal? Shouldn’t the heartsong be the focus and you can let the money come later?”
It was a great meeting and of course made me reflect on myself. I got into real estate after living in Tahoe for a number of years. I had bought a couple houses here, thought I might enjoy real estate…and was ready to see if I could start making some money. Well almost 10 years later, I realize that thankfully I may have gotten in for some of the right reasons – but I’m staying in for the right reasons. That is, I know that by doing such a good job on every deal that I am helping people. I get to use my writing and photography (and now with YouTube am learning video) skills while developing great marketing plans for my clients and myself. And last, I enjoy doing all of this.
Thanks for making it to the end of this post – honestly I’m surprised I wrote it. But I guess when you’re moved, you’re moved!