Thinking About Legacy During A Time of Crisis

What's up business freedom podcast listeners? So today I want to jump into maybe a heavy topic. I'm going to call it thinking about your legacy in times of crisis. So we're going through something that from an economic shift perspective. I've seen this a couple times in my adult life from a just the thing that triggered it. Never seen anything like this or been involved in any of it. So I had the opportunity to spend a couple days up in New Jersey. I live in Charlotte, North Carolina from New Jersey and with really dear friends of mine. These guys, Bob and Joe Roda were my best buddies growing up. They lived across the street from my father and if you ever heard me talk about my dad, it was an interesting childhood. My parents divorced when I was 4. My dad was an alcoholic, drank actively until I was 15. And so I just didn't have a support system, any stability in the family aspect of my life. And the Rota family lived across the street. So anytime I visited my dad, my dad may have actually there were times where he drank and we were visiting him and he was unavailable to me and my sister to really kind of be there for us. And there were times where he was drinking, he was shut in to his house. And my mom would let me spend some time with Joe and Bob Roda. So they live right across. So I would be at their house looking at my dad's house with his car in the driveway and he's locked in. So interesting and fascinating to say the least. I can look back now and see how it helped me in a lot of ways. During times of chaos, I can really just see clearly what has to be done. And that's why I think I was successful in the Great Recession building my real estate team went from 60 sides to 250 sides in three to four years during that Great Recession and just how I'm managing through what we're going through. So the point of all of this is that I spent two days with their family. The reason I spent time with them was because their father passed away. So Joe Sr. Worked. Man, I gotta believe he worked into his late 60s. He was a marble fabricator. So he made pieces of furniture and countertops for bathrooms and kitchens and worked really hard. I mean, I remember him coming home from work, he worked six days a week, Monday through Saturday, only protected Sundays. And he would open his car door and a slow walk from his car to the front door and covered in dust. I mean, if you ever touched him with his work uniform on, there would just be dust going Everywhere. And so of course that meant it was close to dinnertime and I was always around. And no kidding, y', all, I must have eaten hundreds of meals there. I wonder if it was more than a thousand. I don't want to say thousands because I didn't count, but hundreds. And on the weekends, like I said, I didn't know if I'd be there, but I didn't know if my dad was drinking or not. And I just spend all weekend there. They were a stable family support system during times of chaos for me. So at the funeral it was a two day gig where gig it's not like it was. The first day was surprisingly upbeat, like just family and friends coming together. I got to see our neighbors from, you know, where we lived back then and we haven't lived there since. I don't know, he hasn't lived there in like 30 years or something crazy, 25 years or something. So I got to see neighbors and just old family members of theirs that we played with growing up cousins and really fun day. Even though there was an open casket in the front and it was just weird, but not weird and just a lot of love, a lot of pictures around. And I always think about in funeral situations like legacy, like truly at the end of the day, at the end of your earthly days, what did you leave here? Like, what signs are there that you made a difference in the world? And I've started thinking about this really intensely, having nothing to do with the market shift that we're going to go through or anything like that. Just over the last two to three years, how do I want to be remembered? What impact do I want to make? I do have a faith. I do believe in God and Jesus and my grounding comes from that. Practically speaking though, like, what is the legacy that you want to leave? And are you starting to think about it and live into what it's going to be so it's not too late and you don't have regrets. So at this day two of the funeral, we come in and it's really somber. And so this is like, this is last goodbyes. This is. Everyone wasn't a lot of laughing, it was just really serious. And everyone was kind of paying their last respects, getting down on their knees, open casket. And I remember going up to the front of the room, there's probably 40 people in the room, maybe 10 or 12, I actually know. And I just got really emotional, like I couldn't hold back the tear. I. I get emotional even just saying it and remembering it and I Remember thinking in my head the impact that this man had on me through his children and through just being a part of their family was really profound. And you know, Joe and I from the. That's the youngest of the four brothers, Joe Sr. Put four kids, you know, supported them and put them through college and medical school and just off probably not a six figure net income from his business. I have no idea what his business made. My guess is that he wasn't overflowing in cash or drowning in cash. He managed to kind of get everyone through it. So Joe and I were best friends from probably when he was born. I was, I think, three months older than him. Bob and I. Bob is the second oldest. He didn't really like us all that much growing up and then we became really tight when I ended up, we ended up living really close together. His grandparents lived in the house next to my dad's and so he moved there. I ended up buying my dad's house. At one point after he had stopped drinking, we mended our relationship a little bit. And so just the consistency of having this family in my life. And on the second day of the funeral, the, the, the sons and their children, I think, and on both sides, so there was like 19 grandchildren. I think they all put the hat, like the actual like baseball cap of the college that they attended into the casket. And Joe Sr. His legacy, he made a decision that his. Anyone that came after him was going to have a different life than he had. Not have to work with their hands unless they really wanted to. To have an opportunity to make more money through less effort, to be a professional. Right or wrong, this was his vision. And to see all of these grandchildren and just crying and putting their hat in the casket, knowing that this guy sparked that legacy and the ripple effects of that legacy, it was just a really profound moment for me. So again, I had to give him, paid my respects. I got super emotional. It was because it just got real clear that there's only a few things we're going to do in this lifetime that are going to outlast. Really if you think about it, if you've got a real estate team where you're selling 500 homes a year, unless you directly impact the lives of those folks outside of a transaction, the chances are that you're really leaving a legacy are pretty slim with your team members, if you're not leaning into accountability and pushing them harder than they want to be, you're not leaving a legacy. You know, if you're, if you're with your family, if you're not really, if your business is taking you away from leading in your family and being there in the morning and at night and on the weekends and, you know, what legacy are you really leaving? Are you leaving it to chance? And this has nothing to do with financial legacy. A lot of people think about legacy in terms of the financial resources that they're going to leave after them. This is more just the impact, the human value that you bring in your lifetime that will live beyond your earthly existence. And so in times like this, where who would have guessed that a health pandemic would have triggered what we're going to see here coming up, which is just going to be an economic shift, a lot of people are going to. Their incomes are hurt. There's going to be less buyers in the market. Sellers are going to deny that fact for a period of time. There's going to be a stalemate between buyers and sellers, and it's just going to be a normal 6, 12, 18 months, whatever. If I was smart enough to predict what all that could look like, I wouldn't be recording a podcast episode right now. I would have speculated on all the various markets we've been through over the last 25 years of my adult life, and I'd be independently wealthy. I'd have a billion dollars right now. So that's what will happen, though. And so in the context of that, how are you going to think about the impact you're going to leave? How are you going to show up in times like this where someone has an opportunity to have a conversation with you that might be a little different than it was before? You know, where maybe before we were just so focused on ourselves and selling homes and kind of just going through the motions and being rushed and all of that. How are we going to slow down now to think about the things we're doing every day? And are they really helping us build a legacy that's going to last? And I don't know, hopefully there's value in this for you, for me to think about my actions today and how they're going to impact my legacy. That makes it really clear what I should be focusing on and what I should be worrying about. I'm not all that worried about what's going to happen with the market or my family being shut in, our businesses being closed. You know, I'm not worried about all that. I'm taking all the actions. I've got into massive action, you know, and I was created for this. I'm wartime general. This is like, you know, it's game on. I'm not. I'm just really clear on what has to happen in the businesses for us to succeed. I just wonder if there are some of us out there that are going into fear and scarcity and are forgetting that we have this opportunity now to be a bright light in a really crazy dark world. And there are scams now related to the coronavirus. There's just a lot of crazy, dark stuff going on right now and people looking to profit in a bad way from what's going on right now. So that's all I've got for you. Much love and respect. If you're at the point in your business where it's hard and you're running a bigger business and you don't have the right guidance in terms of the moves to make right now not only to protect but also to pivot the business and then ultimately profit from all of that, if that's you, I can only offer you a conversation. Just go to realestatebschool.com and click on apply now. Short survey to fill out to get a little bit more information about your business. It's just a 45 minute coaching conversation. There's no hard sell or anything like that. If we can help you, we will. If we can't, we'll point you in the direction of someone that can help you. So much love, much respect. We'll talk soon.