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Forget all the reasons why it won’t work…. And believe the one reason why it will work.

—Unknown—

Concerning God and all the trials and tribulations that are put before us in life….If God gave me one reason… just one reason to believe….. I would only hope that the above quote is the reason why.

Date: September 13, 2020

Time: 10:25pm

Place: The Club In The ATX

Song playing as I begin this post….. Oye Mujer by Raymix/Juanes.

Life…. fucking life…. what can I say? For me……It’s like groundhogs day all over again. Ever get on a diet and ate the exact same food for 30 days? What did that feel like to never eat anything different? Did it make you happy or sad? Ever seen the exact same sunset and forget to notice how beautiful it really is? Ever wake up in the morning and notice that nothing in your life has noticeably or tangibly changed for the better? Ever wished for something…. And waited, and waited, and waited… Then after waiting for so long, you just finally succumbed to the thought of never actually having what you wished or hoped for?….Then somehow like magic….. out of the blue you finally get what you wanted and waited for….. Then when you get what you waited on for so long, you somehow notice that it just doesn’t mean or feel like the same thing as when you first fought so hard to attain it in the beginning? That’s currently my life in a nutshell.

Max here,

It’s a calm almost slow Sunday night at the club. All stages have a beautiful body on it. And on Sunday’s the club is filled with more beer bottles than liquor bottles…..But we’re not here to talk about the club. Nope. We’re here to talk about how the fuck am I going to get to my millions. 20 Million to be exact! You know, in a previous post I wrote that one day I was going to post about all of the life experiences that I expect to have in my life. And I think today is a perfect time to do this. Life has been so shitty lately that I must find a way to grip to anything that will help me remember to push forward. I must go David Goggins on life.

Oddly enough I take this experience list with me almost everywhere I go. But painfully I don’t look at it enough. This must change.

The Experience List…. Some people call it a bucket list… Personally I don’t like… nope wait… let me rephrase that… I actually hate the phrase or term “bucket list”… Personally I think and feel that the things you consider the most precious to your heart should never go in a bucket. They are meant for the world to see and feel. They should be experienced, expressed and cherished and never be put in a bucket, even if it’s in a verbal manner. And so for that, never a “bucket list” but rather “The Experience List”.

The following are the things in my life that I EXPECT to experience and have in my life. (and not written in any particular order)

1. Get my 8 doors up and running
2. Add 10 new doors by June 2020…. (So much for making that happen by June 2020……..Super fucking Frustrating)
3. Wingsuit base jump (I’m getting close to this goal)
4. Waterski
5. Have children (4 or more)
6. Find and have a wife/partner (someone that I consider beautiful in my eyes)
7. Own a plane
8. Fly a plane
9. Be financially free (20 million dollars in 20 years 2015-2035)
10. Become a philanthropist
11. House in Hawaii
12. Visit the Great Pyramids
13. Paris 2 more times
14. Maintain top physical shape (Shape = mind, body and spirit)
15. Enjoy time on a yacht
16. Have a science room for science projects
17. Have music studio (this is almost complete) thumbs up!!!!
18. Understand happiness thru all I want and achieve
19. Own multiple homes across the USA (A total of 600 doors,  with 100 doors in 6 different states….. Texas, Washington, Florida, Montana…..) Haven’t decided on the last two yet. But I will!
20. Visit major cities across the world….. (Example of countries with what I consider to have major cities that I want to visit are China, Europe, Middle East etc.)
21. Have people that surround me be the type of people that also strive for the same fundamental basics of self improvement as myself.
22. Enjoy and have time, and help employees build a small farm so that I can enjoy the beauty of plants and animals.
23. Have and maintain straight teeth. (Victory!!!! get disciplined with the nightly retainers)
24. Learn to stay on top of cutting edge technology for body and health. (This is a major reason why money is important)
25. To easily provide love, time, and money to the woman/women in my life. (Discipline myself daily)
26. Visit Alaska
27. Swim with a 100 or 200 year old turtle. (Maybe in Hawaii, Just the thought of this is super exciting!)
28. Visit plum village (Think of others that may want to go with me)
29. 600 doors in 5 years (Focus on this. It will happen. I will find the beliefs and methods)
30. Play piano
31. Rock climb
32. Learn to dance salsa
33. Climb Mt. Everest
34. Visit Dublin Ireland and eat bacon and cabbage
35. Go back and study Jujitsu or maybe even Taichi
36. Visit the Terracotta army
37. Move to Homestead Florida (Buy property in 2021)
38. Visit Bhutan
39. Have Personal lunch with Tom Bilyeu
40. Possibly have residence in China or Japan
41. Bull Ride
42. Finish Personal home
43. Start, run and get off the ground a mentoring program (kaizen 360 H.H.H)
44. Swim with the humpback whales in Tonga. (And possibly watch a baby humpback whale be born)

The Experience List….. Wow. for some reason as I digitally write these words into the ether, it somehow sounds like a lot of wild and amazing things that I expect to do and experience. I don’t know…. maybe it’s really not a lot, but as I reflect on the recent events of my life and then look at the items in my experience list, so much of it has yet to happen. So much of it has been written on paper for such a long time and has not yet come to fruition. And even my timelines of getting my doors up and running and acquiring more doors seems to be so slow. Many times, It feels like trying to empty the ocean with a spoon. Just almost never noticing any progress. Like watching paint dry. For example, at this moment I have an apartment at the 4plex, it’s a 3 bedroom 1.5 bath with living room, kitchen and large outdoor patio. This apartment will fetch me a minimum of $1000.00 a month, but as I mentioned earlier in a previous post, it still needs about $10k worth of work. Which will eventually will get done….. But at the same time, I arrive to the gate of my home, I walk into my house only to see that there is still 25% of my own personal house that is not yet completed.

Now usually this should not really bother me because I know that it will eventually get done… But at the same time… the term “eventually get done” needs to turn into the words “finished and completed” And in reality which should come first? the apartment rental or the personal home? Some people would say to me…”Max, finish the apartments and then finish your house. Get the money first”. Which you know… I would normally completely agree with them…. But then again… at the same time, also remember I started building my personal house almost 10 years ago. FUCK!!!! imagine that, building a home for almost 10 years and still not have it completed! At what point do you finally say to yourself that enough is enough and just get the damn personal home completed? At what point are you finally able to go home to something that is complete and finished?

Now WTF would make me take so long to finish my personal house? Well, I am glad that you asked. One word… One simple word…… No wait, 2 words, not one word, but instead it’s 2 words, two simple words have made me yoke these goals for so long without completion….. And these two words are “Money and Belief”

Money is the largest tangible factor that is holding me back. But oddly enough the word “belief” is also both a blessing a curse. Here’s why… when you finally and truly “believe” that you can have something, you will then do anything and everything to have it. And that in itself can be a problem. You see, I love the analogy that Tony Robbins uses when he talks about wanting something and needing or having belief to attain it… The analogy is this… “If you want to take over the island, then you MUST burn the boats” It’s just that simple. Because the reality in his analogy is that if you find an island that you want to take over (conquer), you must ensure that you don’t in any way give yourself any options for retreating from the fight and not taking the island. If you burn your own boats then the only option left is to fight and conquer the island, or die trying.

So as you might be wondering, what does burning the boats have anything to do with my personal home? Well it’s simple…. I could have just created a very simple home, but as an ex-girlfriend once told me…..”Max you built a mansion in the ghetto”…. (I mentally chuckled as I remember her saying those exact words) Although she is correct that it is a mansion in the ghetto, It’s by no means the most expensive mansion in the ghetto, but I assume to some that it would still be considered a small basic mansion in the ghetto. LOL.

So one part of me dislikes that I have decided to build a mansion in the ghetto, but the other half of me knows that it won’t be the last mansion that I build, nor will it always be in the ghetto! That’s for damn sure. So what’s keeping me from completing my own personal house?……. Just money and belief…. You see, I just recently and finally bought the mirror for my master bathroom…. Just the mirror alone cost me almost $400.00 and that’s just the mirror and not what it cost me to have Eddie install it. If you ever go to Home Depot to find a bathroom mirror, you can get a super basic mirror for about $15 plus tax. Think about it $15 for a mirror….. but NOOOOOOOOOOOO, my crazy ass “believes” that I should have something nice. So what the fuck do I buy? I buy a $400.00 bathroom mirror. That’s what I’m talking about. That’s the part of “belief” that becomes difficult. I have chosen to believe that I deserve nice things. I have chosen to believe that it doesn’t HAVE to be perfect, but god damn it better at least be close to perfect! Perfect in my eyes.

So where does this leave me? Well this leaves me with an apartment rental that needs about $10k of remodeling before it will fetch me $1000.00 a month, and it leaves me with a personal home that needs about $40k or more worth of work before it will be finished. And for the last 10 years I have been getting it to where it is today. Which still looks nice, but it’s just not finished yet. As a matter of fact, as of last week the projector wall is finally almost complete and is now ready for me to go and buy some cheap ass projector so that I can get a feel of how it is supposed to look. You see, I have NEVER owned a projector or ever had a projector wall. None of my childhood friends ever had a projector or projector wall. And yes, I could have easily went to the most expensive store in town and found someone to come out and build me a projector wall and recommend me a projector, but damn, to have that done would have cost me at least $6k. (for the wall, the projector and the install)

So fuck that. I’m not paying $6k dollars for something that I can get cheaper. So I will first begin by buying some cheap ass projector at the pawnshop and do some personal learning about how to get the best picture as well as how to connect the things that I want connected to the projector. One of the sub level goals with the projector wall project is to have it all smart connected to google. A top notch projector runs in the area of about $4000.00. Luckily I don’t watch that much TV. So in the end hopefully a $1000.00 projector will work just as good. But I won’t know this for at least 3 more months.

So yes…. The Experience List…. As I think about where I am now…. It just seems like almost a dream to complete everything on that list. Will I accomplish everything? truthfully idk. What I do know is that if I don’t try, truly fucking try, then I will never truly know if I can accomplish all that I am capable of. Conversely, currently this loneliness and issue of bills and money beats the shit out of me and plagues me on a daily basis. Like EVERY F-in day!. Today on the way to work I listened to some TD Jakes on the power of belief. I listened to almost an hour and a half of his stuff. And I plan on listening to it again on the way home. I tend to feel that if I am going to make it thru this current spell of where I am mentally then I am going to need a lot of “belief”…. Belief in the sense and depth that what I want, desire and expect in my life is really going to come to fruition.

Just imagine for a moment and walk down memory lane with me for just a few seconds…..

Remember,  here is the synopsis of my personal movie……… a boy from the hood, born into poverty, with rarely any food in the refrigerator, and with clothes that had more holes than buttons or zippers, a young boy that walked to school alone before the sun would come up, and that would do the long walk home from school to an empty home because his mother had to work late and couldn’t be there to walk me to school or walk me home from school or make me breakfast or dinner, a young boy born from a mother that only made it to the 6th grade, and from a father that he vaguely remembers seeing once in his life……But yet somehow, almost like a miracle, this young poor boy from the hood one day somehow, almost by a stroke of luck, becomes a multimillionaire with all of his dreams unfolding before his very eyes. Just let that sink in for a moment… What mentality will that boy need to have to transform a hand full of nothing into a million dollars? What things will have to happen in his life for him to accomplish a larger than life goal that he never knew was was really possible? None of his childhood friends have ever accomplished this feet. Some of them still live in the same house in the hood! What will he have to change about the way he see’s life? What will he have to change about himself? Just what will he have to un-believe, un-write, un-program from everything he was initially taught as child?

It just makes me ask myself……What will I need to begin to believe? What self esteem will I now need? What internal confidence will I need when life is always trying to tell me NO. What armor must I find and wear for this journey? And most of all what “BELIEF” will I need to have about myself, my life, and my dreams? Just what mountains must I climb and what transformations must I endure? These are the questions to ask to attain what we thought was too hard or constantly tells us NO.

Now let’s get back to the chicken and egg question… Which should I finish first? the personal house or the apartment? Well on one hand the apartment only needs $10k while the personal home needs about $40k or more. Which should come first? In the end I can only assume that it all sums up to personal preference. I know that I sure as hell don’t want to hold off on the apartment forever. (fuck that!) I need that apartment to make me some money. Once that apartment is rented then it adds to the goal of getting all 8 doors up and running. But at the same time I do need my personal home to actually fucking “feel” like a home.

So I have come to a conclusion that I will get the following work completed on my personal home before jumping back on the apartment rental… I have decided to get the master bath 99% completed and get the master closet 50% completed and get the projector wall and projector up and  running and then I will jump back on the apartment. Currently my master bath is about 50% complete and the master closet is about 15% completed, and the projector wall just needs a little more work, but first I need to buy a projector and a Roku and a google home so that I can get it all working together. Then I can make adjustments to the wall and possibly decide on the final projector that I will want. As for the apartment… Well, it’s only $10k and luckily I already know 99% of what needs to get done.

Things that need to get done at the apartment…..

1. Main bath needs mirrors installed (btw that mirror only cost me $60)
2. Main bath needs tub to be connected.
3. Main bath needs  led lighting around the mirror
4. Main bath needs texturing and painting of the walls.
5. Main bath needs a new sink (Sadly John my electrician broke the current one because he was installing wires for other items in the apartment. No bueno)
6. Main bath needs new faucet installed in new sink. I am installing waterfall faucets.
7. All closets need just a little more work. They are about 85% completed. (Shelving bracing and painting)
8. Flooring in the whole apartment needs to be installed. It was a tiled floor but I am installing laminate flooring.
9.  Half bath needs painting and mirror and the sink needs touch up and the waterfall faucet needs install, and the mirror needs install.
10. The Kitchen…. Oh Man, the kitchen was completely revamped and is about 60% completed. The kitchen still needs a $600 tempered glass to be installed on the backsplash.
11. The kitchen needs the hood vent to be vented into the ceiling and out of the roof.
12. The kitchen needs a new counter. (I will be installing a butcher style counter and I will also be burning words of love and empowerment into the wood, then I will lacquer the counter to preserve the work.)
13. The kitchen needs the new counter cabinets installed
14. The kitchen needs some sheetrock work and have a few final plumbing adjustments made.
15. The kitchen needs the wall cabinets repainted. (I took the current wall cabinets and decided to recess them into the wall to create a look of more space. Shit looks good!!!! Totally gives a small kitchen a look of more space)
16. I may need to add a TV and a counter into the kitchen but I won’t know until all the other things are completed. The goal is to make the kitchen feel multifunctional
17. The front door NEEDS to be moved. This will require some stucco work and a little bit of carpentry. But it’s nothing that I have not done or seen done before.
18. The laundry room needs new paint and a barn sliding door installed.
19. The outside patio wood needs painting.
20. Beyond this there is outside stuff that needs attention… gutters need to be installed to preserve the patio wood, and there are probably a few things that I am missing or that will unveil themselves in the process. But overall This is the list for the apartment.

And so the idea is this, if you know nothing about remodeling our building then some of this might not make sense as to why they need to get done, but in reality all of these things will create the look that my renter will want and will easily make them pay $1000 or more for an apartment. Plus it will easily allow me to raise the rent as the years move forward.  And I could easily pay more than $10k to get this stuff done, but for me, I have set the internal budget of $10k. The flooring itself will cost about $2500 and that doesn’t include installation. And as for the moving the front door, I haven’t yet decided if I want my guy Eddie to do it or to have Cesar do it. If I have Eddie do it then it will take him several days to complete as well as the possibility of me needing to help him. However if I have Cesar do it, then Cesar will come in with a couple of guys and have it done in one or two days (stucco sometimes takes two days to complete because of its dry time)

So yea, that’s the apartment…. I could also make a list about my personal house, but we’ll save that for another post. Remember I started this post about “belief”

And that damn word “belief” (You know that thing that started this post) is literally layered into so many facets of my life. From who I believe myself to be, from what I expect myself to have in life, from what I expect of myself when I look in the mirror, to the person that I expect to have in my life to share special moments with, to the friends that I expect to surround me, to everything that I believe is and is not possible for myself…..to just every damn aspect of my mind, body, and soul. It’s at every level and sublevel of who I am on this planet.

And so from my last post… my loneliness…… that damn thing is still there haunting me almost on an hourly basis like a bad reoccurring nightmare. Walking in my home, all I still hear is the echoing of my own footsteps, and I sadly still make enough food for two even though its just me in the house, but by the same token, as bad as I recently had my encounters with almost certain death, and the fact that I can still feel the pain of my fractured/broken rib, and as much as it is so surreal that I recently saw a coworker literally take his own last two breathes of life on the kitchen floor here at work, and as much as I am just not happy with my life or the lack of progress that I have had over all these years, and as much as I am pummeled with a waterfall of bills that I have yet to recover from, somehow, someway, I must still believe that greatness is about to happen, I must still believe that after every storm there really is a rainbow, and that no storm lasts forever, I must believe that I must and will overcome all of these adversities. And most of all, I must still believe that I am not alone and that some how some way that everyone of the items on my Experience list will happen.

Pray for me,

Max.