This post is also available in: Español (Spanish)

You don’t know how much you have grown – Until trouble comes back for an encore

—T.D Jakes—

Facts. That’s the best words to describe the above quote….. Facts!

Stardate: Sunday, May 22, 2022

Time: 11:44 pm

Place: The club in the ATX

Song playing at this moment of starting this post: Dua Lipa – Cold Heart (Feat. Elton John)

Max here…..Let me paint a picture for you… I arrive to work and walk into the DJ booth, with music playing louder than I already had in my headphones, and as I begin to walk up the steps to the booth there are 5 people taking shots of tequila or vodka or something else that’s in a cup. Every one of these people I know. They are either employees, regular customers, or entertainers….. And then they see me as they are about to drink those shots… and within moments after downing the shots, they quickly disperse. I guess they could easily see that I am not in the same mental zone as them. They were already in 100% party mode. But me…. nope, I am just getting to work. It’s been a long weekend. And I am just mustering every ounce of energy to pretend that I am happy about everything in my life.

How is Max… Well, he is better than a year ago. but damn, he still has a long way to go. Fun fact, just made me wonder about something… When we think about Batman, you know that Super Hero, that “dark knight” crime-fighting masked man. And we think about how he lived that double life. How he had a life that on the outside looked so normal, so fun and vibrant, but yet on the inside of his mind and worse, when he is alone, he struggles to find joy and constantly fights the demon within… I don’t know, but in many ways (minus all the money and cool toys that I currently don’t have) kinda sounds and feels like my life.

Anywho back to my true story… So within moments everyone in the DJ booth disperses and leaves. However within a few minutes after they all have left, they each, one at a time, slowly come back into the booth… I can only assume it was their way of testing the waters of my mentality. I obviously did not have a party face painted on my face. If anything I must have had the “leave me alone look”… Although I will say this, each one of those people I knew, and each one of them came back one at a time and tried to connect with me. Some did it better than others. I guess it shows two things…

1. I MUST build my apartments ASAP. Because this current life does not fit my vision of my life.
2. In some way or form, I have created a bond with each of these people that even though when I walk into my domain of the DJ Booth, each of them in their own way, try to find a way to show me concern for my well being. They may never read these words…. But I thank each of you guys for caring.

After they each came back and during that same time (after I took off my motorcycle gear) and took a deep breath, I began to stand there for a moment and then slowly started stretching and was very solemn in my actions of getting myself mentally prepared for the night. I kept very to myself. But each of them seemed to understand that I was trying to work myself out of a mindset.

So that was how I began my night here at work. I could say so much more about things at work, but I rather wait until I have my apartments up and running. And more importantly, I think it will be important for me to have some space between talking about things here at work and the time at which I will no longer need to be at work, space like that will allow me to see things from a different perspective.

The thought for me to remember concerning the above few sentences is that my surroundings are really only a perception of my own inner problems.

Ok.

Now, let’s get into my life (The life that leads me to my real wants and desires, my real dreams, and truly deep and meaningful relationships for this beautiful life that I am so deeply trying to create)

What have I been doing lately and where did I leave off from the last post…

Well, from my last post things on my mind were things like…… real estate, 12plex, corner property, palm house, engineers, my life, my mentality, my health, my love or lack thereof, my money (or lack thereof), my pursuit to better myself, my energy to be able to get up every day and feel inspired, and friends and life and death.

And from my last post, you could hopefully see a little of where my mentality is, or at least where it should be.

So today let’s touch a little on real estate, in it, we will include all the pieces of it that weigh on my mind.

Speaking of “weighing on my mind” it sparked me to remember a thought. a secret tool, a way to reframe life when things get difficult, the secret tool is this…….. “Do I have to” or “Do I get to” So when thinking about real estate, and when making decisions, sometimes things get so convoluted that I typically default to a negative state… But that WILL eventually change…..So when thinking about things that are weighing on my mind, I allowed myself to remember…… Do I “have to do” real estate, or do I “get to do” real estate…. and honestly, I get to do real estate, but damn… I just wish I knew better ways to enjoy it alone. Yeah… Yep, I said it… I said that word…”alone”… that loneliness shit still hits me pretty hard. life alone, for me, is pretty damn dismal.

Now let’s get back to real estate…

The good and the bad… As of last week, Me and Rich finally signed the contract for the corner property. As a matter of fact, tomorrow I go to the title company to sign my property into the deal. If I have not mentioned it yet, me and Rich are doing a short-term joint venture. Rich will be building two houses on my property, and after the sale of the homes we will divide the profits evenly, or (almost evenly). As we moved closer to the signing of the contract into reality, Rich switched things, or at least for me it felt like things were switched. It’s definitely a learning lesson for me. And I have learned more about working with people from it. Truthfully, it’s neither good nor bad, but rather, me learning that life outside the club is still like many things inside the club….. understanding how people think in their rawest moments is the key.. And ultimately, for me, it’s all a part of doing business. Rich has more capabilities than me at this moment so I must allow certain things to occur. And again, he has paid his dues in life to obtain what he has. He will probably say that he does not have much in life, and true fact, he is not a millionaire. At least not yet, but I am sure that he will get there. As for me, overall, my current goal, or at least something that is at least a small goal hasn’t changed, it is to hopefully have something tangible that I can use as leverage to allow me to build my 12plex. Rich has also been actively trying to get me to let him build my 12plex. However, Rich is only being a business person and as time moves forward he keeps moving the goal post. In other words, he keeps raising the amount that he wants to charge me to build the apartments. And for me, remember, I now have my general contractors license and although there will be many headaches in building the apartments myself, all I really need from Rich is the loan to build the apartments. But for Rich, he doesn’t currently see it profitable for him to “only” lend me money. For him, he wants to maximize his gain. Which for me, I can understand. Which is why I will not currently be using Rich to help me on my apartments. Hopefully, things in my life will change that will allow me to see the path needed to obtain funding for the apartments. In real estate, I have noticed that things in real estate are sometimes much like the weather…. it always changes.

So for me, I am trying to work myself into finding ways to get $400k to build my apartments. I have thought about hard money lenders, but sadly hard money lenders are just a little more expensive than the deal that Rich is pitching to me. And then there is the idea of me going to a bank. Which in some way or form, that is going to ultimately be the route that I take, but as of this moment, I have never gone to a bank to ask for the money. (side note: I just thought to myself… “I must make it a goal to go to some banks and start asking questions” I am so scared of going to banks until I have money in the bank or at least until I look like I have something to offer. But the truth is this, “nothing ventured, nothing gained”

So soon I will be carving out time to try and see who and how I can get the money to build the first 4 apartments. But within that are still things like my current 4plex… I now finally have two units rented, but I still must get the other two units up and running. And within my current 4plex, I am now beginning to have problems with my current “patch guy”, the guy who is doing the work at the apartments has gone AWOL on me. He is not returning my calls or texts. And honestly I rarely call or text him. I call or text him about once a week and I meet with him about once a week. And within the last two weeks he has not completed any work and has not returned my calls. This is now an issue for me and means that I must now spend time finding him. UGH! Just shit that I don’t want to have to do. I hate having to look and hunt for people who are supposed to have work completed. But nothing great ever comes without issues or challenges.

Apartment #2 (at the 4plex) is now about 80% completed. I can almost smell it ready to rent. Then I have my electrician. (who considers himself semi retired) He is slowly working on a project for me. I am having video monitors put in at the 4plex. monitors that will allow each tenant to see who is at the gate. My electrician said that it would take him about two weeks, but sadly this project has gone longer than that….

And honestly, what all this is really saying is that I, (Max) am being lethargic. It is saying that I (Max) need to be on peoples asses. Including my own ass so that I can push people that really don’t want to work for me. And hopefully somewhere down the line I will learn how to find people that are inspired to work for me. But until then I must ratchet down and call people, find people, hunt people, and call people. This is a part of my job that I really dislike. But fuck it. No one will ever care about my life but me. Just the facts. More so, I was supposed to get some info accomplished with the monitors, there are new locks that will go on the gate and I have been needing to send the info to the locksmith, but because other factors of my life (not all real estate related) and also my mentality, I have not made it a priority. That MUST change.

Shit to see how badly I am not organized, as of this week, I finally went to go and renew my passport. I have been wanting to renew my passport for the last 6 months. and it took me until this week to finally make the time for it. 6 months to finally make time for it! Do you believe that? That must not be acceptable in my life. It is starting to become very apparent to me that my major issues are multi fold… I am not yet able to put prioritization on items in my life, or a better way to say it, is that I am not able to yet “actually SEE” what are real priorities. This is a major issue because it then says that I don’t have real direction for my life and deeper, that my goals are not organized. And secondly it also means that I am just wasting time in a day. And that I am somehow bouncing from task to task without any “real” feel of accomplishment. This shit must stop. Literally, I must get my life under better organization.

Ya know…. lets divert off the topic for a moment… This blog is about my journey to my first million, but my first million really all depends on my mindset, on my ability to focus and to direct all of my energy in the proper sections of my life needed to obtain each of my goals. But as I write todays post, and I talk about organization and how I need it to accomplish specific tasks, I realize that in reality its really deeper than I would normally think, its the fact that I truly don’t care about money… I really could give a shit less about money. In reality all I want is to be happy. like truly happy. That’s all that anyone ever really wants. And worse the idea of what “happiness” is, is actually different to everyone. And for me…. It’s love, its connection, its helping, its being more, doing more, experiencing more, and to know what it’s like to have more. It actually doesn’t have a god damn thing to do specifically with money. I could give a fuck less for money. But here’s where shit get real, here’s where shit gets twisted real fast…. I don’t care about money….But literally just about 99.9% of everything I want, need, desire, or want to experience requires money! and fun fact, it requires a shit ton of money…… And that my friends, really sucks! It sucks because I don’t care about money, but I need it to do, get, and accomplish the things I want in life. And somewhere in there, (within those thoughts) is a secret to how I should think to better see my life. Let’s get deeper….

Maybe rather than worrying about money or caring about money, what I should do instead is to find beauty in the journey…. Just think about it for a moment…. They always say, it’s not the destination that counts, instead its the journey that means the most…. And for me whenever I heard someone say that shit, I would always wanna punch them in the face. Like literally, I have always wanted to kick someone in the face when they say that “it’s about the journey and not the destination”. fuck that! because very rarely has my journey ever been enjoyable. Rarely have I ever enjoyed feeling pain and heartache and disappointment and unattainability in life. Very rarely have I ever woke up and said….”God please give me more pain and heartache today… Just please God… Test me more today. Please God, Please give me more of what I can barely handle. Please make sure that I barely make it thru this day. It’s almost never been a fun journey. Maybe if there was or is a way for me to reframe my thinking about all the difficult shit in my life, then maybe things would be different.

Now, let’s get shit straight. No one and I mean, no one has a perfect life. Every human I have ever met has not miraculously been blessed to avoid all of life’s problems and challenges laid before them. As a matter of fact, I personally feel that life itself is meant to challenge you to find your next challenge.(We can get deeper into that in another post)..But maybe there is a way for me to view this so called “life is about the journey” shit or at least maybe I can view parts and pieces of life, of this journey, as a “momentary workout”

For example, when I actually get my ass to the gym. It’s because I have already decided that I am going to put myself thru difficulty, that I am going to put myself thru pain and stress. (Maybe, as I think about it, it’s because I say that I am going to put “my body” and not necessarily “myself”, maybe that’s the secret sauce that is allowing me to have the mental difference of being able to actually in some form, be ok with the pain of the workout… That it’s not me, and rather that it’s my body. Not sure if that makes any sense, but maybe I am able to disconnect myself from my body or rather compartmentalize myself and my body as two different things… I don’t know. Just a thought. But for the most part I typically have already decided that I am going to challenge myself for a specified period of time… And when I am putting on my shorts and tying my shoes and grabbing my gym bag and getting in my car to drive to the gym to put myself thru pain…. All I really tell myself is that Its time to go to the gym. Just a “quick workout”. Nothing more.

And somehow I am able (or maybe what I actually do) is to compartmentalize my mind to see that this moment of my life, that my pain, my struggle, is really just a workout is towards my growth. That my time at the gym, the suffering is towards a future benefit. So a workout is not something that I always enjoy, but I don’t bitch about it. Instead, and Yes, it’s true, I sometimes avoid it, but when I really want something, then the workout seems much more worth it.

Allow me to give an example of wanting something that does not cost money but did challenge me (and still challenges me)…. As of the last 2.5 months I have been OMAD (one meal a day) Yep. I now only eat one meal a day. Many people in America would probably say that it is unhealthy to only eat one meal a day, but science is finally starting to show how we humans now eat. Science is starting to show how businesses and commercials on TV and newspapers and governments lied to us about what the food they give us does to our body. When I was younger I remember hearing everyone around me say that we NEED to eat “3 square meals a day” and that “milk does the body good” (and this is milk from a cow) they would even say that milk helps to build strong bones… Now all these years later science shows that all of that rhetoric is just lies. 3 meals a day is not what we need. And that milk from a cow (milk that has been heated to the point of killing anything healthy) is not good for the body, and worse they added Vitamin D3 to the milk to help say that milk helps build strong bones. Science is now showing that milk is actually not good for your bones. then I also remember seeing someone on TV say that we might not have enough food for everyone on the planet. And for me, coming from poverty, that just made life feel more scarce about my life. But now as I am older, I can easily see that there is definitely enough food for everyone on the planet, the issue is NOT that there is not an abundance of food, rather the issue is that many times the food is disproportionally grown and disproportionately distributed. And worse businesses are in the business of making money and not really helping people. So ever since I was a little boy, the idea of “processed foods” was thought to be good for you. But now as I turn 50, I see that processed foods has wrecked havoc on my body, (this does not include other ways that I may have hurt my body). So now with my new information, I have started programming and I am still programming my mind to only have one meal a day. If I am going to live to be a healthy 120 years old or longer. And still do things that I enjoy, then I must start training my mind and body now. And eating one meal a day has been really good for me. I currently monitor my glucose and ketones daily. I use a glucose monitor from a company named Keto-mojo. It’s a blood stick monitor. I prick my finger once a day to see what my blood glucose is and what my ketones are. And on top of that I now luckily can afford to have a continuous glucose monitor. About a month ago I went to my Botox doctor and asked her to prescribe me “Freestyle Libe 2” It is a patch with a needle that goes into your arm. It stays in my arm for 14 days. And it monitors my glucose through out the day. It’s not perfect, but it allows me to see an overview of what my blood is doing on a daily basis, and more so after time it will allow me to see how food affects my body. My point in all this is that in the attempt to get healthy I have had to do so many things just to get where I am today. I have had to do research, I have had to visit doctors, I have had to work for money to buy things, I have had to change 99.9% of what I eat, I have had to change my view about food, I have had to change how I enjoy food…. Fuck I have had to change literally almost everything! It’s just so god damn painful. However, the only good thing about it, as I think about the journey is that I have unknowingly, and somehow, been able to see pieces of this health journey as a “workout at the gym” It’s my ability to look at parts of this health workout in a way that says, I will have a better outcome if I go thru this temporary pain.

But man, I’ll tell ya… It’s so much harder to see that view in other aspects of my life…. Aspects such as real estate and love. Am I really going to have a better life once I get enough apartments?…. And enough to me is 600. For now I make the super low bar marker line at 20 apartments. If I can get 20 apartments, then I know for sure that the magic number of 20 is enough to get me out of the damn strip club. 20 apartments will allow me to comfortably make enough or more money to live my current life style, but also have freedom to not have to drive almost 2 hours to a club 4 nights a week. It will allow me to be able to work on things that are more important to me than drunk people at a strip club etc. And as for love…. If I really love myself, will my soulmate really be here next to me? I don’t know if I can truly believe that. Right now that is such a leap for me mentally. That my soulmate will finally find me once I love myself. Sadly a part of me still calls that hogwash. Like, I am really trying to believe that all I have to do is love myself and my girlfriend/ future wife will magically appear and tell me that she has been looking for me her whole life. and that she has been waiting to have children until she finds me. That’s currently just very difficult for me to see… Just “be happy” and all your dreams will come true. I don’t know. Life has never been that way for me, and even every book I have read about real people that have had true success in life, have never just said…. “be happy” and your dreams will come true. Be happy and your soulmate will come looking for you. I don’t know, Sounds like it’s missing something. It’s like saying, “work hard and you will become a millionaire” If that was true then everyone who worked 8 hours a day, 5 days a week would by now easily be a millionaire. Life just seems a little more tricky. A little more detailed. A little more depth than a simple “just be happy” in order to see that love will actually find me, or that I will attract my soulmate….. I literally thought that I already did that. Now I have to reframe everything in my mental life. The problem is that I still want, or expect, to enjoy certain things in my life with my soulmate. I want to walk the streets of Paris with the woman I love. simple things like that. And that the woman I love, is also the same woman that loves me, and that she has, and bears only my children. Simple things…. At least in my mind they are simple things, but for some reason, life has been nothing but pushback on every front on the aspect of love. And as for the real estate…. Well, that shit has been an uphill battle. But oddly enough, in certain small ways, I am not as deeply concerned about the uphill battle in real estate. (Don’t get me wrong, I still feel challenged to the point of pain almost daily about money) But what the uphill battle really does is tire me out. It leaves me exhausted and needing a recharge. And a recharge for me is some type of confirmation that I am doing the real estate for a reason that is larger than just me. And that I see some form of progress in real estate. Whether its just a simple bathroom faucet that has been fixed or even a $30,000 remodel that allows me to finally get a renter for the apartment. Progress, that’s the key. And hopefully, its that someday I am doing it for my family. But sadly… (and although I have my brother and sister on the island, and luckily my mom and my dog is still alive) I sadly don’t have a personal family. I don’t have a wife and children. I don’t have that. Now full disclosure, I do have a daughter, but for the last 10 years (as of this writing) she has chosen to not be a part of my life. She has chosen to make a life without me in it. and after enough depression, enough Ketamine, enough books, enough Ayahuasca, and with her at the age of almost 30, I can honestly say these next few words…..” I send her love” When life is meaningful enough to her, she will seek me out, then I’m sure we can revisit things. But for now and for what time I have left, I must work to create a family. Or at least hold on to the belief that my life will be able to do the magic of “creation”….. Create a meaningful life, create a real and meaningful business, create love, create a family, create new life, create all that is beautiful and more.

So my point…. It is extremely difficult for me to envision that love is in my life, when I can’t feel it within. And I know this must change. It’s currently my biggest pain that I walk with every day. That I wake up to it every day and also something that I lay in bed with every night. And then add the mountain task of trying to create a business that makes money in real estate. And then come to a job that I need. Like I currently deeply need, but I just don’t care for it. Sadly my job holds only the vision of dollar signs. $$$$ The thought of having truly deep and meaningful relationships is sadly gone. Those days of me having true friendships in this club business really does feel like a shipped that has already left the dock. Im not exactly sure when it happened. But sometime between the time that I began to dive into personal development and now, friendships here at work are pretty much void and non existent. Just very empty and sad. More so, this club where I work, has in many ways been the same since I have been here, but at the same time, it has also changed in many ways that is 180 degrees different from which I am growing. And the best way for me to view it is much like other things in my life…. I send it love.

Funny thing about those words…. ( I send it love) I learned that in Ayahuasca. (I send it love) It’s something that I was able to see and feel during one of my journeys. It really is a meaningful statement for me…. I send it/you/him/her love.

So, overall, my ability to envision things in my life as a “workout” is something that I really need to think about. If I can see certain aspects of my journey as just a quick workout (that’s the goal,,,,, quick workout) then I can hopefully find a new way to reframe the pain that I go thru on a daily basis. And even better, If I can find a new way to reframe the pain in my life, then maybe someone who reads this will also be able to find a new way to reframe the pain in their own life such that it will allow them the strength, and belief and energy to attain their dreams and goals.

Much love,

Max.