Don’t Stop Believing !

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Sitting here this morning realizing I hadn’t posted a new blog entry in almost a week.  I had a pretty good run there for a while, the ideas kept flowing and I had more material than I had time to write.  My mind was totally blank trying to figure out what to write this morning when just like magic, I am looking at everybody’s daily facebook updates and I see a status update from one of my kids ski coaches “start shopping for airfare now for fall ski camp” and immediately nostalgic thoughts of following my kids to ski racing camps swept over me.  Of course with the personal financial crisis of the last couple years my first thought was feeling bad that I couldn’t do that any more because I couldn’t afford it, then suddenly the song starts playing in my head…”Don’t stop believing…hold onto that feeling” and I immediately was reminded that, “that feeling” is what it is all about.  When you truly believe and know that you can do things, you can !.  I know it sounds simple but doing a thorough analysis and having the opportunity to spend some time with a recent college graduate and incredible entrepreneur I met at Target Field, I know it had worked for me in the past and I know when I focused on “not losing everything”  I lost everything.  When you proceed confidently and know you can do something without a doubt, it always happens exactly the way you visualize it.

Crazy thoughts started popping into my head as ‘Don’t stop believing” continued to play in the background.  I thought about taking a trip to the Caribbean this fall like my wife and I always used to do to celebrate the anniversary of our first date on November 1, 1975.  I thought about going to Colorado in November to watch my son train for the upcoming ski racing season and for some strange reason, a thought came to me to look up the address of our home that we lost to foreclosure in December of 2009 on Google earth.  Now the home issue has been particularly sensitive for me, I haven’t been able to drive by the house we lost and lived in for 25 years, I get physically ill when someone mentions it and for the most part I just had been trying to completely erase it from my mind.   But for some reason this morning, something was telling me to look up the house on Google earth, so I looked it up and there beside the satellite photo was an ad from a realtor saying to look at this listing… so I clicked on it and up popped the listing for the home I lost.  Unlike the last 12 months when mentions of that house made me feel sick, this morning thoughts of hope were rushing over me.  I read the ad for the listing and took a look at all the pictures they had posted.  I think something amazing is happening, first, I thought someone had bought the house and moved into it, second, I thought even if we could have stayed in it I couldn’t afford to fix all the problems that had cropped up with the house over the past few years but when I looked at it, no one had bought it and someone had fixed all the problems with it.  It has a new roof, new windows, the theater in the basement has been restored, the ceiling in the kitchen has been redone and the light fixtures that needed to be replaced have been replaced.  It looks brand new inside and out and my yard that I worked so hard on for all those years still looks great.  Can you guess what my next thought was ?  It was  an unbelievable, I should buy it back thought !  Once again….”Don’t Stop Believing” started blaring in my head. How I could I possibly buy this home back before someone else gets there hands on it ?  To pull that off I would have to come up with millions of dollars to dig myself out of debt, pay everyone back and pay cash for the house because no one is going to give me a loan.  Millions of obstacles, huge barriers and the words impossible haven’t even crossed my mind.  Am I back to being my old self where I could make the impossible happen ? am I going nuts ?  Should my family find some serious psychiatric help for me ?  I choose to think that I am back and better than ever. 

Dreams can become reality, you just have to really believe and know they are going to happen.  I spent the last few years worrying about and focusing on trying not to lose things, trying to keep my business alive and trying not to lose my house.  You might think those were admirable things to focus on but in fact by thinking that way (trying not to lose) I was doing exactly the thing that made me lose everything.  If I had focused on growing the business, improving my home and setting goals for new things to attain, I can guarantee that I wouldn’t have lost everything.   I don’t like to make excuses but it is important to find the cause of your issues, I believe mine all started with a CFO I hired, we would have weekly meetings where he would present spreadsheet after spreadsheet, projected on the wall, showing me when my company was going to run out of money.  Guess what ? we ran out of money and got into a mode of never having any money.  In 27 plus years of being in business I had never taken the approach of looking at when I was going to run out of money and I never did run of money until our focus became “when are we going to run out of money”.  We should have been focused on the things we needed to do to generate money and looking at spreadsheets of what were going to do when the money came in.   A very successful mentor of mine once told me that there are only two things in business: Growth or Liquidation either you are growing the company or the company is going out of business.   I think the same can be said for people as well, either you are learning and growing in your personal experience or you are liquidating everything preparing for things to shut down.  It all comes down to what you think about most.             

As we head into the fall of another year are you heading into the fall of your life ? or are you focused on building yourself up and preparing for another Spring ?  My little journey of the past few years that took me down the wrong path is being quickly corrected, it just took getting the right mental GPS turned on.   No dream is too big, no dream is impossible and fixing the past (including buying your foreclosed home back) is not only possible it easily could become reality if you “Don’t Stop Believing” !