The Most Important Question to Ask

Maybe I've been spending too much time with a 3 year old recently, but I can't get one question out of my head: Why?

Commercial real estate is filled with people with big ideas and even bigger goals. In the CRE world, most of the goals involve some version of assets under management (AUM), number of doors, capital raised, or net worth. You might commonly hear people in commercial real estate having a goal of owning $1 billion of real estate (AUM). Or, even more ambitious, a $1B net worth. I hear this, and I can't help but think... WHY? Then what? What's it all for? To me, those metrics are so UN-inspiring. It's great to have goals to grow your business (I do), but shouldn't there be more?

On the other hand, outside the CRE world, I have noticed an equally un-inspiring tendency: People have a depressingly small goal, or simply no goal or vision at all. It's sad. It's too common for us to drift through our day-to-day with no vision, no drive, no why. We all do it. We spend - literally - hours every day doing things that bring us nowhere - checking email, watching TV, staring at our phones, following the daily news drama, going to a dead end job we hate. Why? What's it all for? Where are we going? Why are we doing what we're doing?

A slew of research has been done on the regrets of the dying. Researchers interview people close - days or weeks away - to dying. The craziest part is that over the last 50 years, most of the regrets are largely unchanged. We're not learning. We know some things are important during our best days, yet we don't take action on them. I've been crafting my 3 year vision since October. The theme that permeates throughout my vision? Purpose and intention. I refuse to drift through life aimlessly, only to have the same regrets when I'm dying as the people a century before me did. Chad Carson's theme is to do "more of what matters". And really, isn't that what we should all be doing?

‍