Brant Phillips Show 9: Stay in the Game
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Welcome my friends to today’s show. Today, I’m going to talk about just staying in the game. Just staying in the game. In the game of life and in the game of business, in the game of real estate investing if that’s what you do, just staying in the game. There’s power that comes from just staying in the game and not giving up. I’m going to talk to you about some of the reasons that it’s so compelling to just stay in the game because I’ll tell you that as entrepreneurs, in life and in business, we’re going to have every opportunity to give up, just to give up. To be honest, it feels really good to give up.
Let’s look at that. In terms of sitting on the couch and eating potato chips versus going and working out, it feels really good to sit on the couch and eat potato chips. While you feel good after you work out, there is that initial push that you got to go out and do that work. It’s not always something that’s enjoyable. Same thing with building a business, with pursuing investing, creating deep relationships and impactful relationships, there is a lot of work that’s involved. A lot of times that work, when we’re pressing into the work, we’re going to run into obstacles. We’re going to run into challenges. That is to be expected.
One of the things that sticks out in my mind is whenever I began my business about 10 years ago and when I was just solely focused on real estate investing, at that time, I didn’t have these other businesses. At that time, I was extremely active and going to networking events. Almost every single week, for sure I would go to several events on a monthly basis. Almost every week I was at a different networking event. I kept this pace up for a good solid two years while I was just really getting myself established.
As I began going to those networking events, I began meeting people. Again, creating friendships and networking partners and business relationships and just meeting with other entrepreneurs and investors. The thing that happened was whenever the market started to tank and it tanked quick, but when it started to tank and whenever adversity started coming in, guess what also happened? A lot of the people that I was working with or seeing or building relationships with, they started falling off. They started not showing up.
Case in point was a wholesaler I was working and he used to wholesale real estate. I met him during those times when I was first beginning my business. I ran into him not long ago. I said, “Hey man, what’s going on? Long time no see. Are you still in real estate?” He’s like, “No man. I didn’t make it. I had to go get a job. I’m doing this and it’s okay,” was his response. Sorry, my throat is so scratchy today and we’ll drink water every now and then. He’s like, “No, I didn’t make it.” It was almost like a response of like, “I didn’t make it out of war or something like that, out of an illness.” He’s like, “Man, I see everything you’re doing. I see you made it man, congratulations.” He had some regret in his voice.
I want to tie this back to just staying in the game because some of you, you may be going right now through some challenges in your life, in your relationship, and in your business that you’re having thoughts about quitting. First off, I want to let you know that that’s okay. Acknowledge that, that that’s part of this game, of battling these thoughts, battling our fears, battling and getting over the mistakes that we make.
Part of this game of just staying in the game is like, even if you “Fail” at something that you set out to do, begin to look at what your labeling simply as failure as opportunities to learn. When I went into my MMA cage fight and proceeded to get my ass knocked out, a valuable lesson was learned from that, from the MMA experience, from the martial arts world. The lesson given to me was that, “You either win or you learn.” When you learn, there’s extreme value from learning even when you “Fail.” One of the reasons for you not to quit, for you to just stay in the game is that there are so many opportunities to learn from your mistakes. These are often times the ways that we learn the most. It’s like the Thomas Edison quote. Something along the lines of like, “I’ve never failed. I’ve just found 10,000 other ways that don’t work.” I think that was in reference to creating the light bulb.
When we’re able to remove this label of failure from our vocabulary, from our mindset and look at these things that don’t turn out the way that we expected as just simply learning opportunities, then it allows us to remove regrets. Then we’re not worried about what others think and just living with all this regret because one of the hardest things to do in life is to live with regret. When we do that, when we hold on to this regret, it’s like this weight and this baggage that we carry around. When we’re carrying around a lot of weight and when we’re carrying around a lot of baggage, guess what that translates to? That translates to making it very hard just to stay in the game.
We know that longevity is one of the ways that we create success. Allow yourself the opportunity rather than quitting on your dreams and beating yourself up to just make this commitment to say, “Hey look self, I’m going to make a commitment. 2) I’m not going to self-sabotage and beat myself up mentally. I’m going to allow myself to learn from things that don’t work out the way that I intended.”
On this path of creating success and creating results, you’re going to be given the opportunity to face fears. When you’re facing your fears, you really got to tap in to finding your inner strength. Let’s face it, you’re never going to know how strong you are until you face some of these fears. That’s the only choice that you have to put your chips on the table and see what you got.
Guess what? Some hands that we play in life and some hands that we play in business, we’re going to win and some we’re going to lose. We have to keep just putting ourselves out there. Being okay with being vulnerable, being okay with taking risks and knowing that they’re going to fail. The three Fs, fail, forward, fast. The most successful entrepreneurs in the world, in the history of ever are the ones that were okay to fail, but they were able to extract the lesson from the failure and get valuable real life experience that they could apply moving forward.
Every time that we do this, even if it’s what you deem as a failure, even if you deem it as a failure something that didn’t go right, when you stay in the game, I’m going to promise you this, just take me for my word right now but the more that you stay on this path to creating success, to creating the business of your dreams, to creating the life, the relationships, the health and fitness, just staying in the game, being okay with what is, being okay with what is, whatever that result is in terms of the past, like, “If this happened, I can extract the lesson and apply it moving forward,” You’re going to gain optimism. You’re going to gain optimism in moving forward. Rather than just giving up and giving in and being like the masses, you’re going to be able to go down the road less travel by just staying in the game.
You are essentially already different from most other people in life. You’re already on the path of we’ll call the 1%, the few. It’s probably a little bit more than 1% but that’s the path that you’re on. For those of you that are on this path that you’re committed to not giving up, to staying in the game, this is where the magic happens. This is where the experience and the essence of life happens. Being able to take that next step, to walk on that tight wire knowing that maybe or maybe not there is something underneath to catch you.
We don’t really know what’s going to happen when we take that next step always but we also know this is life. This is living. This is how we define who we are. This is how we go to the next level. This is how we discover what more life has to offer because if we stay complacent and we stay where we’re at and we continue to do the same things that we’ve always done, and I don’t care where you’re at in life. I don’t care where you’re at in business, we stagnate. We will fail to discover what greater things can be obtained, what greater successes can be had, what greater freedoms can be experienced. What greater ways that we can motivate and inspire others.
My friends, today’s message is all about encouraging you to simply just stay in the game. Whatever you’ve committed to, whatever goal you set out to do, if that’s something that’s worthy and desirable for you to achieve, just don’t quit. Just don’t quit. Nike used to say, “Just do it.” Just take action and just do it. Right now I’m saying to you, “Just don’t quit. Just don’t quit. Be okay with missing targets but continue to set targets and work to achieve them. When you don’t, assess what happened, find the positive from it, extract the lesson and apply it moving forward and staying on your path.”
That’s it my friends. I want to say thank you to all listeners out there. I’d love to have your feedback. Give me some positive reviews. If you’re getting value from this, if you’re able to extract value from this, get a little daily motivation and inspiration, then I really, really appreciate that. I appreciate you. I love and appreciate each and every one of you. I thank you for listening to the show. Until next time, I look forward to helping you create results in your life and business.