Conditioning or Choice? The danger of doing what you're "supposed to do"
(This is the second lesson in my series "The Rise & Fall of My Flipping Company")
Stick it out.
Don’t quit.
I made a decision to start a house flipping business, so success is my only option right? Anything short of success is quitting, and I don’t quit.
That’s what I told myself as I was miserable inside the cocoon of a business that I created.
Think about the absurdity of this for a minute…as someone without a job, I had nobody telling me what to do. I created a business that I wasn’t enjoying and that wasn’t doing well.
Instead of making a change to do something different and more fulfilling (a decision 100% within my control), my brain told me I was supposed to stick it out because anything else was quitting.
That’s some bullshit.
That’s conditioning, not choice.
Why Social Conditioning?
A core piece of the entrepreneur life is surrounding yourself with amazing people that are at least a step or two ahead of you on the path you’re taking.
Early on this looks like books, podcasts, and social media, and we often seek to emulate those that we respect. So when every major self help and real estate personality eschews the concept of shiny object syndrome, we’re in total agreement!
For me, I always resonated strongly with Brandon Turner’s analogy of bridges. He explains it much more eloquently, but you get to your destination fastest by building a single bridge to completion rather than by starting a bunch of partial bridges.
Throw in my time in the Army and the part of the Warrior Ethos that says “I will never quit” and I was locked in.
I picked this house flipping bridge, and damn it I’m going to keep building it no matter what.
What if it’s the wrong fucking bridge?
Social conditioning is when you know it’s the wrong bridge, and you keep building it anyway.
So what?
There are plenty of things in life that we have no control over. Most of them actually. So in the decisions that are 100% ours, why allow anything else to influence that decision???
That’s what I had to learn. I was in full control of the direction I took my life and the type of business I started, continued, or ended.
I had to step back and question the major decisions I was making from that lens.
Am I about to take a particular course of action because it aligns with my goals? Is it a fit with the direction I want to go? Do I truly care about it?
If the answer is yes, great! Let’s do it.
But if the answer is no, and ESPECIALLY if there’s a looming sense of “what I’m supposed to do”, that’s it’s time to pause and reassess.
How do you handle your time?
Do you allow your precious time to be taken up by phone calls, events, and activities where you feel that’s what you’re supposed to do? Or are you doing these things because you truly want to?
Stop doing what you’re supposed to do! Start doing what you’re meant to do!
If you want help figuring it out, let’s chat! Send me an email or schedule a call.
Life is too important to be guided by conditioning. Let’s live on purpose!
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