#66 - How is that possible?
What I’m Watching
Ray Dalio’s article on navigating the current conditions and how his economic principles apply.
Resource of the week
PropertyTribes is a resource I’ve been using since before I first got into property. It’s a forum founded by Vanessa Warwick a long-time landlord and provides a lot of balanced articles, support and info for investors.
Quote
“Learned helplessness is the giving-up reaction, the quitting response that follows from the belief that whatever you do doesn’t matter.” Arnold
Schwarzenegger
News and trends
- Rental market ‘crisis’ as we see a 91% increase in S21 evictions amid landlords increasing rents or rushing to sell up.
- The viewpoint in the industry that the government are intentionally pushing private landlords out for corporations seems to have some merit as we see Lloyds bank aggressively growing its rental portfolio to 1,000 properties with 700 in the pipeline.
Other stuff
Thoughts
Recently, I’ll almost jump at any opportunity to talk about rowing, probably much to the annoyance of my family (as I’m trying to get my brother and sister into the sport)! The reason is the many benefits I’ve seen on a personal level since taking it more seriously. Sure, there are all the obvious health benefits, getting in shape and all of that. But the biggest of which I have to say is not so obvious.
It has basically recalibrated slightly how I view what’s possible. I remember a few months in, after a particularly tough indoor rowing session (2k test, which gives a lot of rowers anxiety) as I was lying on the floor, gasping for air. I thought to myself ‘I’m too old for this, I wish I got into this at least 10 years ago, it’s too late to be competitive’.
The next session I was having a chat with Jeremy, one of the guys at my club who is 60, about an online daily leaderboard he participates in. He showed me that he came 3rd out of 700 people across all age groups, in their 20s, 30s, and 40s upwards. It was a ‘wtf’ moment. ‘How the hell is that possible’.
Fast forward to a recent race, where I didn’t get the result I was hoping for. I was by far the smallest guy. So my conclusion was that I’m too short, it’s genetics I’ll never be able to compete with these giants who are all over 2 metres, they can just generate much more power than me. I need a 2k test time of at least under 7:40 while it’s now 8:07. I’m too small I can’t generate the leverage. Well, cue in Steve, who is smaller than me, well over 40 and can pull a 2k time far beyond my target. Steve can go sub 7 minutes, which again, I didn’t think was possible.
So the more I spend time training and learning, the more I realise it’s mostly in my head. It’s not because of my age, or size, or genetics or any other excuse. I just need to put in the work, grind it out and be better.
I’m starting to apply this more to my everyday life in general. I used to scoff at a lot of this disingenuous motivational content on social media (and still do). However, the fact is we really can achieve almost anything, if we want it bad enough and put in sustained work over a long enough period. A lot of these limitations we place on ourselves are not true, they’re just excuses so we feel better about not putting in the hard work over the long term. Sure, we are all born with different talents and predispositions but in the majority of cases we can work with them and still achieve incredible results like Jeremy and Steve and many of the people I’ve interacted with.
So the next time I think that I’m not smart enough, not articulate enough, or too introverted. To put it bluntly: dumber and less well-spoken people than me in this world have at some point achieved incredible success, so why can’t I?
Most meaningful things will require more work and take longer than initially thought.
Hans