Today as random topics came into my head I took some time to write it down. Brief words or sentences so that I knew what to write about tonight when I got home from work. Today might be a little all over the place however it’s true to my days as they have a tendency to do. 

The first part that I’d like to touch on is that we hit a 5% bump today. One of the Super Deluxe Mixtape Award level was scooped up today. That means there are only 9 left. That definitely made my day beyond anything else. It was also great to see the person who had backed it was an old friend. By old I mean we  met at a younger time in life. 

There was a huge relief of anxiety with that pledge today and there was another pledge last night that felt good. Today was less of an emotional rollercoaster even before the pledge was noticed. I think I am coming to terms of stepping away from the project and letting things run their course. 

That also brings me to some things I wanted to touch on that it was definitely a lesson in patience. In a world of instant gratification we get so caught up in getting everything instantly that we forget to take a breath and let things flow. This project is a marathon not a sprint. Today I came to a huge level of gratitude when I realized this. 

I thought of my day job selling cars and how it relates. For one when I meet a customer for the first time my first thought isn’t I need to sell a car to this person right away. My thought it what brought this person here and what can I do to help them? From then on some deals might close on the same day but the reality of it is that most of my sales are a long term process. By long I mean a couple days or a month and sometimes even a year. 

One thing I noticed is that sales people new to our dealership even when coming from a different type of cars sales are really quick to jump up in the beginning of the month to get as many sales as possible. For me it’s the opposite typically my first couple days I am focused on my pipeline. This month I have been off because I took more days off than usual to work on the Kickstarter. I also haven’t been working as many hours as I would because I am running the Kickstarter campaign. 

When I went to check my schedule for tomorrow I noticed I had booked over 10 appointments. This is a huge amount. I will more than likely close 2-4 deals tomorrow depending on a few different factors. What I noticed was that my pipeline was building stronger. That I know in my day job it’s a marathon not a sprint. The funny thing about car sales is that you live and die in a months time. This Kickstarter is similar that I am born the day it runs and the funding dies the day that it ends.

Today was a huge lesson. I needed to pull back from the front and step back completely and look at what has been created. It is very evident that what I am doing is moving towards a bigger process and in the right direction. I have a hope that things will get better and they have already been doing awesome. 

Looking at another part of my life that I do not go into so often because I was always worried what people would think is that I have been running a business quietly for going on two years now. That the exact same amount of time that I have been working at my job in car sales. 

What is it that I do? Well everybody on YouTube always talks about passive income and sitting on a beach resort in the middle of some exotic island while money flows to you. While I do make “passive income” it all stems from a huge amount of work and effort. 

At 27 I purchased a condo in South Florida. With that I lived in it for a bit with all intentions to rent it out however in the meantime I needed a place to stay and was sick of paying rent. To back track a couple years prior to this purchase my credit was horrible, the economic sucked and I just happen to get out of college without a real job. I got my first adult job as a credit analyst where I learned the ins and outs of credit. Which helped me buy a condo. 

I lived in the condo for a while then moved to Austin, TX only a couple months after getting married. It all happened so fast. We both came to the agreement that we would rent to condo out and I did. I have a property manager who I pay to take care of everything and I sit back to get a check each month. Periodically I make executive decisions which are all through a simple email or text. There was a couple months of struggle when it was vacant and of course growing pains of taxes as well as other small “good” problems. 

Needless to say the reason I bring this up is because that business was not built over night. It’s success is a direct result of patience. The “passive” income is a result of a lot of hard work. Hard work financing a home completely on my own without help, working on my own credit and repairing it from destruction, learning to hire the right people and learning to set standards for myself in this business. 

This was another great reminder to myself that things take time. Patience is something so important yet taken for granted. Today I am grateful. I am thankful for everything and the opportunities in front of me. I am glad for learning the lesson that it’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon.  

In the words of the wise Yoda “Patience you must have my young padawan!”