I sometime feel like there might be something wrong with me because I have this extreme drive to succeed in life. This feeling has lived within my soul for as long as I can remember, I feel like I have to become successful and that it is my mission in life to do something positive to improve the world. Regularly I stop and look over my life, I realize I have achieved many things but I always feel like I should have achieved more. I am truly obsessed with creating something of value for myself, for my customers and for the world.
Even though I am very thankful that I have this drive it can also be a curse, more often then not I have driven myself insane or become so stressed out that I can’t sleep. My first true passion (and still is) was real estate, I started with both pockets empty and for 5 years I lived as cheaply as I could and spent all the money I could on real estate. At this point I had a few rental properties that all had positive income and the profits that I was making on each property seemed to be growing with every deal I made. All of a sudden the icelandic economy crashed and my asset in the properties turned into horrible debt. So in a very short period all of my hard work for the past years disappeared and actually much worse then that it turned into debt. This was lika a punch in the guts and it took me a few years to recover from it both financially and mentally. Mentally I broke down after the punch, not right away but after I had been struggling with trying to swim out of this pool of debt for almost two years. Losing all you own is not so difficult but being thrown into a invisible prison of debt for years can truly kill your spirit. But I was able to build myself up and overcome this hard lesson in business and last year I finally finished tying the final lose ends of my financial debt and was able to start again from zero. I still have that extreme drive to succeed but I must admit that after you get the wind knocked out of you that badly you don’t run quite as fast towards the next fight. But slowly and surely I am getting back to my good old obsessed self.
Even though I haven’t really gotten back into real estate I did start up a internet company 2 years ago and that has been growing steadily and is becoming more profitable by the day. The good thing is that a lot of what I learned in real estate can be transfered over to my new company giving me a unique perspective that most of the competitors do not have. I am starting to fill up again with that burning drive that I had and I know it will not be long until I return to buying rental properties.
When starting out in business I knew that it wouldn’t be easy and most business people I know today have had their share of rough times. The truth is that the people that always continue working towards their goals no matter how often they get knocked down are the ones that become successful in the end.
