At Last... Competition

Tee hee hee... Property Chi is fully rented and it feels good! The couple, Gary and Ira, seem to be the right fit. Straight from Florida, Gary works at the car shop making $15 an hour while Ira is looking for a job. After some printer problems, I printed out the leases and drove to his job. He signed it, gave me money, and I got the hell outta there. It feels good to be done with that damned place, at least until the next problem comes up.

My brother Rex contacted me a week or so ago to talk about business ideas. He had told me earlier that he was going to present some ideas for us doing business together. I didn't know what to expect so I had an open mind. Rex is smart. I'm not sure how smart he is, but definitely smarter than me. To say that his ideas were ambitious would be an extreme understatement. I won't go into the specifics, but the ideas were bold, lofty, and immensely profitable if done correctly. While I enjoyed the ideas he presented, I was much more excited about something else.

One of the criteria of his business plan entails that we be successful in our individual businesses before we do business together. This means that I have to be successful at real estate while he has to be successful at FX (foriegn exchange) trading, IT security, and all the other things he does. I should have my business up and running by the end of 2014, and I suspect that we will each need at least 500k to start our joint venture. Who can succeed enough at their chosen profession to get to that number first? This means that I now have competition!

It's the healthy kind of competition where you want the other to do well, while pushing yourself to be better and not fall behind. It's the kind of competition I had hoped my father, Roy, was going to give me. But Roy, as I explained in my Father's Day blog, is a shell of what he once was. He's good for talking about his past and getting a sense of culture but that's about it. Roy once told me a story about how he had a friend that was always in competition with him. They both studied in university together and would compete with each other to see who would get the better grade. It made them better students and I think it'll do the same for me.

I've always been tempted to do business with Sha, but he and I handle business differently. So maybe this thing with Rex is what I'll be doing when I retire. It's all the more reason and motivation to succeed in this business.