A New Competition

In an old blog I did, called At Last... Competition. I talked about how I needed competition to make myself a better investor. I chose my brother, Rex, mostly out of friendly competition and similar goals. Well, one phone call from him changed all that.

Rex called me out of the blue sometime last week and we talked for over an hour. It was probably the longest conversation we’ve ever had. Anyway, we talked about a lot of things, particularly business and family. He said that he was in a funk for a long while and wasn’t motivated during that time. It reminded me of when I graduated college and it hit me that my degree was useless when coupled with my awful GPA. I stayed home and wallowed in Lucky Charms and talk shows for 6 months until I got the motivation to get up and do something. He said that he is now motivated and plans to complete his million dollar journey in a little over 3 months by using his now patented Forex (foreign exchange) Trading strategy. It’s a strategy that he’s been working on for years and I guess it’s finally ready to be implemented.

Rex wanted to get things going now so he could start taking care of family: his wife, our parents, etc. He was dead serious, with a conviction I hadn’t heard before. It seemed as though he was taking back his role as big brother and was going to start getting involved with the family again. It felt good hearing these things, especially hearing that we both have the same ideas on familial duty. This information, however, left me with a problem: How the hell can my 3 year plan compete with his 3 MONTH plan?! By the time he has a million dollars I will have just started Phase 3! Because of this, I have to cancel our competition. My ego can’t take a beating like that, no matter how friendly our competition may be. Besides, the whole purpose of our competition was to motivate each other and it seemed to have worked. But now I need new competition.

Enter Sha. This works out better because I’ve always wanted to surpass Sha. He does the same business as me in the same town, and he helped me get started in real estate. If I could beat him with my three year plan, that would be great. It also helps that I currently don’t feel too good about Sha thanks to that whole non-repayment issue, so I’d really like to beat him good. The only purpose of this competition is to fucking win, and it should be a good one. Sha got started with help from his family while I got started with my own teaching and security money. Sha owned, at one point, almost 30 properties when I only had 2. And here we are now. Whose business method will turn out to be the better and more profitable? Who will be able to retire first? Let the games begin. Ding. Ding.