Big Life Perspectives

# 15_Big Life Perspectives

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## [00:00:00] Perspectives on Living a Big Life: Navigating the Journey with Confidence and Contentment

[00:00:00] **Justin:** Today’s episode, we’re going to talk all about perspectives of a big life, what it looks like during the journey to know that, number one, you’re doing the right things, and number two, you’re setting yourself up for a really big life.

[00:00:14] I listened to just recently, the sermon of a church leader. And he talked about some experiences that were very touching to me when it comes to having the right perspective on life. Life and how to be very content with right now, knowing that what you’re going through right now is a set up for good things to come.So if by chance you’ve ever wondered, boy, the road is bumpy. I hope this is going to have a good ending. This episode is going to give you some great perspective. Stay tuned.

## [00:00:41] Intro

[00:00:41] **Justin:** The big question is this how do those of us in the real estate industry with crazy amounts of ambition? How do we think bigger than the building of our own empires? How do we simultaneously seek success and significance, income and impact? My name is [00:01:00] Justin Stoddard, and this is the Think Bigger Real Estate Show.

[00:01:06] Welcome back, my friends, to the Think Bigger Real Estate show. I’m your host, Justin Stoddart. Very excited to share with you a perspective. Let me begin by telling a story.

## [00:01:13] Trusting the Process and Finding Beauty in Life’s Challenges

[00:01:13] **Justin:** Oftentimes when I was going through rough times in my childhood, my mom, who’s had the single greatest impact upon my life, forming me into the man that I needed to be to attract the wife that I attracted, which I’m extremely, eternally grateful for that, she would always tell this story when we’re going through. In fact, she’d always say this one thing. She’d always say this too shall pass. And then she would oftentimes follow that up with this kind of parable that oftentimes in life we are behind a giant tapestry.

[00:01:45] Now, for any of you that are seamstresses or seamstress, not sure if I’m pronouncing that correctly, but you’ll recognize that behind a tapestry, it’s quite ugly, right? There’s [00:02:00] knots and there’s snags and there’s loops and it’s not very pretty. And she said oftentimes life is exactly like that. She said, I believe at certain points in life, and for sure at the end of life, we’ll be brought around to see the beautiful tapestry that was being created.

[00:02:15] And it’s that theme that I want to share with you today is that I recognize that the audience that I serve is experiencing a bit of a challenging market, that maybe you had set out big goals in 2022 and 2023, maybe you’re hitting them and it’s just been a lot harder than what you thought. Or maybe you’re way off and you’re wondering to yourself, man, this isn’t quite what I had envisioned. This isn’t quite what I had in mind. Am I on the right path?

## [00:02:42] Growing Through Adversity: Embracing Life’s Challenges to Achieve Greatness

[00:02:42] **Justin:** And I want to share with you some perspectives. Number one, that I’ve learned from my own life. I’ll tell you this is that right now some things are unfolding for me that are so much bigger than I had even ever imagined. Keep in mind I intentionally and purposely put myself [00:03:00] around big thinkers who might interview on this show so that I can expand my possibilities, so that I can think bigger and bigger all the time.

[00:03:10] And even being around all of them, I had no clue as to what was coming. Some of that will start to roll out to all of you here in the near future. Some of you already know about it. But I do want to share that from my perspective. I feel like right now. Although I’ve been through some bumps, some snags, and some challenges over the past couple of decades, I will say that my life right now, I’m being brought around to the front side of that tapestry, and I’m like, oh, all of those snags, all of those knots, all of those difficulties were actually creating something beautiful on the other side.

[00:03:45] In other words, they were turning me into the person that I needed to be to be prepared for this moment. Now I know that moving forward, my life’s not going to be free of snags and knots and ugly things. That’s just the way life [00:04:00] is, right? That’s what we signed up for. And keep in mind that that’s part of the purpose of all of this is to actually become something more by going through difficult times. Just like we go to the gym to have resistance. In fact, my business partner, he said today, I’ve got interval day today, so we have to hurry.

[00:04:16] So know that purposely we put ourselves in what might seem like harm’s way, at least in difficult situations, so that we can grow, right? We do that on purpose so that we can grow. And this life as a bigger perspective is the same thing. I believe we came here, we chose to come here because we wanted to grow. Because we needed to experience some adversity in order to grow.

## [00:04:41] The Power of Doing the Work: Lessons Learned from a University President

[00:04:41] **Justin:** So with that in mind, I want to share with you a couple of experiences that I learned just here over the past few days. My university president, I attended a small college up in Idaho called Rick’s College.

[00:04:52] I went there for one year, played football at that university and I later married a Rick’s. My wife’s maiden name is Rick. So quite interesting. [00:05:00] But that university president, he was maybe in his early fortiess at the time and he’s leading university. Super impressed with him. I was really impressed. Every time he spoke, I was like, oh my goodness, he is such a good speaker. To the point that I actually went and called his office. I was taking a public speaking class at the time. I called his office and asked if I could come interview him.

[00:05:24] I wanted to get some insight on how he became such a good speaker. And I remember sitting in the lobby and he comes out of his office and they’re kind of behind this, like this divider wall. But I could hear him ask his secretary now, Justin Stoddart, who’s that? And she said, I don’t know. He just is a student that wanted to have a conversation with you. He’s like, do you know what it’s about? She’s like, I don’t. And in my head, I’m thinking, like, oh, I guess students don’t do this. But I did it. And I sat down with him and I connected with him for a number of minutes.

[00:05:55] And it was impactful because he’d become a real mentor of mine. And I [00:06:00] asked him the question. I said, how do you become such a good speaker? And he said, It’s kind of like the dew on the grass. You wake up in the morning, the dew is there, but you don’t really see it happen. It happens ever so slightly, ever so slowly that over time it appears and it’s there. I’ve taken that to heart, that lesson, that you aren’t going to notice some of the progress and some of the things that you experience in life because it happens so slowly.

[00:06:24] If you just go about doing the work, even when it’s hard, even when you aren’t seeing the fruits, those are the people that succeed. Those are the people that are behind the scenes working on that tapestry. Even though they can’t see the front of it, they just keep doing the work, knowing and expecting and trusting and having faith that good things are to come.

## [00:06:42] Trusting the Unknown: Doing the Right Thing Without Knowing the Outcome

[00:06:42] **Justin:** So this particular mentor, I was listening to him speak. It was a recording. He was doing a devotional for a bunch of college students. And he’s now moved into a very kind of high role within the church that I belong to.

[00:06:56] And he was talking about some experiences from his [00:07:00] younger years which reinforced this point that even if we can’t see the benefits and the fruits of what we’re doing, we should still keep doing the right thing, knowing that good things are to come.

[00:07:11] He shared an experience as a missionary. He was living in Germany, and there was a senior member of the church that was there visiting. And as this particular person, I’ll call him David, David was the young missionary. And David was helping this senior member of the church, this senior leader of the church get on a train to go to another part of Europe.

[00:07:34] And before he departed, he gave him, I think it was 20 francs or whatever the German currency is. And he gave him 20 francs. And he said, I have zero recollection of this. Zero. I know. I took him to the train station, dropped him off. I did not remember giving him some money.

[00:07:50] So this senior leader of the church and his wife come to a train station between East and West Berlin and the people come through and they start asking [00:08:00] let us see your passports and his wife. Or maybe they’re visas. Anyway, the visa had expired, but they had had an extension from three years to five years.

[00:08:10] And apparently the East Germans who were Communists, didn’t like that. They weren’t accepting that. And so in this situation, this older couple, senior leaders of the church, were confronted by somebody from East Berlin who came on the train to say, show me your authorization to be here. And they’re like, no, this isn’t going to work. This one’s expired. But they said, no, we have an extension. No, that doesn’t work. And so he didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know how serious this situation was. But he took those 20 francs and he put it inside of the passports and handed it to the gentleman.

[00:08:41] And that the Communist train conductor guy came back and said, you’re both approved to go. Now, you might call it a $20 bribe or whatever. But in that very moment later on, they learned just how serious that situation was that his wife could have been taken into Communist Germany at the time [00:09:00] and might not have been able to return and he would have had to go with her. Like, it just would have been a really sticky and difficult situation. Who knows what kind of conditions she would have been and how safe she would have been or would not have been.

[00:09:11] But my point is that sometimes we do the right thing and we don’t even know we’re doing it. And that was the point of this young missionary. His name was David, where he said, I have no recollection of that. But I have to trust that when we have ideas to do things, when we have ideas to take the right step, we might not understand the full ramifications. We might not understand what’s actually happening behind the scenes that’s going to open up doors and protect people and create opportunities and safety for other people. That was one story.

## [00:09:42] Trusting the Journey: The Power of Following Your Gut Instincts

[00:09:42] **Justin:** The second story, the same leader. Again, he was my university president my freshman year in college. Again, David is his first name. He said, here’s another experience. He said, I was sitting as a church leader on the stand getting ready for a meeting and I looked out into the [00:10:00] audience and one of the members of that particular meeting that evening was the dad of another young man who was the same age as his son. And those two sons 2 hours away, happened to be playing for the championship against each other. And at that very moment he had this thought, although he was supposed to be in that meeting, he went and tapped that dad on the shoulder and said, Come with me.

[00:10:27] And he actually turned over the responsibility of that meeting to another, like one of his counselors. And those two dads, david and this other dad, drove 2 hours to watch their sons play in the championship game. And he said the whole time I felt a little bit guilty. Like I’m kind of shirking my responsibilities here, right? I’m kind of leaving what I probably should be doing and going to watch my son play basketball. But, hey, you can’t go wrong when you’re choosing to go watch your son play basketball. A few months later, he gets a phone call in the middle of the night to say, come to the hospital.

[00:10:59] Come to find out [00:11:00] this young man. So the son of the other man had died. Some freak accident. Like, crazy freak accident. And that was the last basketball game that that dad ever got to see. And he hugged David and told him, thank you so much for listening to that, that prompting whatever you want to call it that gave me that moment with my son that I’ll never get back again. I share that example as well as another example is that if we just do the very best we can with the knowledge that we have, even if we may not know that if it’s the right thing or the road may be bumpy, right?

[00:11:40] There may be challenges and snags and snarls and difficulty. But if we do the very best we can with the very best knowledge that we have, we must trust that good things are to come. That on the other side of these snags, on the other side of these knots, there’s a beautiful tapestry being made.

## [00:11:59] Encouragement and Perspective: Trusting in the Good Things to Come

[00:11:59] **Justin:** This [00:12:00] podcast is today’s episode is really just an episode of encouragement and of perspective. Big life perspectives is that nobody gets to a big life without going through some ugly, gnarly, difficult things. Like everybody, you study the most successful impactful people in the world and their life is wrought with challenges and heartaches and difficulties, but they just stay the course.

[00:12:24] They just keep doing the work in the very best way that they know how, with as much integrity as they know how and trusting that good things are to come.

[00:12:33] So if you’re in that spot today, this is encouragement to you that good things are coming. Keep doing what you know to be the right thing to do in this very minute and just trust and know that exciting good things are on their way.

[00:12:45] Thanks for tuning, everybody. My final request of this for everybody is to go Think bigger and do that by following the insight that I shared today.Talk soon.

## [00:12:56] Outro

[00:12:56] **Justin:** Hearing good ideas is not enough. You have to [00:13:00] apply them in order to get the results desired. If you found value in today’s episode, then you’re really going to love the community of big thinkers and high achievers that we are building in order to help you to apply the principles taught today. If you’re not yet a member of Think Bigger Real Estate on Facebook, go sign up now. You.