Description:
Fear can block us at every turn. Fear can stop us from doing and getting what we want. Nick’s experience flipping homes early on, and his method of overcoming that fear, enabled his business to grow and flourish. In this video, Nick gives you insight into his fear and how he uses it as a motivator.
Transcript:
00:00 Nick Bonadies: Hey. How are you? It’s Nick Bonadies. Wanted to just a quick minute and talk to you about something that I personally believe holds most of us back from getting what we want out of life. Whether we want to go get a new job or start a company, lose weight, go get a new girlfriend, or whatever it might be. And I believe that that’s fear. I personally believe that fear is stifling sometimes and holds us back from moving forward in our lives for things that we know will better us and know will help us into the future. And I’ll give you an example of how to overcome this, something that I’ve used over and over, and over, and over again in my life, and it has worked phenomenal. Let me give you a quick background, it’ll take me just a quick second.
00:39 NB: Years ago, six or seven years ago, I decided I was gonna buy some homes. I was gonna fix ’em and I was gonna flip ’em, more for the experience and hopefully make a little bit of money at the time. Well, I signed on the dotted line for that first home, very, very fearful time in my life, I’ll tell you how I overcame it in a second. $283,000 for a townhouse that was trashed. That was scary and fearful and so on, but the stuff that happened after that is really what made me nervous. I ended up signing for two more right after that for a total, I believe, of $1.8 million, it might have been 1.9, but it was between there somewhere. Well, here’s the thing, I was on the hook for a lot of money at this point. These were trashed houses. It wasn’t like I could just turn around and sell ’em in the market. So here’s what I did, though. Before I ever bought those homes, I looked back and I said, “What is the absolute worst case scenario if I do this?” And here’s what I came up with. Things like, “Well, I could go bankrupt.” Things like, “I could get sued.” My family could have a problem, right? If people are after us and I’m in the court systems and blah, blah blah.
01:40 NB: Well, what I did is I came up with these two, three, four things that were the absolute worst case scenario, and then I had to make a decision. Is that worth the risk? And here’s what I came up with. At the end of the day, just using this example is, yes. That was worth it to me because I thought, “What’s the chance of that happening?” Well, because I had never done this before, it was actually a fairly high probability, let’s say 40% chance that that could happen, 60% chance that it wasn’t. On the flip side of that, and looking at it, I thought, “You know, I can control a lot of the outcome of this. I can’t control everything, but I certainly can stack my deck up, let’s say, in a way that was actually going to not let that happen”. So I came up with worst case scenario, and then I looked at it and said, “Okay, what can I put around it to make sure that that doesn’t happen?” And I went for it. And by the way, I’ve done stuff like that over and over, and over, and over again. I look at worst case scenario.
02:30 NB: When I started my company, I looked at worst case scenario, and I said, “One of the worst case scenario is that I could lose all the money that I put into it. I could end up owing a lot of money. I could get sued, I could go bankrupt”. You kinda see a trend here, by the way. I don’t necessarily go small with things. But what happened was, at the end of the day, I looked at that and said, “You know what? I can live with that if that happens. I don’t think it’s gonna happen, it’s a possibility. A lot of small businesses, for example, go under… ” But it hasn’t happened. So, everything that I do in life now, I look at that, worst case scenario, and can I live with worst case scenario if it happens? I hope this helps you out. I’m gonna be following up on this as well, because fear is an incredible motivator and I’ve learned to use fear to help me motivate myself to get things done as well, and to go in the right direction. So I hope this helped you out a little bit. Again, look at worst case scenario and can you live with it?