The Wrong Kind of Hope - How To Put Your Faith Where It Counts!

For almost 30 years I had the wrong kind of hope and faith - and it wasted a major portion of my life. Make sure your hope and faith are based on the right things, or you may find yourself in the same position as I was. Follow this journey of time-wasting, goal-setting, and honest-to-goodness personal development - and find out about THE RIGHT KIND OF HOPE! (WARNING: THIS EPISODE HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH RELIGION!!!)

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MATT BENNETT, REALTOR®
Joe Herbert Realty
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Transcript

I was introduced to personal development in my teens, which gave me a decent but clearly imperfect mental attitude. I was headed in the wrong direction, and I hated the thought of working at a job 40 hours a week for the rest of my life. But I didn't have the knowledge yet to be an entrepreneur, and I hadn't learned what perseverance really meant to find out how to do something and to totally stick with it.

That was completely beyond me. In general, I was a positive, encouraging and inspiring guy, but because I decidedly did not want to be trapped in the career box, that everyone in my life seemed to be trying to stuff me in, and because I hadn't learned how to seek knowledge and persevere, I was going downhill quickly.

I was wasting my life away by the day, fully knowing in my mind that everything was gonna be okay, because without effort, that's where the personal development concepts ended. With positive thinking. I was hoping with the wrong kind of hope. I knew without a doubt that it would be all okay when it wasn't getting okay, and in fact it was getting farther and farther away from, okay, every second of every day.

So what is hope and what is the wrong kind of hope? Let's talk about that in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 . 

Welcome to the Second mix podcast. Get ready to reflect, revise, and remix your life with personal development ideas and concepts for real estate agents, real estate investors, and other entrepreneurs. At the root of all business development is personal development. Your business gets better as you get better. 

My statement that there are two different kinds of hope made it necessary this week to make sure that I knew what I was talking about, researching and writing. This episode was pretty eye-opening. I would've always thought that it would be easy to discuss the difference between hope and faith, but diving into that showed me the truth.

These are not easy things to define, and in fact, there have been many arguments about the meanings of each. Hope as I'm defining it in this episode, is a desire to have something that you do not yet have. Faith as I define it here is the belief that you will get what you hope for. An easy way to remember this is that hope is something that is not yet realized, something not complete, something you don't have. But faith can be complete right now. You can believe right now that things will get better. So when I was hoping that everything would be okay with my life, even though I was on the wrong track and not doing anything about it, my faith was not in myself and my actions.

It was a totally blind faith that trusted that the world was a positive place that was gonna bring me whatever I desired. I just had to sit tight and wait for the time that it all came to fruition.

My hope wasn't in the wrong place. What I wanted wasn't wrong at all. I wanted success, financial security. I wanted to be doing something that I loved with my life. I wanted meaning, I wanted purpose. It was my faith that had a problem. My faith was in everything that was out there.

Everything that was outside of me, I was hoping that the clients would come, that I would get a raise, or that someone would come along with a free house that I could live in, or that I'd start a business that would just work, or that I would impress someone enough that they would pay me a lot of money to work for them.

My faith wasn't in my own efforts. It wasn't in my own education or my own perseverance. I was hoping that things would get better without having any real basis to actually expect them to get better. This kind of hope and faith as I found out, is poisonous because it wastes the most precious commodity we have, which is time.

We must get time working for us, and if our faith is in the action of waiting, then we are wasting time. I did that for almost 30 years of my adult life. I'm not saying there wasn't progress. I did a lot, but it all came in sporadic, massive effort, not simple habits that I built daily. I could have done so much more, and the sporadic effort yielded even less than what it could have because it was misdirected.

I started so many businesses, created so many plans, but each business and each plan was a new shot in a completely different direction. I aimed for different things every single time, so I didn't get ahead in any one thing. In any one area. I didn't learn the lesson that I should stick with a plan, no matter how much I had hope and faith that things would get better.

I didn't learn the right lessons. I could start a thousand businesses, but until I stuck with one idea, one opportunity, and made a singular effort to make it successful, I was not going to move forward. So I really didn't have any faith at all in my own effort. I can't recall my exact feelings about the whole thing, but a reflection and examination of my life at the time proves that I really didn't believe that anything that I did could be successful.

I could plan, which I love to do. I could dream, which I love to do. I could set up the entire business system, which I loved to do, but that would be entirely fruitless if I didn't go through the hard parts. I had to quit quitting when things got hard. The wrong kind of hope and the wrong kind of faith is the kind that leaves you in the hands of everything else and everyone else.

It's the kind of faith where you're not the decision maker in what your life is going to be like. There's always gonna be outside influences that have some control over you, but you still get to decide the course of your life. You get to decide the direction that you're heading. And it wasn't until the end of my 45th year in February, 2019, not too long ago, that I realized that I needed to set some goals and continue going after them until they were achieved, or until I miserably failed.

That would've been okay with me as long as I'm going after one thing. This attitude is what turned my life around in so many ways. So much I've, I've already spoken about in the first season of this show. I learned about the right kind of hope and the right kind of faith. I learned the most important lessons in my life after I turned 46 years old. Here's what I learned. 

1. I get to decide. My purpose, I get to decide my meaning in life. In Victor Frankl's book, Man's Search for Meaning, he says that we don't get to ask life what our purpose is.

Life is actually asking us that question. Life is saying, what is your purpose? What is your meaning in life? And our job is to come up with an answer. 

Now the interesting thing is to come up with that answer, I don't know if I'll ever have a clear, perfectly defined vision and meaning and purpose in my life, but they do get clearer every day, every time I look at my goals, every time I figure out where I want to head my life, what direction I want to steer my own life, every time I get more and more focused, I get more and more clarity, and presumably even to the point of whenever I die,

I still won't have it all together, but I'll have more and more clarity . So to me, getting clarity of vision, clarity of purpose, clarity of the meaning that I want in this life is a vital step in this declaring what my meaning is. 

2. I can massively change the course of my life, the entire course of my life right now.

I might not be able to change my life immediately, though in some cases that's possible, but I can change my direction. I can change where I'm heading right now I'm heading in a direction that's gonna take me somewhere five years, 10 years from now, 10 years down the road. The big question is where. Is it taking me, what I'm doing right now, my current actions, if I keep going, like I'm going, will it get me what I want to get?

Will it get me where I want to get? And to be able to analyze that and think and look at my daily actions and say, if I keep doing this every single day, where am I gonna be five or 10 years from now? And the time to change the next 10 years is right now. So what can I do to change the direction that I'm going in?

If I say, these habits are not the ones that I want to have 10 years from now, my life is not heading in the direction that I want it to 10 years from now. So when I get to that point, then analyze and say, what do I have to change so that 10 years from now I'm getting what I want? This is one of the most exciting things that I've ever learned, and it works for everybody.

You can shift your course right now. You can pick up some new habits right now. You can start reading the books. You can start taking some courses right now. You can start meeting new people. You can decide to persevere. You can alter the course of your entire life like I did. Right this very second. You don't have to wait.

And that is number three.

3. I didn't need to wait for things to get better. In fact, if I wait for the economy to get better, or for my boss to see my good qualities, or to win the lottery for someone to give me a house or to catch a break, if I wait for the right idea or wait for the right opportunity, then I'm hoping for the wrong thing.

I'm trusting in the wrong thing, and I will be left with disappointment and regret because I waited instead of taking action. So you don't have to wait for permission from anyone to decide to change your life right now. So don't wait. You can take action. Choose your purpose, figure out what it takes to shift in the direction of your purpose, and don't wait for circumstances to be right. Just go after the purpose that you've decided. 

In order for things to work out, we have to get time working for us. And the only way to do that really is to set goals, and I'll make this as brief as possible since I don't have time here to cover goal setting. But as briefly as I can, figure out what you want and write it down.

Decide what goals you have to achieve, what must be in your life, then look at them daily and make sure that your activities are getting you towards your goals. Ask yourself, if I do this thing daily, will it achieve my goal? Plan your days each day and each week to make sure that you are on the road to achieving your goals.

Here's what I change to find my purpose, to get time working for me and to get to work on the activities that will bring me success. 

Number one, I changed my input. I make sure that everything going in my head is positive. The forward moving stuff that makes me think and makes me better. The reason I started this podcast is to pass on everything that I've learned since February, 2019.

I'm also constantly reading books specifically. Non-fiction books in my areas of interest, business marketing, behavioral economics, sales, social science, personal development. I also changed my network. I started spending time with people, doing the things that I want to do, people with the money, people who have the money I want to have.

I started hanging out with business owners, real estate investors. I took classes and courses and began filling my mind with all the information I could get my hands on to help me get the life that I want. 

Number two, I took a lot of time to decide what I want out of this life, and we're back to goals here.

Goal setting is not easy. . It's not. It's not a simple, easy process. It takes some time to sit down, decide what you want, and write it down. It can get boring, tedious. It can get lengthy, but it's important and it's relevant. Making a big list, going through the list and deciding what you can live without and which goals are non-negotiable.

And then here's where it gets harder. Looking at the non-negotiable list and narrowing it down even more. I read my goals every day. I plan every evening before bed so that I know what my day looks like tomorrow, and I make certain that the daily activities that I have planned are actually getting me closer to my goals.

And number three, I constantly reflect, revise, and remix my life. I started journaling. I'm not gonna say that journaling is necessary to success because there's too much evidence to the contrary. There's a lot of people who are successful doing well and very happy who don't journal. But journaling is necessary to my success, and the reason it is, is because that is how I reflect on each day.

That's the method that I use to figure out how to do things better and how I plan to implement those new ideas into my life. Whatever methods you use, get some, get some reflection on your day, some reflection on your week, your month. Um, do some scientific experiments with your life so that you can keep going till you figure out what works for you.

So I'm not the same person I was on February 19th, 2019. I've lost about 50 pounds. I've completely changed my mindset. I became a morning person, which I never would've thought possible. I tripled, then quadrupled my income. I began investing in real estate and with that business I replaced my work income with nearly passive in income. I call it pseudo passive income. That's something that we'll talk about in a future episode, but it's nearly passive. I've spoken for audiences, taught classes. I have read in the last almost four years, about 350 books, and I'm still going. I joined a mastermind group, a paid mastermind group that has really improved my network, my thinking, my level of challenge in this life. 

And in this journey, I've been able to help so many people do so many things that I never would've been able to help with before, and I consider this my biggest blessing. I wanna break down goal setting and all of this in later episodes, but for now, let's bring it back home one more time and talk about the right kind of hope.

So here it is:

Put your hope and faith in your own activity. Have faith in your own effort. As Jim Rohn says, make plans like an adult. Be smart. Look at the plans. Make sure that each step that you're taking toward those plans, that's the things that you're doing every day. Make sure that the activities that you're doing daily will bring you what you want by looking at your goals.

It's hard work to make plans like an adult, but it's well worth it. Then after thoroughly examining those plans, believe in them like a child. Keep the faith that your plan will bring your goal to fruition and keep the faith like a child. So make plans like an adult and believe in them like a child. I covered a lot here and I intend to keep bringing this subject up over the next few months and hopefully probably forever.

But ask yourself. Important question right now to see if you are living and experiencing the right kind of hope. 

Are you waiting for things to get better for you?

If so, I wanna suggest to you that the only way for things to get better for you is for you to get better. Life change does not start with this inspiration.

Life change starts with education. Also, if you're already on this path that you want to be on and you have the faith that your efforts are going to have a result, keep that up. I want to, uh, congratulate you cuz in many ways you're in one of the hardest spots to be because you're doing what it takes to be successful, but you're not seeing the results yet of your success.

So let time be your friend. And patiently struggle forward for everyone. Stay strong, do the work and keep reflecting. Revising and remixing your life. I'll see you soon. Thanks for listening to the Second Mix podcast. Please subscribe, leave a review where you can, and visit second mix.net for more content like this.

If you want to get in touch with me, you can email me at matt@secondmix.net or go to the website and leave me a voicemail. Make it an amazing week and I'll see you soon.