Alignment

Or Why I Am Now A Real Estate Novelist (With Time for a Wife)

Now Paul is a real estate novelist
Who never had time for a wife
And he's talkin' with Davy, who's still in the Navy
And probably will be for life

And the waitress is practicing politics
As the businessmen slowly get stoned
Yes, they're sharing a drink they call loneliness
But it's better than drinkin' alone

-Billy Joel, “Piano Man”

I know it’s not news to regular readers, but I’ve been in a hell of a rut for the past couple of years. Loss of faith, the auto-demolition of the only job I’ve ever been really successful at, estrangement from family, a ginormous mid-life crisis, and a giant reset button getting pressed on my whole life and the way I think about and approach…well, everything, had me borderline catatonic for a while. So much grief, so much confusion and betrayal, and a lot of anger and hurt that I just needed to process. I’ve got a lot of work still to do, but at some point I decided that it was time to drag my ass out of the dark wilderness and back into the light.

I still don’t have the answers I’m seeking, but I’ve at least figured out how to stop drinking (with occasional exceptions), keep my carb intake low, my medium-chain triglyceride intake high, and get at least 6,000 steps in every day (yes, 10K would be better, but baby steps.)

I’ve lost 34 lbs so far this year, most of it since June - but still have a long way to go. At my lowest point, I was carrying more than double what I weighed in my senior year of high school. My body felt like a prison. I was always tired, my resting heart rate and blood pressure were high, and when I started seeing a doctor focused on natural medicine early this summer, I was informed that my fasting blood sugar had me at the level of pre-diabetic. The changes I’ve made have already been positive. Just look at the difference in my face from August of 2022 vs. August of this year:

I’m a big guy - 6’4” - so I can carry a lot of weight, and in the last decade I guess I sought to prove it. Still have about 90lbs to lose to get in my goal range, but I feel better than I have in a long time. My fed blood sugar is now the same as my fasting blood sugar was, and almost all my critical markers have been dropping quickly towards the normal zone. The alarms and red lights on my dashboard are slowly turning off.

I got a full hormone panel done and found out my testosterone was extremely low, which likely contributed to both weight gain and depression. I’ve been doing weekly injections, and as we’re getting closer to the right dose, my energy levels have come up and the weight has come off. Staying in ketosis has had me feeling great. Adding things like MCT oil to my coffee twice a day has also been like rocket fuel for the brain. I’m easily 10 times as productive as I’ve been at any point in recent memory. I rarely find myself distracted by social media or other nonsense. If I’m working, I’m working.

“But then why,” you may be asking, “have you not been posting here?”

Well, that’s a bit of a long story. It all began with an epiphany about alignment a month or so ago, and it changed my focus entirely.

The epiphany came as I was listening to a podcast from Tom Bilyeau of Impact Theory. Can’t remember which episode, can’t remember which guest. Just remember that I was on the treadmill at the gym, getting my steps in, when he dropped a realization that profoundly struck me.

The gist was that when he built his first business — which he later went on to sell for 9 figures — his wife wasn’t a part of that, and it was really hard on their marriage. He was working all the time, she was doing something else, and they weren’t on the same page. When he built his current business, he wanted her to be a part of it. That way they’d be talking to the same people and thinking about the same issues and if they were both at work, they were also together.

That’s when it hit me: I was doing things all wrong.

For the first half of 2022, I had some residual income from consulting work. We had also sold some real estate at a great price, and between the two things, our expenses were covered without any new revenue coming in. It was a good thing, too, because as I said, I was borderline catatonic for a while. That’s what New Hampshire was for me, really. A beautiful place that we never should have moved to, but which sort of served as a personal retreat so we could try to get our shit together — especially me. A place where we didn’t know anyone and didn’t have to answer any questions. We could just process all we had gone through at our own pace. We went to the coast and we ate cheap lobster and we enjoyed the autumn leaves and the snow and tried acupuncture (which helped a surprising amount) and we hung out a lot and played games and watched movies and just tried to figure out what the hell had happened and what came next.

Jamie was also dealing with her own version of a crisis, but she came out of it first. As I’ve written about before, she saw that I was trying to re-capture something good from my childhood. New England was the place where I had the happiest memories, and it’s like I was subconsciously mining for some magic that had been lost. She also saw early that it was the wrong fit for our family, and that it was not a place where she wanted to plant roots for the long term, especially if she was going to have to be the first one to get the economic engine of our family running again while I was finding my way out of la-la land.

So she told me she thought it would be best to come back to Phoenix, where we’d had everything we needed and real estate was still booming, so we could put the kids back in their old school and she could take point while I continued to heal. (At the time, we had no idea how out of whack my hormones were and what that was contributing to the problem.) She’s been a real estate agent for about 20 years now, and although while I was running 1P5 she didn’t have to work, she always had a deal or two in the pipeline. It was time, she said, to ramp that back up to full production.

So we did it. And for months, I kept trying to figure out what my own next business move would be. Could I build the Substack up to a point where it provided a living income? What if I got a new podcast going? Could I sufficiently monetize that? Of course, there was also the novel I was writing, which really started coming along when I could make the time for it. But we have a toddler who is very demanding, and when Jamie was working, I had to take him. Often, that meant total derailment of any attempt at productivity, for obvious reasons. I started chomping at the bit for “my turn” to do my thing without a 2 year old in tow. I wanted to be providing for my family the way I was used to. I was getting really annoyed about the holding pattern I was in. This created conflict, and we were always competing for limited resources - primarily time without having to be predominately focused on childcare to work on business.

And it clearly wasn’t working. She had a critical investment deal that got complicated and dragged on months beyond when it should have closed, and it kept her preoccupied constantly. We both felt like we didn’t have enough time. We were moving in different directions, and that was creating a kind of tug-of-war, all while we still had to manage the exigencies of a household with 9 people in it, including multiple school pickups and drop-offs a day, at 40 minutes per trip. It was causing conflict and frustration. And it felt like it was only getting worse.

When I stood there on that treadmill and heard Tom Bilyeau talk about how he and his wife had built the new thing together, and how much better that had been for their marriage and their work, I knew immediately what I had to do:

I had to stop working at cross-purposes with my wife and get on the same page.

Real estate sales and investing was, quite clearly, going to be the cornerstone of our financial security. I had done well running my own business, but I didn’t yet know how to replicate that doing something new, and it was going to take time we didn’t have to figure that out. You probably noticed how expensive things have gotten, and for a family this large in a city where home prices and rents have both soared, that was even more pressing. But real estate had always given us a financial boost, it could mostly be done from home, and if we both put in the work, it could easily become the economic foundation for whatever else we wanted to work on afterward.

So I sat down with her and I told her my plan: I wanted to stop going in my own direction and get in alignment with everything she was doing. I wanted to build the real estate business together with her. I tried being a licensed agent in the early 2000s, but it didn’t play to my strengths. So instead I would partner with her on her marketing and prospecting efforts, which I’ve also done before. I’d do the heavy lifting on creating all the branding and creative collateral, produce many of the videos that have now become a required part of the business, and work on building her social media presence while she talked to clients and worked deals. I wanted to learn more about the investing she was doing, which included not only flips and rentals but also buying certain kinds of businesses that provided a solid ROI that didn’t require us to be involved 24/7. And I would sideline my projects until we got all of it up and running with a momentum of their own. She agreed that she would help me when it came time to finish and promote my book.

And ever since, things have been so much more harmonious. First of all, it took a huge pressure off me to try to figure out the next iteration of my content creation career. I still hadn’t landed on a great idea of how best to do it, and this would give me the luxury of more time to find it naturally instead of trying to force it. Even better, Jamie and I are now working the same problems, learning the same strategies and techniques to improve what we’re doing, collaborating on all the particulars, and invested in the same outcomes. No more misalignment. We also both really enjoy the video work, so it gives us both a common career skillset that we can actually share our passion for.

Now, instead of it being a game of hot potato, managing the little guy is just a question of whose work takes priority any given day. If I’ve got a video or a marketing piece I need to get done, she takes him. If she has a meeting or a showing or admin stuff to do, then he stays with me. We mix it up on who takes kids to school or picks them up depending on the rhythm of the day, and often we just do everything together so we have more time to talk. We both collaborate on getting dinners done, and take turns depending on who has a little extra room in the schedule. And we get to spend most of our days together, which, with some exceptions where our strong personalities sometimes clash, is actually really lovely. There are far worse ways to spend your life than working together with the beautiful woman you love.

It isn’t perfect, but it’s going well. I’ve gone from barely being able to get a couple hours of work done a day and feeling like I’m just spinning my wheels to 12-18 hours of focused work/errands/chores knocked out every day. It’s not exactly a great work/life balance at the moment — too many nights I find I’m pushing myself away from the computer close to midnight to roll into bed, only to get up again at 6 to do it again — but we’re in a building phase, and that won’t last forever.

And I’m actually having fun working through problems and learning new things. Real estate used to bore me, but I’m much more interested in it now, especially since I’ve come to truly appreciate the financial freedom and security that it can provide our family.

It has kept me from being here much, though. I had to carve time out of my busy day today to write this update, and that means other things that are time-sensitive are being neglected. But I love you guys and I’m so glad you’ve stuck with me, and I especially appreciate those who have subscribed, because every revenue stream counts right now. So I wanted to let you know what’s up.

I’m trying to trick my brain into realizing I can write shorter things here that don’t take all day to put together, but it’s still resisting. I’m a perfectionist, what can I say? I’ll keep working on it. My biggest issue has been trying to figure out what I want this to be. From personal dumping ground for religious deconstruction to my interest in weird phenomena like UFOs to insights about the creative process to whatever has my attention any given week, it’s super eclectic. Everyone says I’m supposed to focus on a niche, but I’ve become terrible about that. I’m interested in too many things! I’ve even been playing around with a couple of side hustles, like this robot coloring book I created (using a lot of AI) under a pseudonym. I got my own copy, and the quality is surprisingly high!

(You can order a copy here if you’re interested.)

So please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments on anything I’ve done that you’d like to see more of. I will keep trying to carve out time. Writing has always been my first love, and I know I need to nourish it more than I have been.

For the foreseeable future, I’ll be a real estate novelist. Unlike the guy from the song, though, that’s because I made time for my wife. And I’m truly grateful for it!