It’s hard to let go of control. Scary, even. But every time I’ve taken a calculated risk to surrender control in exchange for more freedom, I’ve made progress toward my larger life goals.
This is because you can’t have both freedom and total control. You need to choose—in your real estate investments, in your business (if you have one), and in your personal life.
We run a Facebook group with nearly 50,000 landlords and active investors. Whenever we talk about more hands-off real estate investments, we get a lot of pushback from them. It all boils down to one objection: “I want to keep complete control over my investments.”
My days of arguing with people on social media are long behind me. But if I were to bother trying to change their minds, I’d paraphrase Ellie from Jurassic Park: “You don’t have control in the first place. That’s the illusion.”
Here’s how my own struggle with control versus freedom has played out, to get you thinking about your own choices moving forward.
Committing to Move Overseas Without Knowing Where
At the start of 2015, my fiancée approached me about moving overseas. She knew I had some wanderlust, and she was curious about living abroad herself. She signed up with a recruiting agency for international schools, and we decided to commit to doing it. We flew up to Boston for a weekend job fair in February, knowing she’d have a job by the end of the weekend.
Within 24 hours, she had offers from a half-dozen schools around the world, and we decided to take one from a school in Abu Dhabi. We figured we’d go have a two-year adventure, then move back to Baltimore and pick up where we left off.
That was nearly 10 years and three countries ago.
We spent…