Happiness and success elude me unless I’m doing something I love

By David McElroy · September 11, 2020

I don’t really want to sell you a house. I wish I did.

You know how you sometimes admit something to yourself that you’ve been trying to hide? I had one of those moments this week — when I couldn’t even try to lie to myself.

I was waiting inside this nice $425,000 house for a potential buyer to arrive. I had arrived 15 minutes early and had the house to myself. I decided to record an impromptu video that I could use as a promotion. I started recording about half a dozen times but stopped in disgust each time.

“I don’t want to sell houses,” I suddenly said out loud. And I was glad no one was there to hear me.

For the last five or six years, I’ve felt as though my life was on hold. I felt like someone treading water. I’ve worked in real estate — because it was a convenient opportunity — but I’ve hated work every day. And it makes me long for the days when I was excited about work instead.

Earlier this year, I had decided to leave my job and take a chance on things I care about more, but this entire coronavirus mess made that a non-starter. It just didn’t seem feasible with as much financial uncertainty as we were facing.

I spend half of my time running the office operations for a real estate company. I’m free to sell in the other half of my time. I’ve actually become really good at what I do, which is almost annoying since I dislike it so much.

If a friend wants to buy a house, I can actually enjoy that process, because it’s someone I’m excited about helping. I love helping people I like. But if it’s another random stranger — who’s probably delusional from watching idiotic and unrealistic real estate shows on television — it’s hard to make myself care. It’s hard to even make a call, even if it’s someone I know wants to buy or sell.

I’ve been thinking about this again Friday night because I found myself getting excited about a project that I would care about. It’s actually a real estate project, but it’s not something simple and pragmatic like matching up buyers with available houses. It’s a development project that I’ve dreamed about many times.

It’s a project that I would care about. It’s something I would be excited about. It’s something that should be far more profitable than what I’m doing now. But it would require a partner who could sell investors and raise the money. I have good ideas and I’m a good project-builder, but I’m terrible at selling people on things that seem obvious to me.

There’s an ornery part of me that wants to shout, “If you can’t see why this is a great idea, I’m wasting my time with you!” And that isn’t very diplomatic, much less successful

This isn’t anything new. I’ve encountered this obstacle time and time again in my life. It’s something I’ve never really figured out. I feel like somebody who’s invented an amazing space ship that can take people to another planet successfully and gracefully — but I forgot to figure out how to build the booster rocket to get it off the ground.

The world is a playground of exciting and possibly profitable projects to pursue, but I’m doing something that I hate every day instead. I’m not sure how I allowed this to happen. It wasn’t that long ago when I was making well over six figures and enjoying what I was doing. It’s humiliating and it’s humbling to have lost that and somehow fallen to this point in life.

I have to find a way to get back to doing something I’m passionate about and that offers big rewards for success. In some ways, I feel like Job from ancient Hebrew scriptures. I had everything take away from me — for reasons I don’t understand — and I’m waiting for the nightmare to finally end. If God and Satan had a bet about me, I’m ready for it to be over.

In the meantime, I’ll sell you a house. I’ll keep working to make the company I administer more profitable and competitive. I’ll do what I have to do. If I like you, I’ll enjoy helping you. If I don’t know you, I’ll help you and try to pretend I care. If I can make myself call you.

But I don’t know how much longer I can do this. I’m not very good at pretending to be someone I’m not. And I’ve gotten to the point that I can’t even look into a video camera and pretend to care about finding new clients.

I’ve somehow dug a hole for myself — and I haven’t been able to find a way to climb out.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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