The $500,000 Check I Wrote Myself at My Lowest Point

In 2009 we lost our house.

I drove all over Southern California doing whatever work I could find. I was scraping. I was grinding. I was begging God for help and honestly unsure He was hearing me. I always found a way to provide, even at the lowest points, and I credit every bit of that to Him. But I couldn't feel His presence. I was too loud inside to hear anything quiet.

If you've built something, you probably know a version of that season. The work never stops, the worry never stops, and somewhere underneath it you start believing this is just what life is.

I refused to settle for crumbs

Going into 2010 I made a quiet decision. I had spent years taking whatever life was offering me just to survive. But somewhere underneath all the fear, I knew I was not the kind of man who settles for crumbs. I didn't know exactly what that meant yet. I just knew it was true.

So I started reading. Personal development. Mindset. How the mind works and how to change it. And I started doing things that probably looked foolish from the outside:

• I cut out pictures of the future I wanted and put them on my desk.
• I glued my business logo onto a picture of a large commercial building.
• I wrote a check to myself for $500,000 and put it where I would see it every day.

I had no idea how any of it would happen. That wasn't the point.

The quiet door

At the end of 2010, at my absolute lowest, I was seriously considering leaving California and starting over in Texas. Then I felt a strong prompting to search for pool builder websites near me in Temecula.

I found Premier Pools and Spas. I saw a link to become a licensee. I filled out the form, with no idea what I was stepping into.

I went all in in 2011. I was coachable, and I needed to be. They gave me a pathway and I implemented it one step at a time. We went from $500,000 in revenue in 2010 to $1.5 million in 2011, and we kept doubling year after year. Eventually there was a building with the Premier Pools and Spas logo on top of it.

The check I had written to myself for $500,000? I cashed it.

What the check actually did

I want to be careful here, because this isn't a story about a magic trick. Writing a number on a piece of paper didn't make money appear.

What it did was give my mind a target. When you're anxious, your mind is always imagining something. It's just usually imagining the worst case, rehearsing every way things can fall apart. That check pulled my attention off the problem in front of me and pointed it toward something I was building.

"Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen."Hebrews 11:1

Faith and imagination are close cousins. Faith is believing before you can see it. Imagination is how you practice seeing it before it arrives. A man with no picture of what he's believing toward has a hard time exercising faith at all.

And notice what actually moved things forward. It wasn't my grinding. It was a prompting I almost ignored, and a door that opened quietly. I've come to believe those doors open for men who are paying attention, and anxiety is the thing that keeps us from paying attention.

If you're in your own 2010 right now

Here is what I'd tell you, man to man:

1. Name the crumbs. Be honest about where you've been settling for survival instead of building. You can't refuse something you won't name.
2. Make it specific and visible. Not "a better business" or "a better marriage." A scene. A number. A picture you look at every day.
3. Bring it to God honestly. Not "bless what I've already decided," but "here's what I see, show me what You see."
4. Watch for the quiet door. The biggest turns in my life came from promptings I could have talked myself out of. Get still enough to notice them.
5. Take the faithful step. When the door opens, walk through it, even before you understand where it leads.

The part the check couldn't fix

Here's the honest ending. The business grew. The revenue was real. The logo went up on the building.

And I was still the same man inside, carrying the same weight, just with a bigger stage to carry it on. That's a story for another post. The outside success was never going to close the gap on its own. That took a different kind of work.

But it started the same way: with a man at his lowest point, deciding he would no longer settle for crumbs, and daring to see something he couldn't see yet.

What are you letting yourself see right now?

— Jeff