3 Words That If Applied, Will Change Your Life

In order to save money, I did things differently, so that, one day, I could purchase real estate in Florida.Focus on your goalFocus on your goal + discipline toward making that goal a reality (consisting of breaking it down into steps, then taking action to make it happen) will bring that goal into reach, something tangible where you see results.Living cheap in downtown West Palm Beach, FloridaFor years, I had lived in a giant warehouse with a group of artists, writers, drifters, dreamers, in the corner of a quonset hut about 50 feet from the railroad tracks. The entire warehouse consisted of three quonset huts, joined together at the middle, lower sections, located at 502 Kanuga Drive, in Flamingo Park, an historic area of town inWest Palm Beach, Florida. This artist's living/work space was affectionately called "the hut".The official name for this fringe artists community was the Unarmed Underground Art Centre (UUAC) and it sat in a section of town known as Flamingo Park, an area that was undergoing a revitilization. People were moving into the neighborhood, buying up homes, painting them, sprucing up the yard. The area was becoming a hot place to buy and sell real estate. Investors and property owners began to complain about the eyesore at the end of Kanuga Street, the quonset huts, surrounded by beat up cars owned by arists-in-residence, a revolving door of shipwrecked-looking castaways, and the continuous stream of cars, vehicles and bicycles coming and going all hours of the day and night. Things were changing, and the little artist-community-that-could was feeling the squeeze.

City officials started visiting the UUAC by sending code enforcement to harass the director/owner Alan Patrusevich, a brilliant and benevolent former Navy man of Lithuanian descent, who operated an antique restoration business from one of the warehouse bays.Finally, caving into pressure from city officials and mounting debts, Alan sold the quonset huts. The Unarmed Underground Art Centre aka "the hut" was no more. The artists, writers, drifters and dreamers scattered. Eventually the dust settled and they found spaces of their own.At this point, I was in my early thirties, and wasn't about to settle down to work at a job I don't like, to buy things I don't need, to compete with people I don't even know. I wanted my own space. I wanted freedom.Living among artists in the giant hamster cage of the hut had given me freedom to work part-time pick up jobs and in my free time write journals, compose songs, start a Christian coffeehouse, produce a film festival, and a number of other creative enterprises. Those creative projects enabled me to meet groups of people and have the project be the campfire around which we gathered. What I learned from living with Scott is this--being a landlord is a full-time job. There's got to be a better way to make long-term profits. Later, I found out there is a better way.Some time later, after moving out of Scott's, I received a call from David Knight. A Bahamian born entrepreneur and musician, he was an interesting, somewhat enigmatic fellow, who I had met years fixer film earlier in downtown West Palm Beach, Florida, and had done work for, assisting him with maintenance--usually painting or carpentery--on his investment property on Dixie Boulevard.David was calling from New York.