Terrie Schauer started investing in Real Estate. She has been doing property management for 20 years and has her own real estate portfolio in Montreal as well. She wrote the book Mindful Landlord that dovetails nicely with Jonathan’s book, Mindful Money.

She has her PhD in communications with the intention of being an academic and has competed at the world level in Brazilian Ju Jitsu.  In the end, she has transferred all that energy into real estate and a curiosity about the backdrop socially and institutionally to wealth creation.

The idea for the podcast popped up during her interview of me for her Real Estate podcast. We connected over the holistic backdrop of wealth across geography and over time.

WHY PODCAST

Twitterization of everything. How can we have a longer conversation that includes all the necessary nuance and groundwork so you can really understand what is happening?

DEEPER QUESTIONS

1. Narratives around success – how much is financial success, how much is human well-being
2. Historical moment – Wealth Gap – mindset – privilege. How do we democratize some of the things that help “us” succeed. We did it… how did we do it? How do we help others do it?

WEALTH

Deaton and Kahneman study – need $75-$100k to feel happy, after which the additional positive feeling fades with higher incomes. Bigger and better doesn’t mean anything without a higher purpose. IS your goal really to win the bank account Olympics. Independence is not the same thing as “wealth.” You’ve got to know when you are winning – in the sense of enough and when you are winning – in the sense of higher status.

THE GOOD LIFE

The good life for Terrie is one thing – an equilibrium between money, sport, family, and contented fulfillment. Yes, of course, financial independence is great… but it isn’t  – by itself – the path to happiness or well-being. The Good Life is personal.

The trade-off of ambition for relationships is an important marker.

WEALTH CREATION IN THE CONTEXT OF A SOCIAL FABRIC

Today there is a lot of criticism of anything that is associated with privilege.  There is, today, a number of people who were born into greater socio-economic status and don’t recognize they had a head-start. And, there is a lot of success and opulence visible in social media that gives “wealth” a very bad name.

But, there is simultaneously a second face of wealth. And it is just as real a real, but it keeps a low profile and doesn’t show up in the news. There are people who grow wealth, don’t consume conspicuously, don’t brag about their wealth in Twitter, and who use their wealth both for their own and their families betterment, but also towards the greater good of their communities.

HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

Every time I have taken steps to get better at something – regardless of the field – there are rewards to the incremental steps I have taken. This can be wealth, it can be sport, it can be relational.

“How do you get out of your own way to allow the hard physical training that you did because if you mentally sabotage yourself you can take all that work you did and throw it in the garbage.” – Terrie Schauer

WHAT IS THE GOAL? Victor Frankl – Man’s Search For Meaning

Happiness and Well-Being are problematic as “targets” of the meaningful life. But, if you seek out things that are meaningful to you and you pursue them with ethics and attention you will stumble upon both happiness and well-being. As you set goals and take action in pursuit of meaningful ends, you will discover hardship and ultimately growth that will enable reaching higher and doing more. When you do things that are uncomfortable, the fact that they are meaningful is what pulls you through to the positive end.

“And then there’s also, when I lie in bed at night or when I imagine how I’m going to look back at my life when I am older, I’d hate to think that I’d been doing something trivial and that I’d been spending my time on things that were meaningless. So, I think as human beings who are finite and we only have a certain amount of time on this earth to become a butterfly and then leave, right. If we don’t spend that time in something that is meaningful to us in some kind of framework, I feel like I’m going to get to the end of my life and be disappointed with the way things went” – Terrie Schauer

PRIVILEGE

How do we go forward in a fair way at this point in time?

We are required to ask ourselves these questions. And I think there are 2 different answers we have to give. There is the traditional policy response that we have to attend to and there are structural things that need to come up on a large scale political level. And, we absolutely have to work to address systemic issues.

AND, we have to avoid the trap of disengaging the benefits of individual growth and the incredible strength and power each of us has (whatever our station) to improve ourselves and grow and become better versions of our excellent selves.

Our background matters, but we all need to run our races as hard as we can. The less privileged your background, the MORE IMPORTANT it is for you to use the tools that are available to you to improve your situation. We need to do everything we can to empower people to better themselves.

It is a both and. We have to improve the system to support better outcomes more broadly. AND, we have to do the work on ourselves as well. We have to believe that work will be beneficial.

INFLUENCES

Not a lot of female heroes to look up to. I’m aware of being ahead of women who are behind me saying that they can have a family, and a business, and an athletic career.

Rich Dad Poor Dad – Robert Kiyosaki (Perhaps a J.O.B. is not the path)

The Alchemist – Paulo Coelho (Hero of my own story)

The Peaceful Warrior – Dan Millman (Holistic “way of life”)

12 Rules for Life – Jordan Peterson

Silence of the Girls – Pat Barker

It really is different for women. Female success may not be the same success as male success. And that is OK. I wish there was more honesty about the differences.