When disaster strikes, the strength of a community is truly tested. In this episode, Jeffrey Saad delves into the aftermath of the devastating Los Angeles fires, exploring the impact on the community and the inspiring stories of resilience, courage, and compassion that emerged from the ashes. He discusses the challenges faced by those who lost their homes and businesses, the heroic efforts of firefighters and first responders, and the outpouring of support from neighbors, strangers, and volunteers alike. This episode is a testament to the enduring power of the human spirit and the unwavering hope that can rise from even the most difficult circumstances.
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The Los Angeles Fires: A Story Of Resilience And Community
The LA Fires: A Wake-Up Call
I missed you. I’ve been inconsistent with my episodes. For those of you who are regular followers, I apologize. I will tell you that there are two reasons for everything that happens. The first one is the one you tell everybody. The second one is the real one. The reason I’ll tell everybody is the holidays. We had family in town, and then there were the LA fires. The real reason is I just didn’t prioritize it, so I apologize to all you regular readers. Thank you. I appreciate your support. I will do my best not to let you down again. For those of you who are new or didn’t notice or care, there’s been nothing lost.
The LA fires. I have to admit I love disasters and tragedies. Before you stop reading or think I’m a jerk, which you might think anyway, I don’t want to see anyone suffer ever. I don’t want to see anyone lose their home, property, and peacefulness. All of that is horrible. As a realtor, my wife and I have been running around like mad, getting displaced people housed, and taking care of everyone. It’s been very emotional and intense.
What I love about tragedy, minus the loss, death, and injuries, is that it wakes us up like COVID, which was one of my favorite periods. The LA fires have been amazing. In life, you’re either going up, even if it’s super gradual-like I always talk about Kaizen, 1% better every day, or you’re going down. If you’re flatlined, by definition, you’re dead.
The Circle Of Control In Tragedies
Personally and professionally, you always want to be moving up, getting better for the people you love, the people you work for, and the people you work with. Tragedies shock the system. They wake us up. If there is a God, that would be His intention: “Time for a wake-up, guys. We need to get you back on track.” It’s like a reset. It was interesting. With the circle of control and tragedies with COVID and the fires, you clearly see who lives inside the circle, who lives outside the circle, and who’s doing their best to bounce in between the two.
The ones living outside the circle of control spend all their time on, “Why did this happen? I can’t believe this is going on.” They double down on what went wrong. The ones inside the circle focus on what they can control. “What am I going to do moving forward?” It was interesting. No judgment. I’m here to spread joy and add an ounce of value where I can, but I’m also observing what I see.
Some people were immediately in outside-the-circle mode. “I can’t believe this. LA is never going to be the same.” To that, I say, “You’re right. It’s going to be better.” It’s going to be better than ever because that’s what humans do. If you bet against humans, you are probably going to lose. We will rebuild. It will be better than ever, and so will we. It’s a wake-up call. We had people focusing on all the bad and what had already happened that they couldn’t change.
I had one client, Juliet, who called me. She was like, “Could you please email me a summary of what my house was worth the day it burned down?” That was like two days ago. I said, “Are you okay?” She said, “Yeah, it’s a house.” She said a beautiful thing. “We had all our great memories there, and those are still alive.” That’s an important thing to remember when anything bad happens to anyone.
It goes without saying, “It is easy for Jeff to say it while he’s sitting in his house and his family is fine.” I also believe that real learning comes from observing. Real change and transformation come from experiencing and being in it. The people who have had loss have the most amazing opportunity to grow, learn, and find out what’s important. She was like, “We had our memories.” That’s the thing to remember.
People were saying, “The community will never be the same.” What is the definition of community? To me, community is a feeling and a culture. Community is the love and shared experiences of a group. Just because their houses are gone doesn’t mean they don’t have a community anymore. They still have all that love, I hope. All those memories don’t just disappear. I mean the physical house. It’s wood and stucco. We were evacuated for one night. It was a great reminder and wake-up call that I loved.
My wife was crying, “I don’t want to lose my home.” Sometimes, I feel like, “Is there something wrong with me?” I immediately went to, “My wife’s okay, and I love her. My kids are okay. I love them. They love me. So far, everyone I know is okay.” That’s what matters. You can rebuild a house. You can’t bring someone back from the dead. A house is made of wood. A house is a glass. Some are nicer than others, but it’s a thing.
These fires were a reminder not to overvalue things. Everyone should have to evacuate once as a lesson. It’s something to learn from. As we were evacuating, there was a moment where I said, “Honey, I like these shoes. I got these in Santorini. Remember?” We love our things, but as long as things bring you joy and you’re not a slave to things, then it’s good, in my opinion.
Real learning comes from observing. Real change and transformation comes from experience and being in it. Share on XWhen you’re evacuating, you stop. I had friends and people tell me, “I looked around and said, ‘It’s just stuff.’ I don’t need to take anything. I’ll take my laptop, a couple of photos, and my phone, but it’s just stuff.” There were other people in tears, trying to load up five storage containers to get everything out. I don’t judge either, but there’s an opportunity to learn, grow, and say what matters.
Finding Opportunities For Growth In Times Of Loss
As we move forward, the fires are out in LA and are under control. There’s already a spirit of moving on. More moving on if you didn’t lose your house, but even the people who lost their houses were getting placed. They’re already talking about new chapters. We have one client going to Miami to take a new job for a couple of years. They don’t even want to be in their neighborhood until the toxins are cleaned up, but they’re excited about it.
It’s a new chapter. They have two young kids. They’re going to experience Miami and try out this new job. You can always come back. That’s the thing, too. When you’re forced to mix it up and change houses, neighborhoods, and cities even, it defines the chapters. You end up having very clear memories that mean even more because they’re defined by each chapter, versus being in one place your whole life. There are benefits to that for whoever’s reading who’s been in one place their whole life. You could share that.
That’s the beauty of it. I love people. I do. Sometimes I joke and say that I hate people as a group when you’re in traffic or whatever it might be, but I love individuals. I find something to love about every single person. Through these tragedies, you get to know people even better. Especially if you’ve had a good relationship, you get to learn from them, help them, and make a difference.
The other thing that I like about tragedies is that I have an opportunity to help. My immediate instinct is, “What can I do to make it better?” That’s the whole point of the circle of control. What can I do? Complaining about the fire and saying it’s not fair, “Why didn’t it rain sooner?” Those are all legit questions, but we don’t control that. My direct line to God or whoever has not been working. I can’t change the weather or the fire, but I can say, “What do I want to do starting today?”
You can rebuild a house, but you can't bring somebody back from the dead. Share on XAs a quick side note, I want to reach out to everybody and say, “Please, I beg you go straight to love when it comes to politics.” We’re into this new president. It doesn’t matter what side you’re on. We all learned that doubling down on hate, dissing, and posting nasty stuff on either side has not solved anything or helped anything.
Double down on love because what you can do and what’s in your circle of control is to wake up every day and say, “I’m going to do what I do the best I can do it. I’m going to be who I am, the best I can be.” If we keep spreading that joy and love, we can’t help but have things get better. I believe in the universe in the sense that this is some kind of a rebalancing, whatever it means.
All of us need to say, “What do I see on both sides?” There’s no such thing as black and white, rarely. There’s always gray. What is the learning opportunity from this? How can I reach across and help bring people to the middle? To me, it’s not even about which side. Peace, love, and perfection reside in the middle, in balance. Any extreme is unhelpful to me.
The Circle Of Control In Your Work
The other thing I wanted to talk about is the circle of control in your work. My wife and I are realtors. I’m going to use real estate as an example, but I believe that it applies to anything and everything. For many years, I had a bunch of restaurants and hundreds of employees, and the same lessons apply. With the circle of control, what can you affect? As a realtor, we take a listing. Sellers have high expectations, as they should. “I want the most money for my house. I want it so quickly. I want to feel like my things are safe.” All legitimate. I focus on how I can get them the best result.
Accountability is a big part of that. I love accountability because it’s almost like a sigh of relief. When you accept responsibility for anything and everything, even if it’s not your fault, it becomes so much easier to make it happen because you’re not focused on what somebody else did wrong or what the client did wrong or that you’re right and somebody else is wrong. “It wasn’t me.”
You say, “I’m going to make this happen. What can I do today and every day to get my client the highest price and get things done the way they want to get them done?” That is the circle of control. If I focus on, “The market is this. That client has these expectations, and they’re not realistic,” as soon as you go there, all your energy goes into a black hole. It’s not going to solve anything at all.
Focusing On Better, Not More
The key is to focus on being better every day. You’re either going up or down. In real estate, especially, you hear people all the time that the whole focus is more, more, more. “How many houses do I have listed? How many houses have I sold? How many buyers have I worked with?” In my early career, sure, I had a spreadsheet. “There’s my goal. How much can I do?” What I always focused on was being better for each client. That has become my wife and I’s sole mission.
We don’t pay attention to how many we do. We pay attention to how great of a job we do. If you keep exceeding your client’s expectations, coincidentally, you’ll end up doing more as well. If your focus is better instead of more, it’s a whole lot more fulfilling. If you’re in a job, a business, or an industry where the only reward is more, if you wake up and say, “I love my life,” keep doing you and doing exactly what you’re doing.
If you don’t, stop and say, “Is that one of the reasons? My world is about more and more.” As we all know, there’s never enough. There is no end if more is the goal. If excellence is the goal, you can probably never be excellent enough either, but at least it’s a rewarding journey when you keep trying to get better. In the restaurants, it was the same thing. If I focused on everything the managers, the director of operations, and general managers were not doing, it was a spiral downward.
If you can wake up every day and ask how you can be better as a person and as a professional, your life will just keep getting better. Share on XMy circle of control is I would say to them, “Something’s not getting done and not happening.” It’s always one of three things. Either we didn’t train you right, we didn’t show you, meaning you don’t know, or you do know, but you’re just not capable, or you just don’t want to. I would always go to that with my crew. If somebody doesn’t know, that’s on me. Let’s get them trained and retrain them, whatever we have to do.
If they know but they’re not going to get it done, I hated torturing these managers. If they consistently could not build a culture and a crew, get results, and have a good business, I don’t want to torture them. You’re not capable, so let’s end this and not make it terrible. If they say, “I can totally do this. I know exactly how to do it. I understand the goals. I’ve been trained,” you just don’t want to. If somebody doesn’t want to do it, then there’s no hope at all.
I challenge everybody. Whatever your business is, stop and ask yourself. Is your energy going into how to make people better, how to help people, how to take an action in front of you to move things forward, or is your focus on what people aren’t doing, what’s not happening, and why the market isn’t behaving the way you want it to? That’s the key. That’s my quick, short message from fires to lighting your life on fire in the best way possible. If you can wake up every day and say, “How do I become better as a person and a professional,” your life will keep getting better. Have a beautiful day.