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Swim Through This Crisis

Focus on what you can control, and learn how to swim better

Joseph Mavericks
4 min readMar 24, 2020

I thought I was done writing about the coronavirus, but then I watched a short video from Ryan Serhant, the famous real estate broker. I don’t watch any of his TV shows, but I find a lot of his motivational videos insightful and less fluffy than the other stuff he does.

As a real estate broker, Ryan Serhant obviously could find a lot of reasons to panic about the current situation.

How many people do you think want to visit homes right now? Not a lot.

How many people do you think are excited that the interest rates are so low, to go spend money they don’t have? Not a lot.

These are scary times, for him and for many other people. But he decided to not panic and to focus on what he CAN control, instead of obsessing over what he CANNOT control. And he has a great metaphor for it, that I wanted to share in this article.

Consider this crisis (or the possible beginning of it) a storm in the ocean (or the beginning of a storm), with people swimming everywhere. Everyone swims well when there are no waves. Everyone is a great swimmer, can make perfect time, and go fast. But now there’s a storm, and all of the sudden there are lots of waves. A lot of the swimmers start failing, they try…

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Joseph Mavericks
Joseph Mavericks

Written by Joseph Mavericks

Living with a purpose and improving myself is changing my life — I also make Youtube videos: bit.ly/3QAEXTm

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