My Way: 10 Things About Life I Know to Be True

My Way 10 Things About Life I Know To Be True

Who?

Ben Badiee, Founder and CEO of Badiee Development

Where?

La Jolla, California

What?

Badiee is a serial entrepreneur who has started more than 10 successful businesses throughout his career, ranging from agriculture and apparel to mobile apps. Of his accomplishments, a couple include Apparel Designer Zone, the largest apparel liquidation event organizer in the U.S. at the time with annual sales of $300 million at retail value, and ParentsWare, a popular app allowing parents to control excess mobile device usage for children. In 2003 Badiee created Badiee Development, a San Diego-based development company transforming the way industrial buildings are designed and developed.

A book that I have read for the past 10 years is…

Vedanta Treatise: The Eternities by Swami Parthasarathy. It teaches you the alphabet of reading life. Once we have the understanding of how life works, then the ups and downs of life don’t affect us as much. You enjoy the ride of waves equally.

One of my favorite  quotes is…

“Confident people don’t know who they are, but they know who they are becoming.”

A movie that had a meaningful effect for me was…

Groundhog Day. As human beings, we keep living the same lives day in and day out without noticing the changes we can make.

Two things everyone should try at least once are…

1. To have a very good mentor. Once you have one, the impact of it is so profound that you will never again go through life without a mentor.

2. To take a hiking trip to high mountains in a different country. I take a trekking trip in a different country every year. The experience you get being away from family and friends without a phone and away from civilization will rejuvenate the mind in such a way that all of the answers you were searching for come to surface from within you.

IMG 2989COURTESY OF BEN BADIEE

My secret weapon is…

Knowing that we are separate from our perceptions, emotions and thoughts. Don’t take your thoughts too seriously.

If we don’t face disappointments and challenges…

That means we’re not growing. It means we’re not taking any steps outside our comfort zones. Disappointment and failure equal future opportunities. Without trouble and disappointment, a human being will never figure out how to move on to the next stage of their life. It’s a must in our lives.

My mother always said…

There was nothing in this world we couldn’t do if we had enough time to research and pool resources. That outlook is what inspires me to take on new challenges and constantly innovate myself.

Nothing we experience in this world is…

The way it seems—it’s a perception. If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. When a problem comes up, if you look at it as a problem then there will be problems. On the other hand, when a challenge comes up and you don’t look at it as a problem, you can ask, OK, what are the good things in that? With that attitude, nothing goes wrong.

IMG 0740COURTESY OF BEN BADIEE

My aha moment was…

Experiencing failure. I learned that once you have nowhere to go and no other solutions, you have to get rid of blame or circumstance and believe in your abilities to figure things out. At that point, you’ll find the amazing power that resides inside all of us. I have experienced losing all of my wealth. But with this  thought-process—believing in my abilities to figure things out—I got out of that situation and I am much more successful now in many ways.

 

This article originally appeared in the Fall 2018 issue of SUCCESS magazine.

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