Let me tell you what’s not normal.
It’s not normal to wake up at 6:30 every morning, rushing the kids to get dressed, yelling about shoes and toothbrushes, shoving them out the door while they fight each other the whole way to the car. It’s not normal to drop them off at a place that’s supposed to prepare them for life but mostly prepares them to sit still, follow instructions, and fit into a system somebody else designed.
It’s not normal to get a couple of hours with your partner at night, both of you exhausted, and spend half of it arguing because you’re too stressed to do anything else.
And it’s definitely not normal to live paycheck to paycheck, knowing that if you lost your job tomorrow, you’d lose the house, the car, everything.
We’ve been sold that as life. That’s not life. That’s survival.
The script they wrote for us
Somewhere along the way, we accepted a script we didn’t write. Go to school, get a job, buy the condo with the city view, work until you’re too old to enjoy it. And when that life makes you feel empty, they sell you something to fill the hole. The drinks, the smokes, the streaming subscriptions, the retail therapy. All of it takes that little bit of money you have left and sends it right back up to the people at the top.
Meanwhile nothing changes for you, because none of that fixes the real problem. The real problem is that life was never meant to be lived this way.
So my question is simple. How long are you going to keep acting in somebody else’s script?
You can’t eat the view
They told us a high-rise condo with a skyline view is the goal. That’s worth millions, they said. Man, to each his own, but that high-rise ain’t gonna feed you. You can’t eat the view. You can only eat what you plant in the ground. If the trucks and trains stop rolling in, that penthouse becomes a very expensive box in the sky.
We lost the plot. They’ve got us running on a treadmill chasing a carrot on a stick, and we’re never catching that carrot. Never.
My grandparents understood something we forgot. In Haiti, land was everything. Tè a pa janm bay manti. The land doesn’t lie. If you had land, you had food, you had a place for your family, you had something to pass down. That wisdom didn’t become less true because we moved to Florida and got smartphones.
So get off the treadmill. Go plant your own seed. Grow your own carrot.
Why real estate is my seed
That’s why I love real estate and deal making. Yeah, it’s entrepreneurship, but to me it’s something deeper. It’s the ultimate family business.
Think about how many moving parts go into a deal. Finding the property, talking to the seller, running the numbers, lining up the money, handling the paperwork, finding the buyer, closing. No one person does all that well alone. It’s built for a team. It’s built for a family. It’s built for a community.
Haitians already have a word for this: konbit. When it was time to plant or harvest, the whole neighborhood showed up. Everybody worked one person’s field, then the next, then the next, with music and food and laughter the whole way through. Men anpil, chay pa lou. Many hands make the load light.
That’s how I see real estate. A konbit with contracts.
The dream
Here’s where I’m going with all this. One day I want to buy five acres, start a small farm, and build a real lakou. A family compound where people live together, raise their kids together, grow their own food, and give back to the community around them. And the real estate business would be part of the work we all do together, funding the growth of that community one deal at a time.
Kids running around outside instead of staring at screens. Real food out of real dirt. Fresh air. Time with each other that isn’t squeezed into the tired hours after work.
We’ve been tricked into a complicated lifestyle, chasing things that don’t make our lives better in the grand scheme of things. I’m done with that. It’s time to get back to nature, breathe real air, and enjoy the fundamentals of actually living.
Piti piti, zwazo fè nich li. Little by little, the bird builds its nest. Every deal is another twig.
So what about you? Are you going to keep running on their treadmill, or are you ready to write your own script?