Roland Frasier: How to Increase Happiness and Capitalize on Opportunity by Practicing Gratitude
Roland Frasier: How to Increase Happiness and Capitalize on Opportunity by Practicing Gratitude
SNIPPET #104
Roland Frasier flew a little too close to the sun and fell from the sky in a fiery crash.
The once-successful tax attorney believed he was crafty enough to outwit the government by staging his own version of a professional protest against asset reporting rules. The government was not amused.
Ultimately Roland accepted a plea deal that sent him to prison for five months. It was rock bottom, and the fall was slow enough that he had plenty of time to see his crash landing site grow larger.
His wife left him. Her family turned its back on him too. People he’d thought of as friends cut him off. His business crashed and burned alongside him as he approached the day he’d have to report to prison.
Things were so dark and so devoid of hope that Roland began believing suicide would be his only way out. He began googling ways to kill himself. As his internal battle between giving up and getting back up played out in his mind, he took advantage of his temporary freedom and still – valid passport and traveled to Denmark.
It was there, in what was one of his most hopeless moments alone in a hotel room, that he decided to get up and take a walk that changed everything for him.
He wouldn’t describe it as a religious moment, but there was something about the way sunlight streamed through a Copenhagen chapel window that pierced the darkness around him, and within him.
“It was just kind of a realization that everything would be okay,” he says.
He suddenly found perspective as he reflected on the millions of other people who’d endured far worse than he had and still would experience. Nelson Mandela, for instance, had spent years in a horrific prison not as a result of professional interests, but in his fight to end oppression for others. He’d gone on to live an amazing and inspirational life, and Roland suddenly believed he may be able to as well.
Roland Frasier returned home with a new mindset and began changing his own life.
Admittedly, it was not the best time in his life to meet someone. But, says Roland, when everything else in your life is falling apart you have to do something. So back to the internet he went, only this time it was to a dating site, where he met his future wife. She’d signed up for a free trial, picked three men who interested her, and narrowed that field down to Roland.
That first date was all it took, says Roland. “I have cancer and I’m not sure I’m going to live,” she told him.
But Roland came right back with, “That’s okay. I’m going to jail.”
It was not your typical first date material but it was perfect for them.
With a new love and a new mindset, Roland turned his prison sentence into an opportunity to both grow as a person and indulge his longstanding interest in teaching GED English. It was something he realizes he would not likely have taken the time to do otherwise, and which gave him a sense of fulfillment he’d been missing.
The experience of being ripped from his comfortable life and placed in a room with 200 men for 5 months turned out to be not the end of all good things for Roland, but the beginning of many new ones.
With each day that passed in his new life, Roland Frasier began to understand the difference between a life of mediocrity and a truly fulfilled life. It was not the path he would have chosen, but it was the path he walked, and he chose to make the best of it.
He not only endured his losses and his prison time, but he also leveraged those to build a new foundation for a new life.
Instead of a marriage and a career that held no passion, he remarried to the love of his life and built a career that excites him every day.
Today, Roland Frasier has a career that eclipses the one he lost.
He’s a strategic investor who specializes in buying, growing, and scaling companies that have not realized their potential. He shows them how to recognize and reach their potential before exiting the company for a nice profit.
He’s done this with dozens of companies that are worth up to billions of dollars. He also maintains some level of partnership in dozens of companies at any given time. His theory on this is simple; It is inevitable that one or more companies will fail, and by having stakes in several companies at once, that loss is easier to absorb.
Roland Frasier is also a principal at Real Estate Worldwide, Inc, Digital Marketer, War Room Mastermind, and Idea Incubator, LP. When he’s not busy in any of those companies he focuses on his CEO position at All Channels Media or interviewing guests on his own podcast Business Lunch.
You’d think all of those roles leave him exhausted and burnt out at the end of the day, with family time being a casualty of success, right? But that could not be further from the truth.
He’s got lots of free time and loves spending it with people he loves, doing things he loves.
The secret is delegation. He knows the areas he is good in and enjoys, and he knows the things he is not good at and does not enjoy. But for everything he does not enjoy or excel at there is someone who does, and Roland Frasier partners with those people to get the job done.
“It’s doing the things you hate that’s killing you,” he says.
This means he can travel the world for a month at a time, speak on stages with people he once read about, make millions of dollars in deals, and still have romantic nights with his wife along the way.
Not bad for the boy from the paper mill town in Virginia, who grew into the man who lost everything and went to prison.
Life may not always have been easy but he’s mastered the art of leveraging moments and turning them into opportunities. He’s learned important things about himself and about life, and he’s grateful every day for the blessings he has.
“If I’d decided to end my life I wouldn’t have learned those things or reinvented my life,” he says.
Asked what advice he as for others who may be overwhelmed by their struggles, Roland Frasier offers one word : gratitude.
“One of the keys is to be grateful for the things you do have.” Even the basic things matter, he says. He begins each day by thinking of three things he is grateful for. He makes it a point to chose things most people take for granted, like his ability to walk, or the people in his life. By repositioning his thoughts from what he is stressed about to what he is grateful for, he is better positioned to navigate each day.
It’s all about mindset, says Roland, and he’s dialed in a winning one. This time he’s not just flying close to the sun – he’s soaring.
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Barb Allen
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