Face the Tiger: Dealing with Unexpected Surprises & Challenges

I can look back to April and sort of laugh. Well not really. That was a brutally expensive 2025 and start to 2026. I was bleeding cash through my cursed real estate properties. Then despite all the losses and such, I still ended up with a massive tax bill. Especially painful when I was so cashstrapped in 2025 and Q1 2026. Surprisingly, I was pretty equanimous about it. 

Rule number is don’t mess with the taxman. It’s just not worth the trouble and smoke. At the end of the day, philosophically, it’s just funny money and digits on a screen. Don’t get me wrong, it really hurt me to cut those checks. But I’m healthy and still in the game. I can go make more money.  

I happened to listen to the excellent Invest Like the Best podcast where they did the 2nd interview with Alan Waxman of Sixth Street Partners, one of the biggest and pioneering private credit firms in the world. They live “facing the tiger”. The old prior to 2020 Marvin, would have freaked out and panicked. I was still pissed but I took a deep breath and tapped into my inner sociopath. I just looked at this coldly. Facing the tiger as Waxman describes it: “ there's hard things in this world. We're gonna make mistakes. We're gonna have problems. But when those problems happen, instead of pointing fingers……we have a saying from day one of our firm is that we look at the problems head on.”

So that’s what I did. I called my tax guy and we went through the report line by line. How did this happen? What did I miss? What can I do better and make sure it does not happen again? I took personal ownership, this was totally my fault. 

Then I controlled the controllables as they say. I sold and sorted assets. I went to austerity mode and managed my cost structure super tight for 4-5 months to sort it out. I also went hard into exploring new cashflow opportunities and projects. 

You do what you have to do. So when you run into surprise challenges. It’s okay to get mad, I certainly was but channel it to face the tiger. Then you can move on to solving the next inevitable challenge or curve ball that life throws at you.