Become Disciplined

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If you've worked a 9-5 job like most people, real estate is going to be a huge change for you. There's no-one telling you when to come into the office, no-one to say you only get a two week vacation, no-one to count your sick days, etc.

You don't report to anyone and that's a freedom you'll cherish. But that also comes with a huge responsibility. To be truly successful, you have to know when it's time to work and when it's time to play.

We can all think of things we'd rather be doing than sitting in an office on the phone or doing the things required to become successful. Even if it's our home office. Some of the things we have to do aren't especially fun. I call it "grunt work" but it's necessary.

It's so easy to look outside to a pretty day and say to yourself "I'm going to take the day off. I'll catch up tomorrow. You only go around once, right?" Then the next day comes and something else always comes up. Maybe you have to take the car in for a repair, run errands, you have to take the kids to the doctor, anything, but times flies and that day goes by without you doing a thing for your business.

You'll never get those missed days back. You might not know it, but I can absolutely guarantee there are motivated agents out there working and they're going after the same business you are.

If you want to get to a high level, especially early in your career, you should be grinding . As you become more experienced, you'll develop a sense of when it's time to work hard and when you can relax a bit. You'll just know.

What's ironic is once you've become fairly well established, you'll find yourself either so busy you can't come up for air or so slow you're in a panic no knowing where the next deal is coming from. Quite often it's just the result of the market conditions

I've always used this analogy with our agents. You should feel like there's a little person on one shoulder whispering in your ear "Congratulations. You're doing great. You deserve a break" The little person on the other shoulder is whispering "If you relax now, you're falling behind. There are lots of agents out there who want to take your business from you". I've felt like that my entire career and it's kept me working.

I'll share a couple of true stories about discipline from early in my commercial career. My first year in the business, I hadn't made much. I was barely scraping by, but boy the other agents in the office and I were having fun. They were all men so we were playing softball, flag football, going to the fun broker parties, but work wasn't at the top of the list of our priorities.

We really had no direction from the top. One time we were all pitching quarters against the wall in the middle of the day when our broker walked in. He had a classic comment "Business must be good". We still laugh about that, but out of all those agents, only two are left in the business.

However, there was one agent on the team who was a grinder during work hours. While we were wasting time, he had his door shut and was working.

One day he walked in with a commission check of around $30K. That equates to about $72K in today's dollars.

I just assumed he'd be taking several days off to celebrate but I was amazed he was the first one in the office the next morning with his office door shut making his calls. It's not surprising he was our top producer. He taught me a lot about his discipline.