BRUCE LEE said [paraphrase] “Im not afraid of the man who practiced 10,000 kicks, I’m afraid of the man that has practiced one kick 10,000 times”
Here are some real statistics and the bother me–
The average lifespan of an agent is about 18 months. The average agent will sell less than 10 homes next year. The average agent will constantly be cycling between overload and uncertainty. I don’t want to be average. I rebel against average——-Ive always despised being in the middle of the bell curve. For me—to be average would be death. Thats actually kind of sad but, its true. I would rather die than be average–hmm never said that out loud before.
I think its safe to say that we all realize the power of taking action in today’s busy, loud world. The thing we struggle to find is optimizing the right action at the right time.
Most people begin and end their careers trying to do a little bit of everything and never really master that single devastating kick.
In that small window of time you are required to learn the complexities of selling the most expensive asset in the market. You are required to become a master salesperson and an expert marketer.
Its almost like the beginning of some navy seal movie—”listen up soldiers–in the next 18 months you will become the person you always dreamed of—you will be able to hold your breath for 5 minutes—you will be a master interrogator of your enemies an expert in geo-politics and you will get blackbelts in 4 different disciplines.
WOw!! All that sounds great but, its not reality. Its no wonder most agents wash out in 18 months. Where do you start? Which person are you? Will you practice kicking 10K times or practice a single specific kick 10K times?
Most people begin and end their careers trying to learn on the fly—they
do a little bit of everything and never really master anything
Here is mistake #1:
Smart entrepreneurs will reverse engineer their goals or business and they quickly become reductionists. Reductionism is an approach where you break the system down to its pieces basically, you reduce a system to its elements and then rank the elements in terms of importance of reaching an objective.
When we set goals we are encouraged to become reductions—we are taught to reverse engineer our goals. If I want to sell 50 units—I must go on 150 listing appointments and therefore must get 1150 leads for the year.
If im using this example—Typically that person then looks to the world and tries to figure out where in the world he/she can generate 3 leads a day. You might read a book. Listen to a podcast or talk with a top producer to learn what they are doing. They then set out to model whats working—in school we used to call it copying someone elses homework but, in the work world we call it modeling.
Heres what happen
Mistake #1–monkey see monkey do I see agents do over and over. They look at the tools a top producer is using and mistakenly think that “If I use the same tools I will surely geth the same results”.
Nothing could be further from the truth—-that is like saying if i use the same driver as tiger woods I should be able to drive it just as far and as straight as him or pretty close. OK–I get that –if you want pro results you must use pro tools.
Would you spend 500 dollars on a new fancy driver—use it on and off for a month or two and then discard it? Absolutely not—–most of us would try the driver and when we cant reliably drive our ball a straight 300 yards we correctly assume we need more training.
Most people would agree that not throwing the driver away and getting some training would be the logical decision however, I see people throwing away their drivers —–claining it doesnt work and then vowing not to try that same driver again—does that sound familiar? Have you started some kind of outreach program–door knocking, cold calling etc and then quit a month or two in?
Look–we have all done this—there are things that we dont want to do but, me must do them anyway——–. If our coach tells us to go door knocking—-we do it. We dont want to do it but, we do it. We are not happy about it complaining its hot out here–nobody is home—etc and at the end of hte afternoon that thing you didnt want to do —-well it turns out it didnt work anyway. So what bow coach?
People go from campaign to campaign with nothing ever really getting traction. All of us do this in different forms. This is a form of self sabotage I see all the time. We somehow become Veruka Salt thinking “I want it now daddy” “I want that goose that lays golden eggs now daddy”
This approach is almost always fatal——-it will leave you broke and disheartened and you know what happens? That next thing we try—-we go into it knowing its going to fail—we start to disbelieve what our mentors are telling us–and we end up getting what we know we are going to get—-nothing. We get nothing but, the satisfaction of personally knowing that this strategy or that would not work.
If this sounds like you—you are not alone we all have these tendencies in one form or another.
Trying to fight these instincts are incredibly difficult mainly because we know that making the wrong decision can have huge negative consequences–like not being able to pay our bills or take care of our families.
