My family history is Swedish. Which means going to IKEA for me isn’t just a furniture run it’s something closer to Old Home Week. The meatballs. The lingonberries. The assembly instructions that somehow, eventually, make sense. There’s a comfort in it I can’t explain to anyone who didn’t grow up with that heritage.

So when I came across this quote from Ingvar Kamprad the man who built IKEA from a small Swedish mail-order business into one of the most recognized brands on the planet it stopped my scroll:

“Only while sleeping one makes no mistakes. Making mistakes is the privilege of the active — of those who can correct their mistakes and put them right.”

He wrote that in The Testament of a Furniture Dealer and it didn’t land as a motivational poster quote. It landed as a challenge.

The Privilege Nobody Wants

We’ve built a culture in this industry where mistakes are career events. An agent misses a contingency deadline and it becomes a war story. A broker rolls out a new compensation model and it doesn’t stick, so they quietly shelve it and pretend it never happened. A recruiter pitches the wrong value proposition and retreats into what’s safe and familiar.

We treat mistakes like indictments. Kamprad treated them like proof of life.

The only people who don’t make mistakes are the ones who aren’t doing anything. The sleeping. The inactive. The people managing from a distance, afraid to make a call that might be wrong.

That’s not safety. That’s a slow fade.

What Active Actually Looks Like

The broker-owners winning right now — in this market, not the 2021 market — are not the ones who got everything right. They’re the ones who moved fast enough to collect real data, failed forward, and corrected.

They launched the recruiting campaign that bombed and learned which value proposition didn’t resonate — then built one that did. They hired the agent who looked great on paper but wasn’t a culture fit, then tightened their interview process. They restructured splits, lost two producers, and rebuilt a model that actually retained the right people.

None of that feels good in the moment. All of it compounds into a brokerage that actually functions.

The broker waiting for certainty before moving? Still waiting. The market didn’t pause. The competition didn’t either.

Correction Is the Skill

Kamprad wasn’t celebrating mistakes. He was celebrating the capacity to correct them and recognizing that correction only belongs to those active enough to make something go wrong in the first place.

We treat the mistake as the story. The correction is actually the story.

Your best recruiters aren’t the ones who never said the wrong thing. They’re the ones who said the wrong thing, noticed it wasn’t working, adjusted in real time, and closed anyway. Your best agents aren’t the ones who never mispriced a listing. They’re the ones who had the hard conversation with the seller, reduced the price, and protected the relationship anyway.

The skill isn’t perfection. The skill is what you do the minute after something goes sideways.

For the affiliates and service providers reading this: mistakes in relationship-based businesses aren’t fatal. Radio silence after the mistake is. The ones who correct fast, communicate clearly, and show back up keep the business. The ones who disappear lose it.

You can’t steer a parked car. You can’t correct a mistake you never made because you never tried anything.

What’s the thing you’ve been holding back on because you were afraid of getting it wrong?

Get it wrong. Then fix it.

Win The Day!

There’s a moment in a Spartan race – and if you’ve done one, you know exactly what I’m talking about – somewhere around mile eight, soaking wet, covered in mud, muscles telling you every logical reason to stop, where something shifts.

The comfortable version of you gets quiet. The real one shows up.

I’ve been thinking about that moment a lot lately. Not just on the course, but in this industry. Because I keep watching the same pattern play out – in brokerages, in recruiting pipelines, in individual agent careers – and it looks exactly like what happens to civilizations when they forget how to carry weight.

The 14th-century scholar Ibn Khaldun documented the cycle a long time ago: hard times create strong people, strong people build prosperity, prosperity creates comfort, and comfort destroys everything the strong built. He wasn’t talking about real estate. But he could have been.

The Drift Is the Danger

You don’t lose your edge in one catastrophic moment. You lose it slowly. And here’s the part nobody warns you about: it feels completely harmless while it’s happening.

It looks like sleeping in when you said you’d prospect. It looks like skipping the Saturday open house because the week was already decent. It looks like taking the easy conversation instead of the honest one. It looks like refreshing your email instead of opening your CRM.

Nobody announces the drift. It just happens. Quietly. Until one day the calls are fewer, the follow-up is slower, and the standard has dropped and you’re not even sure when it started.

I’ve watched agents who built their books in 2010 to 2015, when the market forced creativity and grit, become some of the most resilient people I know. I’ve also watched agents who entered during the 2020 to 2022 frenzy when anyone with a license and a phone could produce only to wash out the moment conditions required actual discipline.

The dangerous zone isn’t when things are hard. It’s when things are good. That’s when the edge dulls.

What the Hard Way Actually Does

Ancient cultures deliberately engineered suffering. Not because they were sadistic but because they understood something we’ve mostly forgotten: humans decay without resistance.

Muscle decays without load. Willpower weakens without use. Character softens without pressure.

The modern business world keeps trying to optimize away every point of friction. But remove all stress from muscle and it atrophies. Remove all stress from bone and it deteriorates. Remove all stress from the human spirit and it collapses.

This is why the hard way cannot happen in perfect conditions. It has to rain. It has to be cold. It has to hurt. You have to question why you signed up. That exact second you want to quit is where identity gets rebuilt. It never happens on the couch. It happens in resistance.

I’m training for the Long Beach Marathon right now. Not because I love suffering, but because I know what I’m maintaining. The discipline I’ve built through training has done more for my business than any commission split restructure, any CRM tool, or any coaching program I’ve ever paid for. That’s not an exaggeration.

What This Means for Broker-Owners, Recruiters, and Top Producers

If you run a brokerage: the teams that will win the next cycle aren’t the ones with the fanciest tech stack. They’re the ones that maintained standards when it was easy to let them slide. They kept the accountability structures when nobody was watching. They chose friction on purpose.

If you recruit: the agents worth having are the ones who didn’t drift when they didn’t have to. That’s your data point. Not their production in a hot market – their production when the market got hard and staying sharp required actual effort.

If you’re a top producer or affiliate: your biggest risk right now isn’t the market. It’s your own comfort level. The 2020 to 2022 market trained a lot of high earners to expect results without the same level of discipline that built those results in the first place. The ones who win the next cycle already figured out that they had to reset.

The Hard Way Isn’t Punishment

The Spartan finish line doesn’t feel good because it’s over. It feels good because of what you proved between the start and the end.

That’s the thing nobody tells you about doing hard things on purpose. It’s not about the race. It’s about the version of yourself it builds — the one who shows up the same way whether the market is hot or cold, whether recruiting is easy or hard, whether the week was great or brutal.

The Hard Way is not punishment. It’s maintenance. It’s how you stay sharp enough to serve clients at the highest level, recruit from a position of genuine strength, and build something that survives the next cycle instead of depending on it.

The market will shift again. It always does. The only question is whether you’ll be sharp when it does or whether you’ll have drifted.

Don’t drift.

Win the Day.

Usain Bolt — 8 Olympic gold medals, the fastest man in history — was interviewed recently about Gout Gout, an 18-year-old Australian sprinter who is already turning heads worldwide. The kid is running times that are making people uncomfortable: in the best way. Comparisons to Bolt himself are everywhere, and for once, they don’t feel like a stretch.

Someone asked Bolt what advice he’d give him.

He didn’t talk about training. He didn’t talk about technique or competition or managing expectations. He said he hoped the kid finds the right people around him. That was it. Not a training tip. Not a mental performance hack. Just — make sure the people in your circle are the right ones.

Here’s why that matters. Bolt knows exactly what happens when the attention starts coming fast. He lived it. You go from being a kid with a gift to a commodity almost overnight. Everyone wants access. Everyone has an angle. And most of them aren’t wrong because they’re bad people. They’re wrong because their interests and your long term success are not the same thing.

Then he said this:

“If you mess up at track and field, then it all goes away.”

The fame. The platform. The income. None of it exists without the performance. And the performance doesn’t survive without focus. And focus doesn’t survive without the right people protecting it.

I read that and immediately thought about this industry. Because I have watched that exact sequence play out more times than I can count. Agents come up fast, start making real money, and suddenly have more people around them than ever. New partners. New opportunities. New voices. And within eighteen months the production that created all of that attention has quietly fallen off a cliff. Not because the market changed. Not because they lost their skill. Because nobody in their circle was honest enough to say hey, you’re drifting. Get back to the work.

The ones who build something that lasts almost always have the same thing in common. Not the best brokerage. Not the best leads. A coach who told them the truth. A mentor who had been through it. A peer group that held a standard. Someone who cared more about where they were going than where they were right now.

Bolt wasn’t giving Gout Gout a motivational speech. He was giving him the most practical advice available to anyone at the beginning of something big: figure out who your people are before the noise tells you who they should be.

This one hit closer to home for me personally. I just started training for the Long Beach Marathon in October. And the first thing I did wasn’t download a training plan. It was figure out who was going to hold me accountable to actually getting to the starting line. Same principle. Different track.

So here’s what I’d actually do this week. Two things. That’s it.

Audit your circle. Not your contact list. The actual people you listen to. Write down the three to five people who influence your decisions most right now. Then ask one question about each of them — are they invested in where I’m going, or just where I am right now?

Find the voice that’s missing. Most people in this industry have plenty of cheerleaders. What they’re missing is someone who will tell them the truth when they’re drifting. A coach. A mentor. A peer who has already been where you’re trying to go. If you don’t have that person right now, finding them is the most important business decision you can make this quarter. Not the new CRM. Not the marketing plan. That person.

Bolt had decades of hindsight when he gave that advice. You don’t have to wait that long to act on it.

Win the Day.

The top-line number looks fine. Roughly 103,000 agents active per quarter, less than 6% variance over 18 months. Stable. Consistent. Under control.

It isn’t.

We tracked 192,788 individual agents across six consecutive quarters — Q4 2024 through Q1 2026. Not rosters. Not license counts. Actual closings, quarter by quarter, agent by agent. When you follow the individuals instead of the totals, the picture changes completely.

Two Industries. One Licensing Board.

The Professional Core — 30% of agents, 70% of volume.

Always-on agents closed every single quarter for 18 months straight. There are 34,751 of them — 18% of the market. Median annualized production: $5.8M. They generate 54% of all closed volume.

Add the Occasional agents — those who closed in 5 of 6 quarters, one missed quarter in 18 months — and the combined core is 30% of all agents producing 70% of all volume.

The In-and-Out — 70% of agents, 30% of volume.

They close some quarters and go silent in others. In any given quarter, roughly half the active board is drawn from this group. The following quarter, it’s a different half. The headcount stays constant. The people underneath it rotate constantly.

The always-on agents produce at 2.6 times the rate of the in-and-out group. Same license. Same market. Fundamentally different business.

What To Do With This

If you run a brokerage: Your overhead is priced per agent. Your production is generated by 30% of them. That math is eating your margin. Stop building one model for everyone — reserve your highest-cost resources for the agents generating your highest returns. And recognize that your biggest compliance liability isn’t your top producers. It’s the agent closing two deals a year who hasn’t read a contract form in four months.

If you recruit: Stop chasing headcount. The most valuable target in this data isn’t the always-on agent at a competitor — they’re well-compensated and not in motion. It’s the 5-of-6 producer: one missed quarter in 18 months, close to dominant, something got in the way. If you can identify what that quarter was and solve for it specifically, you make a recruiting pitch almost no one else is making. Data-driven. Personal. Impossible to ignore.

If you’re an MLO: You have limited hours. The in-and-out group will refer you one or two deals a year — if that. The always-on and occasional producers close at three times the rate. Build your referral partner list the same way a good broker builds a roster: by closing frequency, not by who was friendly at the last networking event.

If you’re a top producer: You already know you’re carrying the market. The 18% who close every quarter generate 54% of the volume. What you may not be asking is whether your brokerage’s infrastructure is built for your production cadence — or for the 70%. There’s a difference. It shows up in your daily experience every time you need something done fast.

The Metric That Replaces Headcount

Stop asking how many agents you have. Start asking how many closed last quarter. And the quarter before. And the quarter before that.

Quarterly closing frequency is the only number that predicts brokerage health, recruiting ROI, and pipeline reliability. Everything else is a lagging indicator dressed up as a strategy.

The brokerages that win the next cycle won’t have the most agents. They’ll have the highest concentration of agents who close every single quarter — and they’ll have structured their overhead, their recruiting, and their retention around that reality instead of around a headcount number that flatters no one.

Based on 192,788 agents tracked across six quarters (Q4 2024 – Q1 2026) across four major MLS markets representing approximately 30% of U.S. residential volume. Closings list — agents appear only when they transact. Volume annualized (quarterly × 4), reported as medians.

Here’s a number that should stop you cold: 80 percent.

That’s how much AI reduces task completion time, according to Anthropic’s research across 100,000 real-world conversations. Eighty percent. Think about what your agents spend most of their day doing — follow-up emails, market updates, listing descriptions, recruiting outreach, transaction coordination. Now imagine doing all of that in one-fifth of the time.

That’s not the future. That’s right now. The only question is whether it’s happening in your firm and your offices or in the brokerage down the street that’s quietly about to out-recruit you.

The Stat That Should Rewrite Your Recruiting Pitch

Here’s the finding I keep coming back to: AI doesn’t help your top producers the most. It helps your languishing performers. It’s the hidden “force multiplier!”

A landmark Stanford-MIT study of more than 5,000 customer service agents found that AI increased overall productivity by 14 percent — but for newer, less experienced workers, the lift was 35 percent. Researchers called it the “skill equalizer” effect. The least experienced performers benefited most because AI gave them the judgment, the language, and the decision-support that usually only comes with years of experience.

Think about what that means for your recruiting strategy. If you’re building a value proposition around AI-powered training and tools, you’re not just offering a better split or a shinier CRM. You’re telling a newer agent: “In this office, you’ll grow faster than you would anywhere else.” That’s a recruiting story worth telling — and most broker-owners aren’t telling it yet.

The Adoption Gap Is Your Competitive Moat

A recent Gallup poll of 23,700 workers found that while half of employees report some AI usage, only about one in four use it frequently in their daily workflow.

Your office probably looks exactly like that.

You’ve got a handful of agents who are all-in, a bigger group who dabble, and another group still waiting to see if this is “just another thing.” That gap is where your opportunity lives — because the same Gallup data found that managerial support is the #1 predictor of whether productivity gains actually materialize.

Read that again. The tool isn’t enough. You are the variable.

If you’re not actively modeling AI adoption, integrating it into onboarding, and setting the expectation that this is how we work now — the gains stay theoretical. Meanwhile, the broker down the road who’s running weekly AI office hours is compressing years of productivity growth into months.

A Word for Your Affiliate Partners

This one’s for the title reps, lenders, home warranty contacts, and inspectors in your ecosystem. I say this because I care about your business, not to scare you.

Since early 2025, a reported 184,000 U.S. jobs have been displaced by AI where employers explicitly cited it as the cause. Customer support workers were disproportionately affected. Your role — the relationship, the local knowledge, the trust you’ve built over years — has real and lasting value. But the process side of what you do? That’s exactly where AI is moving fastest. The partners who will win the next decade are the ones building human value on top of AI efficiency, not waiting to see what happens.

Three Moves. This Week.

Run your own audit. Pick one repetitive task — follow-up emails, market summaries, recruiting outreach — and run it through an AI tool every day for five days. Track the time saved. Make it real before you preach it.

Make it a standard, not a suggestion. Set the expectation, model the behavior, build it into onboarding. Adoption without leadership integration produces nothing.

Have the conversation with your affiliate partners now. Don’t wait for them to figure it out. The broker-owners showing up for their referral ecosystem with this kind of clarity are becoming the leaders of choice. That’s your differentiation.

AI is already showing up in your office. The only question is whether you’re directing it — or just watching it arrive. What’s one task you’re doing manually today that you could hand to AI before the start of the next week?

Win the Day.

Strategy Over Statistics: Becoming the Leader of Choice

Data is everywhere, but clarity is scarce. My goal for today’s blog is to provide the insights your team can leverage to bridge the “Expectation Gap” with their agents and recruiting prospects. When you empower your agents to lead in the local market, you become the “Office & Leader of Choice” in your recruiting, attraction, and retention efforts… and this can happen more naturally and automatically.

The Leadership Leverage: Bridging the “Expectation Gap”

The “Expectation Gap” is the single biggest threat to agent productivity and your brokerage’s bottom line today. While 80% of sellers currently believe they will fetch their full asking price or more, the reality is that 62% of homes are selling for less than their initial list price.

When you equip your agents to explain – not just quote – why a higher percentage of listings now require price reductions, you are giving them the authority to win the listing and price it correctly from day one. High-performing agents are attracted to leaders who provide this level of clarity; it is your most powerful tool for recruitment and retention.

The $35,600 Conversation

Your agents – and agent prospects need the confidence to show sellers the literal cost of “waiting for the right buyer.” On an average $400,000 listing, the May 2026 data is clear:

• Days 0-14: Properties typically sell for $380,400.
• Day 120+: The “staleness” factor and buyers questioning the asset drop that average to $344,800.

That $35,600 penalty is the price of an unguided seller. By providing the interpretation that protects a seller’s equity, you prove that your brokerage is the premier destination for serious real estate professionals.

The “Equity Shield” as a Recruiting Tool

In an era of negative foreclosure headlines, your role is to provide the “Equity Shield.” While foreclosure filings are rising toward 120,000 as the market normalizes, the average homeowner sits on $295,000 in equity.

By showing that two-thirds of homeowners either own their home free and clear (39.3%) or have 50% or more equity (27.1%), you give your agents the grounded optimism they need to stay focused. This culture of clarity is why you become—and remain—the Leader of Choice.

Local Market Snapshots: May 13, 2026

Consider these specific market profiles—or type in your own local market—to give your local leadership team immediate context:

• National Market: The median list price is $449,900 with a Market Action Index of 37. Inventory has increased to 767,132, signaling that pricing strategy is more critical than ever.
• California (CA): With a median price of $799,900 and an index of 43, prices have reached a plateau. Agents should watch for the Market Action Index to trend higher before expecting prices to climb again.
• New York: This market shows a stronger seller’s advantage with an index of 41 and a median price of $669,000. Inventory is tight at 17,710, creating upward pressure on prices.
• Florida (FL): The median price sits at $498,500 with an index of 34. Despite headlines, inventory has actually decreased to 88,612, suggesting a more resilient market than many expect.
• Texas (TX): Texas is currently the most price-sensitive of these markets with an index of 33 and a median price of $375,000. With inventory at 128,743, agents must be experts at the “Staleness Conversation” to keep listings moving.

Most agents know what’s happening. Good agents understand what’s happening. Only great agents can explain what’s happening. Use these insights – like these – to ensure your office is where great agents choose to be.

Want the slides? Hit me up…

Look, I’m the first to admit I don’t have this totally figured out. I’ve had seasons where I was purely chasing the next closing, the next recruit, or the next ego-boost on a leaderboard. We all have. In our industry, it’s almost impossible not to. But after years of riding the real estate rollercoaster, what I’ve discovered is that the “hustle” eventually runs out of gas if you don’t have something else under the hood.

Here is the truth about how this actually looks when you’re in the trenches.

The Trap of the “Next Big Thing”

Earlier in my career, I was 100% extrinsic. I thought once I hit a certain production level or bought that specific car, I’d finally feel like I “made it.” And don’t get me wrong, the money is great. It’s why we do this. But I realized that extrinsic rewards are like caffeine. They give you a massive spike, but the crash is inevitable. If your only reason for picking up the phone is the commission, then every “No” feels like a personal robbery. It makes the job heavy.

What I’ve learned is that you have to use the money as a scoreboard, not the soul of your business. If you’re a Broker Owner, you’ve probably seen agents who make a ton of money but are miserable to be around. That’s because they’ve mastered the reward but lost the “why.”

What Actually Keeps Us in the Game

The shift happened for me when I started focusing on the “Inside Game.” I started looking at a difficult negotiation not as a hurdle to my paycheck, but as a chance to see if I was actually as good at my job as I thought I was.

That’s intrinsic motivation. It’s that feeling when you solve a title issue that everyone else said was impossible, or when you see a new agent finally “get it” and realize you had a hand in their success. When I started chasing the growth and the identity of being an expert, the burnout started to fade. The weirdest part? When I stopped obsessing over the commission and started obsessing over the craft, I actually ended up making more money.

How I Balance it Now

I’m still a fan of a good incentive. I use “If-Then” rewards for the stuff I hate doing. If I grind through my recruiting calls or my P&L reviews, then I’m going to treat myself to a nice dinner or a round of golf. I use that outside reward to get me through the friction.

But for the big picture, I focus on the “Now-That” side of things. Now that I’ve built this team, how can I make us the most respected name in the market? Now that I have this platform, how can I help my staff grow their own careers?

If you are a CEO or a top producer, my advice is to stop waiting for the next trophy to make you feel successful. Use the trophies to keep the lights on, but find the part of this job that you would do even if the commission was half of what it is. Find the curiosity in the market or the pride in your professional reputation.

That’s the only way to stay a high performer without losing your mind in the process. We aren’t perfect at it, and some days are still a grind, but shifting the focus even 20% toward the “Inside Game” changes everything.

The one thing standing between you and a full pipeline isn’t knowledge — it’s akrasia from ancient Greece times: (meaning, acting against your own better judgment).

You know you should be making the calls. Building the relationships. Sending the texts. Blocking the time.

Whether you are a real estate office leader trying to grow your office, a recruiter building a pipeline, a real estate agent building your listing base or a mortgage loan officer staying top of mind with referral partners — you already know what 30 minutes of proactive activity looks like.

And yet the day ends and it did not happen. Again.

This is not a discipline problem. It is not a motivation problem. There is actually a name for it — akrasia. Acting against your own better judgment. Knowing the right thing and doing something else entirely.

You are not alone. And it is fixable.

Why it keeps happening

Your brain is running two systems at once. One knows what matters long term — the calls, the relationships, the outreach that builds a real pipeline. The other only cares about right now. And right now there are emails, fires, and people who need you immediately.

Recruiting, prospecting, relationship building — it always feels important. It almost never feels urgent. So it loses. Until one day it is urgent and you are starting from zero.

What actually works

Set up before you sit down. Have your list open before you start. Have your script ready before you dial. The leaders, recruiters and MLOs who struggle with consistency almost always struggle with setup, not execution. Remove one friction point and the 30 minutes happen.

Plan your prospecting week on Friday. Before you close your laptop on Friday, know exactly who you are contacting and how for the entire week ahead. Who is on your Top 5. Who needs a follow up. What D.R.I.S. angle fits each person. Which channel you are leading with each day. When Monday comes you are not getting ready to get ready — you are executing. A few minutes on Friday means five days of momentum instead of five mornings of hesitation.

Block it like your best appointment. Do not wait to feel motivated. You will not always feel like making calls. Block the time on your calendar and treat it like your most important meeting of the day — because it is.

Start smaller than you think you need to. Ten minutes. Two calls. Three texts. One real follow up. A small action done daily beats a big effort done occasionally every time. Momentum is the goal, not perfection.

Say it out loud. Tell your coach or your group what you are committing to this week. Once you say it out loud the internal negotiation gets a lot harder to win. External accountability is not a crutch — it is a system.

Name what you are avoiding. Sometimes it is not laziness. It is fear of rejection, fear of saying the wrong thing, or waiting until the approach feels perfect. Ask yourself honestly — what am I actually afraid will happen if I make the call? The answer is almost never as bad as not making it.

Track every touch. A simple checkmark makes progress real and keeps you going. What you measure you do. What you ignore disappears.

The only question that matters

You will not think your way into this habit. You build it by doing it before you feel ready.

Is recruiting and prospecting a core function of your day — or is it still waiting for a better moment that never quite comes?

The 30 minutes are there. Protect them.

Win the Day

The market changed. Maybe your pattern recognition didn’t.

December 29, 1972. Eastern Airlines Flight 401 is on final approach into Miami. The crew spots a burned-out landing gear indicator light. Nothing catastrophic — just a bulb. But all three of them lock onto it. They put the plane on autopilot and stare at that light, poking at it, talking about it, completely absorbed.

Nobody notices the autopilot has quietly disengaged.

The L-1011 descends for four minutes at a rate nobody feels. At 11:42 PM, it hits the Everglades at 227 mph. 101 people die.

The NTSB investigation found the aircraft was perfectly airworthy. The landing gear was fine. The crew simply stopped flying the plane.

Investigators called it target fixation: a term WWII fighter pilots coined for bomber crews who got so locked onto a ground target during a strafing run that they flew straight into it.

• Your brain narrows.
• Everything outside the focal point disappears.
• You stop reading the instruments right in front of you

Here’s the question no one in this industry wants to sit with:

What’s your burned-out bulb?

Because I’ve watched some MLOs stare at rate sheets waiting for the refi wave to return, while $35 trillion in homeowner equity sits in their existing database untouched. Nearly half of all mortgaged homes in America are “equity-rich” right now: loan balance under 50% of value. Average tappable equity per homeowner: $195,000. That’s not a rate environment problem. That’s a conversation that hasn’t happened yet.

I’ve watched some Broker-Owners chase the Instagram agent — big following, big personality, big promises — while the steady $4M producer on their own roster quietly grinds toward burnout because nobody called to ask how she’s doing.

One conversation. One system. One habit shift.

That agent doubles. But the radar never beeped for her because she wasn’t moving fast enough to register.

I’ve watched some agents run the same buyer lead campaign on repeat — same Zillow spend, same open house routine, same Facebook ad — while their past-client database ages out untouched. Those clients bought three, four, five years ago. Their lives have changed. Kids, divorces, job moves, aging parents. They’re not “not moving” they just haven’t been asked the right question by someone they already trust. That agent isn’t in a slow market. They’re flying over the opportunity at 30,000 feet and calling it a headwind.

That’s not a market problem. That’s a calibration problem.

• The recruiter ignores the “not yet” candidate who said no six months ago — and who now has a new manager they would rather not work for.
• The MLO skips the past-client check-in because it doesn’t feel like prospecting.
• The Broker-Owner cancels the culture meeting because nothing’s on fire today.
• The agent refreshes Zillow lead counts instead of opening their CRM.

Nothing’s on fire yet.

The pilots who survive target fixation aren’t the ones who fly less aggressively. They’re the ones who built a discipline of checking instruments even when everything feels fine. Especially when everything feels fine.

So here’s the challenge — not a checklist, not a homework assignment:

This week, make one call your radar told you to skip.

The past client sitting on $200K in equity who “probably isn’t thinking about it.” The steady producer you haven’t checked in with in 90 days. The recruit who said no in October. The buyer from 2020 whose kid just started high school and whose house has four bedrooms they don’t need anymore.

Your radar didn’t lie to you in 2021. It just hasn’t been recalibrated since.

The signal is there. The plane is flying.

Check your instruments.

Read a brief story from the archives: [Situational Awareness vs. Target Fixation]