Inspired by Seneca’s first letter to his friend Lucilius, written almost two thousand years ago.

Seneca was one of the richest men in Rome.

Villas. Vineyards. A fortune most senators could only dream about. He tutored the young Nero and then served as one of the emperor’s closest advisors. Power, access, reputation. He had all of it.

Late in his life, he began writing letters to a younger friend named Lucilius. In the very first one, he told him this:

“Everything, Lucilius, belongs to others. Time alone is ours.”

Not long after, Nero ordered his death.

All that wealth could not buy him one more day.

Seneca knew exactly what he was talking about.

Look at What You Actually Own

Now look at your business.

That listing? Borrowed. The seller can expire on Tuesday.

Your top producer? Borrowed. Every agent on your roster is one recruiting lunch away from a transfer.

The split model. The market share. The rate environment. The award on the wall. All borrowed. All of it can be called back by circumstances you do not control.

There is one asset in your business that nobody lent you. Today. The hours sitting in front of you right now. You get them outright, every morning.

But Seneca adds a warning. Anyone who wants that time can walk right in and take it from you.

And here is the part that stings. It is the asset we guard the least.

We Fight Over Desk Fees and Give Away Afternoons

Watch how a broker owner handles money. We might argue over a $50 transaction fee. We might audit a vendor invoice line by line. We might spend a month negotiating a lease.

Then someone leans in the office door and says, “Got a minute?”

And we give them forty-five.

Seneca saw the same thing in Rome. People were tight-fisted with their property and careless with their time, the one thing where being stingy is actually a virtue. Nobody logs the loss. Time never shows up on the P&L.

Taken, Stolen, or Slipped Away

In that first letter, Seneca breaks down how our time disappears. Some is taken from us. Some is stolen. And some just slips away.

Here is what that looks like in a brokerage.

Taken. The agent crisis. The deal falling apart at 6pm on a Friday. The escrow officer who needs an answer now. Some of this is the job. Leadership costs time, and it should.

Stolen. The meeting with no agenda. The vendor demo you agreed to because saying no felt awkward. The email thread with eleven people on it and zero decisions.

Slipped away. Seneca called loss through carelessness the most shameful kind, because nobody did it to you. The five minutes between recruiting calls that turn into forty. The “let me just check the CRM first.” The call block that quietly becomes a planning session about the call block.

Taken time you can manage. Stolen time you can refuse. Slipped time is on you.

The One Debt You Cannot Repay

Seneca makes one more point, and every recruiter needs to hear it.

If someone lends you money, you can pay it back. If someone gives you their time, even the most grateful person alive cannot return it.

So when a $20M producer gives you an hour at a coffee shop, understand what just happened. They handed you the one thing they will never get back. Walking in unprepared is not casual. It is disrespectful. That is why the quiet hours of prepmatter so much.

Now flip it around.

If time is the only thing an agent truly owns, then the most valuable thing you can offer them is hours, not two more points. Transaction support that keeps them out of the paperwork. Systems that kill the busywork. A leader who removes friction instead of adding meetings.

Which is why one of the best questions in any recruiting conversation is also one of the simplest:

“If I gave you back six hours a week, what would you do with them?”

Watch their face when they answer. That is where the real move lives.

Hold the Rest Loosely

Here is the part that makes this freeing instead of grim.

If everything else is borrowed, you can stop gripping it so hard.

The listing that went to the other broker was never fully yours. The agent who left for a better cap was on loan the whole time. The market that shifted under your feet was never yours to begin with.

That does not mean you stop fighting for them. You fight hard. It means losing one does not get to set the temperature of your day. You feel it for an hour. You learn what you can. Then you go back to the only thing you actually control.

What you do with the next hour.

Try This

• Keep the account for one week. Seneca admitted he wasted time too. But he said he could tell you exactly what he lost, why, and how. Can you? Three columns: taken, stolen, slipped. Be honest.
• Treat a time request like a money request. Before you say yes to a “quick call,” ask what it is withdrawing from. If you would not write a check for it, do not write your afternoon.
• Close the open door. Set office hours for walk-in questions. Your agents will adjust faster than you think.
• Stop saving the hard call for later. Seneca told Lucilius to grab hold of today’s work so he would depend less on tomorrow. The recruiting conversation you are holding until “after the quarter” is a bet that you will have the time. You might not.
• Give one hour back. Cancel or cut in half one recurring meeting this week. Your agents will notice. So will your calendar.

Question

If you had to send an invoice for every hour you gave away last week, who would get the bill?

And the follow-up: which of your agents is waiting for someone to give them their hours back?

Resources

Read Seneca’s first letter to Lucilius, usually titled “On Saving Time.” It is two pages. You will find it in Letters from a Stoic. Then read On the Shortness of Life. You can finish it in an afternoon, which feels about right.

Winning the day is not about owning more. It is about owning the one thing that was yours all along.

Everything else is on loan. Today is yours.

Two Olympic golds. One silver. One standard.

Freestyle skier Eileen Gu captured elite performance psychology in eleven words:

“I train like I’ve never won, and I compete like I’ve never lost.”

It sounds great on a motivational poster. But look closely at what it actually asks of you on an ordinary Tuesday morning.

Gu’s equation splits high performance into two completely different gears:

1. The first half builds discipline and humility in the quiet hours when nobody is watching.
2. The second half silences doubt the moment the pressure is on.

In real estate—whether you are listing homes, running a brokerage, or building a team through recruiting—almost everyone gets trapped on one side of that equation.

The Quiet Hours: The Recruiter’s Grind

Take recruiting.

Training like you’ve never won is the dirty work no one posts on social media.

It’s spending hours building relationships, researching local MLS data before making a phone call.  It’s auditing an agent’s production gaps, analyzing their recent transactions, and anticipating their objections.  It’s role-playing difficult conversations, refining your value proposition, and following up with agents who ignored your previous messages.

The moment a recruiter or manager thinks, “I know my pitch, I don’t need to prep,” complacency takes over. You wing it. You make a generic call. And the candidate smells it within thirty seconds.

Humility keeps you sharp. It forces you to respect the process, regardless of how many desks you filled last month.

The Arena: Absolute Certainty

Then comes game day.

You’re sitting across a coffee table from a $20M producer who could transform your office. Or maybe you’re standing in a living room fighting for a crucial listing against two rival brokers.

This is where humility has to turn into conviction.

If you walk into that recruiting conversation worrying about your brokerage’s flaws, hesitating on your split models, or acting grateful just to have their time, you’ve already lost. A top producer isn’t joining someone who seeks permission to lead them. They join certainty.

Competing like you’ve never lost means you believe down to your bones that your platform, your leadership, and your culture will make their business bigger and their life better. You don’t bring doubt into the room. You bring an immovable belief in the value you deliver.

The Balance

The lesson cuts through the noise:

• Preparation requires humility. It keeps you hungry, grounded, and outworking yesterday.
• Execution demands conviction. It silences fear and projects unshakable authority.

Carry only humility, and you out-prepare everyone but fold under pressure. Carry only conviction, and you’re all swagger with zero substance—and the market will expose you fast.

Elite performers do both. They grind in the dark as if they have everything to prove, and they walk into the room as if they cannot fail.

Take a look at your calendar, your pipeline, and your next appointment:

Which half of that equation is harder for you right now: the daily grind, or silencing the doubt?

Do the work today.

Dollars Is Seventh on Our Own List. It’s the Only One They Ask About.

Every leader in real estate knows how the recruiting conversation starts. An agent sits down, glances at the numbers, and asks the question you can set your watch by:

“What’s your split?”

And if we aren’t careful, we answer it. We negotiate caps. We shave desk fees. We find two more points somewhere. In doing that, we quietly agree with the agent’s assumption — that the only lever available to them is a cheaper version of what they already have.

Henry Ford supposedly said that if he had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses. The line survives because it gets something right about how people ask for things.

But here’s the part worth sitting with: the agent isn’t being naive. Dollars is the only D anyone publishes. Every brokerage in the market advertises its split. Nobody advertises their transaction-support response time, or how many deals their broker saved at the closing table last quarter. So the agent optimizes the one number they can actually see.

That’s not their failure. That’s ours.

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Run the Math Out Loud

Take an agent doing $1.5 million in volume — three or four deals a year at 2.5%. Roughly $37,500 in gross commission income.

Move them from an 80/20 to an 85/15. Five full points. The kind of concession you’d have to fight your P&L to make.

It’s worth about $1,875 a year to them.

Now sell one additional $500,000 home. At 80/20, that single transaction is worth roughly $10,000.

One deal beats five points. Say that out loud, on a whiteboard, in front of the agent. Once they see the number, you are no longer defending your split — you are asking the better question: what is standing between you and that one extra deal?

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The Eight D’s

We’ve been writing about the Eight D’s here for two years — 104 straight weeks. They came out of the agent migration data, not a brainstorm, and they hold up because agents don’t move for one reason. They move for one reason they can articulate, sitting on top of six or seven they can’t.

Direction — Leadership vision and brokerage strategy. Do they know where this company is going, and do they want to go there?

De-Risking — Support systems that reduce personal and financial risk. One rescued deal pays for a lifetime of split difference.

Development — Training, mentorship, and growth opportunities. Not generic webinars. One gap, ninety days, measured.

Differentiation — Clear brand or model advantages. Something that answers the client’s real question: why should I hire you?

Dynamics — Internal culture and team cohesion. The one thing a competitor can’t copy by Friday.

Digital/Data — Tools and platforms that actually raise productivity, plus live local market intelligence they can use in a listing appointment tomorrow.

Dollars — Competitive compensation and commission structure. Real, and worth being honest about. Also the only D on this list that can’t create a transaction that didn’t already exist.

Dissatisfaction — The push factor. Nobody moves because a deck was impressive. They move because something has been grinding on them long enough that change feels safer than staying.

Look at where Dollars sits. Seventh of eight. That ordering wasn’t an accident, and it isn’t marketing — it’s what the migration data shows. Meanwhile it’s the first thing out of the agent’s mouth in nine meetings out of ten.

Your job in that first meeting isn’t to present the other seven. It’s to find out which one the Dissatisfaction is actually attached to — because it is almost never Dollars, even when Dollars is the word they use.

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The Questions That Replace “What’s Your Split?”

You don’t get there by presenting. You get there by diagnosing:

1. How many appointments did you set last month — and how many did you actually run?
2. Walk me through what happens between “I got the lead” and “I’m at their kitchen table.”
3. Where in the last year did a deal nearly fall apart, and who did you call?
4. What part of your week do you dread?
5. If I gave you back six hours, what would you do with them?

Every answer points at a D. None of them point at Dollars.

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When the Split Is the Problem

The honest part, because leaving it out makes everything above sound like a broker defending an uncompetitive model.

Sometimes the agent’s math is simply correct. A 100-transaction producer paying $60,000 over cap for services they don’t use is not asking for a faster horse. They are reading a spreadsheet accurately. If you can’t say what the other seven D’s are worth to that agent in dollars — not in adjectives — they should leave, and you should let them.

So this isn’t a rebuttal you deploy when the split question comes up. It’s a standard you hold yourself to: if you can’t price your value, you don’t have any. Do that work, and the split conversation stops being a threat.

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The next time an agent asks you for a faster horse, don’t quote them a rate. Find out where they’re actually stuck, and show them how to build the engine that gets them there.

That is how you win the day.

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When an agent sits down across from you, which of the Eight D’s is actually driving the move — and which one do they say out loud?

Inspired by bestselling author and journalist Charles Duhigg’s research on how the best students and teachers excel.

With the new school year starting, parents and kids are adjusting to new routines and fresh classrooms. But the research on how people actually master new skills is not just for students.

As some of you know, beside my business I also teach at the community college, bachelor, and master level for the School of Business and Real Estate. Whether I am standing in front of a lecture hall of graduate students or sitting across from a broker trying to scale an office, the pattern is identical: it is tempting to believe that leadership means handing people all the answers.

It turns out, that is the exact opposite of what great teaching—and great leadership—looks like.

The Power of the “Flounder”

Charles Duhigg recently highlighted a study examining physics students that should make every manager pause.

Before giving a lecture, instructors handed students complex, unstructured problems. Predictably, the students struggled, bombed, and got frustrated. But after they went through the lecture and took the exam, those same floundering students vastly outperformed everyone else.

Why? Because early mistakes force our brains to pay closer attention.

Duhigg pointed out that the best educators do two counterintuitive things:

1. They let students struggle first.
2. They ask leading questions instead of handing out answers.

When instructors were restricted to asking “What else?” and “Describe to me how that works” with no explanations allowed their students learned significantly more than those sitting through traditional lectures.

When you give an agent or student the answer immediately, you save five minutes. But when you force them to grapple with the problem, you build capability that lasts.

Productive Struggle Is Not Aimless Drowning

Here is where I need to be precise, because “let them flounder” can easily be misread as “leave them alone.”

Notice what those physics instructors actually did. They did not throw students into a graded exam and walk away. They handed out hard problems in a classroom, before the lecture, where bombing carried no cost beyond a bruised ego. The struggle was real. The stakes were not.

That distinction is everything for a sales organization.

Productive struggle happens inside a container you built on purpose:

• Role-play the listing presentation in a Monday sales meeting before the agent runs it live.
• Have a newer agent draft the pricing strategy for a mock scenario, then walk you through their reasoning.
• Send them into a real appointment—with you in the room, staying quiet.
• Let them build the CMA from scratch and defend it to you before it ever reaches a seller.

Aimless drowning is handing a six-month agent a $2M relocation client, a nervous seller, and a competing offer situation, then congratulating yourself on developing talent when it falls apart.

The container only works if people believe a bad answer is survivable. If your agents think a wrong guess in front of the team will cost them status, referrals, or your respect, they will stop guessing. They will wait for you to talk, nod along, and learn nothing. Psychological safety is not a soft add-on to this approach—it is the mechanism that makes it work. Struggle produces learning only when the person is not simultaneously managing fear.

Practically, that means saying out loud what most leaders assume is understood: “I want you to take a swing at this. If you freeze up or get it wrong, that is the point of doing it here instead of in front of a client.“ Then, when they do freeze up or get it wrong, respond with curiosity instead of correction.

When to Give the Answer Immediately

There is a second failure mode worth naming, which is applying Socratic questioning to everything and calling it coaching.

Some things are not judgment calls. They are facts with legal consequences. Run a quick triage:

Just tell them. Fair housing language. Agency disclosure timelines. Contract deadlines and contingency mechanics. Earnest money handling. Advertising and licensing rules. Anything with a statute, a form field, or a fine attached. Asking “What do you think the disclosure requirement is?” is not developing an agent it is a compliance incident waiting to happen with extra steps. Give the answer, give the source, and move on.

Ask the question. Pricing strategy. How to handle a seller anchored to a Zillow estimate. Whether to counter or hold. How to reopen a stalled negotiation. Prospecting approach. Time-blocking and business planning. Reading the room in a listing appointment. These are judgment muscles, and judgment is built by reps, not by transcription.

The simple test: if being wrong creates liability, teach it directly. If being wrong creates a lesson, let them find it.

There is a timing dimension too. Mid-crisis is not a teaching moment. When a deal is actively falling apart at 6pm on a Friday, solve it. Coach it Monday, when the pressure is off and they can actually hear you.

Stop Being the “Expert” and Start Coaching

There is a trap high-performing leaders fall into: we think our own expertise automatically makes us great teachers.

Duhigg cited an experiment involving golfers. When skilled golfers tried to teach their putting technique, they struggled to explain what they did instinctively—and their own putting actually got worse. Meanwhile, less-skilled golfers with strong teaching backgrounds produced far better results in their students.

Being a top producer is not the same as being a great developer of talent. The goal of leadership is not to show people how smart you are; it is to create the environment where they teach themselves.

4 Ways to Upgrade Your Own Learning Curve

Whether you are onboarding a new hire or sharpening your own skills this quarter, Duhigg highlights four research-backed habits that separate top performers:

1. Tackle the hard material first. In studies of elite violinists, the best did not log more total hours—they spent nearly twice as much time on the hardest passages. Re-reading your notes feels comfortable; effortful practice drives actual growth.
2. Use the Protégé Effect. Tell someone they will need to teach next week’s meeting on a core skill. Even if they never teach it, the expectation of explaining it forces deeper retention.
3. Change your environment. Studying in different locations breaks reliance on environmental cues and builds stronger mental scaffolding.
4. The Benjamin Franklin Method. Read a great presentation, pitch, or essay. Put it away for a few weeks, try to rewrite it from memory, and compare your version to the original to see where your thinking was weak.

You Are Never Too Old to Master New Skills

Adults often assume they cannot learn as quickly as they used to. Duhigg notes that someone in their 60s holds about six digits in short-term memory compared to seven in young adults—the difference is negligible.

The real reason learning feels slower as we age is that adults stop experimenting. Kids absorb knowledge by trying things and failing; adults try to look smart and avoid mistakes. When researchers had 80-year-olds learn three distinct skills at once, their cognitive scores improved to mirror people decades younger.

Which brings the whole thing full circle: the reason your agents stop experimenting is usually that somewhere along the way, experimenting stopped feeling safe. That part is on us.

Question

Where are you jumping in too quickly to rescue your team with the answer, instead of asking the question that lets them figure it out?

And the follow-up: have you built a place where they can be wrong without it costing them anything?

Resources

Read Smarter Faster Better and Supercommunicators by Charles Duhigg.

Winning the day is not about having all the answers. It is about building a team capable of finding them—and giving them somewhere safe to practice looking.

What’s Possible?

Listening to my bachelor’s degree students pitch their business dreams this past week brought a jolt of energy into the room. Their drive is infectious. They see clear problems to solve, markets to capture, and lives they want to build.

Sitting there listening, I kept coming back to a single question: What actually turns a raw dream into a lasting reality?

Passion gets you started, but passion on its own is cheap. The bridge between a vision on paper and a real outcome is built on four relentless principles: ownership, empathy, preparation, and radical personal agency. When you look at people who rose from zero to achieve monumental goals, you see these patterns over and over again.

Here are four lives that show us how it is actually done.

Dolly Parton: Own Your Worth and Protect Your Craft

Dolly Parton grew up in a one-room cabin in rural Appalachia with eleven siblings. She turned that lived poverty into songs that resonated worldwide.

Her real masterclass came down to business ownership. When Elvis Presley’s manager demanded half the publishing rights to “I Will Always Love You” before Elvis could record it, she said no. It was a massive short-term gamble, but she protected her work.

If you want to build something sustainable, you have to value your own craft enough to defend it. True ownership means keeping control of what you create and using your success to lift your community along the way.

Oprah Winfrey: Turn Adversity into Purpose

Oprah faced horrific childhood trauma, poverty, and early career demotions where people told her she was unfit for television. Instead of letting that pain make her bitter, she let it make her empathetic.

She stopped trying to fit standard broadcast molds and built an empire on genuine human connection. Every move she made was driven by alignment and purpose rather than quick money. When you encounter setbacks, do not treat them as dead ends. Treat them as the very perspective that gives your work depth and authority.

Colin Powell: Back Your Ambition with Relentless Preparation

The son of Jamaican immigrants growing up in the South Bronx, Colin Powell rose to the highest ranks of American military and diplomatic leadership. He did not rely on luck. He lived by a simple rule: success is the direct result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure.

Big goals fall apart without daily discipline. Powell showed that steady execution, emotional composure, and personal character turn vague ambition into real results. You do not rise to the occasion; you sink to the level of your preparation.

Liz Murray: Never Let Your Starting Point Dictate Your Finish Line

At fifteen, Liz Murray was homeless on the streets of New York, having lost her mother to AIDS while coping with parental addiction. She made a conscious decision that her circumstances would not define her future.

She took full ownership of her daily actions, finished four years of high school in two years, and won a scholarship to Harvard. Her story proves that while you cannot choose the hand you are dealt, radical accountability can completely rewrite your trajectory.

Winning the Day

Looking back at my students and the blueprints left by these four leaders, the lessons are clear:

• Your starting point is just where you begin, not where you must finish.
• Protect your ideas, your values, and your personal equity.
• Consistency, grit, and preparation beat raw talent every single time.

A real dream requires daily execution and relentless ownership. Do not just dream about the finish line. Put in the work, stay disciplined, and win the day.

Here is a simple test for your mindset today:

Do your circumstances dictate your mood? Or do you choose your mindset, and treat the situation as simply something to respond to?

One sign of mental toughness is being larger than the situation.

The less your mood depends on your circumstances, the more mentally tough you are.

The Thermometer vs. The Thermostat

Some people operate like a thermometer. When the environment heats up with chaos, urgency, or bad news, their stress spikes. When things slow down, they drift. When a deal falls through or a timeline breaks, their entire day is ruined. They let outside events dictate their internal temperature.

Mentally tough people act like a thermostat. <– read this twice!

They set the standard for their focus and discipline before they step into the arena. The situation does not decide how they show up. They do.

Reaction vs. Response

There is a huge difference between reacting and responding:

• Reacting gives away your control to whatever problem hit your desk five minutes ago.
• Responding sees the reality of the problem without adopting the panic.

When you allow unexpected setbacks to wreck your mood, you are shrinking beneath the problem. You are letting a temporary circumstance break your daily standard.

Being larger than the situation does not mean ignoring reality or pretending challenges do not hurt. It means recognizing that circumstances are just data.

• A lost client is data.
• A delayed project is data.
• A sudden market shift is data.

None of those things have the right to decide your attitude unless you hand over control.

How to Apply This Today

When something inevitably disrupts your plan today, pause before you react:

1. Strip away the drama. Ask yourself: “What are the objective facts here?”
2. Reclaim your standard. Take a second to reset your focus.
3. Execute the next move. Do not try to solve every problem at once. Just make the single best decision available right now.

Your team, your clients, and your competition notice how you carry yourself under pressure.

Control your response, set the tone, and keep moving forward.

Win the day.

Inspired by a recent Mark Cuban post on X.

Mark Cuban posted a concept recently that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.

He noted that if he were a doctor with a private practice, he wouldn’t just hand a patient a referral and send them home. Instead, he would sit down with them and configure their AI—Claude, ChatGPT, or whatever is already on their phone—with specific instructions, recurring questions, and a reporting system. The AI would ask the patient a specific question every day at 5:00 PM, check for new doctor instructions every morning, and email the doctor a weekly summary.

His takeaway is worth writing on your whiteboard:

Help the patient use AI to help you help the patient.

Read that again, but change the nouns. Help the agent use AI to help you help the agent. And taking it one step further: Help the client use AI to help you help the client.

This isn’t just a tech idea. It is a retention and loyalty strategy wearing a stethoscope. Here is what this looks like across every level of your business.

1. The New Agent: Automated Accountability

Every broker-owner faces the same trap: You bring someone on, hand them a binder and a login, and then you just hope. When new agents drop the ball, it rarely happens because they are lazy; it happens because nobody built a system to keep their goals in front of them.

You don’t need new software. You just need twenty minutes on Day One to configure their AI together:

• The Daily Prompt: “Every day at 5:00 PM, ask me three questions: How many conversations did I have? What is my one commitment for tomorrow? Where did I get stuck?“
• The Weekly Report: “Every Friday, summarize those five daily check-ins into a single paragraph and email it to my broker.”

Consistency is not a personality trait; it is a habit your brain builds one action at a time. The AI becomes a coach that shows up every day, whether you do or not.

2. The Top Producer: Catching the Drift

Veterans don’t need you to ask them how many calls they made. But they do leave—and top performers rarely leave in a dramatic exit. They drift, quietly, exhausted by friction for two quarters before a resignation email suddenly appears.

For experienced agents, you configure the AI for leverage and bottleneck removal. Sit down with your top producer and set this up:

• The Friction Audit: “Every Friday at 4:00 PM, ask me: Which transaction drained the most energy this week? What are three administrative tasks I wish I never had to do again?“
• The Broker Signal: “Draft a quick summary of those bottlenecks and email them to my broker with the subject line ‘Friction Report’.”

Now, instead of a surprise exit in month four, you get a weekly “burnout report.” You can step in, offer a transaction coordinator, or fix a bad system before they take a recruiting call from a rival brokerage promising better support.

3. The Consumer: Ultimate Client Stickiness

Take Cuban’s exact doctor/patient model and apply it to the agent/client relationship.

During a buyer consultation, don’t just hand them a link to an MLS portal. Sit with them, open the AI on their phone, and build them a custom real estate analyst:

• The Neighborhood Watch: “I am looking for a home in [Zip Code]. Every Friday, search the web and summarize the latest zoning changes, school board decisions, and new business openings in this area.”
• The Listing Analyzer: “Whenever I paste a Zillow link into this chat, run a quick analysis on the price per square foot against the neighborhood average, and draft an email with three smart questions I should ask my agent, [Your Name].”

You aren’t just an agent sending them listings anymore. You are the expert who built them a personalized intelligence system. You become entirely indispensable.

The Move

Stop thinking of AI as a tool people need to figure out on their own time. Treat it the way Cuban’s doctor treats it—as a system configured together, in the room, on day one.

Question for you:

If you sat down with your most flight-risk top producer and your most demanding active buyer today, what specific prompts would you program into their phones to make their lives infinitely easier?

I was listening to Pope Leo’s homily recently, and my mind eventually went to how I could apply this to you, to recruiting, and to retention.

Say what?

Stick with me for a second.

Reflecting on beauty, Pope Leo pointed out something we all quietly know but rarely act on: we equate value with a flawless, youthful exterior. Real life brings wrinkles, gray hair, and years of heavy lifting. He warned against getting trapped by “consumerist” aesthetic standards, noting that we often meet people who are “outwardly attractive but hard and cold at heart,” while those “marked by the years and by suffering” are the ones radiating real peace and strength.

That’s the whole lesson in building a real business, right there.

The Shiny Penny vs. The Consistent Producer

In our world, we get blinded by our own version of aesthetic standards. We chase the shiny penny the flashy $10M agent with the slick marketing, the perfect pitch deck, the big presence at every event. On paper, they look incredible. And plenty of them earn every bit of that reputation: they’re skilled, they’re driven, and they build real value.

But some of them are all surface. The production is real, the loyalty isn’t. The moment the market shifts, the split gets renegotiated, or a better offer shows up, they’re gone — and they take a chunk of your culture with them on the way out.

Meanwhile, we look right past the $1M to $2M producer — capable, with real room to grow — who shows up every day in their work clothes and tools, ready to grind.

That’s the mistake. Those consistent producers are the anchor of your business. They’re the ones radiating steady, quiet strength when everyone else is panicking over interest rates or low inventory. They’ve got the maturity, the resilience, and the loyalty that actually sustains a company through the hard years the kind of value that doesn’t show up on a recruiting poster but shows up every single time it matters.

Value the Wrinkles

Pope Leo talked about finding true value in “the maturity of an adult… in work clothes and tools.”

Don’t let the cover of the book drive your actions. Recruit for talent, sure — but hire for character, and retain for loyalty. Don’t sacrifice the steady soul of your office chasing a shiny penny you haven’t vetted. Value the wrinkles.

Win the day.

Inspired by Jessi Hempel’s piece “The Case for Doing Fewer Things at Once” and her Hello Monday conversation with Cal Newport.

Jessi Hempel wrote something recently that I have not been able to shake. She first put out a series on time in August 2024 because she was tired of getting to the end of a week and wondering where it went. Two years later she went back to it and found that almost nothing had changed. She is still wrestling with time. She still uses it as her excuse for why the important things did not get done.

If that does not describe half the agents in your office, you are not paying attention.

She revisited her conversation with Cal Newport, the Georgetown professor who wrote Deep Work and Slow Productivity. His argument is one sentence long and it lands like a brick.

We have confused activity with productivity.

Newport calls it pseudo productivity. Visible activity becomes the stand in for actual accomplishment. We clear the inbox. We move from one obligation to the next. We collect evidence that we have been extremely busy. None of it tells us whether we made anything useful.

What This Looks Like in Real Estate

An agent tells you they had a crazy week. Ask what happened.

They previewed a property that was not for a live buyer. They redesigned their listing presentation for the fourth time. They sat in two coaching webinars. They reorganized the CRM. They answered every text within ninety seconds. They posted six times.

Now ask the only question that matters. How many appointments did you set?

Sometimes the answer is zero. And the agent is genuinely confused, because they worked hard. They did work hard. They just did not do the work.

Same thing happens on the leadership side. We build the recruiting deck. We refresh the value proposition. We talk about the pipeline in every meeting. Then Friday comes and we had two real conversations with two real candidates.

Why We Do It

Because pseudo productivity feels safer.

Rebuilding a presentation cannot reject you. Reorganizing the database cannot say no. A dial can. A recruiting conversation can. So we drift toward the tasks that look like progress and never sting.

Busy is also the easiest thing in the world to prove. Nobody has to see your appointment count if they can see your calendar.

Do Fewer Things at Once

Here is Newport’s fix, and it is almost insultingly simple.

Every project you take on drags a cloud behind it. Emails. Meetings. Check ins. Small decisions. Follow ups. The work itself might be four hours. The cloud is twenty.

Take on fewer projects at the same time and the clouds disappear with them. You get more hours to do actual work. And you often finish everything sooner than you would have by juggling all of it.

This is not doing less. It is doing fewer things at once.

Try This

• List everything you are actively working on right now. Not what is on your someday list. What is live and pulling on you today.
• Most agents land somewhere between nine and fifteen. Most leaders land higher.
• Now cut it to three. The rest do not get killed, they get queued. Write them on a second list and stop touching them.
• Protect the lead generation block before anything else touches the calendar. That is the one thing that cannot be caught up later.
• At the end of the week, stop asking what you got done. Ask what moved. Appointments set. Conversations had. Contracts signed. Agents hired.
• If nothing moved, the week was busy and nothing more.

Question

If we looked at your calendar from last week together, and then at your new appointment count… would the two tell the same story? Because the calendar shows how you spent the week. The new appointment count shows what it bought you.

Resource

Read Jessi Hempel’s “The Case for Doing Fewer Things at Once” and listen to her episode with Cal Newport. Then read Slow Productivity if you want the full argument.

Winning the day is not about how much you did. It is about whether the right thing moved.