What I learned from Joe DeSena (Mr. Spartan) and others:

The market shifts. Rates move. A deal you were counting on dies at the closing table. A top producer you spent six months recruiting ghosts you on signing day.

And then comes the feeling. The slump. The “I’ll get back on the phones Monday.” The slow drift into a comfortable hole that takes three weeks or more to climb out of.

Here’s what I’ve learned watching the best owners, recruiters, agents, MLOs, and title reps in this business: the ones who reset fast don’t reset on feelings. They reset on rules.

Most people believe change requires complexity. I’ve found – for me – it does not. It requires a few clear rules that remove the debate.

Feelings negotiate. Rules don’t. The second you leave a decision open to how you feel in the moment, you’ve already lost it — because the moment is exactly when your motivation is weakest. Friday at 4 p.m. with a dead pipeline is not when you want to be deciding whether to make calls.

So you decide before the moment. Rules are just discipline you decided on in advance. Here are reset moves that Joe taught me:

Decide the night before, not the morning of

Your future self doesn’t get a vote. The night before, you write down your first three calls, your priority follow-ups, the one number you have to hit. You set the alarm across the room.

When morning comes, there’s nothing to debate. You’re not “seeing how you feel.” You’re executing a decision your sharper, calmer self already made. Top performers don’t wake up motivated. They wake up committed.

Make the hard thing first

In this business the hard thing is almost always the same: the conversation you’re avoiding. The price-reduction talk. The past client you dropped the ball on. The recruit who said “not yet.”

Do it first. Before you check rates, before you open your inbox, before your brain wakes up enough to build a case for waiting. Discomfort early sets the tone for the whole day. Comfort early sets the excuse.

The agent who makes the dreaded call at 8:05 has already won something the rest of the office won’t touch until noon — if at all.

No zero days

You don’t have to be great. You have to show up. One prospecting call counts. One handwritten note to a referral partner counts. One door knocked counts.

The rule isn’t “do a lot.” The rule is “never do nothing.” A slow market doesn’t get to give you a zero day. A bad mood doesn’t either. That’s how you keep the streak alive — and more important, how you keep the identity alive. You are someone who works the pipeline every single day. Rain or shine. Rates up or down.

Then: kill one easy button

Everyone has something that keeps them comfortable. Pick one. Remove it for seven days.

The snooze button. Late-night junk food. Alcohol during the week. Scrolling in bed instead of reviewing tomorrow’s plan.

Your mind will push back. That resistance is the signal. If it feels uncomfortable, you’re doing it right. The discipline you build killing a small easy button is the same discipline that gets you back on the phones after a deal falls apart.

“First say to yourself what you would be; then do what you have to do.” — Epictetus

Decide who you are first. The MLO who funds in any market. The recruiter who never lets a no end the conversation. The owner who sets the standard instead of mourning it.

Then let the rules carry you there.

Resets fail when you wait to feel ready. They hold when the rule decides for you.

What’s one easy button you could kill this week?

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A quick personal note: I’ll be traveling the next 15 days. I may post some content, I may not — depends on whether I find something worth sharing. I’m also at the start of my marathon training, so even on the road there’s work to do. No zero days. The rules travel with me. That’s the whole point.

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Four sentences that separate the brokerages people fight to join from the ones they quietly leave

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Mike Deegan won his 400th game coaching baseball at Denison University. Someone asked him what drives that kind of sustained success. His answer had nothing to do with talent or technology or market conditions:

“Show up every day. Work hard. Do it with joy. Care more about others than we do ourselves.” ~ Mike Deegan, Denison University Baseball

Read that again through a brokerage lens. Because what Deegan is describing isn’t a coaching philosophy it’s a retention strategy, a recruiting pitch, and a culture playbook rolled into four sentences.

1. Show up every day. Consistency is your brand. Agents watch what their broker does when a deal falls apart, when the market turns, when it would be easy to go quiet. Leaders who show up build trust. Trust drives production.
2. Work hard. There’s no shortcut disguised as strategy. The agents and brokers outperforming everyone else in this market aren’t the ones with the best tools — they’re the ones outworking the room. Prospecting, follow-up, showing up prepared. The fundamentals still win.
3. Do it with joy. Energy is contagious in a real estate office. Agents don’t leave bad markets — they leave bad environments. If your culture feels like a grind, your best people will find somewhere it doesn’t.
4. Care more about others than yourself. This is where broker-owners separate from the pack. The ones growing right now are not the ones chasing headcount — they’re the ones investing in their agents’ businesses like it’s their own. That reputation travels fast.

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Roger Ebert — a sharp observers of human behavior put the business case for joy this way:

“We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try.” ~ Roger Ebert, Go Gentle Into That Good Night, 2009

He wasn’t writing a business book. But “no matter what our circumstances” is exactly the standard high-performing brokerages hold themselves to. You don’t get to opt out of culture because the rate environment is hard or inventory is tight. The leaders who protect their culture through difficult markets are the ones still standing — and growing — when conditions shift.

Your competition is copying your splits, your technology, your marketing. They can’t copy your culture. Build it deliberately. Protect it daily.

Win the day.

There’s a spot on Kilimanjaro – Africa’s tallest free-standing mountain – where a vehicle can reach you for the first time on the descent.

Before that point, if something goes wrong, your options are a helicopter or a stretcher carried by porters. There is no other way out. So you move, and you deal with whatever you’re feeling, because you don’t really have a choice.

After summitting and beginning the long trek down, I arrived at that spot more exhausted than I’d ever been in my life. And for the first time on the entire mountain, I had a choice. A truck could pull right up, I could climb in, and it would all be over. I’d already made the summit. Nobody could take that away.

I won’t sugarcoat it — I thought about it for more than a hot minute. My legs were rubber. My lungs were shot. Every reasonable voice in my head was making a very compelling case for that truck.

But I had made a commitment. So I stayed.

I rested. And the next morning something close to remarkable happened — I felt like myself again. Not just recovered. Alive. That final day out of the mountain turned out to be one of the most memorable of the whole expedition. Views I would have missed. Conversations I wouldn’t have had. A fullness that no truck ride could have ever delivered.

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Scottish mountaineer and writer W. H. Murray said it better than I ever could:

“Until one is committed there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative and creation, there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred.”

And then he quotes Goethe: “Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.”

I’ve turned those words over in my head hundreds of times since that climb. Because in this business — whether you’re a broker-owner trying to scale, a COO trying to fix a culture that’s drifting, a recruiter who keeps getting “I’m good where I am,” or a top agent sitting on a decision about where they really want to plant their flag — there is always a truck waiting on the descent.

It shows up as the market that “isn’t quite right yet.” The recruiting conversation that keeps getting punted. The value proposition you know is strong but haven’t sat down to put into words. The agent who’s been half-out the door at their current firm for eight months but hasn’t made the call. The truck is always there, and it is always tempting.

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Here’s where I want to get real about recruiting — because this is where I see broker-owners leave the most on the table.

The agents you want are not sitting around waiting for someone to hand them a better split sheet. The high producers, the ones who close volume and bring energy and lift everyone around them — they’re watching. They’re watching whether the leaders at your firm are committed. Whether the vision is real or just a pitch. Whether the people in charge believe it enough to act on it, invest in it, stake something on it.

Committed leadership is a recruiting tool. Full stop.

When you stop hedging and start deciding — to build the training program, to hire the support staff, to nail down the mortgage and title partnerships, to show up consistently with your agents instead of just during review season — that energy travels. Agents talk. Word gets out that something real is happening at your office. That is how you attract people who are serious about their career, not just shopping for a better deal.

The agents worth recruiting are not looking for perfect. They’re looking for committed.

And the ones already on your roster? They’re watching the same thing. Retention and recruiting are not two different problems. They’re the same conversation.

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The hesitancy Murray describes is not weakness — it’s human. Every broker-owner I’ve respected has felt it. Every record-breaking agent has stared down that moment of “maybe one more quarter.” The difference between those who build something lasting and those who stay stuck is not talent or market conditions. It’s that one moment of definitive commitment — and what it unlocks.

When you commit, your energy shifts. Your conversations change. The right people start showing up. The affiliate relationships that stalled start moving again. Your team feels it and responds to it. Murray called it Providence. I call it what I watched happen on that mountain — when you stop leaving yourself an exit, the path forward gets sharper.

The brokers who grow in any market — good, bad, weird, compressed — are the ones who stopped standing at the truck.

They rest when they need to. They adjust the pace. But they never get in.

Whatever you’ve been sitting on — begin it. The last leg is closer than you think. And it’s usually the best part of the whole climb.

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If you want to talk about what commitment looks like for your firm right now — recruiting, retention, culture, growth — I’m around. Let’s have a real conversation.

I was reading part of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations recently, and someone looked over and said what is that?

I said, The Wealth of Nations. From 1776. Ever heard of it?

They said no.

So I walked them through it. Not the whole book just the core principles. Division of labor. Self-interest and the invisible hand. Free markets over mercantilism. Laissez-faire government. Wages, profit, and rent. The critique of monopoly.

By the end of it, they looked at me and said: that sounds less like economic theory and more like a description of what’s happening in the economy right now.

I said — that’s exactly the point. Smith figured it out in 1776:

The best way to protect your business is to stop trying to protect your position and start focusing on serving the consumer.

They weren’t wrong. Neither was he.

That conversation stuck with me because Adam Smith is one of those names everyone in business drops and almost nobody has actually read. He’s the invisible hand guy. The father of capitalism. The intellectual permission slip for self-interest. And I’ll be honest: I came to him out of pure curiosity. I wanted to go back to the source not the bumper sticker version, but the actual ideas.

What I found was more interesting, more conflicted, and frankly more relevant to this industry than I expected.

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He Invented the Modern Real Estate Team Model (He Just Didn’t Know It)

Smith’s most famous idea is the division of labor. His example: a pin factory where 10 workers each handling one of 18 steps could produce 48,000 pins a day. One person doing everything alone? Maybe one.

You already run this model. The listing specialist who only does listings. The buyer’s agent laser-focused on relationships. The TC who lives in the details. The mortgage partner. The title rep. Each expert in their lane, together producing outcomes no generalist solo agent could touch.

Smith understood something we’ve spent 250 years re-learning: specialization isn’t just efficient — it’s the engine of quality. Repetition builds mastery. Mastery is what clients pay a premium for.

But here’s the part most people skip.

He warned that a worker performing the same narrow task endlessly risks becoming mentally dulled — incapable of broader judgment, essentially diminished. His solution? Active investment in education to counteract what specialization does to people over time.

For broker-owners and team leaders, that’s not a historical footnote. That’s your training and coaching budget conversation happening in 1776. Are your specialists growing, or just grinding? Because Smith saw both sides of the model — and he knew the dark side required deliberate investment to counter.

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He Didn’t Actually Trust Business People

Here’s where Smith gets uncomfortable.

He was deeply skeptical of the merchant and capitalist class — the very people who most loudly claim his legacy today. He believed that self-interest, channeled through competitive markets, benefits society. But he was clear-eyed that self-interest without competition is just extraction.

He wrote with barely concealed contempt that businessmen rarely meet without the conversation eventually turning into coordination against the public — fixing prices, suppressing competition, lobbying for protection from the very market they claim to love.

He wasn’t anti-business. He was anti-captured markets. There’s a difference most people in this industry don’t slow down long enough to make.

Commission structures. MLS access rules. Affiliated business arrangements. These are exactly the kinds of institutional arrangements Smith would have examined with one simple question: Does this serve the consumer, or does it protect the incumbent?

That’s not a political question. It’s a business integrity question. And it’s one Smith was asking 250 years before the DOJ showed up — and 250 years before consumers, armed with information and options, started demanding the same answer. The legal and regulatory shifts this industry has absorbed since 2024 didn’t come from nowhere. They came from a marketplace that got tired of theater and started demanding real competition. Smith called that, too.

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The Tension He Never Fully Resolved — And Neither Have You

Smith mapped all income onto three groups: workers earning wages, capitalists earning profit, and landowners collecting rent. He was clear that their interests don’t naturally align and that in any dispute, the more organized and financially cushioned party tends to win.

You see this every week.

The broker-owner and the top producer negotiating splits same office, different P&L. The recruiter trying to attract talent while the incumbent brokerage tightens retention incentives. The affiliated partner trying to earn referrals in a relationship ecosystem that doesn’t always reward the best provider.

Smith’s conclusion was that competitive markets discipline each party but only when the competition is genuine, not theater. A market where the rules consistently favor one group isn’t a free market. It’s a managed one dressed up in free-market language.

His answer was imperfect and he knew it. He believed in markets as a mechanism not an ideology. One that requires real competition, informed participants, and institutional fairness to produce the outcomes the textbooks promise.

He’d be skeptical of anyone today — left or right — who claimed him as a mascot.

And he’d almost certainly say that the most dangerous person in any market is the one who wraps self-interest in the language of principle while quietly working to eliminate the competition that keeps self-interest honest.

That’s as true in your brokerage in 2026 as it was in a Scottish pin factory in 1776.

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So here’s what I’d actually do with this.

Pull up your business model this week not the pitch deck version, the real one. Look at your splits, your partnerships, your affiliated relationships, your recruiting value proposition. Ask Smith’s question about each one:

Does this serve the people I’m supposed to be serving, or does it primarily protect my position?

Most of us will find at least one honest answer we weren’t expecting.

That’s not a failure. That’s the beginning of a better model.

Smith said it best even if he didn’t know he was talking about real estate. The best way to protect your business is to stop trying to protect your position and start focusing on serving the consumer.

Win The Day.

When you lose a game, the score doesn’t follow you into the next one. Zero to zero, clean slate. But your habits? Those travel with you everywhere. The way you prepare. The way you follow up. The standard you hold when nobody’s watching. Those don’t reset at the final whistle.

And here’s where it gets uncomfortable: the same is true when you win.

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The Market Was the Score. The Habits Were Yours.

2020 to 2022 was a historic score. Agents who hadn’t prospected in years were closing deals because the market handed them business. Broker-owners hit numbers they’d never seen. Affiliate partners were fielding more referrals than they could handle.

The score was 10 to nothing. And it felt like winning.

But here’s what that environment actually did: it let a lot of people practice bad habits at scale. Skipping follow-up because the next buyer was already calling. Skipping pricing conversations because everything sold anyway. Recruiting without a real value proposition because agents were moving on their own.

The score masked the habits.

Then 2023 arrived. The score reset. And the habits showed up exactly as they’d been practiced — which, for a lot of people, wasn’t well.

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Execute the Same Way at 0 to 10

You want to execute the same way whether the score is 10 to 0 or 0 to 10. Not because the score doesn’t matter – it does. But because the score isn’t what you’re actually building.

The broker who built disciplined recruiting habits during the down years – calling consistently, following up systematically, always leading with a genuine value proposition – recruited well in 2020, recruited well in 2022, and is recruiting well right now. The score changed. The approach didn’t.

The broker who relied on the hot market to do their recruiting for them? Starting over. And starting over in a cold market with habits built in a hot one is brutal.

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Your Previous Reps Are in the Room With You

Every call you make today is a rep. Every follow-up you skip is a rep. Every time you prospect when you don’t feel like it – that’s a rep too.

I talk to agents whose pipeline is thin and they don’t understand why. Then I ask what their prospecting looked like the last six months when business was decent. The answer is usually: I didn’t have to work as hard, so I didn’t.

The pipeline doesn’t lie. It’s a reflection of the reps.

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Standards Beat Motivation Every Time

Motivation is tied to the score. When business is good, motivation is easy. When it’s slow, motivation disappears. If your activity depends on how motivated you feel, your pipeline peaks and valleys with the market.

Standards don’t care what the score is. You call the same number of people. You run the same onboarding process at 50 agents or 150. The broker-owners who have survived multiple market cycles all have this in common: they got boring on purpose. They found the standard that worked and held it when it was hard to hold.

For recruiters and affiliate partners: your habits in a slow market are your portfolio. The agents considering a move in the next cycle remember who showed up consistently – who called when there was nothing to sell. The score of your last year doesn’t transfer. The reputation you built running those plays? That absolutely does.

Circumstances are temporary. But the habits you’re building right now will show up in the next round regardless of what the score says today.

What are your habits actually building?

Win The Day!

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.