Category: Lead Others

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, besides […]

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 […]

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 […]

I’ve lost count of how many broker-owners, recruiters, and agents have sat across from me and said some version of the same thing: “Mark, I just don’t have enough time.” Here’s the uncomfortable truth I usually offer back: the leaders crushing their goals and the ones drowning have the exact same 168 hours a week. The […]

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 […]

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 […]

She looked like she’d just been blindsided in a dark alley. My client, a veteran real estate professional who has seen every market cycle imaginable, dropped her bag and stared at me. “They ran the whole deal through an AI,” she said, her voice a mix of disbelief and frustration. “The Buyer Broker Agreement, the […]

In April 2026, I had the honor to hear Vic Gundotra speak in person, and honestly, I’m still processing it. If you don’t know the name, Gundotra was one of Google’s earliest key hires, a close collaborator with Steve Jobs, and one of the architects behind Google Translate. He also walked away from everything he […]

Our industry is addicted to the elevator-pitch version of leadership. We love punchy slogans. We tell our loan officers to “increase pull-through rates,” our agents to “own the neighborhood,” our recruiters to “find the unicorns.” On the surface, these directives are beautiful. Simple. Sticky-note-ready. But as Xinjin Zhao recently observed, there’s a dangerous gap between […]

“A system will produce what a system will produce, nothing less, nothing more.” I’ve observed many of the talented folks I work with and know using LLMs lately, and I’ve noticed a recurring pattern. Even the smartest people often treat AI like a magic search engine rather than a mechanical system. They give a complex […]