It was 105 degrees. Too hot to run outside, so I headed to the gym, set the iFit treadmill to a 5% incline, and let trainer Hannah Eden do the talking.
Somewhere in the middle of that climb, she said something that stuck with me. She talked about the Big Four: faith, finances, fitness, and family, with family expanded to include all of our relationships. Her point was simple. We are not meant to do life alone.
I couldn’t stop thinking about how true that is in our business.
Real Estate Is a Lonely Sport
We love to call agents independent contractors. Independent is a great word for a tax form. It’s a terrible strategy for a career.
Agents who isolate stall. They miss the coaching, the conversations, and the deal-saving tip from the agent two desks over. And when a competitor calls with a better split, there’s nothing holding them in place. Agents rarely leave a brokerage where they feel connected. They leave the ones where they feel alone.
That makes community one of the most powerful recruiting and retention tools you own. And it doesn’t cost a dime.
For the Broker-Owner: Your culture is your community. Ask yourself honestly: would an agent who doesn’t close a deal this month still feel like they belong here?
For the Recruiter: Stop leading with splits and tools. Lead with people. “Here’s who you’ll be working alongside” is a stronger pitch than any fee schedule.
For the Manager: Notice who’s missing. The agent skipping sales meetings and dodging calls isn’t just busy. They’re drifting. Reach out before a recruiter does.
For the Staff: You’re often the first relationship a new agent makes. A warm hello and a quick follow-up make the office feel like home.
For the Agent: Nobody is coming to drag you into the circle. You have to step in.
How to Build Your Community
Find a Community: Your office, a mastermind, an association committee, a running club. Pick a group that’s heading where you want to go.
Connect: Show up early. Learn names. Ask one more question than you normally would.
Participate: Don’t just attend. Contribute. Share a win, share a struggle, offer to help. Community rewards participants, not spectators.
Faith, finances, fitness, and relationships. Notice that none of the Big Four is built alone. Faith grows in fellowship. Finances grow through people who trust you. Fitness grows when someone is counting on you to show up. And relationships… well, that one speaks for itself.
So whether it’s 105 degrees or 65, find your people and show up for them. That’s how you win the day.
A System Will Produce What A System Will Produce, Nothing Less and Nothing More!
By Thanksgiving, most offices will have more programs than agents using them.
Benjamin Franklin cut through all of it in seven words, in the 1737 edition of Poor Richard’s Almanack:
“Well done is better than well said.”
Almost three hundred years later, it’s still the best business advice on the shelf.
Plans Feel Like Progress
Here’s the trap. Building the plan feels like work. Picking the CRM feels like work. Researching the perfect script feels like work.
None of it is movement.
I see it every fall. An agent spends three weekends on a business plan with fourteen goals and a vision board. January comes, nobody calls back, and the plan sits in a folder. Meanwhile, the agent at the next desk wrote one line on an index card, their march, and started the next morning.
By February, one of them has a plan. The other has a pipeline.
Brokers do it too. We launch a mentorship program, a training calendar, a lead-routing system, a culture committee. All good ideas. But your agents don’t experience programs. They experience Tuesday. Did someone call them back? Did their broker check on the deal that almost fell apart? Did anybody ask what they need?
One real one-on-one this week beats a dozen initiatives on the whiteboard.
Why Action Wins
Action produces data. Theory produces opinions.
Make twenty calls and you learn which opening line works. Run one listing presentation and you find out where your pitch breaks. Have one honest recruiting conversation and you’ll know more about what agents in your market want than any survey will tell you.
Theory has its place. You need a direction. The compass comes first. But once you know which way is north, every extra hour of planning is an hour you’re not walking. That’s the gap I wrote about in Stop Knowing, Start Doing, and it gets wider every fourth quarter.
Try This
If you’re an agent:
Cut your plan to one page. If it doesn’t fit, it won’t get done.
Take the first step today. Make the call. Send the note. October counts.
If you’re a broker-owner:
Kill one program. Which initiative in your office has the most theory and the least movement? Pause it and put that energy into one action.
Book three one-on-ones before Friday. Not a new program. Just the conversations.
Everyone:
Count steps, not plans. At the end of each week, write down three things you did, not three things you decided.
Question
What’s the one step you’ve been planning instead of taking?
Resources
The Knowing-Doing Gap by Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton. It’s the business-school version of this exact problem, and a fast read. For the original, pick up Poor Richard’s Almanack. Franklin was writing productivity advice before anyone called it that.
In Great by Choice, Jim Collins describes a ship at sea with a hostile vessel bearing down on it and only a limited supply of gunpowder.
If you load everything into one cannonball and fire, you’ll probably miss. Then you have no gunpowder left.
The better move is to fire a bullet first. See where it lands and adjust your aim. Fire another. Once a bullet hits, load the cannonball.
This is how brokerages should be testing AI
Here’s what I see instead. A firm buys an enterprise AI platform and holds a big rollout meeting. Three months later, four agents are using it and nobody can say whether it helped. That was a cannonball fired blind.
What a bullet looks like
A bullet is small, cheap, and low-risk. For example:
One team lead uses AI to draft listing descriptions for a month, then compares the edits against the old way.
One recruiter uses AI to prep for five coffee meetings, then asks whether those meetings went better.
Each test involves one person, one task, one measure, and 30 days.
The honest part
Most AI pilots don’t fail because the tool is bad. They fail because nobody decided at the start what success would look like. “Let’s see how it goes” isn’t a measure.
Before you fire, write down one sentence: In 30 days, this worked if ___.
The other honest part: bullets have to be safe. Keep client personal information and contract details out of any tool until you know how it handles data. A cheap test shouldn’t create an expensive compliance problem.
Then load the cannonball
When a bullet hits, commit fully. Train everyone, build it into onboarding, and put it in your recruiting presentation. Calibrated confidence beats hopeful spending every time.
Try This
Pick one friction point. Choose the task your agents complain about most.
Find one volunteer. Look for someone curious, not necessarily your most tech-savvy agent.
Write your success sentence before you start.
Review at day 30. Then decide to fire another bullet, load the cannonball, or walk away.
Question
What cannonball have you fired lately without a bullet first? And what would a bullet have cost you instead?
Resources
Great by Choice by Jim Collins and Morten T. Hansen.
Every semester, I watch students light up when they pass the final. They’re ready to go.
Here’s what I wish I could tell every one of them before they walk out the door.
Your license is permission, not preparation
The exam proves you know the rules. It doesn’t prove you can get a stranger to trust you with the biggest financial decision of their life. That part takes practice, and the practice starts now.
Choose a brokerage for what it builds, not what it pays
Every new agent asks about the split. Here’s the math nobody says out loud: 90% of zero deals is zero.
In year one, the questions that matter are different:
Who will train you?
Who will you call when a deal is falling apart?
Will someone sit in on your first listing appointment?
In the Eight D’s, Development and De-Risking will pay you more than Dollars ever will in your first year.
Build habits before you need them
The agents who make it aren’t always the most talented. They’re the ones who did the work on days they didn’t feel like it. Start now. Pick three daily non-negotiables, like five calls, two notes, and one coffee, and do them before you have a single client.
Your sphere is bigger than you think
Most students tell me they don’t know anyone. Then they sit down and list 100 people: their dentist, their kid’s coach, their old roommate. You don’t need to sell to them. You need them to know what you do.
Plan your runway
Your first commission check may be months away. Know how long you can go without one, and plan for it. Financial pressure makes people pushy, and clients can feel it.
Stay a student
The best agents I know are still learning in year twenty. Read, take the class, and ask the question that makes you look like a rookie. Everyone was one once.
Try This
List 100 names this week. Don’t contact anyone yet. Just write.
Interview three brokerages. Ask each one who will train you and who you’ll call when a deal goes sideways.
Pick your three non-negotiables. Start them before your license arrives.
Question
If you started your career tomorrow, what would your first 90 days look like? Could you write that plan out today?
For broker-owners
What are you telling the students who walk into your office? If it starts with the split, start somewhere else.
Your career doesn’t start when your license arrives. It starts with today’s habits.
As some of you know, I’m training for the Long Beach Half Marathon. Part of that training includes cross-training on the bike and the rower, and on the bike I’ve spent a few work out sessions with Ashley Paulson, an iFit trainer, indoor cycling instructor, and marathon runner.
Somewhere between the intervals and the climbs, Ashley tells a story about resistance and persistence. It stuck with me, and I think it will stick with you too.
The Story
A quick disclaimer: I was taking mental notes while pedaling, so I may not have the exact times or the exact number of attempts right. But you’ll get the gist of the story.
Ashley wasn’t a high school or college cross country standout. She didn’t run track. After having four kids, she set a goal most people would call unrealistic: qualify for the U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials.
On her first attempt, she missed the qualifying time by about a minute.
On her second attempt, she missed by about 30 seconds.
The next time, she missed by roughly 15.
And on one attempt, she came up short by just 1 second!
Did she get discouraged? Of course she did, just like you and I would. Coming that close, over and over, is its own kind of pain. It’s easy to wonder whether the goal is still worth chasing.
But Ashley did something I’ve had to learn the hard way over 30+ years in business and life. She followed three steps:
Accept. The result is the result. The clock doesn’t negotiate. Instead of arguing with reality or making excuses, she owned where she was.
Reflect. What happened? What worked, what didn’t, and what’s within my control next time? Reflection isn’t beating yourself up. It’s gathering information.
Redirect. Take what you learned and point your energy at the next attempt, with an adjusted plan.
Long story short, after several attempts, Ashley beat the required time and went to the Olympic Trials.
What Mental Toughness Really Is
Ashley’s story is a textbook example of mental toughness. Mental toughness is the ability to stay committed to a goal and keep performing through setbacks, discomfort, and pressure. It isn’t the absence of disappointment or doubt. It’s feeling both and choosing to keep going anyway. Accept, Reflect, and Redirect is simply mental toughness put into practice.
What This Means for You
If you’re in real estate, you know this cycle well. The listing appointment you didn’t win. The buyer who went with another agent. The recruit who chose a different brokerage. The quarter that came in short of plan.
Missing by a minute, then 30 seconds, then 15, then just 1 second is not failure. That’s progress, even when it doesn’t feel like it. The agents, managers, and broker-owners who win over time aren’t the ones who never miss. They’re the ones who Accept, Reflect, and Redirect, and then show up again the next day to execute the fundamentals.
So after your next disappointment, ask yourself: Have I accepted it? What did I learn? Where do I point my energy now?
My Own 13.1
Now, about Long Beach. I’m not looking to break any records. I’m going to participate and cross the finish line alongside one of my sons. For me, that is the win.
Not every goal has to be 26.2 miles and a ticket to the Olympic Trials. But every goal, big or small, gets reached the same way: one training day, one conversation, one step at a time.
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?”
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.
“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:
The first half builds discipline and humility in the quiet hours when nobody is watching.
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?
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.
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?
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?
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.
The Questions That Replace “What’s Your Split?”
You don’t get there by presenting. You get there by diagnosing:
How many appointments did you set last month — and how many did you actually run?
Walk me through what happens between “I got the lead” and “I’m at their kitchen table.”
Where in the last year did a deal nearly fall apart, and who did you call?
What part of your week do you dread?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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:
Strip away the drama. Ask yourself: “What are the objective facts here?”
Reclaim your standard. Take a second to reset your focus.
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.
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.
