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 […]
Tag: Growth Mindset
The Stay Interview
Most brokerages have an exit interview. That’s the conversation where you finally ask a good agent what went wrong, right after they’ve already signed with someone else. That isn’t a retention strategy. It’s an autopsy. Ask before they leave Beverly Kaye and Sharon Jordan-Evans, authors of Love ‘Em or Lose ‘Em, have long championed a simple […]
What I’d Tell Every Student Before Year One
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 […]
What We Can Learn from 13.1 and 26.2
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, […]
Your 2027 Twenty-Mile March
In 1911, two teams raced to the South Pole. Roald Amundsen’s team held a steady pace every day. In good weather they stopped at their mileage goal, even when they could have pushed farther. In bad weather they still made their miles. Robert Falcon Scott’s team pushed hard on good days and waited out the […]
Could Your Agents Write It for You?
In The Compass Came First, post I ended with a question: can you write the one sentence that tells you which way is north? Then the harder one: could your agents write it for you? Here is a way to find out. At your next sales meeting, hand out index cards with one question: Where is this […]
What 17 Brokerages Taught Us About Growing When Everything Falls Apart
Between 2008 and 2012, the real estate industry went through the worst stretch most of us will ever see. Values collapsed. Hundreds of thousands of agents left the business. Brokerages that looked unbeatable in 2006 were gone by 2010. And yet some firms grew. My friend and longtime business colleague Steve Murray and his team […]
The Clock Came First. The Compass Matters More.
Direction Beats Speed Every Time It was 6:31 in the morning, and my feed had already handed me six productivity systems. Pomodoro. The 3/3/3 Method. The Eisenhower Matrix. Eat the Frog. The Seinfeld Strategy. Time blocking. One graphic promised eight hours of work in four. Another had been shared more than thirteen hundred times. Then […]
Everything Is Borrowed. Only Time Is Yours.
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 […]
Humility in the Dark, Conviction in the Light
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 […]