we don’t trust the models, we don’t commit. Instead, we pinball all over the place. Unfortunately for this method, success comes not from sporadic activity but from disciplined daily effort. One of the biggest obstacles people face when transitioning from being good at sales to turning sales into a business, is lack of consistency. I don’t care how bad you are when you start, if you’re consistent with your activities, you’re going to improve simply by doing them consistently over time. I was never great, or even good at anything, but I did work consistently over a period of time, and I got better…and better…and better. Once I committed to a model and continued to learn new models entering the industry, it gave me this runway to live in this world of delayed gratification. To get there, I had to brace myself for the possibility of not selling a house for three years, knowing I would still be fine, as I had no intention of changing my budget. And I did. I trusted that consistency would take my business to new heights — and it did. Since rebuilding — my third real estate business — in Portland in 2008, I’ve produced a scalable, sustainable business that isn’t dependent on where I live or how much I sell. And you can do the same. Don’t settle for one marshmallow. Wait out the temptation for instant gratification. In the long run, you’ll get more. Make more. Build more. Be more.
That instant gratification — activity equals result — is what drives our industry. It’s almost like these addictive personalities are drawn to real estate because we do something and then get something almost immediately, and what we get also happens to be a lot of money. Ultimately, instant versus delayed gratification looks like this in real estate: I’m going to pick up the phone and go get a sale, or I believe I’ll get two sales if I actually take the time to build out this system or follow this process. It’s choosing the pain of discipline over the ease of instant gratification, but let me tell you the delayed gratification is bigger here than anywhere else. No one gets checks like these in other industries. But while we have these massive paychecks on the line, our industry has built this scarcity mindset. We all have the fear of our commissions going away. PUT YOUR TRUST IN CONSISTENCY Fear and trust play inescapable roles in our ability to delay gratification. Think about it — if the kids in that experiment are afraid the adult isn’t really going to come back in 15 minutes, why on earth would they hold out for two marshmallows that might never appear? Of course, they’d gobble down the first one. A lot of the fear in our industry stems from not really trusting the models. We don’t trust that if we do this each and every day for three years, our business is going to be here and thriving. When
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