The Beauty of Cancellations

9:58 am EST

Just had an appointment canceled last minute. Was halfway there. Had to turn around, drive back home and return to doing what I really wanted to do in the first place. It was awful, I think. It’s the third time this agent has canceled or rescheduled in the last week. After blaming her clients and throwing them under the bus, she apologized for the inconvenience. I graciously conveyed my understanding and let her know that these things are disappointing, but they happen. Little did she know, she had unknowingly put my entire morning back on track and freed me up to do other things, like write these words.

Somewhere, somehow, the idea of a cancellation for anything has typically held a negative reference. Personally, I find this amusing…

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THINK… And Grow Resourceful

Think…

And Grow Resourceful

 “Education is not the learning of facts but the training of the mind to think…”

All you Einstein’s out there, I know you’ve read it, Napoleon Hill’s “Think and Grow Rich”. It’s a seminal work that has a spot in everyone’s library in some way, shape, or form. This book and others like it are placed in a category that has been referred to as “durable knowledge” that stands the test of time. It imparts a brand of timeless wisdom that validates a sustained presence. This category includes other published works like “How to Win Friends and Influence People” as foundational platforms for us to model as we forge our own style or approach. The fundamentals of any undertaking are a critical starting point that helps…

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THERE’S NO “I” IN TEAM. But there is a Me…

There’s No “I” in Team.

But there is a Me…

Witnessing the growing number of attention seekers on social media, it seems as though a lot of this behavior may be driven by the fact that many individual professional identities have become shrouded within “teams” “groups” or “pods”, starving the more delicate personalities of the accolades they feel they’re due. These collective efforts are designed to make their sum greater than its parts, train new members, and ultimately create more velocity for the collaborative. They’re all generally after the same thing, just on different scales. Corporate models often promote larger operations with an abundance of resources and means from which to move the needle effectively and efficiently. This lends…

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THE CIRCUS AGENT

The Juggling Act. You’re familiar with it. Anyone with a pulse understands what it feels like to be overwhelmed and incapable of completing anything close to what they think they wanted originally. We usually don’t recognize what’s happening until we’re running in quicksand, snapping at those around us, and exercising a modest level of road rage. In the Real Estate industry, it’s usually incited by a constant barrage of new apps, tools, techniques, and initiatives designed to make you better than you are now, or your money back!!! Guaranteed!!! 

This manifests itself in an endless stream of emails, phone calls, and endorsements of new products, services, and loan programs designed to keep you ahead of the competition. What they really do is take…

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The Three Agents You Can Choose to Be

The Closer – A combination of experience, expertise, and a Driver personality that relishes the opportunity to wield it aggressively over clients, other agents, as well as the rest of the market in which they choose to contract business. As they should, being a Master of the Universe. This is the Alpha Agent that has paid their dues and established a supreme network of high net-worth individuals from which to drive obscene levels of commission revenue. Their name and identity are synonymous with the high-end market of irrational buyers and sellers that simply want what they want completely independent of any relationship to Value. This brand of Agent is rare and takes a substantial amount of focused time and effort to build unless one is already…

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SIDEBAR: Where do we go from here?

English majors in college are commonly put through a curriculum that requires reading some of the world’s classic novels and discerning what makes them so. One measure of a great novel is that the reader can see the entirety of the narrative in its first pages. The theme, tone and structure of the early pages of the book foreshadow what is to come. Simply stated, every part of the book leads to the whole and you can absorb this message from every part. Imagine if that were the case right now? We would think in ‘stories’ and write our own.  

Congress is unveiling a proposal that would give most Americans a monthly payment of $2,000 until the coronavirus pandemic begins to fade. This is profoundly necessary relief for those of us who cannot safely…

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The Great Re-Generation

Easter Sunday – 4/12/20 

I noticed this sign on a front lawn Easter Sunday afternoon. It caught my attention, such that I pulled over and took a picture of it to illustrate the message it inspires in these words. When I arrived at my parent’s house, I went straight for the bookcase and lifted my father’s copy of the “The Greatest Generation”, by Tom Brokaw. It was the first thing that came to mind from this image. In light of current circumstances, World War II and Depression Era sentiments would certainly provide a strong dose of meaningful perspective, the likes of which we are unfamiliar. The insights in this book embrace the very essence of the spirit we can reference right now. The level of sacrifice and selfless courage conveyed on its pages…

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THE WISDOM OF SIMPLICITY

Essentials & Basics of the Good Life… 

Anybody out there remember rotary dial phones? How about dial-up internet and AOL’s patented “you’ve got mail” notification as you logged on? For those of us north of 40 years young, we recall a time when we had direct access to far less. No high speed anything. No smart phones. No cell phones at all! Less immediate Entertainment, Stimulation and instant Muse. And we liked it!! That’s right I’m going old-timer on you. Not that I have any right to whatsoever. I do not. But I do remember a time when there was less distraction, noise or what is now commonly experienced as Diffusion. In so many ways we’re “checked out” as a population, fixated on our screens. This is not news. Focused on material rewards, most of…

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RE-SET What we can learn right now…

Here we are furloughed in quarantine, heretofore unseen. Feels like we’re on the set of a sci-fi movie, wondering how and when this story is resolved. At some point the protagonist swoops down and saves the day just as things take a turn for the worst. If we are to stay on script, we’re rapidly approaching the moment when we need the hero to enter stage left. So, where are they? 

Ever notice, award winning movies are often the ones that leave us without any emotional rescue? No happy ending or 11th hour mission that rights all wrongs and puts the villain in his place. Some of us even root for the villain. Why is this? These movies present themselves as realistic. They feel authentic and believable. Films that come across as glib and overly-scripted…

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