The number one key to success no matter what stage you're at in your real estate business

So today, the number one key to success no matter what stage you're at in your real estate business.

All of the things I'm saying is not from my own mind, I'm sharing what I've learned from mental models in my life. However, a lot of them teach you how to think inaccurately, and I was going into the term hard-earned dollar, right? Like why does it have to be hard-earned, who's the one who said that?

A lot of the things that they don't teach us are equally as important. So these mental models are what shifted the way that I think about things, and I'm just going to spit some of them off.

Mental Model 1: Keep your mind on what you want, and off want you don't want

So one of them that I like to use, and I was talking to one of our sales guys yesterday, is to keep your mind on what you want and off what you don't want. It sounds so simple, it just goes over your head, you don't even take the time to really digest it or create an awareness of it, right? But what you want is very important. The world is putting in your face all these things that you don't want, right? Like all those bipartisanship right now, shutdowns, negativity, the economy, the stock market.

But what I want are the goals that I have, and keeping my mind off those negative things and, when bad things happen that I don't want to have happened, and staying on course is the hardest part. I don't have these mastered by any means, but just having awareness is I feel like the majority of the battle. So constantly keeping my mind on what I want and off of what I don't want is the saying.

Mental Model 2: Every adversary has a seed of benefit

The next one that I really love is every adversity has with it the seed of equal or greater benefit. So any time I have a problem come up, I'm like okay what's the benefit? At a minimum what did I learn? So we always talk about failure, fail fast, fail forward, fail quickly, get it over with so that you can learn and get on to hopefully some success.

So that started to really shift my mindset when I would see nice things at the lake, like those giant boats that we just saw last week. I would look at those and I would stare over the dock, I'd be like man… I didn't say how can I afford it, I said someday I'm going to figure out how to afford it. I'm going to figure out how to afford one of those because everybody has one so it must be possible, you know? Expand your paradigm, expand your thinking.

You CAN be successful

So those are just some of the mental models that are important as far as a way of thinking is concerned, financially and in business as far as success goes. And I felt like with that title, it would be irresponsible to not mention mental models. Now there are a lot of them that are equally as good if not better, and if I had something specifically come up that was contextual, I would go to a mental model as far as how to think through it.

And it's a fantastic thing. I was raised like this. My dad had them all around his office, right? Success is achieved by those who try and keep trying. A lot of Napoleon Hill stuff, you think of these things and a lot of times people hear them and all they can think of is the Saturday Night Live skit, and now deep thoughts with Stuart Smalley.

And they make fun of him but why? Because they were taught to make fun of him. They were taught to think that those things were silly, but they're not silly. The only difference between people who have success and people who don't are the way that they think. That's it. It's between the ears.

Because we've all been blessed to be over here in America. We have all these opportunities, most of us have 10 fingers and 10 toes and symmetrical faces, you know what I mean? That's kind of the requisite. If you've got those things then you don't have a lot of adversity, necessarily. And you have the ability to have the same amount of success. If they can have it, why not you? That's another mental model that I always have.

If they're making that stuff for people, why can't I have one? Seriously. And I know it's silly but it really is, it's the difference. And sometimes I have to check myself. As I said, I was having a conversation with one of our sales guys and I was thinking to myself in the shower this morning, I was like man I need to take a little of my own advice, I need to stretch my paradigm as far as what's possible and what are musts versus what are shoulds, right? As far as income is concerned.

There's another mental model, so that brings another one. Man's greatness is not measured by the vastness of his possessions but by the fewness of his wants, right? So for me, part of my problem is I don't have a lot of wants.

And the cost is only an issue in the absence of value. So the reason why that's an important one is in real estate when you're talking to potential customers, you have to have the ability to communicate value very quickly. They call these things elevator pitches, unique selling propositions.

The analogy that's given is hey if I were to say to you do you want to buy this car, you'd say no I'm not looking for a car right now. Well, it's a Lamborghini, it's a $200,000 vehicle, it's brand new, I could sell it to you for five grand today because I just want to get it out of my driveway. All of a sudden, you weren't in the market for a car, you might not even have five grand, but I bet you're going to find $5000 instantly to go buy that car because you know the value of it.

So what we had come to as far as a conclusion is that in real estate, one of the biggest factors for success was what, Jake?

In real estate, the biggest factors of success are the conversations and the ability to take a conversation and move it along in the process.

Chicken and the egg, right? And that's where it went to okay but how do you have conversations, you get on the phone, right? And you make your dials. People were pretty adamant about that. For me, like the mental model that I keep going back to for all of this, like the chief one, the learn like you're going to live forever type mental model, goes back to actually wanting to learn, right? That ultimate I don't know everything, I'm never going to know everything, I can be humble enough to always be in a position where I can learn from anyone virtually.

That first one is kind of key but then we put this into the presentation recently, but just the Tony Robbins quote of if you want to achieve success all you have to do is find someone and model someone who's already succeeded.

I think a lot of times we've been taught that in order to have success you have to be the innovator, you have to be the one that's blazing the trail. You can't do what other people are doing because that's disingenuous, right? You're copying at that point.

Listen, I just want to get to the success quickly, I want to collapse time. I'm not trying to learn every lesson on my own. One of the things that I want to do is I want to learn from others so that I don't have to make every mistake myself. And yeah, it is, it's the ability to hang up that ego but I also feel like it's ingrained in us like oh you have to be the innovator. If you want to do something you have to go invent something new for the world.

And listen, it depends on the business, but not really. Finding a problem and fix it. And it can be the simplest problem. If you fix it better than everybody else, then you're going to have success. And in the real estate business, I think almost every agent if you survey them would say yeah, the industry has a lot of broken parts to it and there is a lot of room for someone who is looking to be an expert and expertly service their clients and give them the service that they should have instead of somebody who doesn't really own their craft, maybe just got licensed and doesn't have a path as far as being on a team or having a good coach or what have you to actually deliver that value. So the industry has a lot of problems for us to be able to solve even on an individual one-on-one basis with our clients, with the consumer.

But it's like that, he said I want to collapse 10 years into two. That hung with me too. It goes back to another mental model that I've lived by for a long time now, Tony Robbins, where he said people always underestimate what they can do in 10 years but overestimate what they can do in a year.

The number one key to success is actually how to think, and that's the difference. If Jeff Bezos was running Market Maker, I've said this before, imagine where it would be. The things that he knows that I don't know. If I could go and tap his brain, wow, that would be amazing. I wouldn't have to learn every lesson on my own.

Who you are today is not who you'll need to be in order to have the business that you want to have and run it at that level. And that's a very humbling thing. Another one, you can do more with others than you can do by yourself. Another humbling thing. I always thought I could just do it all on my own, I don't need anybody. Not true.

Even before I ever had any kind of access to anything like that or saw value in it because it's scary to do those types of things. Generally there's money involved. But some of the smartest people that have lived and done big things have written books that you can read for five bucks. You can read them for free from the library and go turn them back in.

So it just depends on your mindset, and I think that the takeaway is that the mindset needs to be constantly seeking and learning and being open-minded to always looking for a better way. Sometimes good enough is good enough, right? So you don't need to obsess. But it just depends on where you're at and what you want to accomplish.

And it always starts… I think any business book that you go back and read, figuring out like so many start with your why and all that fun stuff, you have to start with a goal, you have to put a plan in place and then execute and then learn, and then execute again and then learn, and then execute and learn until you get there.

And the cool thing about real estate is, in each market we tell each other what our volume is, how many transactions. You can just take that by… and most markets are around 3% and know what their top-line revenue is. And the thing for me that's always been really helpful… someone else does it. If I see someone else is doing it, I know I can figure it out too, because they're just a human just like me and they have all the same challenges humans have. So they figured something out that I haven't figured out yet and I tell you what, I'm going to get close.

You know that that person is human, and it's possible, right? So there's no doubt that you can do it and if you meet the people and you're like I can obviously beat them, if you have some confidence and borderline arrogance or whatever it may be, you can never accomplish something you don't believe is possible. That's where you start, you start with the belief. If there's no belief, then it's not ever going to happen no matter how hard you try.

Oh, another mental model I got from a movie. He said what one man can do, another can do. And I always loved that. I forget the name of the movie, he kills that bear. I did have that one smashed by my dad. He said, "Well, you couldn't run as fast as Usain Bolt," or something like that. Well, maybe if I put the work in, but I really don't have the desire. But he was just trying to kill a mental model.

But as far as business is concerned it's 100% accurate. Sometimes timing and quite a bit of luck does have a lot to do with those type of things but you're not going to get there if you don't start trying, and you want to start trying, if you see somebody else doing it because you think that you can do it too. That's just how the whole thing goes.

Anyway, a lot of good mental models. At the end of the day the biggest takeaway that I want everybody to have is that the cost is only an issue in the absence of value, so the cost for the consumer, if you're talking to them on the phone, would be their time in meeting with you or possibly missing out on working with another agent that might be able to add more value.

So you need to have prepared value propositions, pitches, elevator pitches, communicate your value in probably 15-30 seconds, very quickly and clearly, so that they can say ah-hah, if I do business with Jake, X, Y, and Z is going to happen for me, and I'm interested in X, Y, and Z, so I'm going to consider doing business with Jake, right? Above all the other options, which is competitors.

That's the big mental model takeaway. If you don't have those, go back and watch some of our past lives, we've got a ton of them on value propositions, on scripts, on things of that nature. If you're already a client of Market Maker, reach out to us, we'll give you the one script that you need, it's very simple, it's like one page, big letters, just read that thing to the customers that we put you on the phone with and they will come and meet with you.

It is a wonderful thing, and just do it, right? Find the people that you can download mental models from, listen, consume as much as you possibly can. Put together a plan, have a goal. I love it.

Yeah. The one that I teach my son is we do the right thing, if I say why, he'll say because it's right. We do the right thing because it's right. So that's right. It's good to teach your kids these mental models if you have kids, too.

If you want some help with this stuff, go to marketmakercall.com. Check us out.

There you go. So, as we always say at Market Maker, you are always just one prepositioned appointment away.

Every day.