I had a friend in high school who scored in the bottom 2% on his SAT – and we all thought it was hilarious.
The joke, however, was on us because he was one of the most successful graduates from my high school – almost from the start.
His success started early, too, as he was the kid who was always working: yard work in middle school, food services as a freshman, and then his own businesses from sophomore year on, including firewood and Christmas tree sales.
Interesting sidebar: most ultra-successful people had that same propensity to earn money and start businesses from a young age.
After high school, he immediately went into real estate and started to earn real money while all of us morons toiled away at college.
By the time we graduated from college and/or grad school (like some of us really dumb people), he had already acquired enough wealth to think about retirement.
What made my friend particularly interesting is that he rarely read newspapers, books, or anything else; he never studied market trends; and he did not worry about politics or economics at all.
He just worked, never got distracted – and ALWAYS found opportunities. This includes the period in the early 1980s, when interest rates were well into the double-digit range and we endured the worst recession since the 1930s.
I thought of my friend last week when I was exchanging emails with an experienced agent I have known and really liked for over a decade.
She responded to this blog – The End of Real Estate Agents? Where Have All the Disruptors Gone? – and I complimented her for ignoring all the disruptions.
She responded with these comments: “I don’t know any better. I just keep plugging away.”
And that is the case with every super successful agent I know. They all just plug away – oblivious to economics, politics, ostensible disruptions, and the myriad “doom and gloom” predictions surfacing every week.
This is particularly important right now, with the crash-bros predicting real estate Armageddon, the crypto-bros predicting a budget crisis and a dollar meltdown, and others predicting WWIII, double-digit interest rates, a housing affordability crisis, bond and stock market meltdowns, a civil war, terror attacks, a climate crisis, pandemics, and any other catastrophe we can imagine.
So, what is the best piece of business advice I’ve received?
Just keep making biscuits.
This is something I’ve referenced many times in my blog, referring to an apocryphal biscuit maker in a small town in Portugal, who just keeps making biscuits – oblivious to everything else that is going on in the world.
He always does just fine because there is always someone who will buy his biscuits – no matter what is going on in Iran, in Ukraine, in the bond market, in politics, in economics, or anywhere else.
