The Abundant Agent

Value is often confused with price. And while price is often determined by value, many things and ALL people are valuable irrespective of their price, their productivity, or what a person can do for me.

Yet many of us run cost/ benefit analysis on people all the time. This is favoritism, which shows up ALL THE TIME in our businesses.

Today, ask yourself, even though my business does not serve everyone, and not everyone belongs on my team, how does my business respect the value of ALL PEOPLE?

Talking to a powerhouse Real Estate Team Rainmaker, I asked what she looks for in a great Realtor. In less than a second, she responded, "Integrity, Heart, Hustle."

Do you have these three characteristics? Are you doing the work to increase these traits?

Integrity- Do what you say
Heart- Do What's Right for others
Hustle- Do what it takes

Accountants and Financial Wizards know how to calculate Net Present Value, that is the present value as compared to some future projected value.

We can do the same with our time choices. What is the value of the activities you are deciding between...not today, but well into the future.

The Net Present Value of kid's soccer games, of executing on a business plan, of eating and exercising right cannot be measured in short time scales. Instead, they should be measured in lifetimes and legacies.

Are you looking for a simple secret to massively increase your productivity? It may be right under your nose...Your health--physical and mental--impact your productivity more than you realize.

When you are physically healthy and mentally sharp, you show up to your work able to make a much larger impact. One of the simplest ways to increase your productivity is to take charge of your nutrition, exercise, and management of sleep and stress.

How has your health impacted your productivity? How would a change in your health change your productivity?

Many real estate agents have a sharp understanding of how price works with product and goods.  In service industries though, understanding price is much more challenging.  

Intuitively, we know a retailer won’t sell something for less than they paid for it (at least not for long).  But in services, the cost of production is much harder to identify.  For this, we must look at the value of the providers time to arrive at a price to charge.

More importantly, service providers must increase the perceived value of the service in the mind of the buyer, because that’s where the money really is!

As we talk about mastery, the first thing that we're going to have to master is mastery. We're going to have to get really good at getting really good and so some of you have heard about research that was done on how we get to expert level performance. This was made really popular. The research of K Anders Erickson was been really popular by Malcolm Gladwell as he taught us this rule as to how many hours it takes to get to mastery and how many hours have you heard it takes? 10,000 hours of doing something. Now I want to warn you, it's not just 10,000 hours of doing something right? The golf courses of America are littered with evidence that just doing something a lot does not make you good at it, don't you agree? In fact, what Anderson proved was that it's 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, which is going to require deliberate actions and feedback. So over the next little while here, we are going to go through a three step process. The first thing we need to do is we actually just...

I've had a lot of side conversations with folks out there about what is the blend of my faith life with my work life. I want to take time on Fridays to have a little conversation about faith and work, we'll call this faith and work Fridays.

Specifically today I want you to think about in your work and in your business is how do your values show up at work? You see, many of us have a firewall between our work and our personal life, between our convictions personally and the work that we do. And as long as our work isn't too objectionable to us, we'll continue to do it. 

This is one thing that, that Jeff Van Duzer calls Enron with a smile, right? If you remember, Enron ended up being this kind of nasty company. They were real crooks and maybe even a Ponzi scheme involved.  They ripped off a lot of people of their money. And if we did that but had a nice little smile on it and maybe you put a little religious symbol on it, we would somehow sanctify that it.  Well,...

243 years ago. These words were penned, signed in an act of rebellion, and then mailed to King George III.

"We hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. And among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

What is often missed is that the end of the declaration, those who signed it agreed to this:

"For the support of this declaration with a firm reliance on divine providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortune, and our sacred honor."

As we celebrate freedom and the independence, let's not forget to, to consider how we are spending our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor to protect those inalienable rights for others.

How is your business structured to help you spend your life, your fortune, and your sacred honor to protect the inalienable rights of others--of customers and clients, of bosses and subordinates, of contractors and vendors, maybe...

Tomorrow, those of us here in the United States get a great opportunity to celebrate independence and to celebrate freedom. I love working with entrepreneurs and small business owners as coaching clients. And when I get to speak and teach workshops to those folks, I love it because, like me, they really love freedom. They love that they get to be free to own their own business, to create their business the way they want it to be.

What I find is that many of them have become slaves to their business. Many of them have become servants of their telephone and email. The reality is, and I want to use a phrase that we commonly use in a different context, "freedom isn't free." What I mean by that is when it comes to freedom, life, freedom in our business, it requires us to be disciplined--to create a plan, and then execute on that plan in a consistent way to create discipline that forms habits around systems that get us to our goals. 

What systems do you have in place that you need to...

Well apparently I got a few of you fired up yesterday when I said something crazy, which is that goals don't work. I'm not alone in this. James Clear says the same thing in the book atomic habits. He says, "I've found that goals are good for planning. Your progress and systems are good for actually making progress."

I've come to define goals this way. Goals are a temporary place holder for a thought experiment. You see, a goal is simply there to help you think backwards. The actions you need to take today.

Scott Adams goes even further on this. He says, goals are for losers because you see, if you look high performers and low performers both have goals, but higher performers have systems. They don't worry too much about the goals and they focus on the systems that actually get them there. He says, you don't need goals.


What you actually need are simple systems that improve your odds. So today as we're again, continuing on this path of revisiting our goals for 2019 we visited and our...