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Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill is one of the most popular self-help books of all time. Hill spent 20 years interviewing more than 500 millionaires and identifying the traits that he found common in this group of high achievers.
Over the past 20 years, I’ve had the opportunity to observe thousands of top-producing real estate agents. Many of the same principles identified in Think and Grow Rich are crucial in building a successful real estate business.
The following are a few of the most powerful traits I found in the book and how you can apply them to your real estate business.
1. Own your desire
The ability to clearly define the goals you have and to determine your level of desire to achieve them is the foundation for building the business of your dreams. Do you have a burning desire to sell more houses or to make sure you can play golf twice a week?
Being content is acceptable and, in many cases, admirable. The key is to clearly define the desires you have in your life and make them a priority. Your actions should match your desires, whatever they might be.
This paragraph is for the people who have a burning desire to grow their businesses. Once you’ve identified your level of desire, ask what skills you need to grow to match your capabilities with your desires.
Do you need to learn how to market yourself through social media effectively? Do you need to learn how to generate more listings or add value to your sphere of influence? Whatever it might be, if your desire is strong enough, you will find a way to grow yourself and achieve your goals.
2. Ask yourself: Do you believe your goal is possible?
The next step is coming to a place where you believe the level of success you desire is possible. Find the agents with businesses at the level you want. Sometimes you must see something before you can become something.
Are there people in your company who have achieved the level of success you desire? Study how these people built their businesses. Ask them what they did when they were at your level of production. Ask them what they did that led to their breakthrough to the level you desire.
When you are around people doing what you desire to do, your belief in what is possible grows. When your belief grows, your actions come, and success is inevitable.
3. Have an organized plan of action
Setting goals is great, but a detailed plan of action is critical to achieving your goals. Your plan should break down your annual goals into monthly, weekly and daily activities.
Tracking your daily activities like the number of real estate leads generated, the number of listing appointments set or the number of real estate-related conversations you have provides the ability to track your progress.
Do you know how many real estate-related conversations you had last month? Do you know how many listing appointments you went on last month and how many listings you took? What we inspect, we can expect to grow. Keep track of your business-building activities and your business will grow.
4. Have faith
The definition of faith is believing in things yet to be seen. Do you have faith that if you follow your organized plan of action, you will succeed? Do you have faith that if you do the daily activities in your organized plan of action that you will achieve your goal? The stronger you believe in your plan and have faith that your actions will bring about success, the more action you will take.
Faith grows as you have little wins as well. Keep markers of success along the way. Although the goal is transactions, what small achievements along the way can build your faith?
It might be identifying a consistent lead source or adding people to your database. It could be making your calls every day and knowing the conversations you’re having are getting easier or better. Your faith must be stronger than your fears if you want to succeed.
5. Move past resistance
All success comes on the other side of resistance. Growth and comfort cannot coexist, so how can you come to a place where you are comfortable being uncomfortable? It starts with your understanding that struggle is a part of the process. It’s not a matter of if — but when — you will face the next level of resistance.
When struggle comes, embrace it with the knowledge that it’s a natural part of the process when moving to the next level of your success. Facing resistance is a sign that you are on the right track. Keep moving forward, and push past the resistance as quickly and efficiently as possible.
6. The power of the mastermind
Surrounding yourself with like-minded, growth-oriented real estate agents will lead to success. The power of a real estate mastermind is that the individuals in the group learn from each other, struggle together and celebrate successes together. So how do you find or create a mastermind of growth-oriented agents?
I facilitate a group of our agents in weekly masterminds, but if that is not available to you, then I suggest finding a coaching program that offers mastermind or group coaching.
Another option is to develop a group yourself. You can do this by finding agents through your company, through Facebook groups with agents from around the country or through agents you meet at conferences.
The mastermind should have consistent meetings with specific topics covered. It should include everyone in the group sharing what is working for them and possibly the struggles they are facing. By surrounding yourself with other agents who are looking to grow, you will be amazed at how quickly you will see results.
7. Utilize the power of the unconscious mind
The book discusses the fact that we have two parts of our mind that direct our actions.
The first is our conscious mind. We think about and purposefully do these activities based on our conscious mind thinking we need to take action. These actions might be you knowing you need to pick up the phone to make calls, but you really need your conscious mind to tell your hand to pick up the phone for it to happen.
Actions driven by our unconscious mind are done without us purposely thinking about them. My conscious mind doesn’t have to tell my lungs to breathe. I unconsciously breathe. The question becomes, how do we harness the power of our unconscious mind?
The reticular activating system (RAS) is a network of neurons in our brains that acts like a gatekeeper, determining what is important to us and what should be filtered through without consideration. Think about how many items our brain is processing at any given moment. It is processing the sounds around us, the visual stimulations of things happening around us, the fact that we are warm or cold, whether we are in danger or are safe, and thousands of other things that are happening around us at any given moment.
The RAS decides what it should bring to our attention. Have you ever noticed how many black SUVs are on the road? If I bring that to your attention, RAS will now make you aware of the black SUVs the next time you are on the road.
So how do we harness this for our real estate business?
Your subconscious mind is set up to observe what you focus on and make sure you recognize more of what you have focused on. We can achieve this by spending time studying what it is we desire in our business.
If you desire more listing opportunities, watch YouTube videos about generating more listings, read articles about listing generation, or listen to podcasts with top producers discussing listings. By focusing on listings, your subconscious mind will do its best to make sure you are alerted when listing opportunities are happening around you.
Your subconscious mind is simply waiting on you to let it know what it is that you want it to alert you to. Put it into action.
Think and Grow Rich has stood the test of time and continues to inspire generations because the truth never changes. The principles discussed in the book, and specifically for agents in this article, have worked in the past, are actively working today and will create success in the future.
2022 is the year to build the business of your dreams. Will you just go through the motions this year? Or will you take massive action and create the business you deserve to have? The choice is yours.
Jimmy Burgess is the Chief Growth Officer for Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Beach Properties of Florida in Northwest Florida. Connect with him on Facebook or Instagram.
