Monday Motivation, 2.12.18

Written by: Ben Rogers

Every Monday, The Rogers-Long Team meets for one of its two weekly meetings. The Monday meeting always ends with “Monday Motivation” in which a few minutes are spent listening to one team member presenting a quote, a quick reading from a book, a scene from a movie, or anything else they find motivating to provide a “spark” to the whole team on a Monday morning.

“Have you ever been bitten by an elephant?”

I’ve become a big Andy Andrews fan. Andy is an author and motivational speaker. He has delivered speeches in front of multiple presidents and has advised well-known football coaches such as Nick Saban. Man, I’d love to do something like that one day. Here’s the catch though: those are all big picture things…and that’s not what it’s all about.

I have dreams of doing big things. I have big goals…and I’m sure you do too. But what enables Andy Andrews to do things like that is because his focus on the little things. Andy calls himself a “professional noticer”, and he argues that you really should “sweat the small stuff”.

In a book titled “The Noticer”, Andy writes about a conversation between a man named Jones and a man named Henry. It goes like this:

Have you ever heard the saying “Don’t sweat the small stuff?” 

“Yes,” Henry responded.

“Well,” Jones said, “I’m here to tell you that’d you’d better. See, the ‘small stuff’ is what makes up the larger picture of our lives. Many people are like you, young man. But their perspective is distorted. They ignore ‘small stuff,’ claiming to have an eye on the bigger picture, never understanding that the bigger picture is composed of nothing more than – are you ready? – ‘small stuff.’

“Have you ever been bitten by an elephant?” the old man asked. Henry shook his head. “How about a mosquito?” Jones offered. 

“Of course,” Henry answered.

“You see what I mean?” Jones said, reaching out to cuff Henry on the shoulder. “It’s the small stuff that’ll get you!”

On The Rogers-Long Team, we put a very large emphasis on the small stuff, the little things. Big picture, sure – we want to be the best. Ultimately, we want to be #1. That’s not where our focus lies, however. Our focus lies in doing the little things right. Sometimes little things can be time consuming, tedious, and simply put – annoying. While the “big picture” competition spends a majority of their time dreaming about the big things, we are dreaming with our eyes open, working on the little things.

One of my favorite quotes is: “All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible.”

This week, I challenge you to dream with your eyes open. Go to work on the little things. Be on time to your next appointment. Be prepared for your next meeting. Focus on the task at hand. Concentrate on what you do well and do it better than everybody else. Just be great at one little thing today, and your dreams of tomorrow will take care of themselves.

Remember, elephants don’t bite – but mosquitos do…and it hurts like hell. Be a mosquito and go make your mark on the world.

Ben Rogers, The Team Leader of The Rogers-Long Team, has been in the real estate business since 2012. In 2014, he began The Rogers-Long Team with Kevin Long, which produced over $25,000,000 in volume production in 2017. In addition to selling homes and leading the team, Ben hosts a podcast show called the “The Bottom Line”, which can be found by clicking here. The Bottom Line is a Podcast that links lessons learned from sports, business, and life and is targeted at those who are striving for excellence, while ‘Average Sits on the Bench’.