Monday Motivation, 6.7.2021

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.

“Winning requires all of you and more, and it promises you nothing. Winning is not loyal – it doesn’t even care how hard you work at times. It requires that you sprint when the distance is unknown. You must always go after it. Winning is never guaranteed. The only thing guaranteed if you don’t chase it, is losing.” – Strength & Conditioning Coach at Georgia Tech

On the topic of persistence and continual improvement, author James Clear writes the following:

“Imagine that you have an ice cube sitting on the table in front of you. The room is cold and you can see your breath. It is currently twenty-five degrees. Ever so slowly, the room begins to heat up.

26 degrees. 27. 28.

The ice cube is still sitting on the table in front of you.

29 degrees. 30. 31.

Still, nothing has happened.

Then, 32 degrees. The ice begins to melt. A one-degree shift, seemingly no different from the temperature increases before it, has unlocked a huge change. Complaining about not achieving success despite working hard is like complaining about an ice cube not melting when you heated it from 25 to 31 degrees. Your work was not wasted; it is just being stored. All the action happens at 32 degrees.”

Over a 15-year span from 1999 through 2014, the San Antonio Spurs won 11 division titles and 5 NBA Championships. The results are fantastic, but their daily process was even better. Epitomizing their belief in consistent effort, there was a sign in their locker room that read: “When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the 101^st blow it will split it two, and I know it was not that last blow that did it – but all that had gone before.”

For one final example, imagine valuable diamonds buried 1,000 feet below the earth’s surface. There are two people competing to see who gets there first. One loves diamonds, the other loves digging.

Who wins?

Winning and achieving your goals is not easy. There is only one first place trophy reserved for the person that wins. The path to your victories is littered with obstacles (also known as excuses) and simply loving the trophy is not enough if you want to overcome these.

The person that just loves diamonds is ultimately going to convince himself that there’s an easier way to go 1,000 feet under. He might purchase diamonds instead of earning them and he’ll search for shortcuts. His love for diamonds will not outweigh the effort it takes to get there. Those obstacles take up more space in his mind than the love for diamonds itself.

The person that loves digging, however, is just going to keep digging. It’s a simple plan, sure. But it’s proven itself to work. The best of the best simplify, prioritize, and execute. They execute until the diamonds are found and then they go find the next one another 1,000 feet under.

Those that love digging lock into the process while those that love diamonds can’t stop thinking about the end result – they just can’t stop thinking about when the digging will finally be over. The diggers understand that there is in fact no finish line: just another obstacle that must be overcome and another excuse that must be disregarded.

So far in 2021, there have been 9,957 closed real estate transactions in the CVRMLS, which doesn’t even include off-market sales. To make numbers easy, let’s assume that number is now at 10,000. Each real estate transaction has two sides; therefore, there have been 20,000 opportunities to serve a buyer or a seller in our area. That’s 128.2 opportunities per day.

I can’t force you to love digging more than you love diamonds. What I can do, however, is remind you that there are 128.2 opportunities per day to find a diamond, 128.2 opportunities per day to melt the ice cube, and 128.2 opportunities per day to split the rock in two.

Keep digging and you’ll find diamonds. Keep hammering and you’ll ultimately split the rock. And keep heating up – you’ll eventually hit 32 degrees.

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’.