new outlook on being successful

Books are incredible! In November, Gary Keller was speaking at a large National Mortgage conference. His message was great. He was giving the Lender community some great information on how to survive this market. Following the event I asked him if he had any information I could use to send to some of my coaching clients. He suggested I read the book "Outlier" by Malcolm Gladwell. It basically talks about the study of extremely successful people. The star sports players, top orchestra players, etc.

I just got into the book and there is a whole new perspective on why some are more successful than others. The piece that really blew me away was regarding the study of time practicing. We have all heard the saying "Practice makes Perfect" and in the book they found that some of the most successful people in their field just practice more than those that are just good. In fact, Mozart was playing music for 20 years before his masterpiece was created.

The study of violin players really helped me look at success in a new light. They did a study of Violin players. They put them in 3 groups. The most successful in one group, the semi-successful in another and the violinist that were not good at all and should be moving on to something else. What they found is the most successful violinist practiced quite a bit more than the middle group and the middle group practiced quite a bit more than the lower group. To summarize...the best players in the study had practiced over 10,000 hours compared to the next closest group that only practiced 8,000 hours and the lowest group had around 4,000 hours of practice.

Bobby Fischer became a Chessmaster only with over 10,000 hours of playing (practicing) chess. Very interesting. If you think about successful agents vs agents that don't make it, and look at their lead generation methods. The most successful agents lead generate almost 3 hours every day. If you apply the 10,000 hour rule to that, and you lead generate 3 hours every day, 5 days a week it will take you 12 years to get 10,000 hours of lead generation in. Can you imagine what your business would look like if you did 3 hours of lead generation for 12 years? Which also lends itself to people who are struggling just to put in 1 hour of lead generation every day. If you take that path it will take you 38 years. Now just understand that I am talking about doing real estate at the Bobby Fischer or Mozart level of success.

Sure puts a different perspective on how important it is to focus on the right things.....EVERY day! practice, practice, practice.