A blind realtor once said...
Nov 22, 2025I was on the phone with a realtor in South Florida who leads a team of agents. He went blind late in life, and he often says, “I had to lose my vision in order to see.” By the way, he became a realtor after losing his sight.
We were having an incredibly impactful conversation, and then he said something even more magical: he doesn’t call them “listing” appointments, he calls them “listening” appointments.
Stop and think about that for a moment.
Actually, think about simply getting your real estate license while being blind. I still can’t comprehend that. And, “listening appointments?” Wow. Brilliant. Many agents are so busy talking that they totally forget to listen, and then wonder why things go sideways later on.
At any rate, my friend was remarking about our time together the month before, and he said, “You are approachable in the best possible way.”
I thought about it for a while after we hung up. Why? How did I get that way? (Assuming it’s true).
Then I read a blog post from Ryan Holiday. He was talking about AI, and while AI can be incredibly useful, it has many drawbacks. For one, it is often wrong:
“...my use of AI has reassured me of the value of the old techniques, like when I tried to confirm and source a quote about Abraham Lincoln that I had written down on one of my notecards. ChatGPT first told me it wasn’t about Lincoln at all, instead it was Tolstoy speaking of Dickens…and then when I pushed back, it then tried to tell me it was from Hay and Nicolay, two of Lincoln’s secretaries. When I asked what page I could find this on then—my copy in hand—it then told me that the quote didn’t actually exist. Only when I went back through, page by page, an eight-hundred-page prizewinning biography was I able to confirm that my handwritten note card had in fact been correct. Tolstoy was not involved at all (although he has a great line about Lincoln), it was a 19th century journalist who had known Lincoln well—and the quote was easily findable in many old newspaper databases and public domain books.”
But the following passage was the thing that really stuck out at me. Ryan Holiday apprenticed and was mentored by renowned author Robert Greene. Holiday shared this:
A little while back, I asked Robert Greene what βhe thought about AI. “I think back to when I was 19-years-old and in college,” Robert said. In a class learning to read and translate classical Greek texts, “They gave us a passage of Thucydides, the hardest writer of all to read in ancient Greek. I had this one paragraph I must have spent ten hours trying to translate…That had an incredible impact on me. It developed character, patience, and discipline that helps me even to this day. What if I had ChatGPT, and I put the passage in there, and it gave me the translation right away? The whole thinking process would have been annihilated right there.”
I have spent 26 years working on “being approachable”, as my new friend in Florida said. I have lost track of how many “programs” I have done. I have had many coaches, dozens of mentors, hundreds of books and podcasts, etc. By the way, I’m still not that great, but: I am better than I was!
I remember early in my real estate career, my first wife and I were taking a seminar on Monday nights. One Monday, I was in the real estate office talking to my friend Dave, who is also responsible for getting me into real estate in the first place. I said, ”Hey, I gotta go. I have to leave for my seminar.” He asked, “Why?” I replied, “So I can try and be a better human.” He just looked at me funny.
Then there’s the sixteen years of knocking on doors: A PhD in perseverance, discipline, resilience, pattern recognition, real estate, psychology, and...a lot of steps.
I spent 18+ years working with Steve Shull, five of them including the work we did with Chris Voss. Two years of training to be a Canfield Success Principles Trainer. Then there’s the 10+ years in Toastmasters, plus all the other speaker training I did.
So...when someone comes up to me and wants to be more effective in their real estate business, often what’s behind their question is, “What’s the shortcut?”
There is no shortcut to being better. There is no shortcut to being effective. There is no shortcut to being your best.
“A shortcut is ‘How little can I get away with doing?’ The question is, ‘How much more can I give to the thing I’m making?’” - Rick Rubin, on The School of Greatness with Lewis Howes
You can’t shortcut your way through real estate. If you want to be great, it will require the equivalent of translating Thucydides, whatever that is for you.
This time of year often includes “business planning.” Some people do it, many people avoid it. I am not saying it’s mandatory, and I am not saying it is a waste of time. I am saying this:
As you look out to 2026 and beyond, what can you double down on that will make you better? What more can you give to yourself, your business, and your clients?
If I might add: Don’t avoid doing “work.” Instead, what skills and personal development can you add to yourself?
AI is not going to save you, even though it can help. But...if you rely on it like it will save you the work that makes you worth doing business with, consider that avoiding the hard work will simply leave you out of the business.
