No such thing as a good excuse

If you live in Southern California - you have a really good excuse for not getting much done this week.

I happened to have been in LA this week - I literally flew in Tuesday night over the beginning of the Eaton fire, and right above the Palisades fire. In the latter case, the flames were right under us, and the cabin filled with the smell of smoke.

The devastation, disruption, and loss - that’s real. That’s not what I am talking about in this post.

Tuesday night and Wednesday I was at my cousin’s house in Manhattan Beach - nowhere near the fires. His brother - whose house I often stay at when I am in town - is in the Pacific Palisades. While the fire was very real for our family, it had no specific bearing on me. Yet there I was glued to the TV Tuesday night and Wednesday. It took every ounce of my energy to pull myself away from the news and back to the tasks I had at hand on Wednesday.

View of the Palisades Fire from Manhattan Beach Pier on Wednesday 1/9

In other parts of the country, there were ice storms, blizzards, and other weather events. Also good excuses not to be working. Here we are, not even two weeks into the year, and people are already distracted and off track.

[Note: I know many agents who have clients who have lost their homes, are desperately looking for housing, and all the other things that go with this type of disaster. I am not talking about them. I am talking about you.]

“We have forty million reasons for failure, but not a single excuse.” - Rudyard Kipling

Last week I talked about how the simple act of spilling tea all over my desk could have spiraled me into a whole week or month of lost productivity. This past week’s events might be the excuse that some people use to let them get off track. If it’s not last week’s events, then it will be next week’s. Or the week after.

“Failure is rarely the result of some isolated event. Rather, it is a consequence of a long list of accumulated little failures which happen as a result of too little discipline.” - Jim Rohn

The biggest obstacle facing most agents is not having a clear plan. I don’t mean a goal, I mean a plan. I don’t even really mean a plan, I mean a schedule. What are you going to do every day and week that will move you to where you want to go?

Most agents - yes, I mean most agents - do not have this simple exercise handled. What are you going to do, and when are you going to do it? 

Your success - or failure this year - will not be one week. Or two weeks. It will be the repeated success or failure of your weeks. If week in and week out you make a schedule and don’t follow it, then your shortcomings for the year are a result of your repeated failures.

Get yourself on track before the next week begins - you still have 50 weeks left in the year!