Treat It Like A Real Job
Secrets for the self-employed
When I first got into the real estate industry, I still had a lot of gaps in the “what am I supposed to be doing?” part of my life.
Real estate is mostly self-employed of course and mostly informal.
I was negotiating a sale of a home at the time, and the partner of the listing agent of the house being sold came by my house one evening to drop off a counteroffer. That was back in the days when we killed trees and used paper to sell houses.
A real job
He was chuckling about his partner a bit and made the comment that if she ever treated real estate like a real job, she would have huge success.
That industry, at the time, was easy to get into, and easy to get out of, so it was as easy to be tentative about the work, as it was to be committed to it.
His comment has stayed with me all these years. Anytime a person works for himself, they try it for a while, maybe part-time. They test the waters. Baby steps. Not too much skin in the game in the beginning.
Too late now
At that point, much of the time, the foot officially has been shot. The gangrene sets in, as the grumbling starts about how this pursuit doesn’t pay well enough.
The climax of this three-act play occurs while it is still easy enough to walk away and cast the gaze on something else shiny.
My early days of Medium seem like the early days of almost anything I do. There comes a point fairly quickly, where my natural inclination is to say, “forget this! It doesn’t pay enough.”
Conclusion
Then I have to stop and think, “if I treated this like a real job, (with a real boss and a real-time clock) imagine how much I would make!”
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