Ep 261 | Thoughts on Success

Thank you for joining me today. It's Brian Gubernick, and welcome to the No Days Off podcast, where we believe that every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. Before we jump into today's topic, I want to make sure you all know that yesterday was in fact our 1-year anniversary here at No Days Off. 260 or so episodes over the past year, 1.5 million minutes of our content consumed. I think we have over 50 hours of stuff we've built out over the past year. And I want to thank all of you that are listening, listening and supporting the podcast, those that are part of the No Days Off Nation, sharing it with your team, sharing it with your peers. Others within your business or outside your business world. I just want you to know how appreciative I am and our team is here at No Days Off. Thank you for supporting us, and I'm looking forward to an even brighter year together. Now, on that note, I got to thinking a little bit about success, and I want to talk around some quotes that are kind of playing in my mind right now around success, many of which you've probably heard. Some I will attribute to the author of the quote. Others I think are maybe things I've heard over time said by a number of people, and it's quite possible I just took these things and rewrote them in my mind, but I want to share some quotes and some thoughts around success and analyze some of these quotes. Maybe this serves as a bit of motivation for you today. Maybe it gives you some clarity. Maybe it gives you some confidence in what it is you're doing. Whatever the case, here are 5 of my favorites. The first quote: Extraordinary success is sequential. It's not simultaneous. What starts out linear becomes geometric. You do the right thing and then you do the next right thing. Over time, it adds up. And the geometric potential of success is unleashed. Now that quote comes directly from a mentor of mine, Gary Keller, and he wrote it in his book, The One Thing, that he co-authored with a friend of mine, Jay Papasan. Success is sequential. It's not simultaneous. What that means is achieving success typically requires a series of steps or a series of stages. It doesn't all happen at once. In other words, success is a very gradual process that unfolds over time, and each step builds upon the previous one. The concept to me implies that success doesn't usually happen overnight. It just involves consistent effort, learning and growing and persevering over a period of time. And each step That's taken is towards a goal and it contributes to the eventual success. It's the culmination of these sequential actions that leads to the desired outcome. I think too often in business, you know, in my, my experience in coaching and training and, and leading some, we are rather impatient. We greatly overestimate what we could or should accomplish in the short term. And we underestimate what we can accomplish in the long term. And I think that plays out here with this quote. It is step by step by step. It is sequential. It doesn't just happen. It's not all simultaneous. Now, every time this quote comes about, there's always somebody that's going to throw out an example of what they believe to be some sort of success that just suddenly happened. Now, more oftentimes than not, it didn't suddenly happen. You're just unaware of all of the steps that it took to lead to that point. But every once in a while, I guess something can happen. And that's an anomaly. That's an outlier. 99% of the time it is linear. It's a linear process. And over the course of time, sometimes a very long time, you will eventually hit that geometric, geometric progression. Next quote around success. It's a short one. Oftentimes success is just survival. Sometimes surviving is thriving. So success at times is just survival, and surviving in many cases is perceived as thriving. Why am I talking about this quote? What made me think about this? Well, I've had firsthand experience with this, especially at the start of my career. I started my career in a very, very strange and difficult real estate market. And as much as I'd love to say, to our audience here today, man, I was so strategic and I made such, such, you know, selective moves that ended up working out. And there was, there wasn't a whole lot of that. What really happened was I didn't know any different. I didn't know what a good real estate market looked like. And so for me, I just continued to show up and go to work every day. And suddenly over the course of a couple of years, my competition began to thin out. And my ability to survive the difficult market led to the opportunity to thrive once the market began to change or even rebound. Success is survival suggests that in certain situations, success is just directly linked to the ability to survive. The concept in my world, at least, is associated with environments or conditions where competition's crazy, where resources are limited, where markets change, or challenges just come about that are significant. Success isn't always about achieving goals or reaching a certain level of wealth or status. It's about being able to adapt, adapt, and being able to endure and overcome obstacles in order to survive and ultimately thrive. Now, this could apply in all aspects of life, not just business. It's also in personal and it's in relationships. So I want you to think about that right now. If you're going through a tough time, if your industry is going through a tough time, or your business is not progressing at the rate you'd like, recognize that staying the course and allowing time to play out and surviving this moment is actually either setting you up to thrive or is thriving in and of itself. Surviving the moment is end up— ends up being thriving. On that note, the next thing I want to mention, do not equate speed with success or success with speed. They do not go hand in hand. The speed at which you move does not go hand in hand with the success that you, you desire or that you've had. They're not one in the same. There will be times where you could move rapidly and have success, and there's going to be times where it takes days, months, years, decades to get to the level of success you desire. Just because you're moving fast does not mean you're successful. Just because you're moving slow does does not mean you're unsuccessful. I think part of pointing to our friends Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger, we can say, hey, I don't know if their success was hand in hand with the speed at which they moved. They built a career. Warren started investing at the age of 11, 80+ years later, right? He's insanely successful. Now, granted, he had success well before today. But it took Warren 10, 20, 30 years for that geometric progression to kick, right? For it to start to ramp up. Competition of his, peers of his, aimed to move with speed, and some of them had early success and others floundered. But don't equate the speed at which Warren was moving with, with the success that in fact he was having. Just because it was slow does not mean it was not building the foundation for massive success down the road, which leads to the next quote. Do not grow in order to succeed. Succeed first and let that success force you to grow. That's another Gary, Gary Keller quote. Too often in business, we see companies go out and acquire new tools or acquire new leads or acquire new people or whatever it may be. And they they go out and grow. Maybe they create a new location or a new product or a new service. They go out and grow. And then every day the owner of that business or the key people of that business have to wake up and force all of that growth to succeed. Instead though, what you ought to do is go succeed and succeed so much so that you have no choice but to grow. Maybe that's bring more people into your world. Maybe it's invest in a new tool or resource. Maybe it's go down another lane of revenue. Succeed first and let that success force you to grow. In my industry, in real estate, we see this happen with real estate sales teams where instead of accumulating so many leads that you have no choice, so many prospects that you have no choice but to bring other people into your world, We have a tendency to bring other people into our world and then have to go feed them or find them more prospects or opportunities. I would be cautious around that move. The very last quote for today, and maybe the most inspirational of the bunch, of the bunch. You are 5 years away from anything you'd like to accomplish. With respect to your success, you are 5 years away from anything. I said this in front of a group just the other day, and I asked the group about my friend Greg that was sitting in the room. And I said to the group, do you think that Greg could be president of the United States in the next 5 years? And everyone laughed. And then we really got to analyzing that, that question. Is it possible that in 5 years our friend Greg can be president? Now, would it be challenging to be president? Absolutely. But could he hold a high political office if he desired? If starting tomorrow he had an amazing platform that he created that people could get behind, and then the next day he rallied troops, he rallied people to his cause, and then the next day he fundraised, and then the next day, you know, he began his campaign and he got into a seat, you know, maybe in the local government. And he succeeded, and a year later he moved up, and then 2 years later he had this massive platform and following, could he continue to build his career? In 5 years, could he accomplish anything? And the answer is he absolutely could. And same goes for you. In that same room I'm describing, I asked the group— there was an 18-year-old kid in there, an 18-year-old guy in the room— I said, does anybody here believe that our 18-year-old friend here can't become a millionaire by the time he's 23. And everybody in the room agreed, in 5 years? Yeah, easily. As a matter of fact, I bet he might be able to do it in 3 years. You are 5 years away from anything you'd like to accomplish. I've heard this quote from many people. And I'll tell you, if you sit back and analyze it and really ask yourself, what would I have to do to set myself up 5 years from now, I think you— that— I think that you might have an amazing degree of confidence. Mind you, here we are, you know, recording. We're just over 4 years from COVID when COVID kicked off. We are only 4 years away from that. Imagine if you started working towards a dream in March of 2020. Maybe many of you have. How close would you be to that 5-year goal. My guess is if you were truly committed, and some of you absolutely were, you're on the verge of accomplishing something major, something that you never thought possible just 4 years ago. So on that note, hopefully this has helped you think a little bit more around success. Thank you for celebrating our 1-year anniversary here at No Days Off. I really appreciate it. Thank you very much for listening to us today. Remember, Every single day brings a new opportunity to make, make a difference, to change the game, to improve yourself. So let's get after it.