The Good, Bad, & Ugly: How 10 Minutes on Facebook Gave Me a Headache

Hey there, Lars Hedinborg, founder of Real Estate B School. Welcome back for another edition of the good, bad, ugly of building a real estate team. And today I want to talk about something I was contemplating. Two titles for the podcast. One was keeping your eyes on your own paper and how 10. The other one was how 10 minutes on Facebook gave me a splitting headache. Just a painful headache. And this just happened yesterday. So let's go with how 10 minutes on Facebook gave me a headache. And the reason it did is because anytime and I don't do it really ever, I mean, rarely in a week will I go on Facebook and sort of do the mind numbing scrolling through. And the reason I don't is the other variation of the title was I have so much to think about and to focus on in the areas of my life that I want to perform at a high level. I can't possibly get worried about or spin out. You know, looking into what other people are doing, it just makes you feel like you're doing the wrong things. You don't know truly what's behind that post. When someone posts like this magical moment that they're having with their child and you're not having magical moments with your child because of the season you're in in your parenting or the season your child is in their development, it just makes you feel bad. And here's the thing, you could be doing all the right things in this season of parenting. It's just the hard work, you know, we talked about on a recent edition of the podcast, we talked about the seasons. You know, how everyone loves the spring season. That's where you're planting seeds, you're doing new things. You know, the work hasn't really set in yet. And then there's the summer where it's hot and you toil. And there are seasons in your business that are like that too. And so what I mean by keeping your eyes on your own paper is you can easily get distracted in our industry, in the real estate industry, by lots of folks that are all active on social media that are all saying that their thing is the thing. And obviously I have my own. I'll call it an agenda. Although I think it's. It's for good with real estate B school. But there's like a dozen other things you could be focused on, right? You could become a network marketer in our space that is like nothing wrong with it. You just need to make sure you know what you're looking at. There's no instant path to money. And I really do Believe that. I really do believe that. You know, there's a long game to business and only those that focus on the long game are going to be relevant in the future. And so when you get caught up in a whole bunch of things that can distract you, right. It could be news, it could be social media, it could be what others are saying and the influence others have on you that could take you off the game. What, the game that you're playing? The game that I'm playing in my real estate business is we're building a business that is serving buyers and sellers at the highest level. It's just what we're doing. And anytime and same thing in real estate B school, we're teaching fundamental business principles to an industry that somehow it's escaped us, you know, and it's generally, it's hard to get like make these things sexy. Teaching business to an industry, business principles to an industry. And we're, we're doubling down on that being our mission. And we're building businesses because of sound business principles, not because of hype and shiny objects. Right. The ways that others are sort of promoting their thing is through some sort of, this is a quick path to something. You know, there is no quick path. We built a straight path. It still requires a lot of hard work and you need to decide what you want to have in three to five years. And then once you make that decision, you put your head down and you keep your eyes on your own paper and get off social media. You know, the reason why. So here's maybe an analogy that makes sense when it comes to social media is I get a headache instantly when I get in social media, 10 minutes and I had a splitting headache, not even lying because to me, I don't digest much of it. So to me, it's so shocking. And it's like, man, oh, look at that guy's doing. Look what they're doing. Oh, look how great their kids are. Look at, you know, how fit that guy is. Look at, and it's all these things that'll have you just in your head and it'll drive you crazy. If I did it more often, I'd become numb to it. It's kind of like eating. If you go off of sugar for 30 days, I don't know if you've ever done a no sugar, a 30 day, no sugar challenge. If you do that and you go on sugar, you're going to feel the impact of the sugar. Like it's going to hurt, it's going to give you a headache. It's going to throw you. It's going to do something that you could tangibly feel. If you eat sugar multiple times a day, every day for a year, you don't even notice that you're eating sugar. Right? It's not even. So that's how social media becomes this thing that the more you do of it, the more it just feels like a thing you should do and it's not the case. It's killing you, it's killing your dreams because you're focusing on what other people are doing. And I have to coach my team on this as well. The more time you spend on social media, the less good you're going to do in the world. The less, the slower your dream is going to the speed of your dream. Right. The chances you achieve the thing you're trying to achieve slows down considerably the more time you spend looking at what other people are doing and not just doing the work that needs to get done. That is the message, that is what I want to convey in this short, brief time I have with you. I got an email this morning. It's a guy that I follow that I have a lot of respect for, James Clear. He wrote the book Atomic Habits and the email he sent out today, one of the lines and this was awesome. It's not the event, it's the process. So success isn't an event, it's a process. Building a business isn't an event, it's a process. You need to commit to the process rather than the event. A good analogy, and you may have heard me talk about it, is instead of having a goal be to run a marathon, the goal should be to become a runner. Right? The process of running is the thing that I'm committing to, not the event, which is the marathon. In business you need to fall in love with being a marketer rather than, you know, trying to sell 100 homes this year. Fall in love with something that you could do for 20 years. I love being a business owner. My goal in business is to stay in the game, not to win it. Like you don't win business, right? Your goal is to stay in it. When the stats are so far against us for being in business as real estate agent agents, let alone small business owners, the goal is to stay in the game and to do that you need to have this long term view. And where you end up 20 years from now has, is going to have nothing to do with anything you see on Facebook. It's going to, it is going to take away your ability to succeed. And I Have so much worry for so many people that are just constantly looking at what other people are doing. And you need to just keep your eyes on your own paper and focus on the stuff that you know works. You know what it takes to be successful. Or at least there's like six different phases of growth that we experience in a real estate business, right? The first is that you need to do the thing you need to master the first thing, and that's new business development. You need to figure out how to get yourself so busy that that you have to hire an assistant. 85% of our industry doesn't have an assistant. So let's assume you're past that. You're conventionally successful. You're selling 30, 40, 50, 60 homes a year. The next thing you need to do, lots of agents stall out at this phase of growth, is that you need to imagine a business operating without you in it. We call this the E myth question. How would I have to think about my business differently if I had to replicate it 10,000 times? What would the mindset shift be? I couldn't do anything in 10,000 locations at once, so I would have to design everything as if it were to operate without me. That's the shift, the fundamental shift that most agents don't make. Once you make that shift, it's easy to build a buyer system, right? It's easy to build a seller system that operates without you at an even higher level than with you in it. It's easy to design your client care process for transactions or listings management or your post closing client for life program. It's easy to design those things or your social media. Even though I'm telling you not to be on social media, as a business owner, lots of people are on social media, so you want to be there as well. So hopefully this makes sense. You got to stay out of it because if you're in it, you have this chronic pain and suffering that you probably don't even notice. You know, I challenge you to get out of those external influences for 30 days. Delete every app on your telephone that isn't moving one of your top three significant goals forward. I had a guy in my men's group, Christian men's group. You know, we were having, once a month we'll get together for a breakfast outside of our weekly men's group meeting. And we were. He made the comment to me he divested a business. It was a second business of his and the details aren't really important. He decided that you could only be, probably only be, world class at one thing, you could be really good probably at two or three things. So he's a husband and he's a father and he's a business owner. And it takes a lot of effort to be good at all three and a lot of focus and being present in all those situations and having the mental rack space to be able to be a business owner. Get stuff done during the day, but still show up as a father from 6 to 9pm and then a husband from 9 to 11pm you know, get your seven plus hours of sleep. Start the day with being a father and a husband. Then you work from eight to five, eight to six. That, you know, probably entrepreneurial work week is probably 50 hours or so. If you're being honest, it's okay. You can work from 8 to 6, 8:30 to 5:30. Just commit to doing the right things and doing those things with intentionality while you're doing them. So hopefully this serves you to me. This is the entire game if you can keep your eyes on your own paper and stay out of those things. Includes espn, it probably includes sports, it includes binge watching on Netflix. All the things that aren't moving you closer to your goals, if you're being honest with yourself, need to be excluded from your life. There's no way to sugarcoat it. There's no room for those things. You can't say you want to achieve at a high level as a dad, as a husband, and as a business owner. Yet you're spending hours a day doing things that aren't moving you closer to being good at any one of those three things. So will you do it? That's the question. Will you do it? I hope so. We'll talk to you soon.