I thought that 2020 would be the year the real estate market crashed. When Covid hit, I bemoaned the fact that I’d gotten lax with my finances. I regretted that my database had been neglected. Eleven years of growth had led to sloppy habits and a messy business.

You’re making your list and checking it twice. Gotta figure out who gets what and at what price. Is gift-giving at work making you frown? This week, I’d like to share a hack to take the head-scratching out of professional gift-giving. That said, I have no answers for what to get your mother-in-law.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal’s Rebecca Blumenstein, Astro Teller, captain of Moonshots for Alphabet's X, asked this question: “If I was to tell you that we’re gonna to try and get a monkey up on a ten foot pedestal to give a Shakespeare monologue, which do you think we should do: train the monkey first or build the pedestal first?"

I recently caught up with Laura Gillott. Laura’s team is based in Lebanon, Oregon, a town of about 17,000. Nevertheless, her team sold 552 homes for $196M in volume this past year. For 30 years, Laura has been serving her corner of the Willamette Valley and a huge part of her team’s success comes from client events. They host about two per month, anchored around the biannual Pie Days for Thanksgiving and Independence Day. This year she gave out over 1,000 pies and received 65 referrals!

Four times a year, we mastermind with our top agents from around the globe. We send invites to the top 250 teams and individuals. Of the 180,000 real estate agents in our company, these superstars represent the top 0.3%. This week, I’m sharing my favorite ahas from our most recent gathering.

Today, I’d like to share one of my favorite ahas from our 2022 ONE Thing Goal Setting Retreat last weekend. For the past six years, we’ve hosted a two-day retreat to share a framework for setting near- and long-term goals from a foundation of purpose and values.

On November 6, 2022 at 2am, most of us will set our clocks back an hour. It’s the annual shift from daylight savings time to standard time. In direct violation of the spirit of daylight savings, the extra hour of daylight will almost universally be spent on an extra hour of sleep. With inflation being what it is, it may be the only extra of anything we get for a while.

One afternoon, I noticed my partner, Mitch, had the number “1,440” framed on his wall. This was probably a decade ago when he was just starting his role managing Gary Keller’s family office.

As Wendy and I prepare to host another Goal Setting Retreat, I’ve spent a lot of time reviewing our goals and measuring our progress. Many of our goals are complete. Some are on track. Others need work. Here’s the rub: we have just ten weeks left to cross the finish line for this year. Now is the time to double-down on achievable goals and set the rest aside. The countdown is on.

About ten years ago, I met Madan Birla, author of Fedex Delivers. We were talking about craft. “A writer’s job is to connect the dots,” he shared. “So if you want to be better, you need to collect more dots than the average writer. You need to read more.” Since then, I’ve set a goal to read 50 books a year and managed to average 45 annually.