Urgently Patient

Being patient is somewhat of a controversial topic in business and success It seems.  

Hustle, hustle, hustle, right now, get everything you can do, don’t waste time, 10X, shrink 10 years into 6 months and on and on and on. If you listen closely, patience is in those messages but the speakers are afraid you’ll just sit back while your dreams pass you by.

Gary Vaynerchuk is one of the few people I hear talking about patience. Tom Bilyeu has a great rant about being urgent, though if you really listen, he’s talking about being urgently patient.

When I was in high school, I decided to move the homemade basketball hoop my Dad made me. A tree branch had started getting in the way of my shot so I decided to move the hoop right then. My buddy and I dug a hole where we wanted to place it and immediately started to dig up the current hoop. The pole was a 4×4 that was sturdy enough to hold the weight of a heavy backboard on to it.

For a moment, I thought about waiting for my Dad to get home to help but chose in the wisdom that is youth to not wait. As we pulled the pole out of the ground, the way we learned it caused it to spin out of our hands, landing hoop first and cracking the 4×4. My urgency (and teenage confidence) overrode my patience and I never had a basketball hoop again.

Being urgently patient is a better descriptor of the mindset to best attack performance. You can be urgent in mixing the ingredients of a cake but you can’t make it bake faster. You are urgent in the tasks and opportunities but patient in the process. 

Do you propose marriage to every attractive, potential mate you meet? Of course not. If you are urgent, you ask them out. You put yourself in a spot to ask them out. Were you, like me, one of the people in high school that waited too long after someone you liked had a breakup before you would ask them out? Yeah, that rarely worked out well. 

Here’s what that looks like in real estate:

Someone calls, you call them back immediately.

Someone says they want to maybe see a house, you say let’s go.

If you have free time between showings, you don’t get onto Facebook. You do whatever tasks need to be done. You can text, do home searches, return emails, check your to-do list.

I had a seller that initially refused to do anything the buyer requested after the inspection. He said he wanted to know more about some detail of one of the repair requests though. I called him back to update him and, of his own volition, he said “You know, I’ll give them 25% of what they requested.”

I was a bit surprised but said, “Great.”

For whatever reason, questions kept going back and forth between me and the buyer’s agent over different things. Every time I talked to the seller, he gave the buyers more without me even asking until he finally agreed to all of the repairs. Time was actually the friend here.

And we’ll discuss this in client management as well: pushing clients to make a decision immediately will usually end up negative. Time softens a lot and you will find many problems take care of themselves. It’s a fine balance in those cases between urgency and patience.

So where does this put you? Likely you lean one way or the other. Either you tend towards urgency, or are more patient. I suggest pushing yourself more to the other direction. I see way too many passive agents when opportunities step in front of them. It’s almost like high school again.