A lesson on FOCUS by Arnold Schwarzenegger

I've coached hundreds of agents over the  years and I can honestly say the biggest mistake I see most agents make is...

Lack of FOCUS

We seem to get easily distracted by other agents, the news, interest rates, our brokers and hundreds of other outside influences. Allowing yourself to get distracted from your goals is a recipe for disaster.

Several years ago, I watched an older documentary on Arnold Schwarzenegger titled "Pumping Iron." This documentary highlighted his training for the 1975 Mr. Olympia Body Building Championship. I was blown away by Arnold's complete focus. You'll probably be shocked by Arnold's comments in this video footage. Fast forward to 7:15 for Arnold's comments and his thought process on focus:

When I first watched this documentary, I was blown away by what Arnold said. However, the more I thought about it, the more I realized how critical focus was for success. It doesn't matter what your goal is. If you're not 100-percent focused on accomplishing your goal, you're doomed. I went back and made notes detailing Arnold's comments word-for-word. Here they are:

"If you want to be a champion, you cannot have any outside negative influence coming in to affect you. If I get emotionally involved with a girl, it can have a negative effect on my mind and destroy my workouts. Therefore I have to cut my emotions off and be cold in a way. Do this with the rest of things. If someone steals my car right now, I don't care. I can't be bothered with that. All I can do is call the insurance agency and they'll laugh about it. I trained myself for that and not to let things go into my mind.

When my father died, my mother called me on the phone and said, "Your father died." This was two months before a contest. She asked me to come home to the funeral and I said "No - It's too late. He is dead and nothing can be done.Sorry I can't come home."

Most real estate agents change course in their businesses every few weeks. Every time you change course in your business, you lose momentum. We've all experienced this at some level. One week, we want to focus on referrals. The next week, we change our minds and decide to go after seller prospects. A week later, we decide to go after buyers because we didn't get a new listing.

Not only do we change our target market of prospects often, we also change how we market from week-to-week without much consistency. We try classified advertisements, and then we skip to Craigslist. Then we get frustrated and decide to mess around with Twitter for a few weeks. Then we go to Facebook. And then we move on to the next big thing.

Zero focus.

The next time you think about changing your focus in business stop and think about Arnold. Ask yourself the following question:

Would Arnold allow himself to be distracted by what I'm considering?

NOTE: On January 6, 2010 I'll be releasing 100 copies of a new report titled "How Real Estate Agents Can Eliminate Negative Cash Flow in Their Businesses." I've been working on this report for several weeks and it's sure to change the way you think about your business going forward. In fact, I've come to the conclusion that selling more homes could lead to financial disaster in your business. I'll detail exactly why in this report. If you'd like to receive special advance access to this new report, join the Pre-Release email notification list at http://www.NotificationList.com

Comments

[Derrick]

Great reminder Rob! I must say that over my 20+ yr investing career I've taken a lot of flack over my "cold-ish" demeanor to 'outside-of-work' interrupters during the midst of my work day; I do not freely/kindly accept diversions from my production focused activities of growing my business as a private investor... It has been a very long road full of ups and downs: Monetarily Rewarding, Personally Satisfaction even through one Divorce and a few failed partnerships I still survived/thrived through it all. Where as today, I am even more dedicated to this idea of absolute focus in order to have an even more successful, more productive property investing biz than last year, 5 yrs ago, and even more than 20 yrs ago when I first got started. My success has always come down to and still continues to this day due in part to my own un-wavering determination, vision, and laser-focused approach to work all of my plans... Cheers Rob! ~ Derrick

[Shane]

Rob- Arnold is a machine!

I've followed him as far back as 1989 (when I was 12) and he has had a huge influence on my life.

Awesome reminder on Focus and it's a hell of a movie. Thought that you might have shown his funnier clip- although probably not family friendly.

Great blog Rob,

Later,

Shane

[Rob Minton]

Thanks Shane! There's a lot to learn from Arnold. If you're one of his fans, I recommend a book about his titled "Fantastic" by Laurence Leamer. It's jam packed with stories about Arnold and many life lessons, too!

Rob

[Rob Minton]

Derrick,

From what you've shared, you have a multi-million dollar education through your life experiences. More importantly, your unwavering focus will lead you to the goals you've set for yourself.

Accomplishing big things in life requires thick skin. Go big or go home!

Rob

[Michel Lautensack]

I just wish he was focused on good rebulician ideas now and not wondering all over the place with his views

Mike