Two events in my life forever changed my thinking on what I believe a person is capable of achieving through God-given talents alone. The first was when a Baylor professor chided a certain cavalier young student who thought he might have all the answers. (That would be me, of course.) He said, “Son, you’re not the first person to want to have a successful career. You’re not the first person to have dreams you want to fulfill. You’re not the first person to want to be the very best you can be in life. You need to realize that people have lived before you.
And you might be wise to slow down for just a second and figure out what they learned on their journey before you start your own.” I listened attentively and thought I understood what he was saying, but I wouldn’t really hear him for almost a decade. The second event happened in 1987 when our young company was faced with a collapsed economy. Up to that point we had been successful on certain levels, but there were now some big challenges that were holding us back. In the end, I found that I didn’t have all the answers. In my opinion, our growth till then had been sustained through sheer hard work. Then the market turned sour, and we were faced with a new and very real ceiling of achievement. That was the year I read Unlimited Power by Anthony Robbins and finally heard my professor: “People have lived before
you.” Robbins’ book made that point in a very powerful way. Here are some of the passages that I underlined and that I’d like to share with you:
Passage #1: Long ago, I realized that success leaves clues, that people who produce outstanding results do specific things to create those results.
Passage #2: Actions are the source of all results. . . . This process of discovering exactly and specifically what people do to produce a specific result is called modeling.
Passage #3: To me, modeling is the pathway to excellence. . . . The movers and shakers of the world are often professional modelers—people who have mastered the art of learning everything they can by following other people’s experience rather than their own.
Passage #4: To model excellence you should be a detective, an investigator, someone who asks lots of questions and tracks down all the clues to what produces excellence. . . . Building from the successes of others is one of the fundamental aspects of most learning. Epiphany! A lightbulb went off in my head, and I had an “aha.” I then slowed down just long enough to start looking in much greater detail at what successful people were doing.
I also systematically involved my team in the modeling process. The models we discovered and implemented that year helped us break through the challenges of the lagging economy and laid the groundwork for our later accomplishments since this breakthrough, it has been my goal to actively, aggressively, and continuously model the real estate business for its owners and agents. At the same time, I do think that it would be a mistake to discard creativity. Without a doubt, we have been innovative in our real estate business. The trick to getting the most out of our creativity is always to start with a set of proven foundational models for success. Once we find success with our initial models, we can then allow for creative thinking. But only after we’ve followed the models do we allow ourselves to tweak, innovate, refine, and fiddle until the models work to the level of our expectations. The key to taking this approach is to avoid placing creative innovation ahead of the effective implementation of proven foundational models.