Break your Addiction to Instant Gratification

The paycheck chase never leads to long-term satisfaction

Chris Suarez, Co-Founder, PLACE

One of my favorite studies of all time was done in the 1970s by researcher Walter Mischel at Stanford University. Children were offered the choice of one marshmallow right now or, if they were willing to wait 15 minutes, an adult would return and give them two marshmallows. It’s a perfect distillation of instant versus delayed gratification. The participants’ academic and life progress were measured for years after the original study; the kids who chose delayed gratification had more successful outcomes in everything from SAT scores to self-regulation as adolescents.

So, what do marshmallows have to do with real estate?

Let’s go back to my early days when I started as an agent at 21. I was living in New York City, where I was born and raised. My office was inside the third building that fell on 9/11. Thankfully, I was house-sitting that day, but it was a wake-up moment for me. Evaluating whether to stay in the city where I’d grown up, I realized I was ready for a change. So just like that, I moved across the country, nearly as far west as I could go, to Eugene, Oregon, leaving my real estate business behind. I would spend the next five years in Eugene building a new one. Later, when my wife and I decided to move to Portland, Oregon, the business I’d worked so hard to rebuild in Eugene was gone, again.

That’s when I realized there’s something wrong with the real estate business as a whole if I can spend five years building my business, pouring blood, sweat, and tears (to say nothing of time, energy, and finances) into it, and then tomorrow it’s gone.

Now I know the reason for those losses; I spent my early years in this industry choosing the single marshmallow.

Chris is passionate about real estate coaching, leading a number of consulting programs through his company, Xperience Growth. You can also find Chris speaking at industry events across the globe.

Again and again, I chose the sale, when what I should have been choosing was a sustainable business. More effort, undoubtedly, and a longer wait time too, but a much greater reward in the end.

A Different Business Blueprint

When I got to Portland, instead of simply diving immediately back into sales, I decided to build this business the right way. I chose to wait, knowing that delayed gratification would net me something more than a business that vanished to nothing when I moved 100 miles away. I wanted to build something that wouldn’t depend on a specific location, which I know runs counter to so much of what we’ve been taught in real estate. We want to be the local guy, the one people know, who they see on the streets, but being that guy would mean losing my business the next time I moved. I started challenging everything the industry had led us to believe about what being a real estate agent is all about. Sure, I was starting over again, but this time I was heading in the opposite direction.

That meant hitting the books. Studying, reading, and figuring out what other people are doing — these are things I love. Because I wanted a different start this time, I read up on different industries. I looked at insurance businesses and technology companies. I checked out every business book in the library. One that caught my eye was, “The Millionaire Real Estate Agent,” by Gary Keller.

I come from a world where my dad was a copy machine repairman from the day he graduated high school until the day he retired, 50 years later. I remember being 12 or 13 years old asking my dad, “What’s a million dollars?” His reply? “Don’t worry about that. You’ll never make a million dollars. In fact, you’ll work every day of your life, and you’ll add it up at the end, and it still won’t be a million dollars.” That was his story, so it became mine.

When I saw this book about “millionaire” real estate agents, I thought it was a joke, but I read it anyway. It became the first time someone modeled running a real estate business and not just running sales. I began to emulate that model the best I could, setting up separate divisions for business, lead generation, operations, and budgets. I used an organizational chart. Little by little, it started looking more like a full-fledged business than a typical real estate sales practice.

YOU’RE ADDICTED TO THE PAYCHECK

A big part of running your business as a business is not just transacting as much as you can possibly transact. Chasing sales is choosing the first marshmallow. And I get it — that first marshmallow looks really good.

At one point in my career, I was selling 50 to 70 homes a year; coming from nothing, that is a lot of money. Deconstructing that instant gratification — being willing to do it differently — is nearly impossible once you’re addicted to the money. I wasn’t even spending much at the time. I bought my first condo for $86,000, and I was living cheaply, but I still had this addiction to what we’re taught to do in this industry. I told myself, “I do this activity, and I get this result. Every time I do that open house, I get two clients, and I’m going to close one of them. Every time I close, I’m making money.”

That instant gratification — activity equals result — is what drives our industry. It’s almost like these addictive personalities are drawn to real estate because we do something and then get something almost immediately, and what we get also happens to be a lot of money.

Ultimately, instant versus delayed gratification looks like this in real estate: I’m going to pick up the phone and go get a sale, or I believe I’ll get two sales if I actually take the time to build out this system or follow this process. It’s choosing the pain of discipline over the ease of instant gratification, but let me tell you the delayed gratification is bigger here than anywhere else. No one gets checks like these in other industries. But while we have these massive paychecks on the line, our industry has built this scarcity mindset. We all have the fear of our commissions going away.

Put Your Trust In Consistency

Fear and trust play inescapable roles in our ability to delay gratification. Think about it — if the kids in that experiment are afraid the adult isn’t really going to come back in 15 minutes, why on earth would they hold out for two marshmallows that might never appear? Of course, they’d gobble down the first one.

A lot of the fear in our industry stems from not really trusting the models. We don’t trust that if we do this each and every day for three years, our business is going to be here and thriving. When we don’t trust the models, we don’t commit. Instead, we pinball all over the place. Unfortunately for this method, success comes not from sporadic activity but from disciplined daily effort.

One of the biggest obstacles people face when transitioning from being good at sales to turning sales into a business, is lack of consistency. I don’t care how bad you are when you start, if you’re consistent with your activities, you’re going to improve simply by doing them consistently over time. I was never great, or even good at anything, but I did work consistently over a period of time, and I got better…and better…and better.

Once I committed to a model and continued to learn new models entering the industry, it gave me this runway to live in this world of delayed gratification. To get there, I had to brace myself for the possibility of not selling a house for three years, knowing I would still be fine, as I had no intention of changing my budget. And I did. I trusted that consistency would take my business to new heights — and it did.

Since rebuilding — my third real estate business — in Portland in 2008, I’ve produced a scalable, sustainable business that isn’t dependent on where I live or how much I sell. And you can do the same.

Don’t settle for one marshmallow. Wait out the temptation for instant gratification. In the long run, you’ll get more. Make more. Build more. Be more.