Who Moved My Cheese? ... Reflections of the ideas from this work to help all of us in our real estate careers (Ocean City, New Jersey)
Spencer Johnson writes great books with only a limited number of pages. Now it is one thing to write a long excellent book; quite another to do it in only a 100 pages more or less. Johnson is one of the best. I've been wanting to read his latest book, Peaks and Valleys: Making Good and Bad Times Work for You - At Work and in Life (2009). And I found it in the Ocean City (NJ) Library, one of the best libraries I've ever been in, last night. With my wife out of town for an evening, I read the 100 page book between innings watch the Phillies lose a close one to the Mets. But the real winner was Johnson's new book.
But let's return to his first and major selling work, Who Moved My Cheese? - An Amazing Way to deal with Change in Your Work an in Your Life (1998). Johnson always includes at the end of his books a little card which contains the key points of the book ... you carry this around, or keep it on your desk, so that you can reference it as needed. I've had this card since about 2000. You must remember that my favorite reading next to a good mystery is the business and self-help collection which is always one of the three top 10-15 book selections in USA Today: Fiction, Non-Fiction, and Business.
Here is the card for "Who Moved My Cheese" entitled The Handwriting on the Wall:
Change Happens ... They keep Moving the Cheese
Anticipate Change ... Get Ready for the Cheese to Move
Monitor Change ... Smell the Cheese Often so you Know when It is Getting Old
Adapt to Change Quickly ... The Quicker You Let Go of Old Cheese, The Sooner You Can Enjoy New Cheese
Change ... Move with the Cheese
Enjoy Change ... Savor the Adventure and the Taste of New Cheese
Be Ready to Quickly Change Again and Again ... They Keep Moving the Cheese. * (Spencer Johnson - Who Moved My Cheese? 1998)
So what does this all have to do with real estate (and almost everything else in life)? Change Happens ... it's a fact of life. We change, others change, our families change, our companies change, and the real estate field changes. I've been a realtor in a second career since 1993. That was pre-Internet ... boy is it sure different today. How have we changed to meet the changes that happened? Do you know other agents who have not changed? What happened to them? Where are they?
We must all "monitor change" and "adapt." To the extent that we do ... we gain insights, we grow a little more, and we achieve success. But how many of us really monitor change and adapt. My educated guess would be "very few." It's that old 80-20 rule ... 20% of the people do 80% of the business. Probably 20% of the people are the ones who have adapted to change ... the other 80% have not done so.
But the real beauty as we continue in our careers and life. We can always change, and as Johnson's last point emphasizes "enjoy change. Our son, Nick, who lives in California and work for a major technology company has a job that is truly difficult for me to understand. I try to explain it to people, but it is also difficult for them to understand. He earned a liberal arts degree from a small honors college in Maryland, he majored in anthropology. When he graduated he didn't want to teach, dig, or go to graduate school. He and I spent a winter together in Ocean City, New Jersey after his graduation always getting the house back in shape before my wife, his mother, arrived on Friday nights. His girl friend was in Florence, Italy for a semester abroad. All he did was play around on a computer with a telephone connection (now how long ago is that). So I recommended that he consider another year of study in the networking field. He made an interesting move ... as we all must do all of the time. Dap
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