The Chosen--Learning from your Successes

I am a practicing Massachusetts real estate attorney. I am a licensed Massachusetts realtor. I am a trained Massachusetts divorce mediator. I have many clients and many engagements. There are also many engagements which I would like to have had and did not. There was a time when I fretted over the deals I did not get, or the times when a potential client selected someone else to assist him, her or them. I do not do that anymore. Rather, I concentrate on the deals and engagements I have received and try a type of “reverse engineering” to see why I was selected and not another.

This new approach is recent. It began when I read, and re-read, Steve Jobs Stanford commencement speech. Aside from the emotional impact of Jobs’ words of wisdom, there were many “life lessons” contained therein. The one that struck me the most forcefully was Jobs’s concept of looking backwards when a project or task was completed. It seems that Mr. Jobs would analyze something that happened to him, or a marketing concept that he was involved in, and then try to understand how he reached the point he had reached. What in his background or training had made him lean toward a particular approach or method. Why did something work, when he was never sure that it would?

When you look at a successful engagement, or a listing which you really wanted and received, the best thing for you to do is analyze what it was in your presentation, or strategy, which turned the prospect into a client or customer. Was the fact that you worked really hard at your networking a factor? Did it happen because you were an active blog writer who shared your wisdom with others? Was it the charitable work you selflessly did not for personal aggrandizement but because you really believed that giving back was the way you wanted to live your life?

Sometimes, just doing the analysis is interesting. Sometimes plain old luck is involved. Whatever the answer, I have found that I feel much better, and I get better results going forward, in analyzing my successes and chalking off my failures without much event. I am wondering whether any of you believe the same way.