Achieving your goals: Things can get a great deal better, over time, if you work at them just a little bit every day.

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Here’s my November:

Not bad, and the guitar is sounding pretty decent by now. I’m more action than traction selling real estate, but that’s been the story of my life for the past five years.

Here’s the secret decoder ring, what all those sloppy symbols mean:

S – Write software or work on web-based marketing for the business.

G – Play the guitar for at least half an hour.

W – Walk with Cathleen and the dogs for half an hour.

X – Work out for half and hour.

A – Attend an appointment with a real estate buyer or seller.

C – Write a real estate contract.

O – Open an escrow.

$ – Close an escrow.

Better news first: The server is rockin’ and I’m getting a lot done a little at a time.

Walking and working out are doing great things for both my physique and my psyche. I bumped my repetitions on free weights from 30 to 40 to 50 reps. I’m headed for 60 reps in December. I lost six actual pounds of weight, but, more importantly, I dropped an inch at the waist and at my belly. The accretion of new muscle mass will burn away fat at a steady pace, so I feel like I’m getting where I want to go.

Meanwhile, the guitar is sounding fine to me. Music of any kind is a kinesthetic art: You need to know what to do, as a matter of praxis and theory, but your muscles need to know it, too. To play the guitar, you have to have a perfect muscle memory of dozens of common hand shapes, and you have to be able to hit those shapes perfectly, with a lot of torque, precisely on time. It ain’t easy, which is why it’s so easy to make painful noises on the guitar.

But playing the electric guitar is its own reward. An acoustic guitar has its own sound and it’s own style of playing. But the essential component, when you’re playing an electric guitar, is not the guitar but the amplifier. I can pull a lot of sound out of a solid-body electric without plugging it in. But when you put power behind that sound, you’re making an entirely different style of music. The guitar is a stringed drum, really, and it plays rhythm parts most often. The sound of an amplified guitar — even when you play lead parts — is inherently percussive, and the best fun from playing electric comes when you can’t hear the strings at all, when the amplified sound across the room is much louder than the tinny strings buzzing in your lap.

You can do things with an electric guitar that you can never do with an acoustic box: Piercing sustains, bullet-like quick notes and chords, flanges and echos and tape loops. I still can’t play anything that sounds like actual music to me, but I can make that thing talk for me, and I love to hear what it has to say.

I’m bad at noting opened and closed escrows, but there aren’t enough of them, anyway. I know this will come as a shock to all the thoughtful gentlemen who show up here to display their imaginary third testicles, but selling real estate in Phoenix right now is a hard way to make an easy living. I work a lot, and I work with a lot of really interesting people, but it can be a bear to keep a transaction together all the way to the finish line. There are already too many ways for deals to fall apart, and now interest rates, so long our best friend, are about to turn on us. Was I forged from a different mettle, I might despair.

We’re doing the due diligence to start a second brokerage, this one focused on property management for our investors, so I’m adding a P to December’s calendar. And I want to let Brother Willie out to play a little, so I want to devote some time every day to coaxing him into writing for me. That gets me up to ten things to record, and I’m not a punctilious kind of guy. But I’m living proof that this praxis works — that setting and documenting goals is the way to achieve those goals.

It’s funny, really. Who would think that devoting just a little bit of time to my goals, every day, could produce such salutary results in so little time. But I can see the results I’m achieving, not just on the calendar but in the shape of my body, in the sound of my guitar, in the quantity of work I’m getting done. The money could be easier, but I know it will be in the long run.

This really works. I encourage you to prove it to yourself.