Chicken Soup for Your Business

by Kris Berg

Realtor, Associate Broker

Author website

April Groves shared her thoughts on how mundane tasks often tend to produce seemingly unrelated benefits. I love this post – Whether, as April suggests, it is the ordinary act of house cleaning (okay, not so ordinary in my house) which inspires healthy eating or the simple ritual of applying make-up which increases productivity, random tasks can work to produce surprising results. (I can’t leave this last “make-up thing” without warning April that when her odometer nears a significant roll-over milestone as mine is, the task of “putting on one’s face” becomes about as simple as engineering a space station).

April is right, though – We needn’t surrender our lives and our work to a constant state of entropy. And yes, you naysayers, there is a real estate connection in all of this. I think it is safe to say that we all from time to time find ourselves either on a low boil or losing steam. We all periodically risk burn-out.  Let’s call it Business Block, and sometimes the answer isn’t to do more of what got you into this place, but to recognize your motivating triggers. I have my own mechanisms for harnessing the energy to refocus.  I make chicken soup – Using the Suzuki method. No defined recipe, but just a lot of seemingly unrelated stuff from the pantry which sounds good and I intuitively know will make me hungry again.

Dress for Success

I remember my elementary school dress code. Skirts or dresses for the girls were required. The argument was that we would be more inclined to learn if we dressed the part; sloppy appearances would translate to sloppy attitudes and shorter attention spans. Today, many light years later, this is just silly. Blue jeans don’t symbolize a day off – Ask any Microsoft employee. For me, they symbolize “no appointments” and therefore a “back office day”. My most productive back office days come courtesy of Abercrombie and Fitch. Unfortunately, Steve’s “back office day” uniform involves a pair of hideous day-glo orange shorts which, ironically, work the same magic for me. They send me running for the office.

Blogging

Some days there is just no wind in my sails. I suspect even Steve Jobs has a day now and then when he just isn’t feeling the love for the iJob. For me, finishing a great post or, in this case, a stupid-introspective-nobody-really-cares-but-I-enjoyed-it post, lights a fierce fire under my b-hiney. For some strange reason, hitting that publish button leaves me with desire to move on to overthrowing a smallish third-world government or, at the very least, go about doing some serious real estate business. I think the reason is that blogging forces the brain to engage, and writing even the Dumbest Post of the Week (Greg should consider adding this category to his Carnival – for me) requires some deliberate thought. Granted, sometimes this deliberate thought is along the lines of, “How long will Greg allow me to contribute this drivel to his otherwise deep-thinking blog?”, but, hey, it’s something. So far (knock wood), I’m still here.

Eavesdrop

Spending time at the feed reader always leaves me feeling inspired, inspired to do more and be better. It’s soul food. Ideas spawn ideas, and an hour spent playing Snoop Dogg on others’ sites is worth a U-Haul of motivational or educational seminars. Whether it is the really bad post that reminds me I can do better (take this one, for instance), or the amazingly exceptional article that reminds me that I am being outclassed and outperformed by others in the profession, immersing myself in the brains and business of others can’t help but force me to reconsider and reevaluate my approach to my business. A morning at the feed reader nearly always results in renewed enthusiasm for my work and gets me caring about real estate again.

404 Page Not Found

When I want to shake things up, I immediately set about blowing up my website. Or my blog. Or, in the broader sense, my entire hard drive. I love to tinker, and while I am not a certified, qualified, fully-licensed Geek, I know enough to leave some serious wreckage in my wake. At any given moment, I have a million “great ideas” on the back burner for improving our online content and presentation. Nine times out of ten, my great idea du jour ends in my devoting the remainder of the day undoing my mess, often with the help of my good friends at Best Buy. One of the most frequently shouted phrases in my home, second only to “What’s for dinner?”, is “Where did my sidebar go?” Sometimes, however, through divine intervention or dumb luck, I end up with a new mash-up, a new widget, or other new feature which actually (miracle of miracles) works. Whatever the outcome, it gets my head back in the game, and I find that I am once again thinking in terms of business and betterment and success. When I am feeling less industrious, I just repeatedly add and remove that stupid MyBlogLog widget from my Blog, a simple act I have repeated about 94 times in the past month alone. It is empowering; that much I know how to do in my sleep and without breaking anything.

Belly Laughs

Laughter can bring things back into perspective quickly. My daughter, the one we call our American Idiom, usually fills this role. Most recently, she told us how she needed to take a copy of her “inebriation record” to school. We think she meant her inoculation record, but we still aren’t entirely sure about this. Unfortunately, I can’t always count on Emily to be “on”. This is where the MLS comes in. This morning’s nuggets included “Poen space!”, “Beautiful kirchen”, and “Rod iron”. The language of the MLS is a mysterious one, and is sure to put the laugh-track back into your life. If that doesn’t work, I will loan you Emily.

Brisket

This is about as random as it gets. It’s just that after 20 years of serving my family beef disguised as a large dog’s chew toy, I have finally mastered the art of cooking the perfect low-life roast. It makes me happy, and I think this is what this post boils down to.

Success in real estate, in any business for that matter, is mostly mental. Doing things you enjoy bring focus, inspire and motivate. We all find ourselves in the deep-blue funk occasionally (and more than occasionally this is because you ate my brisket), but taking a step back and trying those tangential, seemingly unproductive acts which you know ultimate produce results may be just the recipe. Whether your pot boileth over or the flame has gone out, tapping into the things that bring you joy may be chicken soup for your business.

Now, I am ready to get back to work.