Grinders and Grinding

by Jeff Brown

Real Estate Investments Broker

Author website

I wake up each morning listening to various radio programs, all sports talk shows with one exception. They’re interesting most of the time, and since there are three of ’em, I can rotate ’till one grabs me. Earlier this week it was ESPN’s The Herd I think. Colin Cowherd talking about the difference between West Coasters and East Coasters and Midwesterners when it comes to discipline. Though they tended to generalize far too much geographically, their point was well made:

Great talent almost always loses out in the long run to great discipline. And great talent yoked to great discipline is nearly unbeatable.

When asked for an example he cited a couple elite teams — the Colts and Patriots. Both are Super Bowl Champs. Both have won far more than their share the last several seasons. Besides winning, they share another factor — they have more players with college degrees than the other teams. Discipline.

He then used Cincinnati as an example of a team with incredibly talented players but almost no visible discipline. Apparently Cincinnati, when translated, means Pay more attention to Me Me Me!! I think anyone who follows pro football can see the merit in these examples, as I did.

Don’t immediately jump to discipline in real estate or the mortgage business, look back on other things you’ve done in your lives that wouldn’t have been remotely possible without it.

I’ve had three hobbies in my life in which I’ve been involved at fairly intense levels. Bodybuilding, baseball umpiring, and running.

Anybody who’s done any of those seriously, knows it involves what Cowherd called grinding — or being a grinder. It’s a perfect description in my opinion. All three of those disciplines require very long periods of both learning curves, practice, and the gaining of real life, real time experience. All three of those is a grind, and there’s nobody but you doin’ it. You lift the weight, you study the rules and apply the correct on-field mechanics, you log the miles each day.

It’s a grind — there’s simply no pretty way to dress it up, is there?

Colin’s point was that those from the east coast and midwest are raised in “Grinder” cultures. Every day they work at getting better, at doing what’s called for, what will produce results ultimately. They watched their dads go to the factory, or mill, or office every day as they grew up. They saw the rewards for faithfully grinding it out — day after day after day.

I remember conversations with Brian Brady about his years on Wall Street, Phoenix style. He spoke of the newbies hired by the big ‘houses’ and how they turned them into 50-80 hours a week cold calling zombies — talk about the poster children for Grinder. But like Brian pointed out, what they learned from those months, which sometimes turned into years of daily grinding on the phone, was that in the end, grinders end up plantin’ their flags at the summit.

Finally, if you’ve never really experienced the life of a grinder, think back to that kid you used to privately smirk at, whose dream was something for which you thought he didn’t have chance number one. He made it though, didn’t he? You bet he did. We all know folks like that. They toiled in the fields to which their goals led them — and before we knew it, they’d accomplished what nobody thought possible for them.

Whether you’re IQ is 100 or 150 — whether you’re hugely talented or can barely get out of your own way — become a grinder and find out how miracles happen. ‘Course, the truth is, the killer results produced by the grinders of the world aren’t miracles at all, any more than a farmer harvesting wheat in October is a miracle after all the grinding work he did from early spring on — day in, and day out.

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Grinders rule the world.