The Hunt for Greg’s October: What I found by quarrying my goals.

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

To be honest, I would like to hear from other folks on what they’re doing about their goals. I will tell you from my own experience that perfect performance is elusive, but if you make the effort to track your efforts, it’s a lot easier to stay on track — and to get back on track if you stray. I may write a MySQL app with a PHP front-end, just to make record-keeping that much easier.

In October, I tracked a lot of stuff, so much that I ended up not tracking some things, so much was there to keep track of. In the photo, my goals are documented at the top:

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.

It’s at the end of that list that I fell apart. I had a ton of appointments, and I wrote a lot of contracts. These are not hugely meaningful: It takes me a lot of contracts, right now, to get to one closed escrow. I actually closed two deals — only two — but one of them was a short sale that I held together against all odds for nine months. That’s not a proud accomplishment, financially, but it speaks volumes about improvements I’ve been trying to make in my sales skills. I opened four escrows, which is the threshold of a pace I’d like to improve upon. Altogether, it was a pretty good month for real estate work.

Software was no problem at all — most days quite a bit more than 30 minutes. Much of this was the server swaps we went through, but I wrote a ton of new software, some of which I’ve discussed in recent posts. I have quite a few more tricks up my sleeve, plus a lot of my recent work is going to be leveraged in new tools as we go forward.

Walking and working out have not been a problem, although we missed walking days here and there. I’ve gotten to a point where the free weights work I’m doing is almost too easy, so I need to add more weight this month.

Playing the guitar was my most-frequent omission, although, if I had time, I sometimes played quite a bit more than half an hour. I truly stink as a guitarist, but I like to do it, even so. And by playing (almost) every day, I sound quite a bit better than I did a month ago.

Here’s a surprise: The weight bench has turned out to be a good friend to the guitar. My left hand is quite a bit stronger than it has been, which makes pushing strings around a lot easier. I have a Variax 500, which is a fun guitar to play, because it’s twice as forgiving as a Stratocaster. But I also have a Les Paul Junior — a very cheap guitar — that forgives no mistakes, ever. Pushing a freight train around every morning has made that cheap little Les Paul sound very good at night.

I agree with Don Reedy: I view myself as a hero in the Greek sense — which is very different from being a hero in the DC Comics sense. It’s no accident that the dog who gave our business its identity is named Odysseus. Ulixes the trickster is my kind of hero — as is Cyrano, who stands, I never forget, not high it may be, but alone. All this is funny to me, because my life is such a ruin, financially, right now. But I’ve always done just exactly what I want, I’ve never done anything I didn’t want to do, and I have never betrayed my own truth.

Business is good and getting better, and so is everything else. I’m not 100% perfect at this calendar game — not perfect at keeping every goal every day, and not perfect at recording my efforts — but I think this exercise has been hugely beneficial. It’s keeps me focused. It keeps me on track. And it yields good results over time.

I commend you to the practice, and I encourage you to tell us how you’re doing with it.