Deliberate Practice meets the Real Estate Agent

In my quest to improve my performance and to reduce the amount of time that I am actually working I am spending time researching deliberate practice strategies.

Deliberate Practice and the four hour real estate agent

If you are not familiar with deliberate practice it is the concept that doing the right type of work will create enormous results vs. just doing work. I want to be a great real estate agent and not simply an average one. To get better I have been reading A LOT! There are a number of books that have been written that cover this topic. One of them Is Geoff Colvin’s Talent is Overrated.  Another is Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. Many of the strategies have been used by students who are trying to master their course work in as efficient of manner as possible Athletes use deliberate practice methods to improve their results rapidly. Both the academic and athletic results have been well documented. Since it has been a long time since I was a college student much less an athlete I have been looking to find more information on how it can help improve professional performance. Thus, I am dabbling in deliberate practice research.

Since I recently revisited the Four Hour Work Week I was exposed to the concept that working smarter not harder is one of the key components to reducing the amount of time necessary to accomplish my goals both personally and professionally. This awakening has lead me to reading the above mentioned books along with finding some new blogs to keep tabs on. One of the more interesting blogs that I have found is Study Hacks. Study Hacks Deliberate Practice is the blog of a 29 year old computer scientist and assistant professor at Georgetown University who is interested in finding out what makes some people so successful while others are not. I have spent a good amount of time reading the articles posted there.

Presently I am using deliberate practice to help me study for my managing brokers license.

I have been “saying” I would be getting my managing brokers license for a couple of years now. I’ve gone so far as to pay for the course work. I’ve put in perhaps 15 hours of actual study time over the course of the past two years. Now I am implementing a new strategy of actually focusing my energies for 3 hours daily on my studies. This is not exactly the most fun I’ve ever had. Yet, by turning off my phone, not having music going in the background,while running Rescue Time (to keep me from sneaking peaks at ESPN or Facebook) I find that the three hours goes by quite quickly. Once the timer dings I am done. I move on to my other tasks. I am finding that by blocking out the time and actually seriously focusing on my studying I am retaining much more than I have ever previously had. Once done I stop thinking about my courses and start working on my contracts.

I am also using the deliberate practice concepts to improve my blogging.

I have multiple blogs that I either own  or contribute on. Two of them Classic Homes Northwest and Explore Tacoma are going through major renovations. By working on the important tasks necessary to improve both blogs I am able to focus and prioritize the tasks that need to be done instead of the fun or easy tasks that I usually focused on. Deliberate practice at work!
In real estate it seems so easy to be pulled in different directions and then never completing anything. I encourage anyone who is feeling overwhelmed to stop and take some time and read up on deliberate practice. My results have been simply amazing and I bet that yours will be too.

Thanks for taking the time to stop by and read my blog. I hope you will leave a comment. It’s nice to know that someone is out there reading the articles. If you are interested in more posts about deliberate practice you can follow my blog here.