Three Habits That Keep People in This Business

Three Habits That Keep People in This Business

In ten years of running Land Academy, we have watched a lot of people start. We have also watched some of them step away and come back, a few of them more than once, and every single time we are glad to see them.

Here is the most useful thing we have learned from those conversations. The people who stay are rarely the smartest or the best funded. They are the ones who built three fairly ordinary habits early. All three are learnable, and none of them require you to be a different kind of person than you already are.

Habit One: Show Up on the Ordinary Days

When people describe what they would do differently, the sentence is almost always some version of “I wish I had made myself sit down and do it.”

Underneath that is something simple. Motivation comes and goes. Nobody wakes up every single morning thrilled to review deals, hat on, pencils sharpened, watching the phone and hoping it rings. Some days you have three deals in front of you, you wish you had thirty, and the work in front of you is just work.

Those are the days that compound.

So take motivation out of the equation and give the job a schedule instead. Today I review these three deals and decide what happens with each one. That is the whole plan. The people who build that rhythm early stop needing to feel inspired, which turns out to be an enormous advantage, because the business rewards consistent small actions far more than it rewards bursts of enthusiasm.

If you need to push yourself on a Tuesday, push yourself on a Tuesday. That is not a character flaw. That is the job.

Habit Two: Give It a Real Place in Your Calendar

The second thing we hear is “I wish I had made this a priority.”

Life is going to show up. Kids, school, work, travel, the family reunion in July. None of that is going away, and none of it is an obstacle you need to eliminate. It is simply scheduling.

The version of this that always makes us smile is someone deciding to time a mailer around a family reunion. Fair enough. But think about what next year’s reunion looks like after twelve months of steady work. That is the trade you are actually making.

Treat your mail dates like they are appointments with a client, because they are. Put them on the calendar for the next ninety days. Work the rest of your life around them the same way you work around anything else that matters. Everything that needs to happen in this business can be planned in advance, which means it can coexist with a full life. It just cannot survive being perpetually last.

Habit Three: Put Supportive People Around You

The third one is the most human, and it comes up often enough that we built an entire mindset event around it.

People say: I let someone who did not believe in this get in my head.

This happens in every field. Say you want to be a doctor. Some people will tell you it is a noble calling and you would be great at it. Others will find a reason you are not cut out for it. The field is irrelevant. There are always both kinds of people, and the ones you hear most often shape what you believe is possible.

Which makes this worth being deliberate about.

Start with the people closest to you. A partner who is on board changes everything. Our own arrangement has always been straightforward: Jack brings an idea, we look at the math and the time commitment together, and if the math works, we are in. He does not bring it to me if the math does not work. In six years together neither of us has ever said anything close to “why don’t you just get a real job,” and that is not luck. It is a two-way street we both decided to build.

Then look at your peers. This is where a community does real work. Having a group of people doing the same thing, on the same day, who can answer a question in twenty minutes instead of twenty days, replaces a lot of doubt with information. You handle your own corner of the world. The professional support is already in place.

The Decision Underneath All Three

Here is the deeper version of this, and it is worth a quiet evening of your own thinking.

At a dinner in San Diego recently with two other couples, the conversation turned to why each of us does what we do. One of the women asked Jack whether he had always been an entrepreneur. The honest answer was that he had never been anything else, and had not fully realized it until recently. Every job he ever had, he was working out how to own the thing instead.

The man sitting next to him said the same, and the two of them landed on the same sentence: we never gave ourselves another option.

That is the whole thing. If you leave yourself an out, life will eventually hand you a reason to take it, and the reason will be a good one. Everyone’s reasons are good. The people who stay simply never put the out on the table.

Worth knowing what is driving it, too. It does not have to be a Ferrari. For Jack it is much plainer than that: he has been wiped out before, twice when he was on his own, and he has no intention of being poor again. Whatever yours is, name it. The people with a clear answer are the ones still here in year ten.

So sit down with yourself, not with your spouse and not with a group, and ask whether this is actually who you are. It is a rarer answer than the internet suggests. Plenty of people want to skip the W2 and keep the paycheck, which is a reasonable thing to want and a different thing entirely. This is a full lifestyle, and it is a great one if it fits you.

One Advantage You Have That We Didn’t

Most people quit right after their first failure, because they assume it means something about them. It usually just means they were early.

When Jack started, nothing was vetted. You had an idea, you spent ten thousand dollars on a mailer, and you found out. The set of companies we run today exists because the ones before them did not work. We do not talk about those much, because what we are good at is buying and selling land, and that is the one that survived.

You are starting with a model that already got tested with somebody else’s money. That is a real head start, and it means a disappointing mailer is information, not a verdict.

And If You Stepped Away

Come back. You will not be the first, by a wide margin.

You are a few years older, with a few more years of experience and a much better sense of what you want. That is a stronger starting position than the one you left from. The door is open, the community is here, and we are happy to help you pick it back up.