Happy New Year! And . . . Are You Feelin' Lucky Punk? Are Ya?
Wow! Can you believe it's February 2nd already? Groundhog day! Hopefully this won't end up for me like it did for Bill Murray. I couldn't take reliving a day over and over again. ;-) Anyway, fasten your seatbelts, I've got a lot to cover today to get you up to speed.Where to begin? My last blog posting was in November, and sooooo much has happened since then! I've gone and bought Teri and I a new home. We flew down to Arizona and California for Thanksgiving to visit Teri's dad and my parents. Golf in November is pretty cool . . .even in 60 MPH winds. ;-) We had a lovely Christmas with friends and family. New Years was spent with Annette and Rick and Annete's niece and nephew Jarod and Janessa playing games and ringing in the new year in grand fashion!
The Phatboyz decided to try to motivate each other to become more healthy in 2006 with our little contest. We had our first boyz weekend of 2006 in Ocean Shores. A good time was had by all!
The John L. Scott awards were announced and I'm happy to say I made it solidly into President's Gold in 2005! A couple more transactions and I'd have had an outside shot at President's Elite! Ahh, but that's a new goal for 2006.
OOH! And I cleaned my office! Anyone that knows me at all, knows this has been a goal of mine for awhile. Many of you are thinking "How can that be a goal, just clean the friggin' office!" But if you had seen it for the past 2 years, you'd know. ;-)
HOUSE SITUATION
So let me update you on the house situation. I was driving around in Sunrise, specifically Rebecca Ridge and Ridge View in late December looking at one builder Teri and I were particularly interested in. They had released some new lots and we wanted to know if the home we wanted would be built on one of these new lots. Unfortunately, the one home that we liked had literally a 5 foot back yard! I don't know how people can live like that. But on the way out, I stopped at a new builder, Luxury Pacific Homes. I walked in to the model home and it was an "Uh-oh" moment. "Uh-Oh" meaning my wallet was burning my butt cause I felt an offer coming on. Well I drug Teri and Marcus out there later that week and we walked through one of the homes that was nearly complete. It has about 99% of the features we wanted in a home. Teri was at least mildly impressed . . . so I drug her out there again on a Wednesday night and we spent literally 2 hours going through the home and figuring out where everything would go and what it would be like to actually LIVE in the home. You have to understand, we've literally been looking for a new home for 5 years. To find one that we can actually make work for us is rare. I think this is the 3rd or 4th home in that time period that we found where we were both like "Yep, we can do this". Teri didn't honestly think I'd pull the trigger. Well the next day, while working out at Pennington, I submitted an offer, the builder countered on a couple of minor points and I signed off on it. I called Teri to say "We have a house!" . . . She was flabbergasted. Her big ticket item that she wanted was a big yard. Well this has a slightly smaller yard than what we have now, but it's still 65 feet from the foundation to the back fence and 50 feet wide. It's a good size. Today they were continuing to build out the 2nd floor. They said the roof trusses would be delivered tomorrow, so by Monday it should pretty well look like a whole house. Here's a picture of the current progress taken this morning.
Phatboyz Contest
So Steve set a goal to motivate at least one other phatboy to get in shape and get healthier in 2006. Well this kind of evolved into a contest of sorts. So the phatboyz (John, Steve, Erick, Scott and Jerry) are all going to work on losing weight and improving their overall health this year. Personally I've vowed to eliminate daily soda drinking (I'm allowing myself 5 sodas per month), daily fast food (I'm allowing 3 trips through a drive thru per month), lose 44 pounds, begin a wokout routine and a host of other fitness goals. To this end, my soda goal was to be complete by 1/31/06. I'm happy to report in the month of February I am soda free. OK, only 2 days, but it's a start. For the 1st month of the year, with only one exception (boyz weekend) I never had soda after 10AM, so I have been weening myself off it. Next up is the fast food. My goal is to eliminate it by 3/31/06. Right now the only trips through the drive thru occur in the morning for breakfast. AS SOON AS I can find a breakfast that I like that ISN'T fast food, I'll eliminate that trip too. But simply cutting soda from that trip too will be a big help. Steve has been blogging about his progress and even keeping some Excel Charts up for his progress. He's working on a website for the rest of us too, so that'll be cool when he gets that up and running.
Are You Feelin' Lucky Punk? Are Ya?
I'll bet in all the commotion you lost track of how many shots I fired didn't you? You're probably thinking to yourself did he fire 5 shots? or 6? Well are you feelin' lucky punk? Are ya?
Or something like that . . . one of the greatest movie lines ever. Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry. Ok, this came up today in my 1st official coaching call with my new Coach Anne. You see, in my nearly 3 years in Real Estate, I've been fairly successful. Closing 10 transactions my first year, 22 my second, and 29 last year. My goal is 33 this year, and with Emily's help, I'm sure I'm gonna reach it. In that time span, I've been able to sock away 3 months personal and business expenses in savings. Pay off all my consumer debt (with the exception of my home), replace my 9-5 income I had at Adobe, and begin to again fund my investment portfolio (I Promise Mick, It's on it's way!). In my discussion with Anne this morning, I revealed that through all that, I still feel like I've just been lucky. Like all the hard work and dedication that I put into my career has been blind dumb luck. I'm telling myself that it's because we're in a hot market. etc. that I've had my success. So she wanted me to journal about it . . . ok, this is as close as I get to journaling, but it's an easy way to share it with her too. So right now I'm just getting it out there. BUT I'm also going to work on wrapping my head around the fact that I have been working hard and I HAVE been putting systems and processes into place to ensure my success now and in the future. That this isn't just all blind, dumb luck. You see it's times like this that I'm really thankful that I'm still in the coaching program at Buffini and Company. Occasionally I see the charge on my CC and think . . man, maybe I should drop out . . .but then the challenges like this come in and I'm grateful again. Maybe coaching isn't for everyone, but at least for the foreseeable future, it's for me. So Anne, I'm thinkin' about it. And I'll be blogging about it. And we'll beat it. And business will explode.
- johnboy out