Influence on Easy Mode. Over the years, my father has told me… | by Lucca Haraway | Jun, 2023

Over the years, my father has told me many times that very few people actually try.

For over forty years, he was a successful real estate broker, coach, and trainer. Even though he retired a few years ago, he still brokers more sales than most active realtors.

Not too long ago, he told me about how he used to give the tools for success to hundreds of fledgling realtors in his training classes. But, after the novelty stage of “becoming” a realtor wore off, the majority only made a few sales a year… mostly among friends and family. They just liked saying, “I’m a realtor,” when meeting people; they didn’t actually sell.

In the three years I worked in the plumbing trade, I had a boss who sat with the team every Wednesday and basically taught us how to ethically get rich in plumbing. He also suggested we read one particular book over and over again. He’d worked in the trade for over thirty years, and shared with us everything that could go wrong. He taught us everything we could ever want to know about sales.

A lot of the guys could barely stay awake.

No one read the book, no one implemented his strategies. They either made mediocre money, or they eventually crashed, burned, and disappeared to go chase the “high” again at the next plumbing outfit.

I’ve worked several different jobs across four different countries; it doesn’t matter who you are, who you encounter, or what their culture is; by default, very few people try to do anything.

Most of them are waiting for a more-successful friend or family member to offer them a job or opportunity where they can do as little work as possible for as much pay as possible.

Once you see the world this way, all you have to do is try just a little bit harder. You can complicate it by taking dozens of courses and devouring books, or you can simply develop your language and focus.

Recently, I wrote a blog post about this, detailing why I traveled thirty minutes away, and paid a few dollars more, for a barber who is slightly better than the others.

Recently, on Twitter, a stranger contacted me with a sales pitch out of the blue. Like a lot of these marketers/creators/influencers/etc. she spoke only in superficial terms, not describing what she’d actually read.

When she says, “I like your content,” I’m left asking, “which content? The thing I said about Mike Tyson? The reflection I had about an incident in the casino five years ago? The Marcus Aurelius quote?”

An A.I. chatbot could tell me it “liked the content.” How are YOU different from an A.I. chat bot?

And we “Think alike?”

About what? The superiority of Italian pizza? The importance of developing your language before chasing a new purpose? The fact that David Lynch’s Blue Velvet gets better over time, like a fine wine?

This is the approach from someone who earnestly wants my business, but she speaks only in generalities. It would be the equivalent of me going up to an attractive woman and saying, “Hi, I’m a man. You’re a woman.”

Ok, and… ?

In contrast, here’s a correspondence on the same day from a mentor I’ve known for over a decade. He doesn’t need to get his foot in the door with me or earn my business, and yet he speaks in a precise language.

The only thing he did different was mention my work by name.

“Oh,” I thought, “I’m not talking to an A.I. chatbot. Yay!”

Everyone craves niche. They want to be called my name. Instead of you saying, “How’s your son,” they want to hear, “How’s Michael doing in college?”

It takes labor and focus to be this way, but it’s not actually hard to do. It’s much harder to go on being generic, and getting rejected, then getting depressed wondering why people won’t let you pitch your services to them.

When people look for their niche, and purpose, it’s often as simple as developing your language and focusing on other people instead of ONLY thinking of the sale YOU want to make.

Easy.