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Success and its Sugary Sweetness (Posted March 21, 2016)

We have a guy here in our office who always has an interesting story.  He’s never told us that he stole the hat off of Fidel Castro’s head and played “keep away” or beat the pants off Usain Bolt in a private, closed-track race, so we tend to believe him and get a good laugh whenever he tells us about an experience he had or about one of his family members.  One of his stories goes like this:

He’s the youngest of four kids, and the brother just older than he was a huge fan of sugar and all things sweet when they were growing up together.  This love for sweets went to the extreme as, according to our office mate, his brother insisted on putting sugar on his Cap’n Crunch cereal.  Never mind that it tore up the roof of your mouth to the point which you had to wait five to seven days before eating another bowl of the stuff, the cereal itself isn’t much more than processed sugar anyway!  Upon hearing this, you would think you were about to be on the receiving end of a cautionary tale, that his brother’s teeth all fell out by the time he hit puberty, he weighed 400 lbs. by the time he started high school, and his growth was stunted to the point that he was the same height as he was wide – throw in a love triangle, and this would be the ideal guest for Jerry Springer. 

Alas, this brother of his has all of his teeth (still), was a multiple-letter varsity athlete in high school, and he hit 6’2” by the time he was a junior.  Wait, there’s more.  He went on to get accepted to and graduated from West Point, received an officer’s commission in the Army, and later went on to Harvard (the university near Boston, not the typing school in Wichita) and got his MBA – and, according to the guy in our office, he was still eating sugar on his Cap’n Crunch whenever he got the chance during this time. 

How is this possible, we all asked?  The answer is simple: his mom and dad picked their battles, and they decided sugar intake wasn’t one that needed to be pitched.  They could see how active he was, and his drive to get the grades and amass the resume needed to get into a military academy was more than sufficient to keep him focused on his studies.  In other words, they saw the bigger picture and knew that he saw it, too – that was the key. 


More often than not, your success as an agent hinges upon your ability to see the bigger picture and make sure your client sees it, too.  That’s, of course, easier said than done.  When your client tells you how much she loves a particular house (it has everything she’s looking for: big kitchen, great school district, convenient shopping, etc.) but dismisses it as “the right one” because she doesn’t like the pink paint in the bathroom, your first inclination is to grab the iPhone out of her hand and make her eat it.  However, that’s frowned upon by the NAR for some reason.  What you can do, though, is take a photo of that bathroom, and with the help of one of numerous smartphone apps, change the wall color to a neutral white and say, “See how much better it looks in white.”  You give her a new vision – and it’s a heck of a lot easier to do with today’s technology than just asking her to picture it in her mind’s eye.  You already knew this, of course, but it bore repeating.  With that said, though, do you have the latest apps to help you make these on-the-fly adjustments?  If not, let us help you figure out which ones are best for you – and we promise they’ll be better for you than sugar on Cap’n Crunch.

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