1. A real, physical newspaper for Lehi.  I started one, but have not had the time to continue.  It was worth the investment.  I learned a lot.  I believe it matters.

2. A serious attempt at a local literary revival.  I know a good deal about the mechanics of how to get a book written, published, and sold.  I am also a fierce proponent of the power of locality and community, and, although this runs counter to the conventional wisdom, I believe that the physical is still more powerful than the virtual.  I believe that it is not only possible but highly desirable to have a local press for local writers distributing books through local stores.  I can see the entire thing, how it would all work.  I don’t have time (and likely don’t have the skills) to do it.

3. Hard research on the value of coaching rotation in college football.  I have a theory.  It would be an interesting one – and potentially a valuable one – to any university that was thinking of trying to win a national championship.  Don’t have time to do the research to see if my theory is true.

4. A solid PR campaign for the mortgage/ real-estate industry.  We’ve been savaged over the last few years because of the economic downturn supposedly caused by the greed and fraud of people who do what I do.  The record could use some straightening out, and more than that, the value created by people that do what I do should be and must be highlighted.  Those of us that are really good at what we do provide services that save people millions.  I believe it would be a very good thing if more people understood that.

5. TEDx Lehi.  There are huge numbers of techies in this part of the valley, and more coming all the time.  We’re a creative and interesting bunch.  The TED program is one of the most interesting and inspiring ideas I’ve seen in a long while, and I want to be part of putting one on right here in Utah County.  I don’t have time to do it.

6. Writing Training Trap.  My good friend Glen has a terrific idea for a business book.  It needs to be written.  Not only can I not write it, I don’t even have time to badger him so that HE has time to write it.

That’s depressing enough for one day.

I had a friend ask me if I was going to survive the wreckage of the mortgage industry, if I was worried about being out of business.  There are several stock answers I use to that question (“as long as there’s a mortgage industry, I’ll be working in it,” etc.) , but I decided at that moment on a new one: Hell no.  The second I don’t have a job here I have ten more ready to go.  Give me back the 40+ weekly hours I spend on mortgages, and I probably have time to do three or four of those things above.  If City 1st ever gets rid of me, I won’t even have time to move my desk.

Meantime, if you’re looking around for something to do, I have some suggestions.

I lived for twelve years in one town down the road. Met a few people. Caused some trouble. Ended up not wanting to stay because of the reaction some had to that trouble. I had a few friends, knew a couple of people, but on the whole, I was nobody.

Then I moved up the road. The first week I was here, I went to the Chamber of Commerce meeting. And instead of sitting at the back, getting my bearings, I sat up front and introduced myself to the Chairman before the meeting. I was invited to stay after. Then to sit on the Board. Then I was the Chairman myself after a couple years. The same thing happened in Rotary, and over and over in other organizations. Shockingly, in just a couple of years I knew everyone in town, where in the other town I knew only a handful of people. The difference was exactly what Tamsen brilliantly outlined in her post.

People drop out of those organizations all the time, and the main reason they give is “it just doesn’t work for me”, which, being that I was in a position to observe, meant “I don’t do anything, so nobody can tell how awesome I am. Guess I’ll quit.” Those of us that have been there, and worked, some of us for years, know that these organizations can be fantastic networking tools, but they respond with a multiple of the force we put into them, after we demonstrate that we’re in it for the long haul. Put in zero, and no multiple will help. Put it huge effort for one project, then disappear, and a similar thing happens.  But stick around and push, and pretty soon the other workers want to know who you are, and what you can do to make their lives better.  That’s business.

Tamsen put this all so well. And do we ever need the reminder.

There’s a particular scene where Vincent, our hero, who has been told all his life that he is inferior, is swimming in a raging storm, racing his perfect older brother, and beating him.  Here’s the relevant exchange:

Anton Freeman: Vincent! How are you doing this Vincent? How have you done any of this? We have to go back.
Vincent: It’s too late for that. We’re closer to the other side.
Anton Freeman: What other side? You wanna drown us both?
Vincent: You wanna know how I did it? This is how I did it Anton. I never saved anything for the swim back.

I won’t ruin the film for you by telling you anything else.  But to me, the message of that was that if you’re going to become the best possible you, you have to use up your reserves.  You have to leave nothing for the swim back.  Vincent was Anton’s superior, because Vincent, though genetically inferior, was the best possible Vincent, and Anton, like most of those told they were genetically superior, never risked enough to become anything more than a pale shadow of what he could have been.

A few posts back I wrote about potential, and how all my life I was told that I had this immense potential, and how I was sure that I was a disappointment to most of the people that said that.  I’ve also written about aging, and how with age comes the realization that there are a larger and larger number of things I will never get better at than I am right now.  None of that is false.

But there was something buried in those posts that I am only now coming to understand.  I am 42 years old now.  I am, by most any measure, middle-aged.  And what image does that call up for you?  Yeah, me too.  Consolidation.  Conservation.  Rationing of strength and resource.  I finally hit an age where people don’t really expect me to do bigger things that those I have already done.  I have become Vincent, after all my life as Anton.

All of us are Vincent.  All of us have the potential to defy our limitations.  But we cannot do it without doing what he did, and playing flat out.  All the way.  Pushing the chips to the center of the table and risking everything on the river card.  Yes, we can certainly make a good life for ourselves without that.  We can be happy.  We can be safe.

But we cannot be extraordinary.  In the last analysis, I believe that the greatest enemy of the amazing is not the terrible, but the pretty cool.  The good enough.  The decent.  It is far harder to go from respected and competent to mind-blowing than it is to go there from awful.  At awful, what do you have to lose?  You don’t go back.  You keep swimming to the farther shore, because you know you aren’t saving anything for the swim back.

We are meant to be extraordinary.  We are meant to shine, not to glow faintly.  Bet big.  Risk.  Try for something astonishing.  Go all in.

If you do, my money’s on you.

A few weeks back, on Facebook, I asked people for their time-management suggestions.  I got a lot of them, and most of them were outstanding.  One in particular, from my old friend Janice Welker, leaped out at me, and set me thinking ever since.  She said that a to-do list was a chance for her to decide on all those things she was not going to do that day, that she used it to remember who was in control of her life.  I thought that was a great concept.

So, in the spirit of that, here is today’s to-don’t list:

1. Don’t stay in bed because you think nobody will care if you’re just a few minutes late.

2. Don’t assume that Jeanette knows you love her, just because you told her last night.

3. Don’t figure that the kids will weed just as hard if you’re not out there with them.

4. Don’t leave the baby for Jeanette to change because you think your work is too important for you to take a couple minutes.

5. Don’t make your body try to do its work on a glass of water and some vitamins.

6. Don’t call later.  There is no “later”.

7. Don’t figure people are smart enough to know what you need without your asking them.

8. Don’t think you can fit everything in that you have to do without taking a couple minutes to plan.

9. Don’t make the mistake of thinking your job is more important than your family.  It’s just louder.

10. Don’t think you’re ever going to get around to going fishing with your Dad unless you put something on the calendar.

11. Don’t think people that need mortgage lending in Utah are going to call you out of the blue, even if you aren’t doing anything to let them know you’re there.

12. Don’t expect blocks of time to magically open up in your calendar so you can take your wife out for ice cream.

13. Don’t get discouraged because two hours of writing only gets 4.7% of your book written.  It’s 4.7% more than you had before you started.

There’s more, but this post was not on the to-do list this morning, which I had better get back to.  What’s on YOUR to-Don’t list today?

My good friend Jonathan and I went to lunch today and chose the American Fork Olive Garden as our spot.  There’s a story behind that.  But one thing at a time.

We got there, got right in, had to wait maybe ten seconds, and our cheerful waitress Laura showed up and gave us a thorough rundown of the menu.  Mentioned some new stuff there.  Pointed out a couple things.  She was professional.  We ordered the soup, salad and breadsticks, which is what I go there for, and Jonathan got the spinach-artichoke dip as well.  She told us it would be about 7 minutes, and asked if we wanted our other stuff first.  We did.

She was back in about 2 minutes with the other stuff.  Cheese on top?  Don’t mind if I do.  I love the Toscana, and Jonathan is into the Gnocchi, so we munched on that and the breadsticks and generally, Laura was right on top of us the whole time.  She was within one minute of her prediction on the dip, too.  Which was also excellent.

We were never without breadsticks – one of my pet peeves about Olive Garden is that I run through the breadsticks too fast.  Not too fast for Laura, apparently.  Clearly, it was not her first day on the job, but she also went out of her way to make sure we were having a good time.  And we told her we noticed that.  We like to do that; I believe that if you praise something, you get more of it, and if you criticize something, you get less of it, generally speaking.  So we told her she was doing a great job, because she was.

Then we get the bill.  And inside it is this:

Okay, NOW I’m going to have to see the manager, who was Darren today, and tell him how impressed I am with Laura (and, frankly, I shouldn’t forget Colleen, either), and that she’s underpaid.  So he comes out, and we chat, and he tells us she’s getting free dessert for making us so pleased.  We part amiably, then Jonathan pulls out two gift cards to pay.

“Know where I got these?” he asked me.

“No,” I said.

“From right here,” he said.

This Olive Garden was hit by a car just last Friday.  It went through the wall into the bathrooms and could have seriously injured a huge number of people (fortunately, it didn’t).  Of course, the restaurant was then closed for repairs.  But during the closed period, while they were furiously rebuilding, anyone that came to Olive Garden to eat, and had to be turned away, was met in the parking lot by the waitstaff, who thanked everyone graciously for coming, then gave them gift cards to let them know how much the restaurant appreciated them coming there, even if they couldn’t now get a meal.  I bet the restaurant even paid the staff to be there, which is a huge deal for many of them.

Unbelievable.  Service like this, appreciation like this, even the very tiny act of giving the waitstaff little cards on which they could write thank-you notes to the patrons are signs of a truly exceptional business.  Everyone there deserves applause, and a great share of our patronage now and into the future.

Go see for yourself.

I wrote a couple weeks ago about managing time and getting things done.  I have several techniques that I use, with varying levels of success, but of course time still gets away from me and I end up accomplishing less than I otherwise would.  Here’s something from a lawyer friend of mine:

Chris,

Like you, I did not realize how hard it is to "work" for 8 hours a day.  I have to keep track of my time in six minute increments--and they add up fast when I am reading your (entertaining and thought provoking) blog posts or the morning newspaper.  However, it helps me be accountable for how I spend my time each day.  Though obnoxious at times, it is good for me.  I still have a long way to go--it still takes me 10 hours to "work" 8--but I am getting better.

Thanks for keeping me on your email list.  Your writing is always entertaining.  You have a way of explaining life's lessons in a way that connects with a lot of people.

Hope things are well with you and your family.  Please let me know if I can ever do anything to help any of you.

Best,

Brock

Jones Waldo
Brock Worthen
Attorney

See what happens here.  Someone complains to his representative about beef being prepared in unsanitary conditions.  The representative gets a law passed forming an agency to inspect beef packing to make sure it’s sanitary.  Then the agency promulgates a gigantic mess of regulation, ostensibly to make sure that if the regulations are followed, the beef will be safe.  Businesses then bear the cost of complying with the regulations, even though they are of necessity made to fit operations that are massively different from theirs.  This cost is least easily borne by small businesses, many of which close.

Thus the original complaint, focused on getting safe meat to the table, closes the businesses most likely to provide it.  That’s consequence #1.  It also raises the cost of the meat.  That’s consequence #2.  And then, best of all, it encourages those businesses which are accidentally now the focus of regulatory scrutiny, to cheat and evade not only the regulation but the taxes that they were happily paying before.  That’s consequence #3.

How much of the US economy is in the gray and black markets now?  10%?  20%?  I’m not talking about the hiring of illegal workers, which absolutely fits into consequence #3 above, but other things like the evasion of labor law by paying under the table, or the changing of business classification from for-profit (taxpaying) to not-for-profit (non-taxpaying), without changing the nature of the business at all, simply to avoid regulation that makes it increasingly impossible for the business to make money.

Salatin’s book describes a situation where the cheese police came and shut down a small cheese factory because it was selling uninspected (though perfectly safe) cheese at a farmers market.  So the enterprising woman called the bureaucrats and asked what the restrictions were on fish food.  They said there weren’t any.  So the next week she labeled her product “Fish Bait Cheddar” and “Fish Bait Swiss”, and nobody could touch her.  Until someone decides to regulate fish bait.  Which someone inevitably will.

Leia Organa famously once said, “the more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.”  This is a terrific commentary on the current US government.  There is already no theoretical way that all the rules and regulations we have could ever be enforced.  Life would come to a grinding halt altogether.  So we are reduced to cheating, lying, and turning a blind eye, running our economic activity in the gray areas, inside the house, but in the walls and the crawl spaces, in order to get anything done at all.

I hate it.  And I think it’s ridiculous.  And I’m now thinking, after reading this book, that I might finally have to give in and run for office.

Sigh.

He’s wrong.

How do I know this?  How can I penetrate the heart of my 16-year-old son so deeply, to expose this secret?  Simple.  Writers do one thing that other people do not.  They write.  And Nicholas does not.  Not letters, not a journal, not stories, not, except under duress, even papers.  He writes nothing.  Q.E.D., he is not a writer.

I’ve always wanted to be able to write well.  Really well, well enough to sell the things I write.  When I was in high school I failed my geometry class because I was writing a post-apocalyptic romance novel about me and this girl I had a crush on.  Sixty-three longhand pages later, I had a work of surpassing ugliness and sap, and an F in geometry, but it didn’t really matter.  I had to be writing.

I wrote a diary.  I wrote stories about my fictional football players.  I wrote newspapers.  I wrote essays.  I wrote quite a bit, when I look back.  When I got to college, I wrote short stories and essays, and some of them won prizes.  I got published a couple of times.  That’s not, as I look back now, a bad beginning.  Clearly, I had some skill.  There might have been a career there.

But I stopped writing.  Oh, not entirely, never that, but seriously.  I stopped writing stories and entering contests.  I stopped sending essays to magazines.  I finished a novel – a really, really bad novel about things I know nothing whatever about – but only because my father told me I never would.  It was unreconstructable, unpolishable.  A dead story with no future.  But it was a beginning, and I finished it at 23, and I had clean sand in front of me.  On this sand, I have made few new footprints.

I have marveled for years at the clarity and power of the writing of people like Orson Scott Card, Dick Francis, Isaac Asimov, Donald Westlake (okay, “clarity and power” don’t fit here, more like “hilarity and seismic wit”), to say nothing of classic writers like Jane Austen or Alexandre Dumas.  Card, especially, has embraced the internet and the opportunities it provides.  He writes multiple columns, reviews, blogs, and still churns out novels and short stories and all sorts of material.  I write a lot, even still, but this guy writes fanatically.  He’s a writer.  So he writes.  No wonder he’s good.

Put that much time in at anything, you’re going to be good.  This is the premise of Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell, a book the Chris Jones Group highly recommends.  You do something a lot, all the time, even, and you’ll be good at it.  Get training, get feedback, be humble and listen, and you’ll get better faster.  But nobody comes out of the box brilliant.  Everyone has to work at it.  Even Christopher Paolini.

That should make you feel good.  It does me.  You want to write?  Write.  You want to sing?  Sing.  You want to program computers, then program the bleeping computers.  Whatever it is you want to do, do it.  Do it a lot.  And you will become good at it.

As I mentioned, borrowers are having trouble qualifying, much as they would have trouble running a 10k.  Some can do it, but those people are almost all those that have been training, saving their money, hoarding their equity, shepherding their credit.  Everyone else?  Well, it’s time for those magical fitness tools, diet and exercise.

There are two difficulties with this.  One, many people don’t know what they need to do, and two, almost everyone needs someone to help them, or they won’t do it correctly, no matter how badly they want to.  This dramatically restricts the pool of borrowers and makes it hard for Realtors and loan originators to make a living.  It sounds terrible.  But it isn’t.  Really, it isn’t.  There’s a fabulous hidden opportunity here.

The good news here is that this means the market is as big as you want it to be.  EVERYONE, or, okay, not absolutely everyone, but functionally everyone, will buy a home at some point.  Right now, true, most of them cannot qualify for a loan to do so.  The solution is simple.  Stop being a track timer, and start being a fitness coach.

By this, I mean that it’s time to stop just taking an application and pulling a credit, and deciding that there’s no deal.  Of COURSE there’s no deal.  That shouldn’t be surprising.  But if you want to make it in a market like this, you’re going to have to do more than issue a denial.

What we do is create a plan.  We train our clients and show them how to get to the point where they do qualify.  More than two-thirds of our clients are people we’ve been working with for more than 90 days.  Almost half of them are people that we’ve been working with for six months and more.  In May, one of our clients opened her file 228 days ago.  But the week before her, we closed a loan for a fellow who opened his file 447 days before the close.

We discovered, looking at our closings, that we had done just as much business in 2009 as we did in 2006, despite the complete market meltdown we saw over that four-year period.  But that happened because in a good market, like the one in 2006, we had no competitive advantage.  Our specialty is rehab, doing the hard work to move a client from unable to qualify into position to get the loan they want.  In a market where everyone can already qualify, in the hundred-yard-dash market, we have no advantages.  But in the 10k market?  We shine.  Rehab and training in this market is not a frivolity.  It’s a necessity.

Anyone can do this.  We happen to be really good at it, and we like it (which is why we’re good at it), but anyone can do it.  I spoke to a loan officer of my acquaintance a few days ago, and he was getting out of the business.  I asked him why.  Was his phone not ringing anymore?  No, he said, it was still ringing, but none of the inquiries was turning into a loan.  “Yet,” I said.  “What?” he said.  “Not a loan yet.  As in, you work with them and eventually they’ll qualify.”  At first he had no idea what I was talking about.  Then he thought that was way too much work.  So now he’s selling cars or something, instead of doing what he really likes and is good at, because he couldn’t change his thinking.

The borrowers are out there.  There are just as many as there ever were.  And we can have a greater impact on their lives than we could ever have had when all they had to do was roll out of bed and get a loan.  All it takes is a little bit of hard work and some patience, and this market can have more opportunities in it than any other.

This is a fancy way of saying that I can work when I want to, within certain boundaries.  I do have to work, unless there is nothing going on.  I never have to come to work and sit there.  There are no time clocks.  I hate those things, anyway.

Except.

Fact of the matter is that I don’t do that much real work.  I don’t do ANY real work in the old-timer sense, where I have actual physical labor that I perform.  No, I push paper around and rearrange pixels on a computer screen.  Still, the work of connecting people that need money with people that have money pays, so it must have some value.  Problem is, it’s very hard to quantify that work.  Can I do it in 10 minutes a day?  Can I do it in half an hour?  An hour?  Two?  Five?

I didn’t know.  A month ago it became important to me to discover how much time I was really spending working at my mortgage business in any given week.  This is time exclusive of Rotary meetings, exclusive of teaching school, exclusive of Heart-2-Home Board meetings, even exclusive of time I spend at work but surfing the Internet.  So I counted, and I’ve been counting for four weeks.

No, I will not share the results.  They embarrass me.  And I think I came a ways toward discovering one of the reasons that my success has not been as incandescent at it otherwise ought to be.

With all due respect to Tim Ferriss, whom I admire greatly, right now it is important to me personally to put some time into my business.  I want always to make that time more productive, but at the moment all I’m counting IS productive time, so that takes some care of itself.  I made a commitment to a partner that I would work – really do productive work – for at least a certain number of hours a week, even though I don’t strictly have to.  It’s been interesting.

But the reason for this post is that today was a victory.  I was a few hours short coming into this morning, as in, in a normal workday I would not get to my commitment for the week, which would necessitate my working on Saturday, a thing I almost never do (for good reasons).  When the baby got me up at 4:30, instead of going back to bed, I got dressed, went downstairs, and began to work.  Not at all coincidentally, I was able to make progress on some things that have been neglected, things that I believe will allow me to generate more work for myself and more business for the company.  Being a creator, I saw that this was good.

It would never have happened if I hadn’t set a time commitment for myself, and that would never have happened if I hadn’t started measuring what I was actually doing with my time.  It’s only one day.  But this thing might actually work.