If you’re like me, you’ve started the new year looking ahead. You’ve been strategizing for the coming months and mapping out a plan to get you from where you are to where you want to be. It’s an exciting time of year and that excitement can be contagious and powerful.

If you’re like many, though, your enthusiasm may be tempered by a little anxiety, too. This isn’t your first new year, after all, and it’s probably not the first time you’ve been down this road. You may have kicked off more than one January with a sense of unbridled optimism, only to find it snuffed out by a harsh wave of reality just days later. 

At the heart of this breakdown in New Year’s resolutions is a simple but critical idea. Get it right, and you stand a good chance of delivering on your promises this year. Get it wrong, and you’ll fall off the figurative change wagon in a matter of days.

“But I’m Working Hard”
If you poll the ranks of real estate professionals from the barely-in-business to the best of the best, you’ll find they share one thing in common: they’re all working hard. From the top performing agents in the market, to the ones who haven’t listed or sold a home in months, everyone’s story is the same. Endless to-do lists. Never-ending obligations. Long hours, including many nights and weekends.

Here’s the twist: they’re right. Most agents are putting in the time. They are working hard.

The problem is that they’re not doing the hard work.

Easy Work vs. Hard Work
This is where the wheat gets separated from the chaff. Successful agents are working hard, make no mistake, but every successful agent is also getting the hard work done.

What’s the difference? The easy work is as easy to identify, as it is to do. Checking and responding to voice messages and emails. Posting to Facebook and Twitter. Waiting for new leads to fall in your lap. Searching out the latest properties and listings. Inspecting new listings. Going to weekly meetings. Showing property to anyone who calls. Sitting at an open house.

Hard work is different. It’s asking for appointments. It’s using tough questions to qualify all buyers and sellers before spending time with them. It’s not working with a buyer unless they have agreed to buyer agency.

Hard work is making calls you don’t want to. It’s prospecting. It’s following up on ALL leads in a timely fashion. It’s telling the truth to a seller about the price of their home. It’s taking the time to communicate your value instead of quickly cutting commission. It’s only showing homes to qualified buyers, and cutting sellers loose when their home is overpriced and have no real motivation to sell.

Hard work takes emotional investment. It requires you to stretch yourself. It’s a risk. And as a result, hard work is also the stuff that makes your business into what you’ve imagined it can be. Easy work, by comparison, is the canned spam of your workday – cheap, easy to digest, and lacking the real substance you need to make things grow.

Resolving to Do Hard Work
There’s a big difference between working hard and doing hard work, and the choice is yours to make. You can spend 35, 40 or 50 hours a week doing the hard stuff that delivers results, or you can spend those same hours being busy. The time commitment is identical, but I can assure you the results are worlds apart.

Just about every ingredient you need to make your business a success this year falls in the category of hard work. The good news is that those ingredients are within your control.

So control them. Plan the hard things you need to do every day and get them done. Do them first every day. You don’t need to do everything, but if you do anything, make it hard work.

This year, don’t just resolve to work harder. Resolve to do the hard work instead and I promise you that your New Year’s resolutions won’t be in vain.