Many years ago I was at an Ambrose Golf Day where everybody had a chance at driving on a tee. Being a big guy I always believed I could hit the ball a long way – in fact I had a golf club like a Volkswagen on a stick.

On this day, I smoked my drive and it was the longest by far. Subsequently on that hole, a golf pro turned up and played with us. His ball flew over mine 100 feet in the air and it could have taken an aerial shot of my ball.

You see, I thought I was good until good showed up.

Why would I expect to hit the ball better than a pro? He’s spent years upon years, hours upon hours, hitting ball upon ball, to perfect this task. Yet stupidly, I thought I would hit a better ball. When I have a bit of good luck, and he’s having a bad day, that might occur once in a thousand.

In our industry new people see a top performer and foolishly think they can write better figures without putting in the hours. I’m not talking about average performers, but our very top performers – who in many cases spend years perfecting their craft.

Every now and then a new agent gets lucky and writes impressive figures. They then start to think that this luck is the norm. Success in real estate is a journey and you have to be prepared to go on that journey.

Some will read this and think about a person who has performed well in a short space of time, but rest assured, this performance is not the norm.

Be prepared for the journey, be prepared for the bad days but keep focussing on the things that matter; developing relationships, building trust and impacting on communities and you too will be like the golf pro, when your bad days are still better than most people’s good days.