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5. There's constant hustle between the best agents. 

The real estate market has had a few tough years. Agents in many countries tend to be recovering from the mortgage crisis of 2008. Meanwhile, brokers are constantly having to compete for exposure and lead with major real estate publishers.

The truth is, things have changed and as a new agent with the arrival of new sites that offer sell my home myself services, you're going to have to acknowledge that more than anything else. The days of plenty are over and that means getting hustle is the only way to become a good person. 

Speak about their work habits to every top-performing employee and you can find he or she is an extremely hard worker. Productive companies are not themselves making and becoming a Realtor is no exception. There is a strong link between how hard you are working and how good you are going to become.

Nevertheless, making hustle doesn't necessarily mean working 12-hour days from Monday through Friday. After all, it's not all about putting in a lot of time to work in real estate — it's about putting in the right time and doing what's needed to close.

Hustle is also about being able to function at a moment's notice, because of this. It's about receiving a phone call at eight o'clock on a Friday night from a potential customer when you're stretched out on the couch watching a movie and not worrying twice about calling your client to set up a meeting.

Are we saying that for the sake of work you should ignore your duty to your family or your spouse? Clearly not. So if the benefits of working outweigh the benefits of something that you happen to do when an opportunity occurs, you need to be prepared to suck it up.

If all of this sounds extremely hard, here's a bit of encouragement: most people, and most agents in particular, don't work hard enough. They would all be top performers if they did. So don't be nervous about competing with any agent on the planet. If you practice hard enough, then you're going to be in your own class.

6. Measure, evaluate, and determine.

We've spoken about the value of hustle to become a good agent. But no matter how hard you work, if you don't calculate your success, you're not going to know if that labor produces results. It isn't just a real estate reality: it's a real-life reality.

Once I started practicing martial arts at first, I was interested in being as tough as possible. I assumed power, like any seven-year-old, is equated to capacity. Nonetheless, as time passed, I began to experience moments in the for sale by owner sector in which my movements were effortless and had nothing to do with energy. 

To some degree, we subconsciously change. Repeatedly, we learn how to execute a task more easily and more efficiently; through observation, we internalize and follow the best methods, sometimes without even understanding them. I was able to make some strides as a martial artist through sheer muscle memory. But I did not display any progress until I took the time to practice the same move over and over in front of a mirror.

The most critical changes come from learning critically about how we do things and constantly questioning whether this is what works best. The top quarterbacks spend hours watching a video, analyzing the throw, and checking for missed opportunities. The best teachers don't wait for their annual review to decide whether they're giving their students everything they can. Instead, after every class, they ask themselves this question.

Similarly, as a real estate agent, your performance should be regularly checked and evaluated. Which you can do in a variety of ways. Above all, consider keeping a daily newspaper to document your experiences of the job that day. Keep note of how many clients you spoke to and how those conversations were going.

Decide at the end of the day what you have done. Have you done enough? If not, then why should it be? No need to get extraordinarily detailed: just get into the habit of jotting down some ideas. You'll have time later to arrange them into something that is more coherent.

You will learn a lot about your results just by taking a long look at your prospects. Track them from start to finish, and see what your pipeline looks like. Do some parts of your selling plan perform better than others? Will you seem to lose outlook at any given stage? If so, maybe you'll need to change your approach.

Finally, crunch the numbers and see the outcomes in black and white that your job is really getting you. Check your sell my house online prospects against your projections and the projections that you need. Have a lot of leads but don't make a lot of sales? You may be better off devoting more time to fewer customers. How many closings does it take you to make a living? Compare your statistics with that number, and set goals accordingly. 

I would like to note that I have spent the next few years overhauling my martial arts technique since my brute force discovery. Alas, I'm always inclined to rely on my strength and height. That takes us to the final step in the self-assessment process: implementation. If you’re not going to try to correct the mistakes and inefficiencies you’ve worked hard to uncover in your business practices, what’s the point of seeking them out?

Start making a weekly list of skills you plan to work on or solutions you plan to try out. Review your success at the weekend. Have you been practicing what you set out to practice? Have the corrections you've made brought more opportunities, more profits, more success? If not, why do you think this is, and what else are you going to do next week?

Make no mistake, self-evaluation is usually not fun, and it can add a lot of work to an already hectic schedule. But if you’re really committed to being a successful real estate agent, you’ll find the time—and pretty soon, you’ll see the results.