Pray or Worry...but Don't Do Both

During a conversation I was having with an agent last week, she mentioned to me that she had to stay at her office late one night recently for a later-evening meeting she had scheduled with a client at her office. While she waited for the appointment to arrive, she mentioned that she passed the hours ‘doing whatever she could to waste time’ up until the meeting.

As she was telling me about this, I couldn’t help but think of one of my favorite sayings: “Pray or worry… but don’t do both.” It has a pretty simple meaning – either pray and believe that your prayer was answered or worry. But don’t pray and worry because it means that you don’t believe that your prayer had any power.

This particular agent is an amazing real estate professional and a top producer who has all of the ability in the world and could have been doing much better things with her time than following every update on facebook and searching the gossip columns.

So I decided to be frank with her and in the spirit of “pray or worry… but don’t do both,” I told her to either put on a business suit or a bathing suit but commit to something!

Your mind can’t live in both worlds. Our job when we are in the office is not to “stay busy until the day ends.” It is to be productive, period. If you are going to think about other things that you could be doing while at work, then you should either readjust your focus or just go and do whatever else it is you’re thinking about and stop wasting your time trying to fool yourself into believing that somehow being in the office counts for something.

My message to her was simple – 90% commitment to anything doesn’t work. Could you imagine looking your spouse in the eyes and saying, “Honey, you are the light of my world. You are more attractive now than when we first met. That is why I am 90% committed to you.” Let me know how that works out for you.

When you are in the office you are married to your job, and as such, it deserves your undying attention. Fooling yourself into believing that you are being productive won’t pay the bills and it sure won’t make you a top producer.

Pray or worry… but don’t do both, and whenever you are working, either commit to your business suit or stop wasting time and put on your bathing suit. This may be tough advice but we need it sometimes.

Jared James is the CEO and Founder of Jared James Enterprises, an internationally sought-after speaker and trainer. James built one of the fastest-growing real estate teams in the country, was inducted into the International Hall of Fame for one of the world’s largest real estate companies and wrote a best-selling book—all before the age of 28. As an acclaimed speaker, James keynotes events for major real estate organizations and conducts regular webinars and training for nationally known organizations like NAR, CRS, Yahoo Real Estate, Trulia and Zillow Academy and blogs regularly for RISMedia.