6 Characteristics of a Top Performer

Highly successful business professionals, especially top-performing real estate professionals, tend to share a number of distinct personality or character, traits. These qualities are innate for some, but others need to analyze and cultivate these qualities on their journey toward success.

We’ve identified six personality traits that define high-performing, driven professionals:

1. Living the Dream: In general, the most successful entrepreneurs, inventors, and business people – billionaire financier Warren Buffett, Bill Gates of Microsoft, light bulb inventor Thomas Edison – maintained an intense belief in themselves and their own ideas. They had a unique ability to visualize how to bring their ideas to fruition even when they faced the most challenging obstacles.
2. Jump Into The Fire: Top performers embrace the need to take chances, such as leaving the “safe” job for the risk that comes with entrepreneurship. They have a powerful confidence in their own abilities. Many top real estate performers started in other industries, but realized they’d rather make their own mark, then climb the corporate ladder.
3. Plain Old Hard Work: Passion is great, but passion alone does not always result in success. Remember the saying: nothing worth having comes easily. Most top real estate performers ascribe to the psychological axiom of “deliberate practice,” or practicing in a way that pushes your skill set as much as possible. That means showing up every single day to make their prospecting calls, regardless of how they might be feeling.
4. Incremental Gains: We all know the stories of new agents who make a cool million right out of the gate. It happens, but the truth is, it’s rare. Consistent, high performers in real estate are those agents with staying power, who know to keep at it, and to celebrate the incremental gains that provide motivation to keep pushing forward.
5. Resilience: Perhaps you’ve noticed: failing is a fact of life. There’s a huge difference between those who leave the business after a year or two, and those who stick around for the long haul. The high achievers know that the ability to flourish in this business is often determined by the level of tenacity and resilience they can muster, day in and day out. These professionals understand the critical difference between “doing” and “trying.” They know how to thrive when their back is against the wall and are able to move on to the next deal after absorbing the lessons of mistakes or losses. We’ll have more on resilience in an upcoming post.
6. Open Mindedness: Or maybe a better way to say it is: never think you are beyond learning something new. Succeeding is about having the willingness to continue learning, to take in new ideas, and use evolving technology to craft new solutions to existing issues. It’s also about having the humility to be able to ask questions when you don’t know something.

As we said at the outset, some driven professionals share these qualities innately. But most people need to cultivate these traits, understanding that they are always a work in progress, blending passion, and confidence in their abilities, with the humility to know they don’t know it all. Which of these qualities do you need to cultivate?