Selling real estate, or anything else, requires a great deal of creativity. As with any other area of expertise, it requires attention and dedication in order to stay fresh. So, how do you practice the art of getting great ideas? Some people do it naturally. They've made selling their passion and are always on the lookout for ideas that might apply to a selling situation. If you haven't given much thought to keeping your creativity level high, here are six requirements for getting those rusty gears in action. There are six requirements for great ideas: want and need, exactness, preparation, belief, and execution.
Want and Need You won't get ideas unless you tell your subconscious mind that you both need and really want ideas. The key word here is want. It's far more important to want ideas than to merely need them. This distinction is crucial. Constant losers, compulsive gamblers, and confirmed alcoholics desperately need new ideas to change their direction before it's too late. Since positive ideas are everywhere, why don't these people jump on them? Because they don't want to stop doing what's hurting them; they don't want to pay the price of success; they don't want to face realities of living; they don't want to change.
Exactness You have to know the specific kind of solutions you want. A consistently successful writer, such as John Grisham, thinks of exciting scenes when he needs them because he knows exactly what he wants -- ideas for great suspense stories. We all want ideas that will make us millions. Unfortunately, that's not specific enough to let the subconscious mind do its work. You can't pull important and specific ideas out of your subconscious mind until you've posed important and specific challenges to it.
Preparation Nothing is free. Profitable innovation and effective imagination are no exception to this rule. Inventiveness and creativity aren't gifts that a lucky few use effortlessly; that notion is false. After you've paid the price, your imagination will soar and innovative ideas will flow from your brain. The price for that result has to be paid with study, with experience-gaining work, and with alert thought. You create ideas by becoming specific in your thinking and thorough with your study of a subject that excites you. Success-building ideas come only to those who look for them vigorously and intelligently.
Belief Your subconscious mind wants to be used; it wants to be controlled intelligently; it wants to help you grow and win. It will go along with self-instructions that aren't true today in order to help you make them true tomorrow. But it won't allow you to fool it forever. In the laborious process of creating ideas, your subconscious mind has to know that some of them will be used. Not necessarily all of them -- or even most of them. But a few of them must be used. Otherwise the flow will eventually be choked off.
Execution The profit of great ideas comes when you turn them into reality. Get rid of the delusion that you can have a great idea and get someone else to work out the details. The details are the invention. Unless you work out the details in a practical way, you can't control the profit that can be made from your great idea. Pick a field to specialize in. Learn everything that's known about that subject. Then start thinking every hour of every day about what can be done to improve performance in your specialty. When you've done all these things, valuable ideas will start flowing out of your mind. Success is doing, not wishing.