 I don't have to grow my database anymore, making 150, and if I'm just staying busy, I'll just naturally organically grow it to 250 and to 500 and all that, false, 100% false. What you do should be, you should think of it as, what is this actually going to do for me over the next three to five years, not today, but the next three to five years, right? And then you're going to know this mindset where everything is compounding, whereas this huge snowball starts to build up, right? And then all of a sudden out of nowhere, nobody, nobody, nobody saw me come in when I became the top remix agent in Alabama. Nobody was predicting that one, okay, at all. And it just kind of came out of nowhere, right? Because everything I did was focused on how can I get there in the next three to five years. As you do that, what happens? A lot of magic happens. You start to close more deals now. When you take the deal out of the equation and start to listen to people about what they're actually trying to do and help them do it, without trying to figure out how to make them do it or get in a situation where they do a deal with you, you make more deals. You do more deals. There's a lot of sellers that I literally, once I figured out why they're selling and what they're trying to do, I would look at the market and what the price is currently and I would say this isn't a good move for you guys right now. I wouldn't do this. And they're like, yeah, I never had a real estate agent tell me that, right? And then what happens? Six months later, they sell, right? And then they buy another one and they refer three people to me. They'll never use another real estate agent ever in their life. On the flip side, that same day, I told them not to, I go to another listing appointment, focus on why they're selling and say, hey, yeah, let's go. You want to go? Go? Boom. There's a listing we sell in a day. So I'm making money now, just trying to help people and I'm making money later. You shouldn't care if somebody's going to do a deal with you today or not. You should be focused more on what you can do to help them, not what you can't do to help them. Like when you're calling property owners and they hear that you're a real estate agent, they say, I don't want to sell my house. And you're like, good. That's not why I'm calling you, right? I'm not calling you. I don't want to know what you don't want to do. I'm glad we got that out of the way, but that's not why I'm calling you. I want to know what I can do to help you. So when you get into that mentality where everything's focused on the long term, you make more short term deals. So as far as exponentially growing every year, your income level is going to be dictated by the size of your database. The size of your database represents how many people know you. I see this all the time. Here's an example. Agents come in, they're a new agent or say they're six months in the business. They get up to where they're making 150,000 a year, let's say. Then they get too busy doing the sales to actually do the things that help them build their database up to that point. Or whatever the case may be, maybe they decide, hey, I don't have to grow anymore. I don't have to grow my database anymore. I'm making 150, and if I'm just staying busy, I'll just naturally or organically grow it to 250 and to 500 and all that. False, 100% false. This is the trap a lot of agents get into. But when you get to the point where you rely on your past kinds of referrals, your business, plateaus. Yes, you're getting referrals. That's a new business that you've never talked to before. Those referrals are giving you referrals, so it does continue to grow a little bit. But that little bit of growth mixed in with your repeat business just gives you enough to maintain your level of income. So that agent that comes in and makes 150,000, they're just going to make 150, 150, 150, 150 until they go back to what got them there and continue growing their database. So the object is to continue growing your database until you get to the income level you want. And then when you get to that level, you can then rely on your past kinds of referrals to maintain that level. Okay, so for me, for example, I'm doing a million a year. 2017, I hit it for the first time. That was the year I quit trying to build my real estate business and just rely on my past kinds of referrals. What happened? I've hit it every year since. So that's a perfect example and I've seen it time and time and time again. I don't know if you guys noticed, but everything I say is real, real simple stuff. It's really easy to visualize and put into perspective of how you can use what I'm saying in your business to try to restructure what you're doing around what you want to happen. But if you're at 250 and you've been stuck and you want to get to 350, then look at what you do on a daily basis. Are you doing any activity per week to actually grow your business in terms of talking to new people you've never talked to before? Because if you're not, then you're just going to maintain that 250 forever and you're just going to be frustrated like, why can't I grow? It's because you're not growing your business anymore. You're just maintaining your business. So a good way to do this, and in my first book there's a chapter called Champions You're Made in the Off Season, because I did this year over year when it slows down in the winter. That's when I would go hyper growth mode. I would make as many calls as I possibly could to try to meet as many people as I could to add to my database while the season was slow, the slow season. That way the next selling season, I go into the next selling season with a bigger database, more people, and I have a bigger year. And then I sell, sell, sell. I don't have much time to try to grow my database because I'm too busy selling during that selling season. Then it slows back down. What do I do? I try to go all in and see a lot of agents take off in them. It's Thanksgiving. They're going to Halloween parties. They've got Christmas. They're traveling doing this and that. They're going on vacations. When they're doing that, I'm in my office grinding as hard as I can because I'm trying to close the gap between me and them. I've got agents that I work with. I have an agent. All they want to do is make $100,000. I've got lots of them. All they want to do is make $200,000. I've got agents that want to do half a million, a million, two million. Everybody has different ambitions and levels of what they want to do. If you can visualize your database and what you're doing with it, then that's going to kind of dictate what your income level is. And then you shouldn't know at that point based on what I just told you what you need to do if you want to raise your income. The good thing is that at some point when you do hit that income level, then you can just rely on your past types of referrals and just enjoy life.