 For closures up 150 percent, mortgage demand fall to 22 year lows, existing home sales fall 5.4 percent, pending home sales down 8.6 percent, mortgage companies and brokerages laying people off, inflation hits highest point since 1981, real estate inventory on the rise and this from Patrick Beck David. The last 30 days, based on a lot of research, as bad as I thought it was, it's a lot worse. So if you've been paying attention to the media and what they've been saying about the real estate market over the last three or four months, you would think that the entire industry was going to completely disappear. Like it's going to get blown to smithereens and it's not even going to exist anymore. We all know that that's not going to happen. We know that this is the one of the most solid industries. It's been tried and true through some of the most scariest moments in economic history. Even if you're a brand new agent, the common sense that you have inside of you still tells you that this industry is here to stay. It's not going anywhere. So why do we listen to the headlines? Why do we listen to the media? Why do we listen to gurus who tell us this is 2008 all over again, which wouldn't be necessarily the most horrible thing in the world, by the way. But why do we listen to all this? Why do we let it shake us to our core and start to dictate our actions? Well, I looked it up and it's called negativity bias. But more on that later. For now, I want to give you this little trick that I've used for years and years and years when I'm reading the news, when I'm watching media, when I'm listening to these gurus and listening to all these stats about the market and everything else. Here's what I do. I read them and listen to them in reverse. Yeah, in reverse. And what that means is I'll take a statistic like this statistic right here. Existing home sales slid 5.4% in June. I take that statistic and I say, wait a minute, that's actually 94.6% of the same amount of existing sales are happening this year as happened last year. So actually from zero, we're actually at 94.6%, which to me is an incredibly large number. It's an incredibly positive number. Yeah, we'd like to see it over 100% where we see growth, but we're not going to see that every year. I'll tell you what else you're not going to see. And that is sales go to zero. It's not going to happen ever in a million years. Closings are going to happen every single day for the rest of your life. Ladies and gentlemen, go out there and get business and stop allowing the media to get to plant the seeds of you making excuses of why you shouldn't go out there and grind. As I dig into the existing home sales data from the National Association Realtors for June, they state that sales are down 14.2% from a year ago. That tells me that we're at 85.8% of transactions this year compared to last year, 85.8%. Does that not put a smile on your face? Does that not motivate you to get out there and see who you can help? Are you sitting around thinking about, well, I haven't been taking a lot of action lately because of the market, but here Ricky's talking about 85.8% of the same sales from last year. That's a pretty big number. I feel a little defeated here. Like I defeated myself that I allowed the market and media to prevent me from going out there and getting my piece of that 85.8%. Don't you want your piece? Yes, I'm sure you do. But the hidden factor there is is you got to go work for it. Again, grind, ladies and gentlemen. Now, through thinking about reading the news in reverse, I also decided to change my mission statement at Zero to Diamond. Our mission statement originally was to reduce the failure rate in the real estate industry one agent at a time. I'm actually going to reverse that. It is now to increase the success rate in the real estate industry one agent at a time. I also have started a blog on Zero to Diamond.com where I'm going to be illustrating and my headlines are going to be the exact opposite of the headlines of the mainstream media. I'm also going to be in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, August 10th and Phoenix, Arizona, September 22nd. Tickets are free. That's at Zero to Diamond.com backslash events. And I'm really hoping to see you there. So why do we let media and the headlines get to us so much and allow them to dictate how we feel and the actions that we take? Well, I did a little research and I realized it's called negativity bias, which means we put way more weight on negative experiences than we do positive experiences. If we have the same magnitude of a positive event and a negative event, we're going to have much more intense feelings about the negative event. It's really human nature. And it's something that we should know about and we should pay attention to within ourselves and not allow ourselves to get caught up in the media negativity train. Listen, the bottom line is, is that the market is great. It's going to continue to be great. If you want to go out there and say, oh, it's doom and gloom and it's going to be another 2008, go back to 2008 and look at the market during that time. Look at how many closings were happening. Watch everything from every different angle of that 2005 to 2012 timeframe. It's not just 2008. It was from 2005 to 2012. It was that entire time where a lot of things happened in the market. I can tell you this. You can take that moment in history and you can learn from it. I bet there's a lot of agents, including myself, who went through that time in the market and they think, man, I wish I had that to do over again. I wish I had 2008 to do over again because I would have absolutely killed it. The agents that went through that, the investors that went through that, by the way, when I lost everything in 2007-ish or so and went back to roofing houses, sleeping on friends' couches, working on an oil rig, sleeping in my car, all that stuff, the biggest reason why I was in that position was really two reasons, but the biggest one was I over-leveraged on properties I was flipping. As an investor, it's really what got me in that position. Going through that moment as an investor and as an agent, thank you, Lord, because I learned so much through that process and through that moment in time. That's what I'm trying to share with you guys through this content. I hope something's hitting home for you and you can really go in on your business. That's what I want. I want you to build a business that can withstand any market swing, and that's what we're doing over here. With that, thank you guys for watching. I'll see you on the next video. Keep grinding, keep hustling, keep working, and all your dreams are going to come true. Peace.