9/19/22 Journal: Alarm Clock

It’s annoying for me to look at this blog and see that the last post was on 9/6. That’s only 13 days ago, but it’s starting to look abandoned, like so many hundreds of thousands of forgotten blogs, gathering dust on the Internet.

I swear I won’t allow that to happen to this one, despite the fact that it wouldn’t really matter to anyone other than me if it did. The numbers here aren’t amazing. Each posts gets maybe 50 views on the low side, maybe a little over a hundred on the high side. That performance kind of pales in comparison to previous blogs I ran, but I am enjoying this one more. Hey, it’s all about me, right?

Here’s the thing: back in February, when I restarted this site and began posting daily, one other (unannounced) change I made was I started calling myself a ‘writer’. I’d never done that before, but I believed if I wanted to take writing seriously, I needed to change my mindset. I needed to state–to myself–that writing isn’t a hobby, it’s who I am. And for me to be who I am, I have to do what I do. And, it worked. For five straight months, I never missed one single non-holiday weekday. The content wasn’t always amazing, but it was never bad, and occasionally terrific. I actually enjoy re-reading my shit.

But you know what else happened? The productivity of my mortgage practice dropped dramatically. There are other variables, of course: the real estate market softened, rates went up, transactions slowed down. But I’m a big believer that the results I generate have way more to do with my mindset than any outside forces. Bitching about the market is for other people. I’m a winner, not a whiner.

In other words, I control it. I’m the master of my fate.

It’s hard for me to ignore the idea that the moment I stopped waking up in the morning and calling myself a mortgage banker is the same moment my production started to slip. And bear in mind, the mortgage income is what pays the bills around here. I have an amazing wife and two young daughters, and I refuse to allow them to suffer.

So yes, I’ve slowed down writing and ramped up my mortgage productivity. And yes, since I started that, applications and ‘loans in process’ have started to tick back up. Maybe it’s just one thing or another with me. Maybe I have to pick one thing and focus on just it.

If that’s the case, I have no choice but to pick the one that feeds my family.

Or maybe, just maybe, I can be one of those amazing multitaskers that can be great at multiple things at the same time. Maybe, I can be an incredible mortgage originator, husband, father and writer, all at once.

Well, I didn’t wake up at fucking 5 AM to write this for nothing.

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