Click here to read Gary’s letter, “Disturbance.”

• The Big Idea: In a World Bank survey of U.S. businesses, the #1 barrier to both adopting AI and increasing AI use is the lack of knowledge and privacy concerns.

• The report also says that adopting AI doesn't create productivity gain. It's changing the business around AI that does. Businesses have to change workflows, management practices, and operating procedures around AI before people inside the business can profit from its value.

• Our Aha: Teachers are the unlock to productivity, scale, and the profit that comes from each. Every repeatable task you help an agent do faster, better, or at a lower cost could create more time for appointments and revenue-producing activities but only if that “extra” time is focused on lead generation.

• Our Second Aha: Brokerage workflows and the automation of repeatable tasks must be thought about thoroughly. If you automate a bad or unnecessary process, you’re just wasting time and money faster. You may want to hire an AI native (someone who thinks of AI first), drop them into an existing org-chart, and watch the changes they make.

• Listen to Greg Shove teach this on the MREA podcast.

• The Big Idea: For decades, researchers found that happiness followed a U-shaped curve where a person was most happy as a youth/young adult and as a senior, but lowest life satisfaction occurred in middle age (AKA the midlife crisis). Between 2013-2020, researchers began noticing that happiness and life satisfaction patterns changed. Now, across the world, studies show that there’s no curve. Happiness simply rises with age.

• Ten years ago, it was easy to assume young adults arrived at the workplace with energy and optimism. All the leader needed to do was teach them the steps to a profitable business and their youthful ambition would take them all the way.

• The young adults walking into your office today need a different type of leadership and mentorship. They’re looking for a place where they feel purposeful, connected, hopeful, and progressive.

• Our Aha: Happiness affects performance and performance affects profit. Your youngest agents want your help seeing evidence that what they’re doing today is getting them where they want to go, developing a business worth owning and a life worth living.

• The Big Idea: German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer believed stupidity wasn't about someone’s level of intelligence. He warned that stupidity is actually giving up your ability to think and act independently. He also says this is a problem that intelligent, capable people can easily fall into, especially the more successful and powerful they become.

• Profit is the result of good decisions, and good decisions require independent thinking. If you give up independent thinking, you give up control of the profit-driving decisions that determine your failure or your success.

• Our Aha: How you think determines everything. As we say often, life is first creation to second creation. We think and then… everything else. Which is why teaching people how to think is the key part of our definition of leadership.

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by Ryan Deiss