Ryan Serhant: "Now, I define success by hitting goals that I set for myself, and it's not about money. It's not about lifestyle, it's not about building a bigger team, or anything. It's that I set goals for myself, and I write them down every year, and if I hit those goals, I have been successful that year. If I don't hit those goals, then I have failed that year. That way, success isn't this big lofty thing that's up there in the clouds, and it's not just like, I want to be a billionaire. Like, that's stupid, right. There's no plan of action that's set there.
There's nothing that drives me crazier than someone who comes to me, says, 'Yo, I'm an entrepreneur, this is what I do, this is what I sell, I sell this, I do this, I'm building this company'. I'm like, OK, what did you do last week? They're like, 'Well, I was in the Hamptons last week, played golf on Sunday, but like Monday through Friday...' No, no, no. If you want to build your own business, you do it seven days a week. I did not take a single day off for three years. And it's easy for me to say now, but really, really hard to do, and it's really hard for a lot of people to do, as well. So, you have to figure out what you really, really want, and stick to it.
The other thing I would say is, you don't have to do it by yourself when you start. That's probably a mistake that I made. I think I would've grown faster, but I started by myself because I didn't have that stick to intuitiveness to real estate. I didn't really know that that's what I wanted to do, it was kind of weird. I didn't see myself as being a real estate broker. I didn't even like real estate brokers. And so, I was doing other things at the same time. If I had maybe worked on someone else's team, if I had maybe worked for another company, if I had maybe learned by watching successful people do what they do instead of just trying by myself to do it, it would've been better."
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