Be The One You’ve Been Waiting For!

Here we are, friends, the end of yet another year. Personally, I love this time of year and for a few reasons: I take some much-needed time off, I see some old friends I’ve had since grade school, I get to look back on the year and review what went right, what didn’t, and what the next year holds in terms of an almost completely blank canvas of opportunity, and, of course, some time with family.

No, presents are not part of the deal for me. We can buy whatever we want whenever we want to and often do. We stopped buying Christmas presents for my children and family many years ago and encouraged family members to use that money to have experiences or donate it to good causes.

I know for many of you, this time of year has religious significance and that’s what makes it special. Whatever your reasons and rituals, I truly hope you too will take some time to look back over the prior year and document some of the lessons and learnings that can, and probably should, be taken into the coming year.

As much as that opening may have put you at ease that this is going to be a nice year-end episode talking about all the good things that this past year has brought, or if you thought this would be another tactical episode of techniques or steps to help you with your business, I am going to disappoint you fast. The title of this episode gives away the topic: nobody is coming to save you!

Let me share with you what I typically start off my own year-end reviews with so that you have a sense of where I’m coming from. I start off my year-end recap and review, as well as the next year’s planning with a mantra: “nobody is coming to save you, so it’s up to you to make it happen”. What I also remind myself, and have ever since the beginning of 2002, is that there is no such thing as normal.

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Normal is gone and has been for a long time. If you’re like me and were born in the 70’s or 80’s, we can look back at those decades and think, “that was normal”. Things have not been normal for a couple decades now. And if any of your plans require ‘normal’, your plans are garbage and it’s time to scrap them in favor of some plans that recognize the futility of hoping for normal, hoping things will go your way, and worst of all, hoping someone is coming to save you.

If the last several political cycles have taught us anything, if you are still living like some savior is coming for you and is going to make everything all better, you are going to get wrecked by reality. So, let me say it clearly for those of you still hoping for some kind of divine intervention or an anointed leader that cares about you; the market is not your parent. Your industry is not your parent. Your association is not your parent. Your boss is not your parent. The government is not your parent. Interest rates are not your parent. AI is not your parent. The economy is not your parent.

Nobody cares about you and your dreams like you like you care about you and your dreams. You are an adult and its time to start acting like it. I know, I know, some people will hear this and they get dramatic. They’ll say, “Wow, Blaine, that sounds negative.” It’s not negative, it’s called being an adult and taking responsibility for your life, your business, and the results you are getting or not getting. Because the most poisonous lie in business and life is this: ‘All I need is for something external to change and then my life will finally work.

Of course, insert whatever you want in place of the word ‘life’. Business, relationships, health, wealth, or whatever you dare place there, the truth remains the same: nobody is coming to save you. That lie turns grown adults into weak people begging and pleading for something from some thing or somebody that doesn’t care about you, and beggars do not build great businesses. They sit around like old house cats complaining and coping.

So that we’re clear, let me name the addiction for you. The addiction is ‘waiting’. Waiting for rates to drop. Waiting for volume to return. Waiting for the phone to ring. Waiting for a better season. Waiting for clarity. Waiting for confidence. Waiting for motivation. Waiting for the industry to be fair. Waiting for the President to save you. Waiting for your associations and organizations to save you. Waiting for the next boom to save you. Waiting until you have enough money saved. Waiting until the time is right. And waiting until your next messiah shows up promising you to fix everything and, of course, in your favor.

Sorry friends, if you haven’t figured out by now, it doesn’t work like that. The world does not owe you a living. It does not owe you a pipeline. It does not owe you a full schedule. It does not owe you respect. It does not owe you higher fees or even fair fees, whatever that means. It does not owe you less competition. It doesn’t even owe you an explanation.

If you want those things, you build the conditions for them…period, full stop! Let’s be clear lest you start to get it twisted, when I say nobody is coming to save you, I am not saying nobody loves you. I am not saying you should become bitter. I am not saying community does not matter. I’m not saying you don’t have friends or people that care about you. I am saying nobody will ever care about your outcomes like you do.

Nobody is going to lose sleep over your bank account. Nobody is going to protect your health for you. Nobody is going to drag your business into the future while you cling to the past. And by the way, most people will protect themselves first, especially when helping you comes with a cost. That is human nature under pressure. It is not evil or even intentional, but it is predictable and the sooner you realize this harsh truth, the sooner and freer you should start to feel.

Stop acting surprised. Stop getting emotionally crushed every time an organization acts like an organization. Stop breaking down every time a president you didn’t vote for does something heinous. Stop lying to yourself every time a president you did vote for does something heinous and you argue it was in your best interest.

Organizations protect themselves. Markets do what markets do. Competitors compete. Politicians steal. Technology moves and the world changes. Your job is not to whine about it. Your job is to wake up to a reality you may not have chosen or preferred and then adapt faster than the average person is willing to.

Just like any good 12-step recovery program, the first step is to admit your weakness and your failings. This helps to wake you up and also somewhat normalize that we all have weaknesses and failings and that we can grow, not despite those weaknesses, but precisely because we’re able to recognize and identify them. That’s the first step to recovery: admit that nobody is coming to save you and that you may have put faith in the wrong things.

If your plan requires the market to change, you do not have a plan. If your plan requires the government to fix what ails you, you do not have a plan. If your plan requires the perfect people to show up in your life with the perfect plan to make your life peachy, you do not have a plan. You have a wish and wishes are expensive. They cost years, sometimes lifetimes.

I am going to speak directly to appraisers for a minute, because a lot of you need to hear this without the polite language. Appraisers, nobody is coming to save you. The Fed is not sitting around thinking about your order volume. AMCs are not going to wake up tomorrow generous. Lenders are not going to suddenly pay you more because you think you deserve it. Homeowners are not going to understand your value because you feel under appreciated.

And if you are still sitting there waiting for the boom days to come back, you are not being loyal to the profession or to yourself, you are being delusional. Same message for realtors, lenders, managers, business owners. If you built a business that only works when conditions are perfect, you did not build a business. You built a fragile arrangement that will break at the first bit of pressure.

I get it, the last decade made a lot of average operators feel like geniuses. Low rates, high volume, easy money, constant demand. A lot of people thought, “Look at me, I am crushing it.”

I’m sorry to burst your bubble, friend, but the market was carrying you on its shoulders. And now the market is not carrying you. So here is the real question: are you actually skilled or were you just busy?

By the way, all of my coaching students will get this because we talk about it all the time, but ‘busy’ is not a flex. Busy is often just poor design or lack of good systems. Often during coaching calls, when it’s the next person’s turn to share their goals and wins, they’ll start off with, ‘well, things are good, I’ve been really busy!’, to which I almost always reply, ‘what does busy mean?’

Busy is a word that means something different to almost everyone. What I have learned over the years is that, almost always, ‘busy’ means ‘functionally overwhelmed with all that is going on because I’m just taking things as they go and have no real systems, processes, or plans for handling more than X volume on any given day’.

Hunter S Thompson said, “A man who procrastinates in his choosing will have his choice made for him by circumstance.” That is what is happening to a lot of people right now, not just appraisers, by the way. I know appraisers tend to think they’re the only ones that matter and that all the bad stuff is only happening to them, but stuff happens and is happening to lots of people all around the world.

But, for many of those people, they are not deciding, they are drifting. They are not building, they’re waiting. Instead of recognizing that nobody is coming to save them and adapting to the circumstances, they’re arguing with reality (and often everyone else around them) and reality is making their choices for them.

Let me share with you a few thoughts that came up when I was doing my own year end recap and review. Many of these things have been said by me on this show in past episode, so they’re not necessarily new ideas, but appropriate for a year-end show titled ‘Nobody Is Coming To Save You’.

First thought: Your License might be permission, but it’s not a promise or guarantee. Just because you hold the credential doesn't mean the market owes you a living. A license gives you the right to play the game; but it guarantees zero points on the scoreboard. And, as is my nature to say something like this, let me not hold back on a year-end episode, many of you play like you’re on a little league team.

If you want to be treated like a pro, you have to act like a pro and stop thinking the world owes you an income or a career, it doesn’t. Many of you act like you’re owed something by somebody, and it only leaves you upset that you don’t yet have it. The quickest antidote to that delusion is to simply say to yourself every morning, nobody is coming to save me.

Next thought, Nostalgia is a Toxic Asset: Stop talking about "how it used to be" or "the good old days". For appraisers, the good old days were from 91’ to 97’, or 02’ to 07’, or 2012 to 2023. Friends, those are typical undulations in a highly manipulated system and many of those good old days were an anomaly, not the baseline. Basing your business plan on the return of a unicorn market is financial suicide.

I’m by nature a nostalgic person. I love old things, things that have some kind of energy worked into them. I loved the practice of giving your martial arts belt to a person a level below you after you’ve earned a new one because the belief is that your belt holds all of the energy you put into training during that phase of your journey. That’s nostalgia.

There is a page from a motorcycle magazine taped to the inside of the door going into my garage and its for a dirtbike from 1988, which is the year I graduated from high school. The picture was there when I first started renting this house during my divorce in 2011. I eventually bought the house, and the picture remains and will remain there forever. In fact, I’m going to throw it into a little protective frame so that the picture doesn’t get damaged.

Why do I keep it? Because I’m nostalgic and that magazine picture contains the hopes and dreams of somebody who lived here before me. It has now become part of my surroundings, and I love seeing that picture on that door held up by four pieces of scotch tape. It represents part of a shared past. Shared with someone I don’t even know, by the way. But that is nostalgia.

What I don’t do is expect that dirtbike to magically show up in my driveway or pine away for a time when dirtbikes were built like that, or that same price, or that color, or any of the other other things that nostalgia beckons us to do sometimes.

Many of you are stuck in a prior age hoping that one day those days will come back. Sorry friends, it doesn’t work that way! Nostalgia is not a strategy, it is a way to remember a prior time and call up some of the emotion of that time, that’s it. The good old days are never coming back, but that does not mean there aren’t good new days ahead. It’s just that it will be solely up to you to create them. Eventually, all the good stuff you create in the coming years because of a shift in mindset and outlook will become the ‘good old days’ you recount to your kids or grandkids.

Hopefully, when you are sharing those memories, you also share with them that if it is to be, it will be up to them to make it so because nobody is coming to save them. It would be irresponsible of you not to share that timeless wisdom.

Another thought, The Market is Indifferent: The economy does not know your name, nor does it care about you. Interest rates do not care about your mortgage or your kid’s tuition. The market is an indifferent force of nature, like the weather. You don't scream at the rain; you build a roof. You don’t curse the winter; you chop wood in the spring and summer to feed the stove when its cold. You don’t blame the dark for being dark, you strike a match to create some light.

What goes along with this thought is that almost everything around you is indifferent. That doesn’t mean people don’t love you, it means all of the institutions you put your faith in will not skip a beat or give you a call when you can’t pay your mortgage. Sorry to all of you deeply ensconced in politics and the asininity of ‘my guy is better than your guy’ thinking, but none of those folks are coming to save you and they never were. If you’re happy because you think you’re getting a tax cut next year and that’s because of your guy, you’re simply forgetting that its money they’re stealing from you to begin with. Those of you still believing in the myth that government is of the people, by the people, and for the people and that, with just the right person in place, all will be well, you have guaranteed yourself a life of misery.

Nobody is coming to save you, and that includes the government. If you get sucked into a defensive situation, know that the police are, at best, 7-12 minutes away. Not sure if you’ve ever been in a fight, but 7 minutes is a lifetime. That doesn’t make the police bad people, it just makes your strategy of hoping someone will be there to save you a horrible strategy built only on hope, not on reality.

If you’re waiting for the Fed to lower interest rates so that you can pay your bills again, sorry, that’s not their job. The Fed has a so-called ‘dual mandate’ of keeping inflation in check and employment stable. They’re terrible at both, by the way, but saving your deal flow because you overspent on the house and cars you bought in the boom times is not their job and they couldn’t care any less about you and your needs. Saving independent fee appraisers is nowhere in the Fed’s mandates or charter. The Fed will absolutely destroy the housing market if it means saving the US dollar and all the people at the top who depend on the strength of the dollar. Nobody is coming to save you!

Next thought, and this one might hit a little too close to home for a bunch of appraisers; complaining is not a strategy. Venting in Facebook groups or forums about AMCs, appraisal waivers, or low fees might feel therapeutic, but it has an ROI of less than zero. It is energy leaked that should have been poured into business development. I say that it has an ROI of less than zero because complaining is ultimately a net negative. Not only does it make you look and sound week and helpless, it does absolutely nothing for your bottom line and certainly doesn’t improve your business or life in any way.

I get it, some of you like to use the excuse that you have to have somewhere to innocently vent your frustrations and talk shop. But that’s all it is, an excuse. You vent to your significant other, your girls at book club, or your boys on golf night. Venting on social media is just dog whistling to all the other people who think like you do and trying to garner either sympathy or create some kind of movement of people who like to complain on social media. Both dead ends.

Nobody is coming to save you, especially the people who like to complain on social media. Those are not the people you want standing next to you when times get tough or in an emergency. Those are the kind of men who will place an innocent woman between themselves and danger and the first to disappear when real shit hits the fan. Stay away from these people!

Next thought I had as I contemplated the year that has past and the new year ahead: tenure does not equal safety. We hear all the time appraisers exclaiming how long they’ve been in the industry as if that should automatically grant them some kind of special treatment or unquestionable fawning at any responses they may give.

Being an appraiser for 30 years does not protect you from disruption, nor does it mean you are the ultimate authority on a topic. It is more common to see veterans of any industry simply repeating years 3, 4, or 5 of their careers over and over for the next 25 years than it is to see people who’ve actually grown every year of those 30. Obviously not true in all cases, but length of time doing something isn’t an automatic get out of jail free card when it comes to change.

If a piece of technology or a systemic change is faster and cheaper, the market will likely choose it. Experience only matters if it translates to current value, and value is always determined by the customer, not the one doing the work.

Friends, here’s the bottom line: it's as true today as it has been since the dawn of history that nobody is coming to save you. It doesn’t matter the situation or scenario, business or industry, whatever you are experiencing today, you created it. Don’t argue with me on this one because you’ll just dig yourself another hole that you alone will have to crawl out of because nobody is coming to save you.

The reasons don’t matter regardless of how therapeutic it may feel to keep screaming them over and over. “It’s the AMCs, the interest rates, the bottom feeders, the hybrids, Fannie, Freddie, Realtors, Lenders…”, and the list goes on. Everyone and everything you blame for why your life and business are not the way you want them now hold more power than you do. When you give away the responsibility and reasons why something isn’t going your way to external causes, you give away the opportunity to change it.

If your business sucks because AMCs suck, what is that saying about you and your business? How can you change it if you can’t change the AMCs? If your life and business suck because the interest rates are not moving in your favor, what does that say about the robustness of your business strategy? It says you built a business based solely on the decisions and machinations of politicians and bankers. Not smart!

When you adopt the mindset that nobody is coming to save you, you realize the futility of blaming, complaining, whining, and wasting your precious time on unproductive activities. You’ll also find, not at all ironically, that the most successful among us also hold the view that nobody is coming to save them either, so they create their own reality, their own economies, and their own results. Who would you rather be around? The whiners and complainers? Or the one’s getting after it and adapting to their circumstances faster than everyone else?

The point is to shift your whole mindset from an external locus of control, which screams that “things happen to me”, to an internal locus of control, which calmly says, “I make thing happen”. The success mindset says everything in your business is your fault. When you start to think that way you become free. If your business is down, it's your fault: fix it! If your income isn’t where you want it to be, it’s your fault, fix it! If your business is too AMC heavy, that’s your damn fault; shut up about it or fix it! Once you accept that it's broken because of you, you accept that you’re the one who can fix it.

As much as this whole thing may come across as mean spirited and off-putting to you, I would encourage you to look within. If your first instinct is to get upset at what I’m saying, my guess is that you also have a list of grievances against all of the entities I’ve been talking about in this episode. You’re the complainer, so it’s easier to get upset with me and how I express this topic than it is to accept that I’m talking to you about you!

It’s time to step up and become the CEO of your business instead of the technician. The technician waits for orders from above to go into action, the CEO goes hunting for fresh meat. The technician thinks they’re the only one who can get the job done, the CEO looks for all the reasons they shouldn’t be the one doing all the work. The technician thinks they have security because they get a paycheck, the CEO knows that security is being able to create and add value regardless of the circumstances.

If you want 2026 to be better than 2025, don’t count on any external factors going in your favor. If they do, great, you’ll get lucky again and think you’re a genius, but it will all be for naught when the winds change again, as they always do. Nobody is coming to save any of us, so get up, wipe your nose, brush off the dirt, look forward and start fixing all the things that are broken because of you. Be your own savior, be your own hero, and be the one you’ve been looking to come to your rescue all alone. Or, as Marcus Aurelius said, “…get busy with life’s purpose, toss aside empty hopes, get active in your own rescue if you care for yourself at all, and do it while you can.”

Until next year my friends, I’m out…