Opportunity
Michael B. Lamb, MAI, SRA June 4th, 2008
Who knows when or where opportunity will strike next. It’s all around us. All the time. Almost every day we hear stories about someone who invented some apparently simple or trivial item, but it made him a millionaire. Or somebody else wrote a book, or a friend secured a wonderful new job, or your cousin got a fabulous raise in pay. It happens every day – but it seems to happen to someone else. And all we see are the results, and not the long hours and hard work that produced these results.
I think all of us daydream once in a while about finding the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, winning the State Lottery, or inheriting a fortune from some long lost relative we’ve never even met.
But the dream passes, and we come back to reality, back to our jobs, and our daily routines. Too often though, we tend to equate back to work, or reality, with drudgery, or unpleasant tasks, and miss the fact that our golden opportunity, the key to future happiness and success, is right there in front of us and always has been just waiting for us to take the initiative.
If you are working to become a professional real estate appraiser, why not upgrade that goal to read, “I am working to become the BEST professional real estate appraiser.” Too many people sacrifice themselves to mediocrity simply because it is the easy way out. There is always an excuse available if needed. One can always justify the reason for not doing something. It’s just human nature at work. But remember, success and accomplishments don’t need to be rationalized, explained, or excused: They tell their own story.
One of the really serious problems of our appraisal profession has been that a large number of real estate appraisers have never taken appraising seriously. They arrived, sort of by accident, found they could make a fairly good living, and having reached a certain level they stopped reading, studying, learning, and trying to advance their knowledge and skills. As a result, we have a lot of people working in the appraisal profession who are actually satisfied with mediocrity, are willing to deliver just enough to get by, and will accept the income such work justifies.
They don’t want to join a professional organization because they say it costs too much, and anyway they get all the work they want without belonging. But these are the people who have benefited from all of the work done by professional appraisal organizations, by the research and techniques developed by members of professional groups, and they enjoy the standards of pay or fees that others have established. They are free loaders.
Human nature won’t change, so there is probably nothing we can do about this attitude of some appraisers, but we can do something about our own attitudes, our own approach to the problem of enlarging and increasing our professional expertise.
Instead of worrying about what “they” do out there, if each one of us will strive to improve his or her professional qualifications this coming year, by attending meetings, seminars and courses, we will discover that opportunity is right there knocking at our own front door. It’s strange, but every time you improve your techniques or capabilities, you find a need for them; you discover a market for your added skills, and a market that will pay for your professional services.
There are opportunities galore for the well-qualified, well-prepared, educated professional appraiser. He or she will find all of the “opportunities” he or she can handle, and then some. Just look back at our recent recession: A lot of “appraisers” dropped out of sight, but the qualified, the designated appraisers, kept right on working.
Opportunity: It’s right there in front of all of us, just waiting to be taken advantage of. And the key to success is preparation, education, and professionalism. Opportunity isn’t an accident, it isn’t luck; opportunity is the result of good hard work.