I was meeting with a real estate broker based here in Lowell earlier this week – let’s call him Bill. The meeting was to see if he had anything we might be interested in buying. As the meeting concluded and I watched him walk out of our office and down the street, it occurred to me that Bill has a unique lesson to teach all of us.

You see, Bill has worked as a broker in Lowell for decades now, and is well known by every building owner, buyer, and seller within the city. He’s a smart, well-spoken individual, but he lacks the charisma and energy of many of the “high-profile” brokers who work in real estate. In other words, he’s kind of the opposite of Ryan Serhand and Fredrik Eklund for those of you who watch Million Dollar Listing, or anybody on the Selling Sunset cast if that’s more your vibe. If you were to look at any given year, you would find that Bill brokered a number of transactions, very few of which would be eye-popping for their size, pricing, or influence on the direction of the city. In other words, much of what you see when you look at Bill appears fairly ordinary.

But when you change the timeframe from a single month, year, or even decade and instead look at what Bill has done over his 30+ year career, you suddenly realize that he’s single-handedly been one of the largest influences on the direction of the city over the last half-century. In that time, high-profile developers have come and gone, major corporations who were going to “change the city forever” have gone boom and bust, and political careers have waxed and waned, but Bill just kept chugging along.  He never set the world on fire, or inked the “deal of the century”, but just by showing up to work day after day, he slowly, steadily, and gradually moved the needle on the direction of the city. 

When most of us dream or think about success, we think about the “big moments” – buying a house, getting a promotion, or even retiring. But those are all single points in time and pale in comparison to the importance and significance of the cumulative impact of the small actions we take day in and day out. So next time it’s sunny Friday afternoon, and you catch yourself staring out the window daydreaming, I’d challenge you to think about what actions, if repeated day after day over the course of your career, would lead you to the kind of impact and legacy that you hope to leave?