What Are You Building All of This For? Your purpose in real estate

I attended the CEO Summit at Mega Camp recently. One of the things I appreciate about that event is that the speakers aren’t only there to talk about real estate. It isn’t another full day of how to get more listings, hold better open houses, generate leads, or improve conversion. Those conversations matter, but sometimes it’s helpful to step outside the day-to-day work and ask a bigger question: What’s the life you envision yourself having? What's your purpose in real estate?

Dan Buettner was one of the speakers. He’s known for his work studying Blue Zones, places where people tend to live longer and have more people reaching 100 years old. I’ve always been interested in health and longevity. I try to think about exercising more and eating better. But what stayed with me from his presentation wasn’t only the conversation about food. It was the conversation about purpose. In Okinawa, Japan, there’s a word called ikigai. It’s often explained as the reason you get up in the morning.

That sounds simple, but I found it profound.

My mom died in 2016. She was still young, at least in my mind, and I’ve always felt like she didn’t get a fair shake. She should’ve had more time to experience life and more of herself to give. She was an educator for most of her career. She taught, served as a principal, and later worked with the county school system. She would go into schools, meet with students, learn about their home lives, and study what was happening so the school system could better understand how to help them. That work gave her days structure and responsibility .

Then she retired.

She passed away from cancer less than a year later. I’ve caught myself connecting those two events over the years. I know I can’t say that retiring caused her illness. Health doesn’t work through one clean cause-and-effect explanation. What the timing has always made me wonder is what happens when the thing that gave your days direction suddenly disappears. The problems you spent years helping solve belong to someone else now. What gets you up in the morning?

That question followed me back to real estate.

This is not an easy career. It’s emotionally charged, unpredictable, and demanding. We help people make decisions about one of the most expensive assets they’ll ever own. We manage expectations, difficult conversations, changing timelines, and problems we didn’t create. Building a business that can eventually operate without consuming your entire life is another challenge altogether. And yet, we keep choosing to do it.

Why?

If the answer is only money, I’m not sure that’s enough to carry someone through every version of this career. A commission check can reward the work. It can’t always provide the reason for doing it. Your reason doesn’t have to sound impressive.

It also doesn’t have to remain the same forever.

The reason you began your career may not be the reason you continue it. As your business changes, it’s worth asking whether the life you’re building still matches the life you wanted. I don’t think the lesson is that we should work forever. The lesson is that our work can’t be the only place where purpose lives. Eventually, production changes. Roles change. Children grow up. Businesses evolve. At some point, we all need reasons to get up in the morning that aren’t dependent on a job title or the number of transactions we closed that year.

So here’s the question I left the CEO Summit thinking about:

-What are you building all of this for? Not what’s your production goal. Not how many listings do you want. Not what award are you trying to earn.

-What do you want the business to make possible? If you haven’t thought about that in a while, complete this sentence: “I get up in the morning because…”

Your answer may tell you more about the business you should be building than another production goal ever will.