Ideas in the Wild: Jason Williford is Helping Business Leaders Achieve Game-Changing Breakthroughs
My biggest epiphany was an obvious one, life is short and can be over instantly. It was a reminder to live and play all out. My personal life mission statement changed. It became “to positively impact 10,000,000 lives, directly or indirectly, with or without receiving recognition.”
Jason Williford is a serial entrepreneur, author, speaker, inventor, and consultant for high-producing real estate agents. After years in the trenches of real estate, he set himself and his team apart with strategies and techniques that were learned in other industries and applied to real estate. In his new book, The Ultimate Real Estate Machine, Jason shares a plethora of nuggets from experience that readers can implement immediately.
I recently caught up with Jason to learn more about what inspired him to write the book, his favorite idea he shares with readers, and how he’s applied that idea to his own life.
What happened that made you decide to write the book? What was the exact moment when you realized these ideas needed to get out there?
Jay Abraham and I decided to write the book because we wanted to impact the lives of real estate agents across the world. After a private consultation with Mr. Abraham, Jay loved principles that my partner and I executed upon at a high level. It gave him excitement to get more involved in the industry and give back. He feels that the industry could use a “stiff shot in the arm” to protect agents and real estate consumers.
The book is dedicated and written as a tribute to Jay Abraham and his lifetime body of work. In addition, the book is also dedicated to my lovely daughter, Callie Burns. Callie is not only my princess but my hero as she battles and wins against her Absence Seizures.
Jay Abraham is widely known as one of the greatest business and marketing minds to walk the planet. For over 40 years, he has been in over 1,000 different industries with over 10,000 clients including Tony Robbins, Daymond John, Joe Polish, Roland Frasier, Stephen R. Covey, a co-founder of FedEx, and many, many other super successful, high profile clients.
In residential real estate, Jay has advised the top coaches and mentored Keller Williams’ first CEO, Mo Anderson. He’s been a keynote speaker on the biggest stages in real estate for close to thirty years now.
The book was written as a tribute to Jay Abraham’s expansive lifetime body of work. My hope is that it positively impacts the lives of real estate agents across the world as his teachings have impacted me.
Consumer trust ratings are horribly low and agent failure rates are tremendously high. There are industry disruptors with their eyes set on their grand prize to remove agents from the real estate transaction. The industry is a prime target for major potential disruption.
The market has been hot for a long time now, right now is an amazing time for growth and to capture market share. I’m not a pessimist, just a realist that the market will not stay hot forever. In the “Great Recession,” many real estate agents were negatively affected, including me. Many were not prepared for the down market, as a result, many real estate agents lost everything.
While reading the reader will see that we didn’t pander to the reader to tell them what they wanted to hear, we wanted to make sure they got what they needed to hear. This straightforward, “tough love” approach is in hopes that the reader not only takes advantage of the great market but also builds a proverbial fortress around their business. Thus, not only protecting their business during tough times but also seizing this moment as a tremendous opportunity for growth.
In Tony Robbins’ Business Mastery, Tony constantly reminds the participants that “Winter is my season”, it becomes a new paradigm for you, it shifts your thinking. The premise is that many opportunities come available during down economies and markets. Many of America’s greatest companies were built or proven to be sustainable during tough times.
What’s your favorite specific, actionable idea in the book?
I truly do not have a favorite part of the book, I’ve deeply contemplated this question but my answer remains the same. The entire book is custom designed for agents to take action and execute on the proven strategies within the book. When they apply what they learn to their business, they will undoubtedly have real tangible results and business breakthroughs. Their business will keep moving upward and onward.
At the end of most chapters, there are “Massive Action Assignments” that the readers are encouraged to complete. Each assignment is tailored for them to take what they have learned in that given chapter, apply it to their business, and get results. The “Compound Effect” is that when they complete X assignments, their results will be exponential versus linear, one-dimensional results.
The book wasn’t written for intellectual entertainment, it was truly written for the reader to start seeing immediate results while they are taking the Action items. It’s impossible for them to not increase their business while doing the assignments within the book.
We are so confident that they will that we are offering a 200% money-back guarantee. If they do the action items and they don’t see results, they get double their money back.
What’s a story of how you’ve applied this idea in your own life? What’s it done for you?
In my opinion and perspective, I believe in manifestation but only to a certain degree. To get what you truly want and desire from life, an opportunity very rarely will knock down your door. You must first accurately and honestly determine where you currently are in your business. When you know this, you only need to develop a roadmap to get from point A to point B.
Then you sculpt out where you want to go not only in your business but in your life in general. Not only in the immediate future but throughout life.
Tony Robbins says “Success without fulfillment is the ultimate failure.” If your business is rocking, you’re having tremendous growth but the other areas of your life are in peril, this isn’t success. If your health is poor, if your marriage is falling apart, you rarely spend true quality time with your children, and your spirituality is off-kilter; this is failure.
We all have our own perspective of what our definition of success is to us. What a well-rounded perfect life looks like to us. My definition of success is “doing what you want, when you want, with whom you want without the lack of money stopping me from doing those things”. That is just my definition, it doesn’t have to be yours.
One of the book chapters, “The 4 Steps to Greatness” outlines the steps that you need to take to live a life of greatness. In my own personal life, one significant event that happened to me was a close call with death.
In early fall of 2021, I was infected with a bacteria called H pylori. The infection turned into extreme gastritis and diverticulitis. I was on a mini-vacation in St John, USVI with family members, the pain became so excruciating that we had to leave the island a couple of days earlier. We rushed to get me to a hospital in the states through a rough boat and shuttle ride, an excruciating plane ride to finally make it to the hospital.
I had never spent a night in the hospital in my life prior to this sixteen-day hospital stay, 8 days were spent in the intensive care unit (ICU). When they found the h pylori, they also found three blood clots, liver disease, gallbladder stones, and kidney stones. One doctor said that my intestines were the worst inflamed that the hospital had seen. The pain was horrendous for approximately 8 weeks. Several physicians said that other patients would not have survived.
I contracted COVID two weeks after being released from the ICU. My blood counts were still extremely low, the COVID infection was a completely separate battle and the pain was still in my abdomen. The only symptom that I thankfully didn’t get of COVID was respiratory, this would’ve been another potentially life-ending ordeal.
My biggest epiphany was an obvious one, life is short and can be over instantly. It was a reminder to live and play all out. My personal life mission statement changed. It became “to positively impact 10,000,000 lives, directly or indirectly, with or without receiving recognition.”
The moral of my story is that there are many lessons within the book that will help you achieve mental breakthroughs in your business and life rather than having mental breakdowns. Developing the mindset that the reader will need to become the person that they need to become to get to the goals that they want to achieve.
Thank you so much for your insights. This was very insightful and meaningful.
