When I was a kid, I loved Monopoly. It’s the real estate board game – of course I liked it. Buying property, building houses, collecting rent, mortgaging property. How could anyone not like this game? I still have my old Monopoly board if anyone is ever up for a game.
Most of us grow up thinking that life is like Monopoly. You move around the board in a linear fashion – buying property, building hotels, and collecting rent. In the end, the person with the most money wins. Simple enough.
Here’s the rub, though. Life isn’t like Monopoly – it’s not a linear path. Life is like Chutes and Ladders – sometime you get a ladder that moves you up several spaces and sometimes you hit a chute.
Learning is not linear. It’s more like Chutes and Ladders. Sometimes it’s linear, but other times you make drastic strides and other times you regress.
So what does this have to do with learning real estate and passing the Florida real estate exam? Well, we like to think that learning new material is very linear like Monopoly. But it’s not. You start to learn new material and you are moving up at a consistent pace, but then you reach a plateau. You stay there for a while, then you move up some more. You might even drop down a little bit and forget material that you knew yesterday. Over a length of time, the general trajectory is up. After all, I know more today than I did last year at this time. But on a day-to-day basis, you aren’t moving up consistently every day.
In my pre-licensing and review classes, we do a review question game. Students often become discouraged when they get questions wrong, especially if it is something that they knew yesterday. I don’t worry about it too much because I know they learn as much, if not more, when they get it wrong than when they get it right.
When you are studying for the real estate exam, focus on consistency – studying every day. If you are making progress, but it doesn’t feel like you are making progress every day, don’t worry about it. When you are doing the practice questions, keep plowing ahead. You will eventually get past this plateau and land on a ladder.