Be Abnormal ! Don't be Normal if you want to be successful | By Sawan Kumar | Best Career Coach

If you want to break into real estate, build wealth, or lead a career that actually matters, the abnormal mindset for success is not optional — it is the entry requirement.

Direct Answer: Normal people follow the crowd, take the safe path, and wonder why they end up with average results. Being abnormal means deliberately choosing behaviours, habits, and decisions that the majority avoid — and that is precisely why it produces outcomes the majority never reach. The data is consistent: outlier results come from outlier behaviour, not from doing what everyone else does slightly better.

Why Normal Is the Most Dangerous Career Strategy

Normal feels safe. Normal means doing what your peers do, applying to the same jobs, taking the same courses, and benchmarking your progress against people who are also just being normal. The problem is that normal is a race to the median. In real estate specifically, normal means chasing the same listings, using the same negotiation scripts, and competing on price alone. I have trained over 79,000 students across 74+ courses, and the single clearest pattern I see is this: the ones who break out do something the room is not doing. They pick an underserved niche. They use AI tools to analyse market data before anyone else in their city. They make 50 calls when the normal agent makes 10.

Normal distributes you evenly into a pool of forgettable. Abnormal makes you the only option.

What Abnormal Actually Looks Like in Practice

Abnormal is not weird for the sake of it. It is precise deviation from the default path in areas where the default path produces weak results. Here is what it looks like in real, measurable terms:

• Abnormal learning pace: While others complete one certification a year, abnormal professionals stack two to three skills in six months. In real estate, that means pairing your licence with AI literacy, data analytics, or GHL-based CRM automation.
• Abnormal prospecting: Cold outreach to expired listings and FSBOs when everyone else is waiting for referrals. Sending 200 personalised video messages a month instead of generic emails.
• Abnormal positioning: Niching into a hyper-specific segment — luxury off-plan in one district, NRI investor properties, or commercial-to-residential conversions — instead of competing on all fronts.
• Abnormal information diet: Reading market reports, Fed minutes, and developer pipeline data instead of doom-scrolling industry gossip. Knowing the vacancy rate of three specific sub-markets before a client asks.
• Abnormal consistency: Showing up every day for eighteen months when normal agents quit after six weeks of slow pipeline.

The Psychology Behind Choosing to Be Different

Most people do not choose normal consciously. They drift into it because deviation feels socially risky. The brain treats standing out as a threat — evolutionary wiring that kept early humans from being excluded from the tribe. But the modern career economy rewards signal, not safety. In real estate, the agent who publishes market breakdowns on LinkedIn every week, who builds a reputation as the data-first consultant in their patch, who is visibly doing something different — that agent gets inbound. The normal agent cold-calls.

Direct Answer: The psychological shift required to be abnormal is moving your reference group from peers to outcomes. Stop comparing yourself to other agents and start comparing your current results to the results you want. Once the gap is clear, the behaviour required to close it becomes obvious — and almost always involves doing things your peer group considers excessive, risky, or unnecessary.

How to Build an Abnormal Strategy in Real Estate

This is not motivational decoration. Here is a concrete process:

• Step 1 — Audit the normal: Write down the five things every agent in your market does. Those are your constraints to break. If everyone posts three times a week, post daily. If everyone works 9–5, prospect 7–9 AM before the day starts.
• Step 2 — Pick one abnormal bet: Abnormal spread thin becomes noise. Pick one deviation and go deep. For six months, commit to becoming the best AI-assisted real estate analyst in your city. Learn PropTech tools, build dashboards, share insights publicly.
• Step 3 — Measure the deviation: Abnormal without metrics is just random. Track your call volume, content output, lead conversion, and referral rate monthly. The number should be moving in a direction normal agents cannot explain.
• Step 4 — Tolerate the lag: Abnormal behaviour takes three to six months to show compounding returns. Most people quit at month two because the results have not caught up yet. The abnormal thing to do is stay when it is uncomfortable.
• Step 5 — Raise the ceiling: Once your abnormal behaviour becomes your new normal, find the next deviation. Growth is a staircase, not a ramp.

Real Estate Professionals Who Chose Abnormal and Won

Graham Stephan built a real estate career and then documented it on YouTube when no agent was doing that. He was abnormal. He now has millions of followers and a media business built on top of his real estate credibility. Ryan Serhant wrote a book, built a team, created a TV presence, and launched his own brokerage — when normal agents were protecting their CRE books and staying invisible. Both of them made choices the room thought were unnecessary, risky, or distracting. Both of them compounded those choices into outcomes the room cannot replicate.

As a Chartered Accountant turned AI educator with 79,000+ students trained globally, I can tell you the same pattern holds across every industry I have touched: the people who break out are doing things the consensus considers excessive. The CA who builds a YouTube channel. The consultant who writes a book before they feel ready. The real estate agent who learns AI tools two years before anyone else in their brokerage.

The Compounding Effect of Abnormal Behaviour Over Time

Normal compounds slowly and predictably toward average. Abnormal compounds exponentially toward distinction. The first year of abnormal behaviour feels lonely and unrewarded. The third year feels like unfair advantage. This is because abnormal behaviour builds compounding assets — reputation, skill depth, audience, referral networks — that normal behaviour never triggers.

In real estate, an agent who spent year one building abnormal content, year two building abnormal prospecting systems, and year three building abnormal client experience has three compounding flywheels running simultaneously. The normal agent has none. By year five the gap is not a gap — it is a different game entirely.

Choose one area this week where you are doing exactly what everyone else does, and change one variable. That single deliberate deviation, sustained for six months, is where the abnormal mindset for success actually begins — start with your prospecting volume or your content output, pick the number, and double it.