Are you happy? Stop! Don't let your left brain departmentalize the question into neat and organized buckets like - "What's this guy getting at?," "that's a stupid question," or "let me scan this newsletter for real content." It's a fair question if you're ready to be bold.  

Here's my life goal that I'm still working on, "If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live." This quote by Lin Yutang suggests that less is more. A challenging thought to our western predispositions.



As commercial appraisers, if we're not happy, work tends to be much harder. We get a new appraisal assignment and at the start it seems complex, harder to find and confirm sales, more difficult to confidently conclude to a final value opinion, we struggle to complete reports, feel overwhelmed with production requirements and feel great angst if a reviewer even emails.

The Indigo Girls have a great tune, Closer to Fine, with lyrics I love, "I went to the doctor, I went to the mountains, I looked to the children, I drank from the fountains. There's more than one answer to these questions pointing me in a crooked line." I think this means that sometimes the "answer" to life's happiness question may lie on the right side of our brain. Rationalization skills tend to be a detriment to this quest.

As an experiment I started a Grateful List exercise. Once a day, simply write down three things you are grateful for and do one "nice thing" for someone else. After about a week or two you realize pretty quickly that you have train loads of things to be grateful for, possibly magnified if you have had the benefit of international travel. After a month, I noticed a marked improvement in my attitude.

Pharrell William's song Happy might seem facile, but if you, as an appraiser, need positive vibes, it's worth getting this tune stuck in your head. Lao Tzu insightfully stated 2,500+ years ago, "If you are depressed you are living in the past. If you are anxious you are living in the future. If you are at peace you are living in the present."

Some appraisers I talk to are tired or discouraged by producing commercial appraisals the same way they did when they started their career. I think the challenge is twofold: first - show up, confirmed by Mark Twain, "just showing up requires a level of optimism that the true pessimist is unwilling to give."  Secondly - don't take yourself too seriously (it's only life after all). The Indigo Girls nailed it, "the less I seek my source for some definitive, the closer I am to fine." Let go of your mouse for a minute, evaluate your appraisal (and personal) world. Are you happy? What are you grateful for? Answer the latter and the former will appear and I guarantee you will be closer to fine.