Monday Morning Match is a simple post – maybe a quote, inspirational story or idea – intended to spark some motivation inside each of you so your week gets off to a fantastic start on Monday morning.

Every morning you have two choices.

Continue to sleep with your dreams or get up and chase them.

Today is a new day. We awake to a blank canvas and get to choose what kind of art we will create. Will our design be original or should we try to mimic the other great artists who have come before us? Will our picture use the simple tones of blacks and whites and the shades of gray between the edges or will we spin the color wheel and get imaginative with the tints and hues available to us?

It’s a great reminder that one of the best things about real estate (and life) is that it’s different every day. It’s also one of the major challenges for many is that it’s different every day. Regardless of what the day brings to us, we control the colors on our palette and the brushes we will use. If we want to stick to our systems and protocols each day and paint by the numbers, we can certainly produce stuff that looks like all the other painters who are following the same instructions and keeping the pre-determined colors inside the lines – but in doing it this way, we are only painters and not artists.

It’s the true “artist” that realizes that there are no pre-drawn lines on the canvas and the edges of the canvas aren’t really a border at all, but instead just a brief stopping point. Everyone has seen a painting or other piece of art hanging in a gallery or art museum and said to themselves, “I just don’t get it. How is this art?” Suddenly they realize that someone felt it was art and decided to hang it, display it, buy it, or share it.

As for the artist, they most likely didn’t create the art for any bigger reason than to get the image from inside their head, or sometimes, from inside their heart, onto the blank canvas before them.

Let’s grab our paintbrushes this week and stand in front of the easel. Fill our palette with those three bold colors – building relationships, solving problems and having fun – and see what we can create. If it doesn’t look like anyone else’s painting, that’s okay. It just means we’re more than a painter; we’ve become an artist.

I didn’t come this far to only come this far.