Turn off the applause machine

Last Friday wrapped up a big week for me.

Not because of a single event or accomplishment, or because of anything that would make the trade press.

If you’d passed me in the hallway, you wouldn’t have noticed a thing. But I knew what it meant. There are milestones that only matter because you know what they cost, the wrong turns, the sleepless quarters, the years of rebuilding something you thought was already built. And then, slowly, almost reluctantly, the momentum catches.

I sat in my office a good twenty minutes longer than I needed to on Friday night. Not working. Just sitting there.

I wasn’t thinking about the business anymore. I was thinking about walking into my house. I was rehearsing the moment. I’d mention the week casually. Underplay it. Let it land. My wife would react warmly. Not dramatically, just a quiet acknowledgment. Something that said, I see what you’re carrying.

There was also a faint, uncomfortable thought in the back of my mind that it might not go that way.

I ignored that thought.

So when I walked in, I mentioned the week. She listened. Then she asked about a minor household issue I’d forgotten to handle.

That was it.

And something inside me collapsed.

I started explaining the pressure I’ve been under. The decisions. Comparing burdens. I minimized what she’d brought up. I raised my voice.

I felt deeply, profoundly misunderstood.

Which is fascinating when you step back from it.

Because the real issue wasn’t the forgotten errand. The real issue was that I had walked into my own house needing applause. And when I didn’t get it, I resented her for it.

This Is Not That Kind of Newsletter

Now, you might think this is heading toward a piece about marriage. About the gap between men and women, the well-trodden territory of spouses who don’t appreciate what originators go through. Or marriage as a metaphor for the customer/originator relationship. It isn’t. I promise you, this is not that newsletter.

This is about you.

Because the part that bothered me most wasn’t that I snapped. It was what I had predicted I wouldn’t get the reaction I wanted before I even left the office. I sat in that chair for twenty extra minutes because some part of me already knew. And I was walking home to collect a debt that nobody owed me.

And that’s when I started to see something I’d rather not have seen.

Ring the Bell, Get the Feeling

In the 1890s, a Russian physiologist named Ivan Pavlov was studying digestion in dogs. He noticed something peculiar: the dogs began salivating not when food appeared, but when they heard the assistant’s footsteps. The bell, the footsteps, the lab coat, none of these things were food. But the dogs had learned to associate them with the reward so completely that the signal produced the same physiological response as the reward itself.

Ring the bell. Get the feeling.

It seems to me that our industry has built an extraordinarily sophisticated bell-ringing apparatus.

Volume rankings. President’s Club. Scotsman Guide lists. The recruiter who calls to tell you how undervalued you are. The real estate agent who phones on a Sunday night with a deal two other lenders turned down and says, “You’re the only one who can make this work.”

Ring the bell. Get the feeling.

And I don’t mean to suggest that recognition is inherently bad, or that it’s wrong to feel good when someone acknowledges your work. Of course it isn’t. But there is a difference, and it’s a difference worth sitting with, between enjoying recognition when it arrives and needing it in order to function.

Because if your drive requires reinforcement, then the absence of reinforcement destabilizes you.

And, after much introspection, that’s what I saw in myself last Friday.

The Oxygen Problem

Consider the originator who takes every difficult file. The borderline borrower. You know the one I’m talking about, the deal that’s been declined twice, that the agent dangles just enough hope to keep you grinding through a weekend.

Now, imagine this imaginary originator takes it and solves it. He will probably tell himself it’s because he’s capable.

And he is.

But it also confirms something. It reinforces an identity. The fixer. The indispensable one. And over time, being needed in that way becomes oxygen. And when being needed becomes oxygen, you will unconsciously position yourself in environments where you continue to be needed, including (perhaps especially) environments that may not be in your long-term interest.

Here’s where it gets uncomfortable.

If your branch manager regularly tells you how valuable you are, and how much they depend on you, how critical your production is, that feels good, and it stabilizes something inside you. But I want you to ask a harder question.

If you are psychologically attached to that affirmation, how likely are you to challenge the economics of the platform you’re on? And, how likely are you to press on the cost per loan, corporate margin, and your share of gross revenue?

I think you see where I am going with this.

If part of you needs the praise, you are less inclined to destabilize the relationship that provides it. And nobody has to manipulate you. You cooperate. Because the applause feels safer than the confrontation.

Beware the Flattering Tongue

I’ve seen this play out in ways that still surprise me.

About a year ago, one of our originators (a guy who was genuinely doing well) called to quit.

Out of nowhere. Because a recruiter had gotten into his ear during a rough patch and told him he was undervalued and that he should be managing people, leading teams, and running things. In short, he told him everything he needed to hear at exactly the moment he needed to hear it.

I asked him when his stress and anxiety had started. He thought about it. About two months ago, he said. And when did the recruiter first reach out? He went quiet. Same time.

It’s a pattern worth understanding. There’s an old proverb, “beware the flattering tongue,” and it exists for a reason. The recruiter’s job (and I say this having once sat through a recruiting course that made this explicit) is to create pain and then present yourself as the solution. Even if someone’s doing well and they’re happy. Your job is to manufacture the anxiety and then sell the cure.

That originator eventually saw it clearly. He told the recruiter to stop calling and recommitted. And six months later, after reviewing his actual numbers against someone else’s in our system, he came to a realization that had nothing to do with anyone’s opinion of him: there were specific, measurable levers he could pull to improve his business. Not because someone told him he was great or terrible, but because he could see the data for himself.

And that’s a fundamentally different kind of motivation, more durable than any award.

The Clean Version

Here’s what I think I’ve learned (and I want to be careful here, because I learned it approximately four days ago, which may not qualify as wisdom):

There is a version of ambition that is clean. It isn’t fueled by comparison. It isn’t fueled by awards. It isn’t fueled by the need for someone (your spouse, your manager, your top agent) to say, “Good job, you’re doing great.” It’s fueled by a decision about who you want to be and how you want to operate, regardless of who is watching.

That version is steady.

The other version, however, is reactive. And reactive people are remarkably easy to steer.

Think about the signals we send and receive in this business, all those scraps and straws from which people build their impressions of a company, a leader, a career. Awards ceremonies. Leaderboard emails. Recognition dinners. These aren’t neutral. They’re conditioning. They train you to associate your sense of self-worth with an external signal. But when that signal disappears, when the market contracts, when the accolades dry up, when something like 2022 hits and the scoreboard resets to zero, people who thought they were strong suddenly feel shaky. Not because they can’t produce. Because they can’t feel themselves without the bell.

The Laugh

After I made a fool of myself on Friday night, I spent most of Saturday stewing. Replaying the argument. Cataloguing my wife’s failures of appreciation. Building my case.

Then I realized something about myself. And I laughed.

I couldn’t stop laughing.

Because I saw it. I saw myself walking through the front door, subtly asking my wife to regulate me. To tell me I was a good boy. To confirm that the grind was worth it, that I was impressive, that I had arrived. And if she had given me that, I would have needed it again next week.

That’s the quiet addiction.

So on Sunday morning, I walked up to her and said, “We’re good.” She looked surprised. I said, “This was my issue. I’m sorry for the way I behaved. We’re good.” And just like that, we were.

It had nothing to do with her. It never did.

What Unleashed Actually Means

So what does it mean to be unleashed? I’ve been using that word for a while now, and I think I finally understand what it costs.

To be unleashed means that you source your validation internally.

Period.

Not from your spouse. Not from your manager. Not from the agent who calls you a hero. Not from the ranking, the award, the LinkedIn comment, or the borrower who texts you a thank-you on closing day. Those things are nice. They may even be deserved. They may even be crack cocaine, used by the people who supply it to take advantage of you. To get you hooked on the sweet drug of validation and affirmation.

Which is why you cannot use it for your fuel.

Because the fuel has to survive the moments when none of that is coming.

Because I promise you, it is coming. And it never stops coming.

You will get tested at home, where your spouse doesn’t understand (or worse, does understand but won’t give you the satisfaction of saying so).

You will get tested at work, where the market is indifferent to how many hours you put in last month.

You will get tested by your kids, who need you present and couldn’t care less about your production numbers eben though you feel like you are doing it for them.

You’ll get tested by competitors, by rates you can’t control, by a borrower who ghosts you after you moved mountains for them.

You will be tested by all of them. Sometimes separately. Sometimes all at once.

And it is how you respond that builds your capacity to respond better in the future.

Not for the recognition. Not for the ranking. Not even for the money, although the money matters. But because you made a decision about who you are and how you operate. Because the work itself is the point. And because the game, played at the level it deserves to be played, is worth playing for its own sake.

That is an extraordinarily difficult place to get to. I am not there. I proved that on Friday. One poke from my wife about a household errand and I crumbled like a man who had never carried a thing in his life.

But I saw it. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

The originator who operates from that place, who has decided who they are independent of anyone else’s opinion, is a different animal entirely. They don’t take bad deals to feel needed. They don’t stay on bad platforms to feel safe. They don’t avoid hard conversations to protect a relationship that only exists because someone keeps ringing their bell.

They build because they’ve decided to build. And no recruiter, or manager, or dry spell can move them off that center.

That’s what being unleashed means.

I’m working on it. I suspect it’s the kind of thing you work on for the rest of your life.

But I’ll tell you this much: it beats the hell out of yelling about a forgotten errand with your wife.

— Rich Weidel
CEO, Princeton Mortgage