Jeff Shinabarger: How to Find Your Purpose in Real Estate
Most real estate agents will tell you they got into this business because they are a people person. They wanted flexibility, income potential, and the chance to help someone make one of the biggest decisions of their life.
What they did not expect was to spend so much of it alone.
Jeff Shinabarger has spent the better part of two decades thinking about that gap, the distance between the kind of work people want to do and the lives they are actually living. He is the founder of Plywood People, a nonprofit that supported over 1,300 social entrepreneurs in Atlanta over 17 years. He has written books on generosity, hosted a podcast with his wife on love and work, and walked 200-plus miles across Spain trying to figure out what came next for him personally.
He now serves as the Fractional Chief Purpose Officer at Bolst. And on Episode 9 of the Justin Landis Show, he brought that entire body of experience into a conversation about what it actually takes to build a career that means something.
The Coconut and the Question Most People Skip
Jeff gets asked about purpose a lot. His answer is not what most people expect.
He does not start with strengths assessments or passion audits. He starts with subtraction. In Nicaragua, he watched a kid climb a palm tree, hack open a coconut with a machete, and hand it over with a straw. The image stuck with him. The purpose of a coconut is not to stay in the tree. It is to get down to the sweetness inside. But to get there, you have to shave everything else away first.
His advice for anyone trying to find their purpose: start by eliminating the things you know you are not supposed to be doing. The things that drain you. The things you do not find life in. Stop doing them. Move forward. Get closer to the core.
For a lot of real estate agents, that clarity is already there. They just have not given themselves permission to act on it yet.
What Excessive Generosity Looks Like in Practice
Jeff does not talk about generosity as a virtue. He talks about it as a practice, one that starts with recognizing how much you already have.
He and his wife once went seven weeks without buying groceries. Not as a stunt. As an experiment. They wanted to know how much was already in their house, sitting in the freezer, hidden in the pantry. The answer was: a lot. More than they realized. And the realization that followed was the point. Most of us have more to give than we think we do.
The barrier is not resources. It is habit.
Jeff's practical suggestions are small on purpose. Give a bottle of wine to your neighbor. Buy coffee for the person behind you in line. Take 15 minutes and fill three bags of clothes to donate. These are not grand gestures. They are the beginning of a practice. And the practice, done consistently, changes how you see yourself and how you show up for other people.
For real estate agents, that translates directly. The agents who build the deepest client relationships are not the ones with the best marketing. They are the ones who give the most generously of their time, their attention, and their expertise, before anyone asks them to.
Love, Work, and the Real Tension Nobody Talks About
For six years, Jeff and his wife Andre hosted a podcast on the intersection of love and work. They interviewed thousands of people. One number stopped Jeff cold.
Less than 30 percent of the people they interviewed believed their partner was supportive of their purpose.
For real estate agents, that number is not abstract. The business runs on nights and weekends. It runs on client calls that interrupt dinners and open houses that eat into weekends. If your partner does not genuinely believe in what you are building, the tension compounds over time until it becomes unsustainable.
Jeff's framework is simple but not easy. First, get to an explicit agreement. Not an assumption. An actual conversation where both people say: this is what I am doing, and I am behind you in it. Second, understand that you are not one static version of yourself. Different seasons of a career require different things. The version of you that is grinding through year one is not the same as the version of you who has built a stable business. Your relationship has to have room for those transitions.
A lot of agents skip this conversation entirely. Jeff says that is one of the most expensive mistakes you can make.
Why Real Estate Agents Feel Lonely and What to Do About It
Jeff joined Bolst not knowing anything about real estate. He will tell you that himself. But he knew a lot about what happens to people when they spend too much time doing meaningful work in isolation.
What he observed as he got closer to the agent community confirmed what he already suspected. Real estate is a business of one. You drive to showings alone. You negotiate for your clients alone. You process the wins and losses without a team around you most of the time. The clients you serve are grateful, but they are not colleagues. You build your business in relative solitude, and for people who got into this work because they love people, that is a slow drain.
He described a volunteer day at Bolst where twenty agents showed up, finished early, and then just stayed. Nobody left. They sat around, talked, laughed, shared. Chick-fil-A arrived. Still nobody left. What Jeff saw in that moment was something deeper than community. It was relief. People who had been carrying the weight of their work alone for a long time, finally in a room where they did not have to.
Bolst was built to solve that problem. Not just as a marketing point, but as an operating principle. The brokerage is B Corp certified. It commits at least $100 from every sale to support people experiencing homelessness in Atlanta. Last December, the agent giving fund distributed $120,000, which doubled again through matching gifts on Giving Tuesday. Agents are not just affiliated with Bolst. They are building something together.
The Invitation
Jeff ended the conversation with something direct. Real estate on television looks like money and champagne and zero-sum competition. The reality is that most agents want their work to mean more than that. They just do not know where to find it.
His answer: it is here. At Bolst, there is a community of people approaching real estate differently, with a shared commitment to purpose, to generosity, and to one another. The invitation is open.
If that kind of career appeals to you, book a mentor call at bolst.homes. Come find out what it looks like to build a business that gives back from the ground up.
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Justin Landis is the founder of Justin Landis Group and Bolst, two of Atlanta's leading real estate companies. He lives in Atlanta with his wife and three daughters and has been selling Atlanta real estate since 2008.
