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Today's track: Autumn in New York — Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong

Somebody, at some point, decided pizza isn't a breakfast food.

Nobody knows who. Nobody voted on it. There was no meeting. But most of us grew up believing it anyway, and most of us will keep believing it, and we'll never once stop to ask why.

Eggs, bread, cheese, tomato. That's basically an omelet with better posture.

I've been thinking a lot about habits lately. The ones I have, the ones I don't, and why. Why I do things a certain way. Why I don't do other things at all. Who set these barriers up for me? Who told me I have to do things this way?

Why. Why. Why.

And a lot of the time, I don't know.

There's something freeing in all that self-reflection. You sit with it long enough and you go, huh, I really don't know why I held on to that belief. Or, that doesn't really suit me anymore. And yet I'm still using it as my identity.

Let me give you the most Rob example possible.

I used to be a huge Chipotle stan. Everybody knew it. If you wanted to grab a meeting with me, the move was simple: invite me to Chipotle. Or ask if you could join me for the next one. It was basically my office.

Then I got to talking with Luke Neubauer. If you've been reading a while, you know Luke is the guy I watch. When he does something, I usually end up doing it too. And Luke is team no seed oils.

Seed oils, from the ground up: these are the oils pressed out of seeds, like canola, soybean, cottonseed and sunflower. They're cheap, they're in a lot of what comes out of a fryer or a package, and a growing number of people, me included, have decided we'd rather not eat them.

So I joined team no seed oils. And Chipotle had seed oils. So I stopped going to Chipotle.

Just like that. Years of a habit, gone. And the wild part is how little I miss it. It felt like part of who I was. Turns out it was just something I did.

My newest run is, of course, Jay's.

Jay's doesn't use seed oils. The meat is local. They cook with beef tallow, which I love. And Jay and Emma and the whole crew are great people. All of them. So that's where I am for most of my meetings now. Monday, Wednesday, Friday.

Same guy. Same meetings. New table.

Your habits are not your identity. They're just the last thing you decided, sometimes so long ago you forgot you decided it.

There's an old story you've probably heard some version of.

A young woman is making a pot roast. Before it goes in the pan, she cuts both ends off. Her husband asks why. She says, that's how my mom always did it. So she calls her mom. Mom says, that's how Grandma did it. So they call Grandma.

Grandma laughs. Her pan was too small.

Three generations cutting perfectly good meat off a roast, because one pan, decades ago, didn't fit.

That's most habits. Somebody had a reason once. The reason went away. The habit kept going.

And habits run a bigger slice of your life than you'd think. Wendy Wood, a psychologist at the University of Southern California who has spent about 30 years studying this stuff, found that roughly 43% of what people do every day is repeated in the same setting, usually while they're thinking about something else entirely.

Forty-three percent. Almost half your day is on autopilot.

Which raises the real question. Who programmed the autopilot?

Sometimes it was you, on purpose. Great. Sometimes it was your parents, an old boss, a coach, an ex, a guy on the internet, a pan that was too small. And you've been flying that same route ever since without checking the map.

Now, I'm not telling you to burn it all down.

There's an idea called Chesterton's fence. G.K. Chesterton, a British writer, said that if you come across a fence in the middle of a road and you don't know why it's there, don't tear it down until you go find out. Maybe there's a bull on the other side.

Some of your habits are fences with bulls behind them. My morning routine is one of mine. I've written about how the box was the thing that set me free. Routine gave me my life back. It didn't take it.

So the job isn't to blow up every habit. The job is to walk up to each fence and ask: why is this here? Is the bull still around?

If there's a good answer, keep it. And this time, keep it on purpose.

If there's no answer, or the answer is "that's just how it's done," you're cutting the ends off the roast.

I've just found that I'm very unconventional. I know it, and I've made my peace with it. I live the way I live and approach things the way I do.

And here's what keeps happening.

People come over and work with me, and they leave going, "I don't know why I've been doing it like that." Or, "I should have been doing it like this the whole time."

I'm not teaching them anything magic. I think when people see me be unconventional, living the way I live and doing things my way, and it working, it makes them feel empowered to do the same thing. Like, oh. I'm allowed to do that?

You are. You always were. Nobody's coming to sign the permission slip.

Real estate is loaded with pot roast rules. A few I hear all the time:

"You need 20% down to buy a house." Not true, and it hasn't been for a long time. The National Association of Realtors (NAR), the big national trade group for real estate agents, found the median first-time buyer put down 10% in its 2025 buyer survey, and that was the highest since 1989. Median just means the middle: half put down more, half put down less. Plenty of people buy with a lot less using FHA loans (government-backed loans through the Federal Housing Administration), VA loans (loans for veterans through the Department of Veterans Affairs), and down payment assistance programs.

"Nobody buys or sells in the winter." Somebody does. And the sellers still listed in December usually have a real reason to sell. Less competition, more motivated sellers.

"Just wait until rates come down." Maybe. But when rates dipped, I sold four properties in about six days. Everybody who was waiting showed up at once. If you wait for the crowd, you're buying with the crowd.

"The asking price is the price." It's a starting point. I send letters of intent all the time and a letter of intent (LOI) is just a one-page note that says here's what I'd pay and how I'd pay it. A different price. Different terms. Seller financing. A loan assumption. A lease option. A lot of the time, the seller had never once considered there was another way to get to yes. I walked through the whole toolbox last week.

Every one of those rules started as somebody's reason. Most of them outlived it.

So, on this terrific Tuesday, let's do a little inventory. Two questions.

What's a habit that doesn't serve you anymore?

And what's one small habit you could add that would?

I don't mean overhaul your life by Friday. I mean small. Like:

Now, meditation. I'll be honest, I have a hard time with it. With my ADD, it's not exactly on the roster. But I'm trying to add habits that give me more quiet time, to try to get that vibe.

Walking is the closest I get, and I try to get some in every day. Turns out there's science on that. Researchers at Stanford found people came up with about 60% more creative ideas while walking than while sitting, and the boost stuck around for a bit after they sat back down. So if you can't sit still, walk.

One more thing, because it trips people up. You've probably heard it takes 21 days to build a habit. That number traces back to a plastic surgeon's observations about his patients, not a real study of habits. When researchers at University College London in England actually tracked people building new habits, it took about 66 days on average, anywhere from 18 to 254 days depending on the person and the habit.

And the best part: missing a single day didn't wreck anything.

So if you skip Wednesday's walk, you didn't fail. You just have a Thursday.

Here's mine. I dropped Chipotle and added Jay's. Now I'm working on adding quiet.

Who told you to do it that way? Go find out. And if the answer turns out to be a pan that was too small, you have my permission to buy a bigger pan.

Or have the pizza in the morning. Who's going to stop you?

📊 Yesterday's poll: What are you doing with a slow week? Learning something new took it with 55%. Catching up on everything I let slide came in at 27%. "Slow? My week is on fire" got 18%. And "Making offers anyway" got zero. Zero.

A reader named Lisa, who picked the fire option, wrote in that she tells her buyers to start writing offers in September or October and have a property locked up by New Year's. That's the move. The quiet weeks are when the offers actually get read.

Today's poll:

Results in tomorrow's issue.

🏆 One habit I'm keeping: every morning I screen the whole Louisville MLS for the five best deals and the five most ripe for a lowball, with the number I'd offer on each. I can't blast other agents' listings to a list, but I can send them to you personally. Reply "FIVE."

Unconventionally,
Rob Bergeron

Owner–Realtor at Award-Winning Winner Realty
Winner Realty: (502) 305-8915
Winner Realty | OffMarket.deals | Property Partner Data Company

Schedule time to discuss your goals, bottlenecks, or whatever’s on your mind — book me here.

The Morning Bergeron daily track playlist

PS: Here is what is on the shelf tonight. Every active Winner Realty listing, from all of our agents, in one place: click here to see them all.

And four kinds of sellers who are ready to make a deal. Click, look around, and text or email me about any that catch your eye:

On the market 90 days or more in Jefferson County (these sellers have waited long enough): see the list

Price dropped in the last 14 days in Jefferson County: see the list

Seller financing or lease option, where the seller acts like the bank, anywhere in Kentucky: see the list

Sold as-is, estate sales, and fixer-uppers at $200,000 and under in Jefferson County: see the list