“If a writer wrote merely for his time, I would have to break my pen and throw it away.” –Victor Hugo
The Russell Shaw entry What’s wrong with Zip Realty?, written in February, was the most clicked-upon post on BloodhoundBlog on Tuesday. Debunking Zillow.com, which was written last July and which often comes in first, took second place.
I’m making note of this because there is a celebration of mental indolence going on just now, reflexively offered up as the rationale and justification for mental indolence. This by itself is meaningless: Erg for erg, laziness is the hardest job there is.
But it occurred to me that the RE.net has undertaken efforts, formal and informal, to instruct novices in the art of real estate weblogging — and laziness is very bad weblogging advice.
The job is what it is. It takes what it takes. If you don’t feel up to taking on the world, that’s fine. But don’t affect to pretend to believe that goofy pictures and bold subheads can take the place of rational discourse. It is actually possible to destroy a specious pose with one onomatopoeical word, but, most often, the work of the mind requires a greater effort.
This matters because you are not writing solely for the day and the visitors thereof. If there is any importance at all to the work that you do, it will be linked and searched. The post that gets only nine hard clicks today may someday get ninety clicks every day — if it deserves them.
What you do is your business, and most of weblogging is ephemeral — of moment for substantially less than a moment. We work the way we do here because we don’t affect to admire the half-assed. If you choose instead to indulge your worst appetites, arguing that that this is the path to popularity among people seeking to indulge their own worst appetites — rave on. It means less than nothing. The work of the mind in real estate will go on — in links, in searches, in perpetuity — without you.
But: If you actually care about improving your own mind and the minds of those people gracious enough to lend you their attention, you ought not betray either their interests or your own by defaulting on the responsibility to think, to write, to grow as a human being. There is never any shortage of rationales for behaving like an animal. But there is never any excuse for failing to live as a human being — persistently rational, immaculately moral, abundantly productive, rapturously joyful, justifiably proud.
The style of your weblogging, ultimately, will be the style of your life, the style of your soul. And everybody’s gotta take a side…
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
Brian Brady says:
Have you any idea how difficult it is to lay out page six?
June 6, 2007 — 1:28 am
Reuben Moore says:
Greg –
From the perspective of the reader, I offer this oh-so-brief comment: Some folks read the Wall Street Journal, some folks read USA Today, and well, some folks read the National Enquirer.
So I read you with a dictionary – some of us enjoy that….
June 6, 2007 — 5:21 am
Steven Groves says:
Great comment Greg…
Jim Cronin / Real Estate Tomato stated back in February that most real estate pros (64%) would try blogging this year and that 96% of them would fail – I suspect for the same reasons you’ve cited here… this is work man…
Your in the 4% bracket Amigo, and at the head of the the Long Tail..
June 6, 2007 — 7:24 am
Jeff Brown says:
Somewhere, John Galt and Howard Roarke are smiling in appreciation.
June 6, 2007 — 8:50 am
John Slocum says:
I enjoy your pithy messages Greg,
In a past life I spent too much time working with legal/regulatory type papers and pleadings. I’m working on finding my own style for real estate marketing that is authentic and still hits my target market. I look forward to more excellent posts at this site…
June 6, 2007 — 5:26 pm
Robert Melton says:
Not to get off on a tangent here, and without taking a stand on how I feel about a very well written and thought out post by Greg, the John Galt comment missed the broad side of the barn. If the philosophy is about living your own life without the intervention of others, I don’t think that would support the post. And John Galt’s acts (withdrawing from society so that it could collapse and be rebuilt) wouldn’t support the post either. So Galt may be smiling, but I don’t think it would be at the post. It has, of course, been a while since I have read either Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead, so if I have opened my mouth and inserted my foot, feel free to let me know.
June 6, 2007 — 7:44 pm
Jeff Brown says:
Robert – Because I say Galt would be smiling, it doesn’t mean I’m expecting Greg to depart from our company, turning out the lights as he leaves? 🙂
>But there is never any excuse for failing to live as a human being — persistently rational, immaculately moral, abundantly productive, rapturously joyful, justifiably proud.
That’s why I think Galt might have smiled. Wouldn’t you agree that isn’t a bad description of Galt himself?
If anything, Galt would belligerently declare him all those things. He would especially lay claim to being persistently rational. His life was built on following his strict moral code. His entire agenda was based on the premise he was tired of those who didn’t produce, taking from those who did. He lived his life joyously, and if anyone was proud, it was John Galt.
June 6, 2007 — 8:39 pm
Greg Swann says:
I understood what Jeff was saying, but I’m with Robert on this. Atlas Shrugged is fiction, but I’ve never cared for the idea of stirkes, not even as a literary gimmick. It happens that I wrote about this recently in comments on a friend’s weblog:
June 6, 2007 — 9:01 pm
Jeff Brown says:
Greg – I’m with you on the concept of strikes. That said, and also agreeing with you on the 13 year time period as unreal – at what point do you decide to withdraw your services, i.e. brains, from those who only use them against you, and whose primary agenda is to eventually confiscate all you produce?
At some point the line is crossed between free man and slave, don’t you think? At the point I begin to feel I’m a slave, exiting the picture, at least from my viewpoint, wouldn’t be meant as a strike. It would mean fleeing slavery, moving towards freedom – and, as in the book, allowing them to keep my assets and choke on them. 🙂
I’d bet you would be by my side, once you first felt you literally were no longer free.
June 6, 2007 — 9:13 pm
Greg Swann says:
> At some point the line is crossed between free man and slave, don’t you think?
Yes, but the point of the comment I posted was that we are moving in the opposite direction (I snipped those parts in the stuff I quoted), not because our would-be enslavers have reformed, but simply because we are out-running them. There is no “end of history,” but the Greek idea stands alone by now. Doesn’t mean we’ve won, and it remains to be seen if we have the nerve to win, even without opposition. But the practical manifestations of Greek ideas accumulate much faster than our despoilers can steal them. This is why we are progressively richer even as we bear the burdens of the Nanny State.
June 6, 2007 — 9:26 pm
Jeff Brown says:
You have more confidence in ultimate triumph than I do. I’m hopin’ you’re correct.
June 6, 2007 — 9:38 pm
Robert Melton says:
I wanted to add in the light of day that my comment was made with a great amount of “healthy respect” – which I will freely give to anyone that read the post and thought of Atlas Shrugged. I thought the John Galt reference was spot on in relevance, and I actually smiled at seeing it before I really started to think about it. There is just so much tension in the ideas in that book that I could see where the comment would come from (though I have to admit that I didn’t associate your comment with that particular line – and for that I apologize).
The debate, though, is one that I think is highly relevant as it concerns weblogging and web 2.0. No one would pick up the phone and just start talking into it (without dialing a few numbers). But that’s actually encouraged online these days. And the race is often to be the first to discover something new – without saying or thinking anything about it. And to participate in everything – without any thought as to what one should be participating in. And to sign up for everything – since everything is now – best of all – free. No cost at all!
The one thing that struck me about John Galt was that he (as if he was a real person) was willing to step back and say that you can live your life how you want to, but I won’t live my life that way. He didn’t descend into Bert and Ernie land. But he also didn’t run around shouting, “I have a better way!”
Perhaps shouting “I have a better way” is somewhere near the core of interesting weblogging. Perhaps the value of weblogging is in the overall collection that is produced. Perhaps it is in the nature of the relationships created during the process. Or in the knowledge accumulated. I don’t know the answer to that question, but warning bells go off whenever anyone says that they do.
June 7, 2007 — 6:34 am