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Category: Egoism in Action (page 19 of 26)

Realtor, Associate Broker

December 28, 2008

The Goal-Getters Game: Yes, you want to set goals for 2009, but here’s a game to make sure you actually follow through on them

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The Goal-Getters Game is a variation on some of the ideas we have been playing with in email since Thanksgiving.

So first: ‘Tis the season for New Year’s Resolutions, made in haste and forgotten more hastily.

The Motivational Speaker Circuit, both inside and outside of the real estate world, is always all over the idea of goal-setting. But real changes in you life can only come from goal-achieving.

In our email discussions, I brought up Jerry Seinfeld’s “don’t break the chain” system of goal tracking.

Years ago when Seinfeld was a new television show, Jerry Seinfeld was still a touring comic. At the time, I was hanging around clubs doing open mic nights and trying to learn the ropes. One night I was in the club where Seinfeld was working, and before he went on stage, I saw my chance. I had to ask Seinfeld if he had any tips for a young comic. What he told me was something that would benefit me a lifetime…

He said the way to be a better comic was to create better jokes and the way to create better jokes was to write every day. But his advice was better than that. He had a gem of a leverage technique he used on himself and you can use it to motivate yourself—even when you don’t feel like it.

He revealed a unique calendar system he uses to pressure himself to write. Here’s how it works.

He told me to get a big wall calendar that has a whole year on one page and hang it on a prominent wall. The next step was to get a big red magic marker.

He said for each day that I do my task of writing, I get to put a big red X over that day. “After a few days you’ll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You’ll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain.”

“Don’t break the chain,” he said again for emphasis.

Teri has mentioned that she is already Read more

December 28, 2008

Psalm

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’m kicking this back to the top of the blog, as well. I think this is a good example of the kind of behavior that has been denounced for millennia by would-be bosses, but I also think this approaches an ideal expression of how human beings should behave. Plus which, it’s the stuff I’ve been talking about all week, boiled down to its essence — and I think it’s good Sunday reading besides. I live to be proud of my life, and the moments that gave birth to this essay are among the proudest of those I’ve lived so far. This is the best I have within me. This is a seed I long to see cast to the winds, to grow wherever it can take root. –GSS

 
Psalm

Art is demanding, and that’s good. But art is petulant and importunate and presumptuous to a fault. Art is that damned nuisance of a snoopy neighbor who keeps knocking, knocking, knocking on your cellar door. Art goes straight for the places you forbid yourself to think about and rummages through your most terrifying secrets like a burglar tearing through your underwear drawer. Good art makes you hate it as you devour it, shun it as you immerse yourself in it. Good art makes you restless and jagged and ragged and inspired. Good art makes you shiver. Great art makes you cringe.

Art is a vanity in precisely this way: I presume to recreate reality in my own image and likeness, and I have the effrontery to demand that you not only acknowledge that reality but prefer it. I presume to seize the universe and squeeze out of it a tiny seed of truth. And I presume to plant that seed within you — without your consent, perhaps without even your knowledge. And I presume to nurture this new universe I have caused to grow within you until you scream — if I am good enough — scream from agony and delight. And I presume to do all of this for no purpose of yours, but only for reasons of my own devising. And at the Read more

December 26, 2008

A sermon for the ninety-and-nine: Don’t mimic bad examples among big-name real estate webloggers

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’m kicking this back to the top from December 21, 2007. This was, I think, the second the the last time that I pissed off the echo chamber clique of big name real estate webloggers by pointing out that they were thoughtlessly committing a serious error. I was right about the issue addressed here, which is why, despite three or four days of mob outrage, no one adopted the insulting video tactic discussed in this post.

I don’t like the way people behave in these mad spasms, but I don’t care, either. The only behavior I control is my own, and, as I discussed last night, I never take an action I know in advance is morally wrong. Doesn’t mean I’m never in error. My contributions to BloodhoundBlog, very often, are discussions of what I’ve learned from my many, many errors. But I strive never to be intentionally in error.

But I have a unique understanding of the ontology of human ethics, and it’s something I feel a responsibility to share with the readers of this weblog. If you want to see everything I’ve written here on the subject, pursue the Egoism in Action category.

Or don’t. I’m easy enough to ignore — which will tell you a great deal about those mad spasms, if you trouble yourself to think the matter through. But if you want to profit by my experience at this kind of mass communication, I’m happy to share what I know. –GSS

 
I always thought that bible story about the lost sheep was stupid. If it were me in the story, I would stay right there with the ninety-and-nine, making damn sure that tomorrow it wasn’t the ninety-and-eight. Too bad about the lost sheep, but the mission-critical job has to come first.

Here’s an interesting fact about weblogs, and about internet discussion forums in general: You will almost never hear from the ninety-and-nine. If you manage to build an audience, you will hear from people who are reading your site. That’s a good thing. But if you take those people as being representative of your audience, you are making a mistake. You Read more

December 24, 2008

My own little gift on Christmas Eve: I’ve discovered a way that a contributor to BloodhoundBlog can get fired…

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I would ask, is this sick-making to me alone? — but I heard about it from a nauseated reader before I had seen it myself.

We don’t take any money out of this site at all, not even Amazon affiliate fees. I don’t want for anyone reading BloodhoundBlog ever to doubt our integrity.

I am repelled by advertising on real estate weblogs, but taking in-kind bribes for pimping vendors and their dubious wares is simply corrupt.

Until today, there were no rules for BloodhoundBlog contributors — if for no other reason than because it had never occurred to me that anyone could do something this disgusting, much less celebrate it. Today we inaugurate our first rule:

If you write for us and if you have taken bribes in the form of cash or merchandise from a vendor, please send me your resignation. If I find out that any BloodhoundBlog contributor has taken bribes from a vendor, I will fire you on the spot. I love having our contributors here, but we each one of us have to be above reproach, now and always. This is the way I built this place, and thus it will remain, even if I have to go back to writing alone.

The one bright spot in this, for me, is that not one of these jackals made their bribe offers to me.

Un-frolicking-believable…

I have two more posts scheduled for the day, but I’m so angry I could spit. I’m going to mix myself a drink and toast, one by one, the people I know for sure I can trust.

December 21, 2008

John Kalinowski’s custom real estate signs — and his custom-made approach to everything at his new Cleveland real estate brokerage

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Totally stunning email this morning from John Kalinowski of LiquidBlueRealty.com. John is a profile in courage, to my way of looking at things. He’s just launched a brand new brokerage. In this real estate market. In Cleveland. He’s being very sweet to the Bloodhounds in this note, but this is an amazing amount of work he has undertaken:

I finally had a minute to sit down and send you a note, to thank you for all the help you’ve provided me, even though you weren’t aware you were helping! I’ve been following your site for quite some time now, absorbing every little tidbit possible, and in the last two weeks left RE/MAX to start my own brokerage in the Cleveland Market, Liquid Blue Realty. I’m building the entire company around the custom sign idea, and so far the response has been incredible, to say the least!

I am eternally grateful to the Bloodhounds (and to Russell Shaw) for all the inspiration that has pushed me to make this move. I even built my own website, using WordPress and the Thesis template, even though I’ve never had a blog or built a site before. I probably wouldn’t know what WordPress was if I hadn’t started following your site.

Our signs are 24″x36″, just like yours, but are actually printed directly onto a sign material that is made of some sort of hard plastic with aluminum bonded to each side. Our printer owns what amounts to a giant inkjet printer that can basically print on anything that will fit inside (I’ve seen them print on a bedroom door!), and uses waterproof ink. They use the same process to print conventional signs for other agents, and the panels are about 1/8″ thick and weigh about 5 lbs, so these are serious signs.

Believe it or not, I create my sign files on a PC! I start with MS Publisher with a full-size 24×36 image, then print to a PDF using Acrobat Distiller at 300 DPI. I then jump between Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop to fix the CMYK values on the blue color, and to create the huge 350mb Read more

December 18, 2008

Inman “news” has always been a FUD-driven vendorslut cesspool — that’s not new — but what is it doing to the Web 2.0 ideal?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Can you read this?

It came this morning in a piece of spam from Inman “news.”

Spam — unsolicited commercial email from vendorslut central.

And: Spam with FUD, InmanStyle: “If you can afford to ignore breaking real estate news and emerging technology trends, then Unsubscribe.”

That’s creepy, sleazy, slimy and repugnant — which is to say it’s marketing as someone from Brad Inman’s epoch understands it. Like all the relics Inman “news” tries to shove down our throats, Bran Inman is a dinosaur — a giant, thrashing reptile incapable of discovering his own irrelevance. Holding someone like him to Web 2.0 standards of behavior is like expecting an actual dinosaur to regulate its own body temperature — it’s more than he can ever do.

But remember that Inman “news” is now allegedly run by people from “our” world.

Do you wish to claim that they don’t know what spam is?

Is it your contention that they don’t know what FUD is?

Evil is doing something you know in advance is wrong. Is there anyone who believes they didn’t know that issuing this treacly piece of spam was morally wrong by standards they understood perfectly well, in advance of their acting?

I’ve been telling you this for a long time, but, sadly, we could not have asked for a more telling example:

When exponents of the vendorslut cesspool — Inman, vendors, the NAR — tell us they want to be a part of our world — what they always mean is that they want to suck us into their sewer of lies.

The things we call surprises almost always result from our failure to pay attention to stone obvious manifestations of reality occurring right before our eyes.

My advice, always: Mind what goes into your mind…

December 16, 2008

What matters more — Attitude or Aptitude? I had always put my money on Application, but I realized the best bet is all three

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I edited 1,407 files in 1,407 folders on Friday. Not by hand, mind you. That would have been a tedious and error-prone path to an inevitable suicide for someone like me. No, I built a spider to do the job, and it took a surprisingly long time to run — almost four minutes.

But I wanted to put the Phoenix Area Headlines Scenius scene into every engenu web page we’ve built so far, and that entailed editing 1,407 files in 1,407 folders — dispersed among thousands of folders in dozens of domains all over our file server.

I didn’t really edit them, of course. Software doesn’t work that way. I sucked the files to be altered into memory, concatenated my new code on at the end, killed the original file and then wrote down my new version under the same name. I built the engenu file architecture anticipating that I might want to do things like this.

And that kind of thing makes me a hard sell on the idea of Attitude with a capital A. I definitely believe in working from a positive frame of mind toward positive goals — all based firmly in reason and logic. But it doesn’t matter how many times you say, “I can do it!” — if you don’t actually know how to edit 1,407 files in four minutes. Attitude is nothing without Aptitude.

But Aptitude is nothing without Application. We are all of us buried up to our necks in work we could be doing, and our success at digging ourselves out is entirely a function of how we apply ourselves.

Aristotle said, “We are what we repeatedly do.” For most of my life, I’ve regarded that as being the essence of human character. But there is an interesting question about those 1,407 engenu pages: Where did they come from?

Each one of those engenu folders represents a web page, and many of them are grouped together into web sites. A single-property web site might consist of 20 or more engenu folders. An extensive home search could run to 60 or more folders — 60 or more web pages linked Read more

December 14, 2008

Hope and despair at the onset of economic recession: Who cares about the tunnel? All I can see is the light…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I don’t do well in despair.

Clarify that. I don’t mean that, when I find myself in despair, I fare especially badly.

What is mean is, if despair were a classroom discipline for which one could be tested and graded, I would probably flunk out.

I’ve lived through some ugly stuff in my life — who hasn’t? — but mostly I didn’t notice. I’m good at thinking — or so I like to think. And, good at it or not, I really do like to think. But I can only think about one thing at a time. For most of my time, for most of my life, I like to think about work. I like to think about what I’m doing. I like to think about what I’m getting done.

That doesn’t leave much room in my mind for despair. Or depression. Or gloom or sadness or fear or doubt or pain or worry or any of the things that people talk about when they’re not talking about work. I know about those ideas, much as I know about ideas like schadenfreude or universal guilt, things that I’ve heard about or read about but never seen from the inside.

You could say that’s my good luck, I suppose, but I’m sure it’s a choice on my part. Who hasn’t known sadness, after all? It’s not that I’ve never lived with painful emotions, it’s simply that I choose not to live with them any longer than I have to — which almost always turns out to be no time at all. I turn to my work not to escape from pain, nor even to work to alleviate it. I turn to my work because that’s what I love most in my life — and my purpose in living is to love my life.

But I come up short, I think, because I’m so badly equipped to prepare for desperate times. We’re headed into an economic recession, perhaps a depression, and I truly don’t know what to think about it. I’ve lived through several of these episodes in the past, and I worked right through all of them and Read more

December 11, 2008

“The world’s largest country is well along the way to forming an intellectual elite on a scale that the world has never seen…”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The Asia Times:

America outspends China on defense by a margin of more than six to one, the Pentagon estimates. In another strategic dimension, though, China already holds a six-to-one advantage over the United States. Thirty-six million Chinese children study piano today, compared to only 6 million in the United States. The numbers understate the difference, for musical study in China is more demanding.

It must be a conspiracy. Chinese parents are selling plasma-screen TVs to America, and saving their wages to buy their kids pianos – making American kids stupider and Chinese kids smarter. Watch out, Americans – a generation from now, your kid is going to fetch coffee for a Chinese boss. That is a bit of an exaggeration, of course – some of the bosses will be Indian. Americans really, really don’t have a clue what is coming down the pike. The present shift in intellectual capital in favor of the East has no precedent in world history.

“Chinese parents urge their children to excel at instrumental music with the same ferocity that American parents [urge] theirs to perform well in soccer or Little League,” wrote Jennifer Lin in the Philadelphia Inquirer June 8 in an article entitled China’s ‘piano fever’.

The world’s largest country is well along the way to forming an intellectual elite on a scale that the world has never seen, and against which nothing in today’s world – surely not the inbred products of the Ivy League puppy mills – can compete. Few of its piano students will earn a living at the keyboard, to be sure, but many of the 36 million will become much better scientists, engineers, physicians, businessmen and military officers.

More:

Any activity that requires discipline and deferred gratification benefits children, but classical music does more than sports or crafts. Playing tennis at a high level requires great concentration, but nothing like the concentration required to perform the major repertoire of classical music. Perhaps the only pursuit with comparable benefits is the study of classical languages. It is not just concentration as such, but its content that makes classical music such a formative tool. Music, contrary Read more

December 9, 2008

Marketing the praxis of a Scenius thoughtfully: How can we use dynamism and triangulation to play tunes that make the spiders dance?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Teri Lussier paid me a very high compliment today in email, although I’m sure that’s wasn’t her intent. I expect she was just being matter-of-fact. Here’s what she said:

You don’t do anything without a purpose.

She was asking why I phrase so many headlines in the form of a question, assuming correctly that I do so for marketing reasons. Questions are a pretty common arrow in the copywriter’s quiver. Properly constructed, they are inherently interesting and instantly involving. I’m not as good at this as I plan to be, but one of things I’m looking for in a good question is something that incites at least as much curiosity as it satisfies. I give you the headline of this post as an example.

But Teri’s off-hand remark — “You don’t do anything without a purpose” — means everything to me, because it’s a completely true statement about everything I do — and everything I’ve ever wanted to be. I can’t promise you that I always know what I’m doing, but I always know with perfect certainty what it is I intend to be doing — what objective I hope to achieve by my efforts.

So we’ve been playing this scenius game since Thanksgiving, really since Swallow Hill Road, and it’s fun to explore how much we understand of what we’re doing, and, fun, too, to understand how much there is that we’ve never thought to explore.

Both Cheryl Johnson and I have been rebuilding our “Current Listings” content as Scenius scenes. Why? Because a content management system like a weblog is the perfect way of organizing frequently-edited copy — provide that you have some way of delivering the content in a form you can stand, once you’ve edited it. This is what Scenius — the software praxis, not the social process — is all about.

Stop.

A scenius — lower case — is a metaphor for a kind of communal genius. The word comes from “scene” plus “genius”, and the best example of a scenius that I can offer is the birth of Bebop jazz. When you put smart, well-informed, passionate people together, the synergy of their Read more

November 30, 2008

“Privacy is an artifact of inefficiency”

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I say that just about every time I speak in public, and people always ask me to repeat it, and they inscribe it carefully into their notes.

It’s a simple enough idea: What you’ve thought of all your life as privacy has simply been a function of inefficient data processing tools. The more efficacious the means of acquiring and storing data become, the less privacy — unintentional ignorance by others of observable facts — you will have.

If you find this idea repellent — dang…

It is what it is, and it’s absurd to rebel against it. We are real, physical entities. Our purposive actions sometimes have secondary physical consequences that are potentially observable to other people — and to data acquisition devices. Your best hope of achieving privacy, going forward, is to expire. Short of that, you might try to exist in some sort of extra-physical way. And short of that, you might try doing everything you do where no one — and nothing — else can observe you. And short of all that, swallow hard and prepare to have every fact of your life known, at least potentially, by anyone or everyone else.

This does not bother me at all. I deliberately lead a hugely public life. I’m not showy, I hope, but I never want for someone to be able to say something truthful about me that I have not said first myself. I try to lead a very moral life, but no one is perfect. But what I don’t want, ever, is to give the impression that I am trying to hide my imperfections. (Disclosure: I caused a car accident earlier this evening. No one was hurt, but the front end of my car was smacked up pretty good.)

(People who send me email will have grown used to me replying with multiple names in the CC line. I’m never trying to hide facts about my life, but, I am normally trying very hard to not-hide those facts.)

Another thing I say in speeches is that the world is becoming more and more the realm I would have imagined for myself. Mostly the Read more

November 26, 2008

Launching SplendorQuest.com: Love among The Unfallen at every wavelength of heaven’s light

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is the official launch of SplendorQuest.com, the official first post. I’m cross-posting it at BloodhoundBlog, as well.

Fair warning: This post is comprised of an extract from my novel, The Unfallen. After the “more” tag, you will be exposed to romantic fiction involving sexually playful adults engaged in actual life-like grown-up encounters. If you’re not comfortable with that kind of thing, skip ahead now. The nets are awash in content, after all, and almost none of it is about grown-ups. This post is nothing but a tiny glob of glowing phosphor on the vast oceans of information. Feel free to swim away with my blessings.

But: If you do want to catch a glimpse of actual grown-ups in action, I might have what you need. The splendor that is the grail of SplendorQuest.com is a state of mind, a state of being, a mental fugue state where being and awareness of being and worship of and delight in being all become the same thing. The fiction I write — or the best of the fiction I write — is about people who live — and who know enough to love — that splendor. The extract shown below is a snapshot of those kind of people at their best.

You may want to read things into this text, and, if you do, you will be wildly incorrect, but there’s nothing I can do about that. All I can do is be what I am, and that’s why I want to start SplendorQuest.com with this text in particular. This is a work of large ambition: I wanted to rescue romance from the Romance genre as a worthy subject of literature, and I wanted to rescue sex from smut. But more than both of those, I wanted — I want, continuously — to rescue the ideas of reverence and worship and rejoicing and adoration and exaltation from the grave, from empty pie-in-the-sky promises. I know that the ideas I treasure are real because I live them in my own life, in my very best moments. There will doubtless be many more grand statements of what splendor Read more

November 24, 2008

Something new under the sun: Sim and the future of human interaction

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I saw this commercial over the weekend and it’s been making me nuts:

This is fascinating to me. This is Game Console 2.0, the participatory gaming experience. Okay, that much is not new, going back to the Dreamscape, anyway. Ubiquitous at broadband speeds since the original Xbox.

What’s cool here is that the interaction is, first, among adults, and, second, has nothing to do with the game play. This is remote schmoozing through a game console, a phone call conducted from within a sim. SecondLifeLite, as it were.

I’m wondering if Nintendo got viraled on this, if a cadre of moms figured out how to use the software this way during naptime, and Nintendo is marketing to grow a niche that erupted spontaneously.

There’s way more. Simulation is emerging as a fourth branch of science. Computing grows year by year in its accretion of power. A model is not reality, a map is not the territory, but a sim of, for example, the life cycle of a star, could teach us as much in ten minutes as we have managed to learn in the last 10,000 years.

Now combine the two. Take ordinary people with better and better user-interface devices and let them work and play together by simulation in the cloud. The two phenomena are not the same, but, even so, at this incredibly cheap end-user level, we are all avidly nurturing and cultivating precisely the intellectual capital we will need going forward.

It’s daunting to stand at the threshold of what may be a calamitous economic disaster and, yet, to recognize that we are also at the threshold of an unimaginable increase in human mental prowess.

 
Further notice: Apparently, Nintendo has pursued an Alpha Moms astroturfing strategy for the Wii since its introduction. I don’t know if this use of this software is something they have encouraged, but presumably it is. Doesn’t matter to me. Better questions: Are moms meeting through this game? Are they strangers until they discover each other in the game — much as we discover one another through weblogs? More interesting: Are the children for whom this game is actually designed meeting Read more

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Inventing Real Estate 2.0

Welcome to BloodhoundBlog, the national real estate industry marketing and technology weblog written by, for and about real estate professionals. Better yet, welcome to the wired world of real estate. We are busily inventing Real Estate 2.0 – technology, marketing, service and salesmanship. Like all Bloodhounds, we are smart, frisky and fiercely independent. We've built a spot on the earth – beloved over all – where each one of us can be who we are, no matter who that might be. We are committed to an idea of excellence that will flush the bums, the con-men and the crybabies out of the real estate industry. If you yearn to have your failures excused, your moral lapses absolved or your boo-boos kissed, seek elsewhere. But if you are sick to death of mediocrity – welcome home. Read all about us, subscribe to our feed and steel yourself for the hunt. We work hard, we play hard, we learn everything we can – and we bow to no one.

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