There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Flourishing (page 3 of 38)

Thriving as only a rational animal can

Is “The Scarlet Pimpernel” the greatest real estate movie ever made?

Perhaps not. It’s more about the relocation process as such, rather than the boots on the ground house-hunting. Even so, “The Scarlet Pimpernel” has plenty to teach Realtors and their clients right now. For example? How to make your getaway without getting a haircut.

Seriously, this is a charming melodrama about a detestable epoch – which we have the misfortune of living through again.

Why should Realtors and lenders be talking to your clients about the perils of Marxism? So you don’t have to risk your life rescuing them later.

Which way, dawgs? There are growth paths from here, but they require effort.

“Got content?”

We added a contributor today, for the first time in what must be a decade. I’ll brag about that more when there is more to brag about, but this much matters: BloodhoundBlog is back.

Sort of. It’s back for me – and I was away for long enough to have managed to miss it. I’m having fun writing a lot, which is what blogging is – writing a lot – and I’m delighting in that playfully-informal blogger’s voice. It’s back for Brian Brady, too, and he can tell you which stars he is shooting for himself. And it’s back for people who have been asking to hear from us for a long time.

We could hear more from the latter folks in the comments. It’s challenging to shop into the echoes of a seemingly empty shopping mall, but there are a bunch of shoppers here – y’all are just too shy.

Here’s where I am: Social Media Marketing and social-media sociability are splitting up. Speaking your mind on social media sites is bad for business and is likely to cost you your marketing investment on that site if you get banned. Meanwhile, being able to speak freely in purely-sociable online settings will become more and more a walled-garden phenomenon. This is already so for the many thousands of folks who socialize with like-minded folks by way of forum software running on hundreds of little web sites.

So I need to get out of Dodge, at a minimum, and I don’t think I’m alone. Are there enough of us to sustain a community? We’ll find out.

Meanwhile, there are lots of ways for this place to grow. There are no more real estate weblogs, for one thing – not in our world, defending the grunts on the ground from the parasites who prey on them. Nothing left of real estate bloggers talking to real estate bloggers, but really nothing left of blogging directed at Realtors and lenders that is not itself predatory – monthly subscriptions, sales training, books-’n’-tapes. If I’m wrong about this, I’m very interested in links.

But from our end of Read more

Torn from today’s headlines? Here there be monsters – everywhere! – but why?

“It cannot be the case that a human being expresses the inability to experience empathy with a torrential fusillade of malicious empathy. Paging Professor Clueless. Your sociopath is here.”

I swear I have sound reasons for talking about Nine Empathies – specifically the idea of an empathy for the transaction, which could not be closer to any closer’s heart. But today I read Chapter 8 – Empathy for the monster – and it whispered to me in ominous tones. I’ve documented the origins of human character, but this as close as I have come to explicating the monstrous malice we are seeing everywhere just now.

tl;dr? Cliff’s Notes:

The reptilian drives are completely self-motivated, obviously, but also completely devoid of concern for any other entity’s feelings. Mammals care about mutually-beneficial empathy, because this amplifies the playing/cuddling feedback loop – the shared state of mutual enlovingness – all because the behavior is mutually-rewarding. The reptile’s purpose in engaging in this kind of empathetic modeling is strictly self-seeking: The reptile wants to know what you’ll do so he can counter it, oppose it, deflect it, defeat it – eliminate the threat.

This is the monster, basically a monster of misapprehension. Every human being has the mammal brain’s empathy, which is itself the mammalian expression of the reptile brain’s empathy. When the mammal brain is eviscerated by repeated outrages, the reptile brain’s empathy is what’s left – under the seething control of an enduringly-outraged reptile. The incoming sensory information is exactly the same, but the goals being pursued are very different: The mammal brain idealizes infinite love – but it is easily distracted. The reptile brain craves infinite safety – relentlessly.

Need some defense for that conclusion? I should think you would. Here’s the full chapter:

Empathy for the monster.

I can give you a very simple formula for the empathy for the monster: Take your pre-existing dysempathy for the untouchable – your niggardly refusal to attribute human emotions to him – and combine it with a big fat dollop of the empathy for the impossible.

Bingo! Instant monster. You already don’t want to believe the untouchable is Read more

My 7 magic laws of done: How to finish the things you start – quickly, completely and with style.

Genius is fueled by midnight oil – by hours and hours of focused, solitary effort. 
 
Photo by: Raffaele Camardella

There is a book of mine that I am going to bug you to read – Nine empathies. Here’s something funny about that book:

I wrote it on a Saturday, six years ago today.

It’s not very long, only about a 90-minute read, and I only wrote about two-thirds of the revised length of the book on that Saturday. But I wrote the whole book, start to finish, with subsequent revisions all being interstitial – additions between the lines. I wrote a book that I could have shipped on Saturday, and in fact I did ship it to Amazon’s servers on Monday, long before I was all-the-way happy with it. I shipped successive revisions twice a day after that, until I called Thursday morning’s version the golden master. Then I said, “Hey look. I’m done!” – but in my mind I had been done since the day I started.

What is it that I’m telling you?

I don’t work like you. Most of the people who read me are going to be Cs or Ss in the DISC system. I’m much too wordy for my fellow Ds – and I’m only wordy because I see words as a currency, rather than as a distraction. Even so, I would much rather write a book than read one. I tend to work more outrageously even than other Ds, but my style of working is completely alien to Cs.

I wrote in ten hours what a high-C would have agonized over for ten months – or ten years. Worse, I took off with almost no plan – twelve lines of notes – knowing that I was at least two full epiphanies short of a revelation. “Welcome to Seat-Of-Our-Pants Airlines. If we can’t get you there on time – you’ll never live to tell about it.”

To say the truth, my kind of productivity annoys high-Cs, because it shouldn’t be possible to do this much this well this quickly. They are equally alien to me, in that I can’t fathom Read more

Why would Zillow abandon the all-time perfect real estate marketing tagline?

Do you want to hear my most perfect real estate marketing image? I’ve never seen this anywhere, except in my mind’s eye. It goes like this:

A little girl and her golden retriever are racing out the front door of their home. Why? Because “Daddy’s home!” – that’s why.

That’s it: Kid, dog, dad, with mom smiling proudly from the doorway. That’s The American Dream, circa 1955, but that is still the idyll we imagine when we think of home. It’s not simply a structure, not even merely a domicile. It’s Christmas and Independence Day, new babies and new puppies, tire swings and bedtime stories. Home is hope, the place where everything we love can thrive.

So tell me, if you can, what gives with Zillow?

Current tagline: “Home has never been more important.” That’s COVID FUD, I guess. The image is of a split-ranch home inhabited by vaguely visible people living widely-separated lives. I doubt anyone thinks that’s selling anything.

Recent tagline: “Reimagine home.” Say what? That dollop of word salad was intended to explain The Incumbent’s iBuyer business – by which Zillow reimagined profitability with a flame-thrower. The word “reimagine” itself has creepy Marxist connotations: As we have learned of late, “reimagine policing” turns out to mean “shut up or else!” Even leaving college-acquired SJW-ism aside, what needs to be “reimagined” about home?

So what did they have before that?

“Find your way home.”

And that would be simply perfect.

I Googled up old images with that tagline, and the photos are all pretty generic. But the tagline itself is beyond improvement: The aspirational quest is the literal function of the website. You simply cannot do better than that.

Why would they walk away from that? And why don’t they do a better job of selling that idea with images?

My takeaways? Billionaires are boobs. And marketing is for guerillas.

Influence is when people actually listen to you. Realtors and lenders can help save the world right now just by evangelizing the middle class.

I am as Cassandra, and it pains me. I know what is wrong with Western Civilization, at the root, and how to fix it so it will never need fixing again. So much good does this do me – or anyone else, for that matter.

Instead we are here, agog as the world we thought we knew crumbles around us, aghast that no one rises to its defense.

Whose job IS that, anyway?

I’m looking at you, thumbsucker…

It is beyond all doubt unconscionably rude to hector your clients about politics. And yet: We are at a place where the free real estate market itself it at peril. Absurd? Who saw the country in flames a year ago? And the private and widely-distributed ownership of the land we live, work and play on is the freedom that undergirds all our other freedoms. The enemies of human splendor will destroy it – if they can.

Me, eleven Independence Days’ ago:

The essence of our freedom is the free ownership of the land, and yet everywhere we turn, private property is subjected to one law after another, and everything that is not forbidden is compulsory instead.

This is a grievous error. The men who become Brownshirts or Klansmen or Khmer Rouge — the men who make up murderous mobs — are men without land. It is the husbandry of the land — each man to his own parcel — that most makes husbands of us, that sweeps away our willingness to live as brigands or rapists or thugs.

By robbing the private ownership of the land of its meaning, the state is, by increments, robbing its citizens of their humanity. No one burns down his own home, nor his neighbor’s home. But when the time comes that we all seem to own our homes only by sufferance, none of us will have anything left to defend.

So what can you do about all this?

I think you have to talk to your clients, those who trust you enough to listen to you – and this doubled-periled epoch is one of those rare moments in the lives of adults when minds are open to Read more

Ask the Broker: Why don’t more poor people own their own homes…?

Why isn’t there more opportunity for poor people to own their homes?

If you were to substitute the word “horses” for “homes”, the question would answer itself, wouldn’t it? Poor people rent rather than own because their income is too low, their credit scores are too low, or their debt-to-income ratios are too high. That much is not rocket science, and it would apply to any other expensive financed possession we might name.

People very enamored of coercive charity can imagine circumstances in which financially unqualified people are given homes – or are given heavy subsidies toward buying homes. But this can only happen by taking wealth away from other people – people who have earned that wealth and deserve every penny of it. Poor people might get more home than they have earned, but only because other people are getting less home than they deserve. This kind of redistribution of purported injustice is made possible only by force – and, by my reckoning, that force is the most vicious injustice of all.

But, even so, there are two persistent problems. First, people tend not to respect what they did not have to earn and deserve. This is nicely illustrated by the awful condition of free or subsidized housing all over the world.

Moreover, unless the problem is to repeat itself, the poor recipients of subsidized housing would have to be forbidden from selling it at its true appreciated value – lest it become unobtainable by other poor people in the future.

Many poor people do not buy homes because for whatever reason they don’t develop the attributes of mind, character and behavior that lead to homeownership. And, even if they were to be given free or heavily-subsidized homes, the restrictions that would have to be placed on the sale of those homes would prevent those poor people from profitably developing those same attributes of mind, character and behavior even after they have become homeowners – in name only…

As it happens, we got to see practical examples of these ideas in the housing collapse. We know about CDOs (collateralized debt obligations – big bundles of bad Read more

Horror stories wanted: How has real estate’s Vendorslut Mafia preyed upon you?

“Results? Any day now, for sure. Meanwhile, this month’s payment is due.” Photo by Ian on Unsplash

I don’t pay for leads. Never have, never will. I pay referral fees to other agents from time to time, this as a matter of expected courtesy, but I don’t collect fees for referrals – not alone to escape the burden of policing them.

Not such big news, regardless: I don’t make a lot of money. We haven’t marketed for new business in ten years, and I make my meager living on repeats and referrals from my existing clients. I’ve never craved money – it shows, I swear – and I am not as much in love with collecting pelts as I once was. When BloodhoundBlog was young, I said we were a boutique brokerage. I am by now my sole licensee, and I think of myself as a lab-rat broker.

I am mainly interested in listing for sale as though I were practicing free-throws on the basketball court. My goal is to perfect my listing praxis and then to hew to it with perfect performance. My numbers bear me out – but I don’t spend much on advertising, either.

My curiosity runs the other way just now: How have you been hurt as an agent or lender by your engagements with the sleazy folks we have always referred to as The Vendorslut Mafia?

Are there no happy stories? Surely there are. Deeper pockets going in may see happier outcomes going forward. But when you’re tap-dancing with your kid’s orthodontist so you can fork over cash you don’t have for “leads” that won’t pan out…

Kinda sucks, don’t it…?

I would love to hear about your experience. Who you paid. How much you paid. How things paid off.

I’m not shaming salesmaniacs, and I know it’s easy to click “Submit” before you know what you’re submitting to. And you can tell yourself that 65% of something is better than 100% of nothing – with luck missing out on the news that you’re paying some gonoph for coming between you and your client – typically with your own listings. Read more

Bebop and the brain – Thelonious Monk’s career advice to hard-working Realtors and lenders: “We wanted a music that they couldn’t play”

“You’re going to listen to your own music at work, that’s understood. But make your own music at work. And master your craft so well that you can craft a music they can’t play…”

We often listen to Bebop Jazz in the office. If I talk about music, I tend to talk about Rock ’n’ Roll or Country, just because they’re more inclusive. Bebop is demanding music even for Jazz, definitely an acquired taste.

Instrumental music is good at work, of course, since you can play it fairly quietly, and since there are no words (except “Salt Peanuts!”) to interfere with your thinking.

I would argue that complex compositions – like Classical or Modern, Progressive or Cool Jazz – will tend to improve the quality of your thoughts, through time, since your mind has to work so much harder to process the music. Constant exercise for the muscle of the mind should make you a stronger thinker. It seems reasonable to me that a familiarity with musical cadences will make you a better writer, as well.

Lately we’ve been tuned into the Bebop station on Pandora. Like all streaming-radio stations, the playlist could be a lot longer, but it’s a pretty nice representation of the Bebop idea in Jazz: Bird, Monk, Dizzy, Dex, Mingus, Trane, Miles. A little bit of Art Tatum, which I love, and a little Hard Bop, which I loathe. Bud Powell and Cannonball Adderley to show the world how a sound this demanding can still be fun. If you really want to listen, you have to go to your own record collection. But for the office, it’s the best solution we’ve found so far.

That’s all beside the point, though. You either like Jazz or you don’t, and many people don’t. But the quote from Monk in the headline

“We wanted a music that they couldn’t play.”

is practically a mission statement for hard-working Realtors and lenders.

Bebop was born during a musician’s union strike in 1942-43. Players who had been working as sidemen in Big Band and Swing orchestras would spend their idle days together in two Harlem nightclubs, jamming Read more

Passed my Check Ride

Back in January, I wrote here about taking private pilot lessons. My post was inspired by one Greg wrote in December about mastering something difficult this year. Earlier this month I took an oral exam and then check ride with an designated examiner for the FAA, and I passed!

The next day, I piled my wife and a little bit of luggage into my Piper Cherokee, and took off for the coast. An hour and 15 minutes later, I was down at Ocracoke, part of the Outer Banks that would ordinarily take someone 6 hours or so to get to by car from Raleigh.

My wife and I got a lift to the local pub – really, the only one worth considering on Ocracoke – where I ordered a non-alcohol beverage and we got some shrimp and burgers, before flying south/southeast along the coast to Beaufort, North Carolina.

It was a ton of fun.

Want to be a better, more-perfect version of yourself? Master something difficult this year.

M
You weren’t just cheated of an education when you were young, you were cheated out of the full awareness of your own humanity.Mait Jüriado / Foter.com / CC BY-NC-SA

I always love to read about the outrageously nefarious bad guys who are doing all the things we hate. Doesn’t matter who “we” are, since the bad guys afflicting every “we” are always blindingly brilliant, amazingly competent masterminds of evil.

I guess it’s useful to exaggerate your opposition, but here’s the thing:

Everyone I remember from school was a fuck-up.

Start with a good solid two-thirds compliant drones, dutifully going through whatever motions seemed to be required. Maybe half of the rest were glib and lazy. Even the straight-A apple-polishers were just phoning it in, doing the minimum necessary to get the grade from the glib-and-lazy grown-up teaching the class.

Am I misrepresenting the world of education? Is there anything you can think of that you did in school that you’re truly proud of now. Away from athletics or the school play, was there anything in your academic life that you gave everything you had? Was there anyone else who did that?

Was there any class that you took — ever — where you had to bust ass every day or risk get hopelessly lost? And when you got to that class, was that the end of your forward progress in that discipline?

The kids from the hard side of the quad — the maths, the sciences — know what I’m talking about. The kids from the soft side of the quad — the arts, the social sciences — may be recalling a graceless exit from the maths and sciences.

But the truth is that virtually all of us were denied the kind of education that was a matter of expected routine for our grandparents. Partly this is our fault: Too often we were grade-greedy glib-and-lazy fuck-ups. But mostly it was the fault of our teachers — and their teachers.

Were they outrageously nefarious bad guys, hell-bent on depriving us of a decent education? Were they blindingly brilliant, amazingly competent masterminds of evil, conspiring to enslave us in a state of Read more

When I start a church, I’m going to call it The Second Church of I-Don’t-Go-To-Your-Church.

Temptation
Thomas Hawk / Foter.com / CC BY-NC

How do you know when a time is right for your idea? How about when someone else comes up with something similar?: Atheist ‘mega-churches’ take root across USA, world. For the past three months, I’ve been thinking about starting a church evangelizing egoism and excluding no one, and here is the something similar. I’m reading this as a publicity stunt, but we’ll see. That’s definitely not what I’m about.

What I want is a mission devoted to the idea of doing better. Just that. The doctrine is mine, Man Alive, et very cetera, but I’m a lot more interested in praxis than dogma. If you cross a soul-enriching music performance with a mind-enflaming motivational seminar, you’re halfway to seeing what I see.

Picture a real live church service somewhere, once a week. My ideal location would be a big bar on late Saturday afternoons, to put the idea of choosing admirably in mind just when it might be needed most. That can be simulcast by Ustream or Spreecast, so the whole world can join in, one mind at a time.

But: I’m digging living on the road a lot, so I would love to take this show on the road 15 or 20 days a month, too: Full-day hotel meeting room seminars with a ton of rotating content and drawing on local talent as well. If you think about the way seminar mechanics do major-city blitzes — TV spots and infomercials leading up to the show in three or four locations on successive days — that’s the kind of road show I’d love to mount. An operation like that could produce one or two new hours of tight, professional video every day.

What does victory look like? How about an operation on the scale of the big boys, like Joyce Meyer or Joel Osteen? That may be too far to reach, but we are entering the age of Garage-Band Televangelism, so anything is possible.

The creed? On top of everything else, there are these two principles:

1. I don’t go to your church.

2. I am not arguing with you.

All I want Read more

Rock Me Mama Egoism In Action: The link from art to human values and back.

Everything is all one thing, so this is a video essay about art about music about morality about song-writing about marriage about redemption – simple stuff. This is egoism in action, me being me.

This video connects directly to the argument I made on Friday about ‘conservative’ art, and all of everything I am saying – and everything I am doing – connects back to everything else I am saying. This is a one-hour immersion in Splendor.

An audio-only version is linked below, and that will show up also on iTunes in due course.

Bidding farewell to brave Odysseus…

It’s a dread we’ve learned to live with. I wrote about this day in fiction a couple of months ago so I would have the choice not to write about the facts today. I can make death beautiful — big deal. Nothing can make death tolerable, nothing but time.

But: He died as he lived, game and eager, his face alight with love for everything. Cathleen was there to hold him and his favorite vet, Doctor Blackwell, was there to say goodbye and I was there to make fun of the most adorable big dumb doofus I ever knew and he left this life with a smile on his face.

One last time: “Lay down, Puppy. Go to sleep…”