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Category: Egoism in Action (page 11 of 26)

Realtor, Associate Broker

November 1, 2010

The Hunt for Greg’s October: What I found by quarrying my goals.

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

To be honest, I would like to hear from other folks on what they’re doing about their goals. I will tell you from my own experience that perfect performance is elusive, but if you make the effort to track your efforts, it’s a lot easier to stay on track — and to get back on track if you stray. I may write a MySQL app with a PHP front-end, just to make record-keeping that much easier.

In October, I tracked a lot of stuff, so much that I ended up not tracking some things, so much was there to keep track of. In the photo, my goals are documented at the top:

S – Write software or work on web-based marketing for the business.

G – Play the guitar for at least half an hour.

W – Walk with Cathleen and the dogs for half an hour.

X – Work out for half and hour.

A – Attend an appointment with a real estate buyer or seller.

C – Write a real estate contract.

O – Open an escrow.

$ – Close an escrow.

It’s at the end of that list that I fell apart. I had a ton of appointments, and I wrote a lot of contracts. These are not hugely meaningful: It takes me a lot of contracts, right now, to get to one closed escrow. I actually closed two deals — only two — but one of them was a short sale that I held together against all odds for nine months. That’s not a proud accomplishment, financially, but it speaks volumes about improvements I’ve been trying to make in my sales skills. I opened four escrows, which is the threshold of a pace I’d like to improve upon. Altogether, it was a pretty good month for real estate work.

Software was no problem at all — most days quite a bit more than 30 minutes. Much of this was the server swaps we went through, but I wrote a ton of new software, some of which I’ve discussed in recent posts. I have quite a few more tricks up my sleeve, plus a lot of my recent work Read more

October 2, 2010

It’s October the second. Do you know where your goals are?

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

That, literally, is a snapshot of my goal-pursuits for September 2010.

W is for walking every day for 30 minutes, a little over a mile, with Cathleen, Shyly, Odysseus and Ophelia. I sneered at walking before we started doing it, thinking it nothing compared to a hard half-hour on my mountain bike. But wrestling with 150 pounds of Shyly and Odysseus makes a work-out out of a walk. Ophelia is only 60 pounds, but she’s so puppyish and impulsive that she gives Cathleen and even better work-out.

The X is for weight-lifting, also 30 minutes a day. I’m doing this at around 6:20 in the morning — up at 6, then just enough time to deal with the overnight email as I hydrate and put two Tylenol into my bloodstream. Free weights work best when you are pushing yourself to the outer limits of your endurance. I do 30 repetitions each of ten exercises, all upper-body for now. The last four or five reps of each exercise are right on the verge of being agony. I literally feel as if my bones are not just going to break but to snap with a resounding crack. But like hitting your head against the wall, it feels so good when you stop.

S is for software, and you would not believe how easy it has been, this past month, for me to put in at least 30 minutes a day on our web sites. I started the month with a great idea that gradually destroyed the SplendorQuest server. While that train wreck was progressing, I built another set of cool tools that is generating huge quantities of new content — and a huge number of click throughs. But by the time that got cooking, I had created a monster on our dedicated file server, so I got to finish the month moving us into four new homes. The last three domains of that effort will be done today and tomorrow. Meanwhile, I know how to rebuild the first monster project on its own new home in such a way that it will be sleek and fast Read more

September 22, 2010

Failing up: The big secret to “the secret to success” is this: The “secret” is completely obvious to everyone.

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I got a speeding ticket today. Oops.

The other week, I had what could have been a nice real estate transaction fall apart because I skipped a fundamental step, thinking it unnecessary, only to trip on it later.

Worst of all, a new software project I’ve been working on is failing, taking the SplendorQuest server down with it — as you may have noticed. I’m having to take it apart now — which just by itself has been a major undertaking.

O! Woe is me!

Not. I got a speeding ticket, which took about five minutes out of an otherwise hugely productive day. I worked in the car on my iPhone while the cop pressed hard to make carbon sets with a ball-point pen.

I blew a great deal, but every time I do something like that, I learn from my mistake and do better from then on.

And even as my one mad-scientist project burns down the lab, I had another one go live this week with, so far, very impressive results.

What’s my point?

First, if you’re doing something you’ve never done before, there’s a good chance you’ll fail — which is completely obvious to everyone.

Second, the only possible way to succeed at anything is to press on regardless, even at the risk of repeated failures — which is also obvious.

And third, “the secret to success” consists of focusing on the second proposition and not the first — which, yet again, is news to no one.

I can be thick, I know it, but I’m actually having to think about this stuff. My whole life, I’ve done huge things, big, big tasks, and I’ve never thought much about the motivations driving my work. I want my work done — that’s what drives me.

Until just lately, I had never thought about the way I work in the context of the formal idea of “goal-setting.” I’ve heard and read enough on the topic to know what people are talking about, I think, but I never made any connection to my own life.

For one thing, the goals were so abstract they seemed meaningless to me. Who doesn’t want to go to Read more

September 13, 2010

Marketing is what you communicate, not what you say.

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’m sorry if I seem to be neglecting folks here, but I’m sure you can guess why. Plus which, at Day 13 of our goal-questing, I’m five for five most days, and days without appointments are the only holes on the calendar. But I’m done for the day, and I’m bound for bed, and I lay me down with a will. Meanwhile, I’m having lots of ideas as I work — ideas both global and granular. This is one I’m gnawing on pretty hard:

Marketing is what you communicate, not what you say.

That’s working two ways for me, but the second — call it Actions Sell Louder Than Salespitches — I can think of a zillion ways to work with an idea like that.

September 7, 2010

How do you make the praxis of continuous goal-pursuit work in practice? It’s not a matter of avoiding the negative consequences of failure, but of celebrating the steady accumulation of successes.

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I think Jeff Brown and I are both thinking out loud, by this point, and I want to emphasize that I am not quarreling with him. It’s his hammering away on the topic of goal-achievement that induced me to think about the subject in a systematic way, and I am by his discourse and by his good example much enriched.

So here’s where I am tonight: You have to make the commitment, yes. Without a sincere resolution to do something different, you don’t have a goal, you just have a wish, a whim, a will-‘o-the-wisp wheedle issued for any reason or for no reason to a benignly indifferent universe.

But: Even so: Just having a specific plan is still not enough. You have to follow through. You have to do what it is that you have planned to do. But when we talk about the process of following through, too often we do it in a language that is inherently dis-motivating.

Like this: No pain, no gain. There is a truth to that cliche, obviously, and that’s why it’s such an easy sentiment to express. But by emphasizing the pain entailed by, in this case, exercise, the expression throws a formidable barrier in the way of actually digging in and doing the work required by the goal.

I keep thinking that for a serious resolution to change one’s behavior to be effective in the long run — to get fit or to lose weight or to learn to speak Spanish or to master a seven-figure state of mind in your career — you have to rethink the incentives. The reward — to yourself, in your own mind — for having made incremental progress toward your goal has to exceed both the cost of achieving that small success and the putative benefit of doing the opposite, instead.

Do you see? Eating is easy. It can be very satisfying, fun even. Not-eating is hard, and it’s hard to think of not-eating as being any fun. But if you cannot find a way to celebrate the victory of not eating the wrong foods, of not eating as much or Read more

September 5, 2010

Do you want to actually achieve your goals? Then make your commitment real by making specific, explicit, objective, detailed plans.

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Teri Lussier turned me on to this TED talk on goal-achievement. The video makes the seemingly confounding claim that announcing your goals to other people makes you less likely to achieve them. As with every other seemingly confounding “argument,” the matter turns on the conflation of unlike things. What the speaker, Derek Sivers, is talking about are not actual goals but casual whims. What a huge surprise: Eating cotton-candy spoils your appetite for real food! Who knew?

I once worked with a woman who would issue random statements of desires completely unconnected to her real life. Like this: “I think it would be fun to be a flight attendant.” This is actually an easy goal to attain, but it requires a process of thought and effort and a significant amount of focused action taken over time. The same criteria would apply to any sort of meaningful goal.

Simply announcing to another person that you might like to lose weight, or you might like to see the pyramids, or you might like to be a better Realtor — these are all equally meaningless expressions of whims. They are the verbal equivalent of cotton-candy, a big pile of sugary nothing whipped up by your mind to confound itself into believing that it has been nourished — when you know without any possible doubt that it has not.

The TED talk turns on psychology, which should be warning enough that it’s pure bullshit. The “science” of psychology exists to “persuade” you to be “satisfied” with a lifetime of dull dissatisfaction. “Come on, now, you know that expressing your goals only makes them harder to achieve. Now take another pill and go back to sleep.”

No, thank you. And don’t make me say it again.

The problem is not expressing goals, but expressing empty whims and then doing nothing. Yes, that is self-destructive, but this is not something anyone needs to be told.

Here is what needs to be explored in detail:

Expressing your goals requires a very strong commitment. A true goal is detailed and specific, explicit and objective. It includes a list of serious actions that must be taken through Read more

August 31, 2010

A kinder, gentler Jeff Brown challenge: Catch yourself doing something worthwhile — for every day in September.

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

It’s hard not to love Jeff Brown’s prospecting challenge. But it’s kind of easy to note that most of us have not raised our hands to submit ourselves to its arduous benefits. It goes for me, too: If I have six hours to spare on any given day, I’m going to throw it at marketing — specifically software — not prospecting. Mainly, though, because our marketing is producing healthy results, I don’t have a lot of time to spare in any case.

Take note: I am not absolving you of anything. If you don’t have enough money work, and if you don’t have any money, prospecting will solve those two problems in very short order.

But whether or not you are running Jeff’s gauntlet, the kind of goal-achieving behavior we have been talking about is hugely beneficial — to your health, to your wealth and to your happiness.

So: Let’s set ourselves a challenge. Declare a worthwhile goal — prospecting, exercise, learning a new skill, etc. — and then jump in and actually do it for every day in September. You can use the don’t break the chain strategy I talked about yesterday. Here is a printer-ready September calendar.

Goal-setting is easy. It’s actually accomplishing your goals that is so hard. Between public declarations here, in the comments below, and that growing chain of red X’s, the month of September 2010 could mark a turning point in all of our lives.

August 30, 2010

Tag-teaming off of Jeff Brown: Daily action builds habits, so don’t break the chain.

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I had a short sale get to approval this morning, which puts us one tiny deal away from a million-dollar September. We haven’t seen many million-dollar months since 2005, and it’s a harder target to hit than it was in those days. I’m loving where our business is going, and I feel like we might be just that close to the glide path. It’s been a hard road since the market turned, but it has been the dedicated — driven — dogged — pursuit of sales fundamentals that has put us back on the road to financial recovery.

Meanwhile, I’m loving the hardy souls who have taken up Jeff Brown’s prospecting challenge. Quoted below is a snip from a Lifehacker post we have talked about privately for a couple of years. The topic? If you want to master something, do it every day and don’t break the chain:

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 Read more

August 20, 2010

If you are a working Realtor — if you list and sell residential real estate for a living — the time you spend on social media sites is almost certainly anti-marketing, doing you more financial harm than good.

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Chris Johnson pulled this out of our phone conversation the other night, quoting me on Twitter:

People don’t want a relationship with you. They just want your damn services.

We were talking about real estate weblogging, but the principle applies even more firmly to the world of social media — Twitter, Facebook, etc.

The notion that strangers are seeking out Realtors in order to befriend them is absurd. For a Realtor to get invited on a getaway weekend with three people who are not old school chums would require that all the undertakers and life insurance salespeople they know are already engaged. We all know what to expect from Realtors in any sort of social setting — which is why there is an entire mini-industry of RE(education)Camps to train Realtors to resist their smarmy, deal-probing impulses on-line.

That’s point number one, neatly Tweeted by Chris — who is, don’t forget, a vendor: You are the means to your clients’ ends, not an end in yourself. Even though you might sometimes hit it off just right with a client and forge a serious friendship, in virtually all cases — including those where you make a friend — it’s the mission-critical job that matters, not your sweet personality.

And that friendship? It will seem serious to you alone. If you are any good as a Realtor, your deep, deep friendship will be invisible to everyone else. You should be much too busy to be anyone’s friend. If you make a stout effort, you can hold up your end with your spouse and kids, but, beyond that, you should expect to hear this from the people you think of as being your friends: “The only time we ever get to see you is when we’re buying or selling a house!” That is real estate in real life.

Here’s point number two: “Marketing” by social media is a huge waste of time. Selling is one-on-one, focused, time-consuming and goal-directed. Marketing, done properly, is broadcast, diffuse, time-efficient and passive and long-term in its goal-pursuit. Even if you are really doing your best to market your services on-line, if you are doing it Read more

August 13, 2010

Unchained melodies: A danceable rebellion…

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

In my spare time I am more than a little annuckingfoyed at the state of whorebottery in the RE.net, which I had once hoped might be an antidote to the whorebots who have infested residential real estate since the advent of the NAR, at least. But: Teri Lussier advises me that the solution to all this annoyance is danceable music, so here do I deliver me of my frustrations.

First, Elvis Costello in an acoustic demo of Green Shirt that is better than the more-polished radio hit:

Second, live and acoustic, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young with Chicago:

And finally, for Jim Klein and Don Reedy, Lyle Lovett puts everything in perspective:

August 9, 2010

Reasons to be cheerful, Part 3.1.4: “Get me rewrite!” How to revise the script of your life — writing yourself a happy ending.

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

A friend said this on the phone: “I’m sorry this is taking me so long. I’m really bad at computers.”

My reply: “Why would you say it that way?”

“Huh?”

“I understand that you’re reporting on what you see as being a matter of fact. But why not say it this way: ‘Computers have been a challenge for me, but I find I’m getting better with experience.’ You’re telling the exact same truth, not misrepresenting anything. But by focusing on what you’re doing right, you’ll improve your future performance just by changing your attitude.”

I’m not talking about canned affirmations. I’m talking about the words you choose when you’re telling the unshaded truth about your life, your mind, your talents, your work, your relationships.

You can say: “I’m a lousy writer.” But you can be just as truthful by saying this instead: “It hasn’t been easy for me to improve my writing skills, but I’m finding that hard work is paying off for me.”

You can say: “I always get lost when I go someplace for the first time.” But it would be equally factual to say, “I find it beneficial to prepare carefully before I travel to an unfamiliar neighborhood.”

You can say: “I’ll probably lose.” But you would be no less honest to say, “I just might win.”

The statements you make about yourself might seem to you to be statements of fact at the time you are making them. But whatever truth there might be in those expressions right now, you are also writing the script for your future. Saying “I’ll probably lose” is functionally equivalent to saying “I’ll never win.” If you don’t mean to say that you can never, ever get anything right, then stop telling these brutal lies about yourself.

If you invert those expressions instead — concentrating on everything you get right, not everything you get wrong — by that one simple change of habit you will rewrite the script of your future. There’s no telling how high you can rise, once you stop putting yourself down, but, at a minimum, you will write yourself a much happier ending.

Here’s what I say: I’m Read more

July 23, 2010

Reasons to be cheerful, Part 3.1.3: Praising Cain: Change the world forever by learning to love your life the way you actually live it.

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Imagine this: You are the High Priest of a nomadic tribe following a herd of foraging sheep. When the tribe needs food, a beast is slain and the meat is shared equally. The political structure is hierarchical, but even the Chieftain is governed by the unchanging traditions of the tribe.

One year the herd wanders toward the seacoast. You encamp a short walk away from a trading post built by a sea-faring civilization.

For the first time in their lives, your tribesmen discover a way of life different from their own. The traders live indoors, sleeping on beds! Their diet consists of more than meat and foraged nuts. They eat grain, fruit and fish, flavoring their water with delectable nectars.

Wealth is not shared. Villagers trade with each other to get what they need — and each family owns its own land! Disputes are resolved by reasoned conciliation, not by fiat. Even so, each family seems to own more weapons than your whole tribe combined.

Anyone can introduce a new tool, technique or idea at any time — upending the whole civilization if it comes to that — and not only is this not forbidden, it is avidly sought!

This is horrifying to you as High Priest, but your horror is nothing compared to the apoplexy of the Chieftain. As he watches tribesmen disappearing into the village one by one, he turns to you for a solution.

Now you understand the story of Cain and Abel.

Cain made a sacrifice of grain, Abel of meat, and the meat — the wealth of the herders — was pleasing to the god of the tribe. Why does Cain slay Abel in the story? To scare the tribesmen back into the herd.

The Greeks found a better way to live, spreading it with capitalistic abandon. Those who abhorred the Greek way of life crafted their mythologies to portray Hellenism as evil.

Would you like to change the world, forever, for the good, one mind at a time? Here’s how:

If you live in Cain’s world, stop pretending to live in Abel’s.

If your life depends on capitalism, private property and free trade, stop pretending to Read more

July 22, 2010

Reasons to be cheerful, Part 3.0.3: When you resolve never to let other people dominate you, you come to be indomitable.

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

That’s a lot to take in, so indulge me as we summarize what we’ve talked about so far:

  • You are a sovereign soul. Your purposive behavior is exclusively controlled by your self.
  • You cannot be governed. Other people cannot control your behavior, nor you theirs.
  • To the extent that other people — your religion, the government, your family or friends — might seem to control you, this is a consequence of your own freely-tendered consent, your own explicit, freely-chosen, on-going cooperation.
  • Because other people’s seeming control over you originates in your own sovereignty, you can recover your freedom at any time you want, simply by withdrawing your consent.
  • If you have surrendered any of your sovereignty in the past, your life will be better — for you — once you have regained full control over yourself.

If you have made the mental effort to recover your sovereignty in full, your life will already be better. This is a profoundly important reason to be cheerful, wouldn’t you say?

In other essays, I take up the mental, physical and moral benefits of a full commitment to self-adoration, but this is simple enough to see in summary: If you devote your life to doing everything you can think of to make your life better, more perfect — more perfectly, more abundantly rich in every kind splendor — your life will be immeasurably improved.

Now reflect that we’re talking about what might happen if the shit really does hit the fan. If the government of the United States does not collapse under its own vast weight, so much the better. But even if it does, your own unique life will still be better than it might have been had you not made this change, won’t it?

There is no downside to self-love. You’ve been poisoned on the idea, for your whole life, by people who know they cannot rule free minds. But just by daring to let your mind run free, by daring to be the uniquely beautiful specimen of humanity you have been all along, your life will be everything you’ve always known it could be.

Yes, the world outside your mind can be Read more

July 21, 2010

Reasons to be (less than) cheerful, Part 3.0.2: What has it cost us to have been so wrong for so long about selflessness and self-adoration?

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

You’ve been told your whole life that all the troubles of the world owe to selfishness, and that the only true path to happiness is to renounce the self and to damn the only life you have ever known. Who told you this? Amazingly enough, it was thugs, priests and politicians — and their many, many minions. If you’ve read this far, you must know by now that every bit of this is a lie, the Big Lie that has been used in infinite variations over the course of all of human history to con decent, honest, innocent people like you into giving up everything you have for the benefit of the worst sorts of people.

This is a premise I believe can be defended in reason to infinite precision: Everything squalid on the face of the earth, for all of human history, is the consequence of selflessness, of the deliberate, conscious, completely voluntary renunciation of the self by a person who has self-induced the belief that some objective he seeks can only be attained by an act of self-destruction.

But that argument is just the corollary of this one: Everything we know of splendor, within our own minds and in the world around us, is an artifact not just of selfishness but of the most profound and most profoundly-beautiful self-love. If there is any normal state for human beings — normal as a matter of ontology, not statistics — this is it: To be so much in love with the things you make with the time of your life and the effort of your mind and your body that you cannot bear for those things to be less than perfect.

Think of that: Whether you’re looking at a skyscraper or listening to a symphony or simply teaching a child to read, the source of the splendor you experience is self-adoration and nothing else — not just your own delight at being alive, or the child’s, but also the architect’s, the composer’s, the author’s and all of the people who worked on those creations. And then consider that it is self-love — the self-love Read more

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