BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Egoism in Action (page 2 of 26)

Realtor, Associate Broker

August 29, 2020

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

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

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

August 27, 2020

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

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

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

August 27, 2020

A proud family of Ants bidding farewell to California’s Grasshoppers

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Found on TheDonald.win – unfiltered and unreliable but uncensored.

There are other sites like this, some of them serious to the point of being dour, but crowd-sourced aggregators are the way you have, for now, of making sure you are not being lied to by omission.

Yes, you have to filter for bullshit – but if you aren’t doing that with everything, you just might be a hopeless case.

August 25, 2020

Why, for the first time in human history, can the Ants so easily escape the Grasshoppers? That’s easy: The Internet.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The metaphor is not mine. It’s Aesop’s. Uncle Willie borrowed it, just lately. Every true fable has a moral, and here’s the moral to Willie’s story:

“Grasshoppers need Ants, but Ants don’t need Grasshoppers.”

Willie was working from a premise elucidated in today’s New York Post, why taxpayer-hostile big cities will not recover from their recent tantrums:

Why can they go so easily? Because for the first time in history, Internet bandwidth allows all or nearly all white-collar ­employees to work remotely.

Being stuck in or near cities and all their discontents was a link in the golden handcuffs of having a boastworthy corporate job. Now that link is broken, replaced by a link to a Zoom meeting – and there may never again be any reason to fear getting lice in your hair or vomit on your shoes.

Nice going, Grasshoppers. It will take decades and wrecking balls to come back from this…

August 24, 2020

Unchained Melody: The “Layla” guitar solo from a very confident Derek Trucks – age thirteen.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We talk about this at home all the time: Extraordinarily “talented” people will turn out to have been obsessively devoted to practice at age 13. This can be an emotional shielding – if you’re looking for the very most shunned people, look here – but it’s ultimately just a fact of practical ontology.

What’s most fun about this clip? The way thirteen-year-old Derek Trucks takes a sip of his Coke before taking The Allman Brothers Band to school.

December 31, 2013

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

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website
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

November 12, 2013

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

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website
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

September 3, 2013

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

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

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.

June 13, 2013

Practical ontology in real estate? Who ever heard of such a thing?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

NewHomeBuildingInPhoenix

From KJZZ Radio in Phoenix, The Way of the Bloodhound:

‘“From now on whenever you’re driving on the freeway look for a truss,” Swann said, referring to a roof truss on the back of a truck. “And when you start to see a truss every day, then things have turned around. If you see three trusses a day, then things have really turned around. But if you can go five days without seeing a truss on the freeway, then no one is building anything.”’

The linked story is from Peter O’Dowd, a journalist for whom I have huge respect — not alone because he listens when I talk about bug’s-eye-view real estate.

June 5, 2013

Bidding farewell to brave Odysseus…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

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…”

November 22, 2012

Black Friday? Grey Thursday? Before the flood, a pensive Wednesday night at Walmart.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I love Walmart. I am very happy to call myself a member of the middle class, and I take huge delight in cruising the aisles at Walmart, scoping out all the incredible deals.

I don’t buy a lot of stuff, though. Away from TechToyz, I lead a pretty Spartan existence. But I love to see all that incredible wealth stacked floor to ceiling, knowing that it is the much-maligned engine of freeish-market capitalism that makes all that stuff available to me.

I’m not a Black Friday kind of shopper. We’re not all that Christmas-y, and I do not like to be crowded, not ever. But the phenomenon of Black Friday, especially at Walmart, is fascinating to me.

We had to stop in at a Super Walmart late Wednesday night, and I took the opportunity to snap a few dozen photos of that store’s preparations for Grey Thursday and Black Friday. Every wide aisle in the store was lined with pallets full of shrink-wrapped merchandise, millions of dollars worth of stuff waiting to be sold between now and Monday.

There were more staffers than customers in the store, and they were all busy getting ready. Black Friday takes its name from the sad fact that the day after Thanksgiving is the day most retailers reach the stage of profitability for the calendar year. In other words, storekeepers large and small work almost eleven months of the year before they make any profit at all.

Walmart might do better than that. Apple’s retail presence does a lot better. But retail is a hard way to make an easy living, and my bet is that it will get harder as the parasitic weight of government crushes more and more of the economy.

Meanwhile, smug people like to sneer at Walmart for selling Americans goods they want to buy at prices they want to pay. I’m happy that some people are so rich that they can afford to spurn and scorn Walmart. But I’m happier still that Walmart is around to provide incredible values every day for people who work hard for their money and want to make it go Read more

November 6, 2012

Embracing your inner anarchist — because there is no alternative.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Here’s my quick take on the presidential election, from a video made one day prior to the event: Mitt Romney is going to win an Electoral College landslide. My state-by-state prediction is shown below, but it’s not based on any sort of arcane science. I’m just betting that married people with kids and jobs will vote to fire Barack Obama for gross incompetence.

Note that this is not an expression of racism, as you will surely hear from the perpetually-sore-losers of the chattering classes. I’m just betting that the people with the biggest stake in the game of human life will vote against the most perniciously anti-life candidate ever to seek the office of the presidency.

But at the same time, Romney’s win will not be any sort of repudiation of Marxism, contrary to Michael Walsh’s claim at National Review Online. It’s just the correction of a bad hiring decision.

In this week’s video, I argue that the self-loving thing for you to do is to accept that fact that each human being is sovereign and indomitable, and that, therefore, self-control is all the control that can ever exist among human beings. In the course of that argument, I cite an essay of mine, Meet the Third Thing. I also recite an old poem, which I will transcribe here for what may be the first time it has ever appeared in print:

What if I’ve been wrong?
What if I’ve been wrong all along?
What if everything I’ve said,
everything I’ve done,
everything I’ve thought about is wrong?
What if I’ve been wrong all along?

Here is this week’s video:

For an audio-only version of this video, take yourself to the SelfAdoration.com podcast on iTunes.

October 11, 2012

Unchained melody: Cultivating indifference with Cage the Elephant.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Man Alive! is six months old this week. A video I made on Monday celebrates the book’s demi-anniversary by eviscerating two mutually-contradictory theories of human free will.

Meanwhile, I’m in the early stages of writing a new book on moral philosophy, this one concerned with moving your self rightward on the number line discussed in Chapter 7 of Man Alive!

Cathleen and I were talking about a piece of this pie last night, the idea I call Cultivating Indifference. She asked me if I am really unhurt by other people’s (sometimes virulent) criticism of me. I am, although I understand why people might find this hard to believe. But here is how my thinking runs:

If you say something about me, it is either true or it isn’t. If it’s true, I am improved by your observation, however it comes packaged. My goal is to do better in everything I do, so if someone points out that I have been in error, I am glad to know it.

And if the claim is not true, I am unmoved. I keep my own counsel in everything I do, and I never change anything in my thinking or my behavior without a good reason.

If the criticism is offered in good faith, I will explain my thinking. And if it is simply malice, a verbal spear intended to wound me, I will know that the person throwing that spear is not to be trusted, and my life will be improved by that bit of new knowledge.

In all cases, I am concerned with nothing but my self, so other people’s behavior toward me is only interesting to the extent that it offers me opportunities to improve my own mind and conduct.

To my mind, this is completely rational. I like it when folks I admire return my admiration, but I don’t give a rat’s ass if unlikeable people don’t like me. It would be a red flag for me if they did!

Anyway, here’s a rockin’ tune from Cage the Elephant that expresses my attitude on this subject perfectly:

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