We can hope, but this song is doubly appropriate tonight.
Category: Flourishing (page 17 of 38)
Thriving as only a rational animal can
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
That’s a big “Duh!” — isn’t it? Here’s a calendar for November. I’ll talk about my October tonight or tomorrow.
Meanwhile, here’s a good looking cat for Halloween:
I’ve had times in my career, the first one at 19, a whopping year of part time experience under my belt, when I was given a slightly unfocused glimpse at what was possible, in terms of that elusive concept, success. In a company filthy with studs and studdettes, (a word I just now made up) I somehow Gumped my way into finishing in second place in a 90 day in-house listing contest. I won an 11″ black ‘n white portable TV — a prize I’ve always been convinced my sainted step-mom was behind. The distance between me and the winner could only be measured in terms of light years. When basking in the shocked applause at the awards meeting, I thought I was a budding gift to real estate brokerage.
NASA still hasn’t developed the instrument capable of measuring how completely fulla crap I was back then. Lookin’ back, (I blush with shame whenever I do this) I would’ve had to climb up three rungs on the ‘Have a Clue’ ladder to have been Mr. Clueless.
Goals, plans, hard work, even talent, aren’t the most powerful weapon we have in life. Ask yourself, what precedes all of that? When we lump 1,000 highly successful real estate agents together, what’s the common denominator? Some had goals, some didn’t. There are massively successful people, for whom the next goal they set will be the first. The same goes for all the factors mentioned above. So, what’s the common denominator shared by virtually all of ’em?
They made a decision.
If ya see yourself here, raise your hand, but I’ll only speak for myself. Success in anything just ain’t that complicated, nor is the road leading to it labyrinthian. There are those who do, and those who can tell ya every way known to Man how something can’t be done — at least not by them.
We all realize the truth of profound principles of life at different speeds. I was a slow learner. You’d think as a PK I’d of understood the pure gold flowing from Solomon’s wisdom (paraphrased) — As a man thinks in Read more
My company’s checks have a typo on them. I’ve left it uncorrected for years, in order to remind me of my lean beginnings. The company name is on the first line, followed by what should be Jeff Brown — Broker on the second line. Instead, it says, Jeff Brown — Broke. No, really, it does. Hardly anyone notices. In fact, we’re in the year’s last quarter and nobody has said anything this year. I think a couple people told me about it last year.
Every time I write a check it’s the first thing I notice. Much like muscle memory, the first picture that pops up is me, grabbin’ a commission check, (with much blonde hair blowin’ in the wind) and runnin’ down to deposit it in the bank. Back in those days, if it wasn’t for the backbone of the real estate industry, the working wife, I wouldn’t be where I am today.
Real estate is, as I was told before California informed me I’d passed my first license test, the highest paid hard work, and the lowest paid easy work around. I’ve found that to be true, but not all-inclusive. As I’ve said a few times recently, .150 hitters can work as hard as they want, but if it’s not at the right things, nothing changes.
Here’s a thought to ponder. In real estate there are no minor leagues. In baseball kids learn their craft there. In real estate? Gimme a break.
There was a seven year period in which I worked for one of the biggest real estate firms in all of CA. The office sported 150 agents. They had a mentor program that graduated newbies as experts in protecting the company’s ass. Their career life expectancy was almost measurable. The office manager aspired to have that program bat .150 someday. The worst kept secret ever was the real reason that program was not axed. The newbies weren’t allowed in the ‘main office population’ ’till they closed three transactions — and their split was 50%.
24 trainees X 3 deals a year, at $500,000 median price, X 3% Read more
Most marketing and branding efforts fail miserably. We all know a ton of so-called talented folks who’ve failed — and they worked their asses off. How’s that possible? I used to ask myself that question all the time. Then one day Dad pointed out a guy in the office who looked completely average. One might even say he blended into his surroundings. He made beige exciting.
He’d been a teacher for 20+ years, was in his 40’s, and had been licensed about three years. He was the fourth highest producer in terms of commission dollars in the highest volume real estate brokerage in San Diego. I was 16 at the time. Dad said to watch him and learn whenever I was cleaning the office. (I was company janitor.)
Watchin’ this guy was beyond boring. All he did was make practice calls to FSBOs. Then he practiced cold calling. Then he practiced listing presentations. Then he practiced showing property — all in the office. It was irritating. His name was Bob, and since I was still in school at the time, I could only imagine how terminally bored his students must’ve been.
In his third year, 1967, he made over $35,000. To put that in perspective, the median income for the nation then was about $7,500 or so. In today’s figures, and adjusting for currently available splits, his earnings would be roughly $700,000. More about Bob later.
Many times after monthly TechTard meetings adjourn, I walk across the hall to attend similar get-togethers with those equally handicapped in the disciplines of marketing and branding. No real point here, except to establish street cred when it comes to my lack of expertise when it comes to these subjects.
For the purpose of this post we’ll leave out selling, which is a stand-alone skill, generally not reliant on marketing or branding. Yeah, I realize bad marketing or branding can significantly hinder selling.
I hereby publicly plead guilty to multiple counts of Marketing By the Seat of My Pants, and Branding By Default.
If you know how to sell, great. If you suspect you could improve, do so. Read more
We’re back, after some travails.
Yesterday, I showed with two different clients, wrote five contracts, opened one escrow and moved 39 domains. I finished the day in South Phoenix, just as the mother of all storms was rolling across the Valley of the (cloud enshrouded) Sun. Y’all think you have weather where you are, but you ain’t seen a storm until you’ve lived through one of ours.
Witness:
That’s hail, forty-five minutes after it pummeled everything, followed by heavy rainfall, followed by still fairly warm temperatures. In other words, that’s some hardy hail. There are more photos here.
I left my clients soon after that photo was taken. The streets were paved with rushing rivers, and the trip home, which should have taken 20 minutes, lasted a full two hours.
Even so, the server swap was grinding on without me. We had a little trouble getting the (very big) BHB database back on line, but all else was pretty smooth. Scenius.net is down, and I have to make a host of minor fixes to some of my PHP files, but everything else seems to be normal.
Was all this worth it? We’re faster than a raped ape, and i haven’t done anything to supercharge our performance yet. It sucks when things don’t work just as you planned, but this — at last — was the right move.
“A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down your pants. A final end, a funeral’s toll, a little wisdom for your soul.”
Legacy is a bitch for most of us. What will you be remembered for? Do you know? Are you sure? Me? Heck, right now I’d be happy to simply know it’s not the little ditty you just read in ode to life and death! I attended a memorial this weekend for a truly remarkable man. In my lifetime I’ve had over 50 teachers, from Catholic grade school nuns to Princeton University professors. Of those, three stand out for their impact on me: there was Miss Carlson in 5th grade, who first taught me that life was fun even in a Catholic school; and my anthropology professor at Princeton who asked me a question so powerful, I finally left the church for good. But in between those two wonderful theological bookends, was Mr. Jerome “Jerry” Lipetzky, for whom the memorial was held. He taught me that there’s no end to learning and nothing quite so liberating as the exploration of a new interest. He was also one of the smartest and sarcastically humorous men I’ve ever met. (In his classroom there was not one square inch of wall space that was not covered with something funny, educational or challenging and usually all three at once.) My favorite memory to this day: a bumper sticker casually stuck to a small, flat boulder near the back of his room that read:
The World is Flat
Class of ’91
Think about that for a minute… humor, history, a little sarcastic jab at what we think we know, and how often we are wrong; that’s an amazing sticker and trust me when I tell you he was an amazing man.
So What…
“Yes, yes, so what’s the point of this post Sean?” Coming to it. At the memorial, one of the speakers stood before us and read aloud a list of seven rules, for lack of a better word, that Mr. Lipetzky tried to live his life by; each rule came with a short explanation. As I heard Read more
The title is an analogy — for the .150 hitter, substitute a real estate agent who couldn’t sell a house for a nickel to a homeless person — and for ‘runners left on base’ a sales board filled with prospects but no sales. Though unmentioned, it’s the manager penciling the .150 hitter into the lineup on a daily basis, who gives him 4-5 at-bats game after game. Continuing the analogy, the ‘manager’ in real estate in this case is technology, which often gives .150 hitters far more opportunities to strike out with the bases loaded.
What managers learn early on, that is if they wish to remain managers, is that continually sending .150 hitters up to the plate with runners in scoring position leads to losin’ a bunch more than winnin’ — the last loss being their job.
Just as .150 hitters often think more at-bats will improve their average, real estate agents often believe that if they only had the technology to give them more at-bats, they’d be drivin’ a Ferrari in no time.
This is what passes for wisdom in the world of real estate brokerage.
The reality is that the lousy hitter needs to learn how to hit, and the starving real estate agent needs to learn how to sell. Why is that concept so elusive?
BawldGuy Axiom: The next time you master a skill by continually doing it wrong, but more often, will be the first. Duh
A Simple Example
As a hitting coach in youth baseball for several years, I learned to spot the flaws in hitters’ swings. We had a strong kid join our team in the middle of the season once, who wanted with all his heart to be a great hitter, but had never been taught. He struck out over half the time, and weakly popped up or grounded out otherwise. His mom told me he’d never been actually coached, one on one. After practice that day, Mom looking on, I had a couple of our pitchers throw him fast balls right down Main St. After about 20 swings, he was frustrated. Turns out more Read more
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
Jeff Brown wants to know if real estate bar camps are a waste of his time. My view is that they probably are, at least in terms of making maximum productive use of time taken away from money-making work. Jeff is a chatty guy, so I expect he can have a good time with any random group of real estate practitioners, but in terms of epiphanies major and minor — or even just an a-ha! or two to cover the cost of the gasoline — there’s just not that much there there.
First a caveat — thus to give you a chance to dismiss me if your mind runs easily to thoughts of thoughtlessness: I’ve only been to one real estate bar camp. Brian Brady and I did a half-day BloodhoundBlog Unchained event at Zillow.com’s headquarters in Seattle, and the first (I think) Seattle REBC was held the next day. Brian and I did a session that day with Ardell Dellaloggia, then I used Al Lorenz’ Windows laptop to do a session on Scenius — with the latter being of benefit to no one, I think. I spent much of the day in a conference room, conferring with anyone who would dare to talk to me, and that was reasonably productive. I taught much more than I learned, but I got to spend quite a bit of time with Al, and that man knows a lot of interesting stuff.
But: The event was opened by a vendor, and the vendorslut influence was an oozing slime everywhere. It was obvious to me that the ordinary punters were completely lost, and it was equally obvious that the vendors were “befriending” folks who had learned nothing — except that they were scared and clueless — picking them off like drunken sorority pledges at a fraternity mixer.
I’ve not done anything with the bar camps that have been held in Phoenix, second because the wired Realtors in town seem to want to have nothing to do with me, but first because the wired Realtors in town don’t seem to know very much that I’m interested in learning. If Read more
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
From The New York Post:
The latest numbers suggest we’re finally at the beginning of the end of the housing correction — no thanks to Washington.
Last Thursday’s numbers from Realtytrac seemed like bad news. In August, foreclosure auctions hit their second-highest monthly total in the report’s history: 147,003, up 9 percent over the month before and up 2 percent over August last year. That’s 7 percent below the peak month, March of this year.
And the immediate precursor to foreclosure sales — bank repossessions — hit their all-time high in August: 95,364, up just 3 percent over July but 25 percent over August 2009. That makes the ninth straight month repos have increased on a year-over-year basis. But foreclosure is a pipeline — and those numbers are the outflow end of it.
On the inflow end, things are slower. August saw 96,469 default or foreclosure notices go out, a 1 percent drop from July and a 30 percent fall from August 2009. And that marks the seventh straight month new foreclosures have fallen on a year-over-year basis. This trend — increased “outflow” and slightly reduced “inflow” foreclosure activity — means that lenders and loan servicers are 1) giving up on modifying mortgages when the borrower can’t pay, and instead repossessing homes and auctioning them off, but also 2) trying to manage the foreclosure pipeline to minimize the downward pressure on home prices.
Why isn’t this bad news? For starters, a multiyear tidal wave of foreclosure sales has been inevitable ever since the housing bubble burst: Too many people had mortgages they couldn’t afford to pay, mortgages with a face value higher than the home’s new market price. There’s never been any way for prices to start heading back up until they first find their bottom — which won’t happen until those bad mortgages are cleared away.
President Obama’s $75 billion mortgage-modification program was always going to be a huge failure — you just can’t keep people in homes they can’t afford — but now the markets are admitting it.
The Unexpected Hanging Paradox:
A judge tells a condemned prisoner that he will be hanged at noon on one weekday in the following week but that the execution will be a surprise to the prisoner. He will not know the day of the hanging until the executioner knocks on his cell door at noon that day.
Having reflected on his sentence, the prisoner draws the conclusion that he will escape from the hanging. His reasoning is in several parts. He begins by concluding that the “surprise hanging” can’t be on a Friday, as if he hasn’t been hanged by Thursday, there is only one day left – and so it won’t be a surprise if he’s hanged on a Friday. Since the judge’s sentence stipulated that the hanging would be a surprise to him, he concludes it cannot occur on Friday.
He then reasons that the surprise hanging cannot be on Thursday either, because Friday has already been eliminated and if he hasn’t been hanged by Wednesday night, the hanging must occur on Thursday, making a Thursday hanging not a surprise either. By similar reasoning he concludes that the hanging can also not occur on Wednesday, Tuesday or Monday. Joyfully he retires to his cell confident that the hanging will not occur at all.
The next week, the prisoner is hanged anyway, despite all the above. That’s the surprise…
The lesson I draw from this is that things are not always what we think they are. The world is full of paradox and real estate is certainly no exception. On the one hand it’s a profession with tremendous freedom of time, yet to be proficient (never mind truly successful) you must become a master of time management. The field of real estate is over-flowing with practitioners and competition can be fierce, yet the key to a smooth transaction is the ultimate cooperation between two “competing” agents. Almost every day as a real estate professional feels like a sprint to put out multiple fires, yet ultimate success depends on the realization that real estate is an endurance event comprised of doing small things right on a continuous Read more
Urban savant Joel Kotkin in Forbes magazine:
What we are going through now is not a sea change but a correction from insane government and business practices. The rise in homeownership from 44% in 1944 to nearly 70% at the height of the bubble reflected a great social democratic achievement. But by the mid-2000s government attempts to expand ownership–eagerly embraced by Wall Street speculators–brought in buyers who would have historically been disqualified.
In some markets, prices exploded as people moved up too quickly into ever more expensive housing. Housing inflation was further exacerbated by “smart growth” policies, which limited new home construction in suburban areas and instead promoted dense, “transit oriented” housing with limited market appeal and economic logic.
Rather than artificially constraining supply and protecting irresponsible borrowers, we should let nature take its course. Home values need to readjust historic balance between incomes and prices. Over the past 60 years, notes demographer Wendell Cox, it took two to three years or less of median household income to purchase a median-priced home. At the peak of the boom, that ratio had ballooned to 4.6.
The disequilibrium was the worst in regions like Los Angeles, Las Vegas, San Bernardino-Riverside and Miami. At the peak of the bubble, between 2006 and 2008, according to the National Homebuilders Association- Wells Fargo “Housing Opportunity Index,” barely 2% of families with a median income households in Los Angeles could afford to buy a median priced home; even in the traditionally affordable Riverside area, the number was roughly 7%. In Miami, barely 10% could afford such a purchase; in Las Vegas, often seen as one of the cheaper markets, only 15%.
What a difference a market correction makes. The affordability number for Los Angeles is now 34%, 17 times better than two years ago, while Riverside is now near 70%. Miami’s affordability picture has improved to over 60% while in Las Vegas, it’s back over 80%.
These lower prices–not Wall Street or federal gimmickry–will lure new buyers to the places that some new urbanists have predicted will be “the next slums.” Already there’s evidence in places like Miami of a renewed interest in Read more