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August 24, 2011

What we can learn from Steve Jobs…

by

The Real Estate Group, Virginia Beach and Chesapeake VA

Author website

Warning long post ahead.

First of all, I was saddened today to learn of Steve Jobs’ resignation as Apple’s CEO. Below is the resignation letter which is making its way around the internet at lightning speed right now.

To the Apple Board of Directors and the Apple Community:
I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come.
I hereby resign as CEO of Apple. I would like to serve, if the Board sees fit, as Chairman of the Board, director and Apple employee.
As far as my successor goes, I strongly recommend that we execute our succession plan and name Tim Cook as CEO of Apple.
I believe Apple’s brightest and most innovative days are ahead of it. And I look forward to watching and contributing to its success in a new role.
I have made some of the best friends of my life at Apple, and I thank you all for the many years of being able to work alongside you.

Steve

I have copied it here because I respect the man greatly. I spent several rough months of my life being diagnosed with the same illness that he has only to find out that I was fortunate and did not have cancer and he did. In the darkest hours of that time for me, him toughing it out helped me tough it out.

What impresses me the most about him is that he has kept his focus on doing his business, in building things to make peoples’ lives better and it helping other people through capitalism.he is everything I admire about the dream of taking things on because they are there and in building more in spite of all odds. He epitomizes the term “Do your worst, I will not kneel.” I am grateful for the example of a really bright guy doing extraordinary things.

Note to the East Coast media currently whining about a 5.8 earthquake…Japan’s was 1,000 times as severe. Let’s have some priorities OK? Quit whining. You do not Read more

August 23, 2011

SplendorQuest: A rallying cry for the Tea Party rebellion: “You’re not the boss of me!”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’m kicking this back to the top, which I think means no one will read it. 😉 In fact, I’m moving stuff like this to SplendorQuest.com, going forward. I think this an insanely-great essay, but it reads better elsewhere.

But: The comments to this post are amazing, BloodhoundBlog at its very best. Here are two of my remarks, illuminating why I am moving content like this and what I plan to do at SplendorQuest.com:

Celebrating my self: I have amazing things to say about the ontology and teleology of egoism and individualism, and virtually no one is paying any attention at all. I would be frustrated, except I can’t be: It’s raining soup in my mind, even if in no one else’s.

And:

I don’t have any organizational goals, I just want to induce people to think better, if I can. It’s a good thing for me, in the long run, since I stand to do better when other people do better — and since I’m pretty much incinerator-bait if things go to hell. But I know that the people I’m talking to will do better if they learn to seek Splendor in their lives. If I give anyone any time at all, my objective is to get that person to question his most basic assumptions about how the universe works. That much is not a kindness, at least at first, since people don’t generally love having the stilts kicked out from under them. But that’s “how much and how far” I want to go. There is no other way to get here from there.

“Save the world from home in your spare time!” I love that joke. But that’s what I plan to do, as time and minds permit. Come play with me, if the quest for Splendor moves you. –GSS

 
A rallying cry for the Tea Party rebellion: “You’re not the boss of me!”

I love that phrase — “You’re not the boss of me!” — those words, that order, that emphasis. Children say it when they’re put upon, and I love it so much I write it into their mouths in fiction, too.

The sentence has Read more

August 21, 2011

Shyly’s delight: “The Secret” to man and god in the universe . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Kicking this back to the top from February of 2007, although the underlying essay is much older than that. This is the shortest statement I have made, so far, of the ontology of human behavior. –GSS

 
Russell Shaw has mentioned the film The Secret a couple of times. Cathy bought the DVD, and we took the time to watch it tonight. As an expression of the right attitude to take toward life, it was right up my street. As physics, metaphysics, epistemology and ontology, it struck me as babbling word salad. The Law of Attraction commended me to The Eyelid Show, as television often does, so Cathy saw the whole thing, and I saw about half.

What the movie would seek to ascribe to a volitionally-caused physics (this is solipsism, right there), I would argue is simply the secondary consequences of particular habits of mind. Russell wants to freely and very generously share all that he has learned in his career. To do this, he needed me as his amplifier, and the two of us needed Allen Butler for his technological prowess. A great many other very talented people will be involved in this project. Are we drawn to each other by a Law of Attraction, or all we all simply oscillating in our own minds at around the same frequency — birds of a feather?

I wrote a book about the ontology of human social relationships, but it’s dense, tough sledding. Appended below is a easier-reading summary of some of these ideas. I wrote this as a speech for my Toastmaster’s Club in August of 2001. In the weblogging world, I’ll throw out details about our lives, but that’s really just so much plastic fruit, local color. This is the world that I live in, the world I wish everyone lived in…

Shyly’s delight

or

Manifesting the secondary consequences of splendor

I have a Labrador mutt named Shyly. She’s about three years old, but because she’s a Lab, she’ll always be a puppy. Always busy, always involved, always eager to be right in the middle of everything.

Shyly is the world’s greatest master at expressing delight. She Read more

August 21, 2011

Reasons to be cheerful, Part 3.1.1: Psalm.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

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

Art is a vanity in precisely this way: I presume to recreate reality in my own image and likeness, and I have the effrontery to demand that you not only acknowledge that reality but prefer it. I presume to seize the universe and squeeze out of it a tiny seed of truth. And I presume to plant that seed within you — without your consent, perhaps without even your knowledge. And I presume to nurture this new universe I have caused to grow within you until you scream — if I am good enough — scream from agony and delight. And I presume to do all of this for no purpose of yours, but only for reasons of my own devising. And at the end of it you may thank me or damn me, but you will never have been more than the means to my end: I sought not you but only to spawn myself anew within you — immaculate conceptualization. Art is a vanity because it is the means by which the artist postures as a god — and not a very merciful god.

I see all of this and yet I embrace it. I am as much art’s victim as you, although on my best days I am lucky enough to have a bit of my own back. But as a species and as individuals we are unwilling to forswear the worst of our vices without that resounding blow to the head that art alone provides. Our artists are Read more

August 21, 2011

SplendorQuest: “You behave in certain ways and you lead people to have certain expectations of you. If you’re comfortable with those expectations and if you want to make everything that much more secure you say the words out loud: This is what you are to me and this is what you will always have from me and I give you my solemn vow that I will never withhold from you anything that is yours to demand. That’s what we do at our very best. But what if you’re not comfortable with the expectations? What do you do then? Maybe you follow through anyway, but you never take that extra step, you never put it into words. You’re accountable for what you do as well as what you say, but if you don’t come right out and say it, you can always deny things, you can always claim you were misunderstood.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is an extract from a book I wrote in 1997 called The Unfallen. This amounts to me letting people I make up speak for me, too, but it’s apposite to the larger conversation, and it’s good, I think. I like art about adults, and this is fun for me because we get to watch a teenage boy growing into his adulthood. I have never yet written a good book, and I don’t know that I ever will; the last chapter of childhood consists of coming to grips with your own mediocrity, after all. But The Unfallen is concerned with nothing but my world — my kind of people tackling my kind of issues. I hope this book is not the best I will ever do, but it’s the best I’ve done so far. And if you want to get drenched my way, it will do that job from the very first page. –GSS

 

Devin stood with Spencer as the car pulled away. He said, “Are you cold? Can you stand to walk?”

“I’m all right.”

“Let’s just walk, then. I learned how to think on the streets of Boston and Cambridge. I don’t always find the answer I’m looking for, but I can always walk my way to peace, to serenity.” They walked their way to the Harvard Bridge across the Charles — named the Harvard Bridge because the students of M.I.T. thought it was too badly designed to be called the M.I.T. Bridge. Elements of the more-or-less perpetual repair crew were out in their orange vests and traffic was backed up in both directions. The walkways were free, though, and they walked, one foot in front of the other, without speaking.

Finally Devin said, “Are you a boy or a man, Spencer?”

“I’m not sure I get that…”

“It’s yours to say. People will treat you like a boy for the most part, I guess. But if you decide you’re a man, and if you decide to behave like a man, who can stop you?”

Spencer grinned, his smile as bright as the sun. “There’s that, isn’t there?”

“I ask because I think it’s a very brave Read more

August 21, 2011

SplendorQuest: My world…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

[This is me in February of 2004. It’s fun for me to read now, because we were selling a lot then, and — like a lot of folks — the next year, 2005, was my best year so far. I’m not selling success as a matter of dollars and cents. That matters to me, but not as much as Splendor does, not as much as integrity and follow-through and a comprehensive commitment not just to the good but to getting better — all the time. I have an essay aborning in me about everything I have learned about sales in the last ten years, but even that’s not as much as I want to do — as much as I want to have done. I want better money, yes, for us and for everyone who listens to us. And I want for Realtors to be better. I want for us to have an earned and deserved reputation as honest brokers who put our clients’ interest first. But before all that, I want for people to do better, to be better, to experience life more as a rapturous treasure and less as an unwanted burden. I want for the world to be better, remarkably better in every conceivable way.

This essay is me, the real deal, entirely unedited. I know I’m not alone in being like this, but no one dares to talk this way. We are children of Abel in every way that matters, and we are too much ashamed of being alive to celebrate the simple fact of our vitality. And yet this is the change that matters. To be free of other people means to be free of them in the silence and solitude of your own mind. If they can’t get at you there, then chains and walls are nothing but expressions of their inevitable failure. But if you forebear to be who you really are at the command of some internal editor, you are imprisoned everywhere — even when you are completely alone.

If you want to buy or sell some real estate in Metro Phoenix, I’m your guy. Read more

August 20, 2011

Online Reputation Management for Realtors (and everyone else for that matter)

by

Rust Belt Realtor

Author website

Recently I was asked to participate on a speaker’s panel at an upcoming real estate conference in Columbus. It’s always nice to be asked to participate and I even had a disturbing but fleeting Sally Fields moment. Conventional conventions are not my thing, but I got to thinking about the subject of the panel- Online Reputation Management and while in the end I demurred, I knew I had much more to say about the subject than my share of a speaker’s panel would allow. Here then, is what I might have said about ORM in 15 minutes or less:

Online Reputation Management. Interesting concept. I know what it means, I’m just not sure it gets to the root of the problem and the problem isn’t that people can post horrible and hideous things about you online, because if you spend enough time online speaking your mind, not hiding who you are, well then girlfriend, someone, somewhere is bound to say something hideous and horrible about you. The focus should not be that you cannot control what other people say, that’s reactive thinking. The focus should be on the only thing you can control- your own thoughts and actions.

It occurs to me that once upon a time a Realtor’s reputation was theirs to control through advertising alone. They wrote smarmy or vague advertisements about being the Neighborhood Expert, and who knew any better? What were you going to do- go around to each of your neighbors for verification? “You know this guy? Is he the expert?” It’d take for friggin’ ever to get a consensus on whether or not Joe, the Friendly Neighborhood Expert (FNE), was in fact, a) Friendly, or b) an Expert, but the interwebs changed all that, sort of. I mean you can still say whatever you want about yourself, but now your clients can turn to the ultimate FNE, aka Google, and in the blink of an eye, all is revealed.

This is a good thing. It’s good for us. It’s good for our industry. But most importantly it’s good for our clients because now you really do have to Read more

August 19, 2011

Escaping Room 101…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

[I wrote this in the late Summer of 1995. –GSS]

 
I moved to a new apartment this Spring, and it happens that my new apartment number is 101. We live by symbols, like it or not, and I can’t look at my door or write my address without thinking of George Orwell’s “1984.” For in Room 101 is housed one’s greatest fear, the secret dread that, Orwell implies, will drive a person to betray every value in his life. Nothing like that here, thankfully, but there’s nothing so fine as a metaphor to focus the mind.

I spend a lot of time thinking about the love of life and its antithesis. For me, the quest for human liberty has little to do with laws or strictures or jack-booted thugs hiding behind mirrored shades. We are not enslaved or set free by other people, and we will not change our interior existence by convincing other people to change their behavior. We are free as we dare to rejoice in the beauty and glory of life, and we are enslaved as we shrink from that rejoicing. The ego is a realm infinite in extent, and it cannot ever be invaded from the outside.

And thus, some of the secret desires of libertarians seem a little silly to me. Assuredly we need to stand firm against new statist encroachments and complain incessantly about those already in place. But the Minerva fantasies and Atlantis fantasies are a bit much. To the world, we speak of free countries where free men and free women can produce untold wealth in free markets by the free exercise of free thought. But I suspect that in the privacy of imagination what is foreseen is the Neverland, where one can play forever and never grow weary. That’s fine, I suppose; life would be dull without daydreams. But the essence of a daydream, or the vice at least, is imagining a universe where one is not oneself, where one is not who one really is.

“‘I like people who live their dreams in the day.'” I made a fictional character say that a long time Read more

August 17, 2011

Reforming FannieMae and FreddieMac with Marx: Rotarian Socialist rent-seekers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your brains!

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Totally cool. An actual newspaper article about America’s favorite welfare program, government subsidized mortgages — and in The Boston Globe, no less:

Amid all the clamor about entitlement reform during the struggle to raise the debt ceiling, one enormous cost – and potential source of future savings – largely escaped scrutiny: the billions of dollars the United States spends to support the mortgage market. Even before the 2008 financial crisis, the government assumed the credit risk on most loans, which allowed banks to offer better rates, but ultimately left taxpayers footing the bill when the housing market collapsed: $138 billion and counting.

During the crisis, the government became even more involved in the mortgage market by rescuing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and agreeing to backstop larger loans. This furnished enough liquidity to prop up the housing market and helped bring about the low mortgage rates of the last three years. But getting in has proved much easier than getting out. Today, the government backs 95 percent of new loans, leaving taxpayers more exposed than ever.

That could finally be about to change. After next month, federal loan limits in expensive areas like Boston, New York, and Los Angeles are set to decline from $729,750 to $625,500. Had the lower limits applied last year, the government would have backed 50,000 fewer loans. But even this modest pullback may not happen. At the urging of homebuilders and realtors, lawmakers in both parties want to extend the higher limits, possibly for good. It’s an early skirmish in the larger battle over the government’s proper role in the mortgage market. And the issue isn’t just when to pull back, but whether to do so at all: Many Americans have come to regard cheap mortgages as an entitlement.

I am so ecstatic to see Fannie, Freddie, Ginnie and FHAVAUSDA properly identified as welfare programs — invented by rent-seeking Rotarian Socialists for the benefit of other rent-seeking Rotarian Socialists — that I’m finding it hard to kvetch.

Well, maybe not too hard. Look at this:

Liberals tend to support government intervention as a means of subsidizing home ownership for the poor and Read more

August 16, 2011

Seasteading: Galt’s Gulch for a new century?

by

Realtor, Media Mogul

Author website

If Galt’s Gulch is going to exist in this century, might it be called Seasteading?

Peter Thiel has given $1.25 million to an initiative to create floating libertarian countries in international waters, according to a profile of the billionaire in Details magazine.

Thiel has been a big backer of the Seasteading Institute, which seeks to build sovereign nations on oil rig-like platforms to occupy waters beyond the reach of law-of-the-sea treaties. The idea is for these countries to start from scratch–free from the laws, regulations, and moral codes of any existing place. Details says the experiment would be “a kind of floating petri dish for implementing policies that libertarians, stymied by indifference at the voting booths, have been unable to advance: no welfare, looser building codes, no minimum wage, and few restrictions on weapons.” – Yahoo.com

A floating haven for Libertarians.  It sounds like freedom.  I wonder where they could find real estate expertise for such a venture?

Galt’s Gulch had one big advantage over Seasteading, it was beyond detection of government.

August 15, 2011

Full price wheel barrel of money and a lost client; Realtor gets tko’d.

by

Realtor, Guerilla Technologist

Author website

When the going gets tough, the tough gets going.  I scheduled an appointment to see a home in a nice community.  The school districts are great as well as the neighborhood.  The price was right and this home was not a short sale, not an easy find in South Florida.  After getting four appointments cancelled by the seller, my buyer was getting rather desperate as his moving date was only 4 weeks away, as his landlord was kicking him out because he would not sign a one year lease.

The buyer decides to write an offer sight unseen.  The offer was full price, cash, with zero contingencies.  The urgency was high, as this buyer wanted to be in a home and have the sweat heart school district.  Surprisingly the offer offer was never even looked at by the seller, because she had a change of heart on selling.  Besides the fact that I was owned a commission and deciding not to waste my time to chase it down, the buyer then ends up firing me because I was unable to pull this deal off.

Hence the title, full price wheel barrel of money and a lost client: Realtor gets tko’d.  What has your experience been in situations like this?  Reporting live from the trenches of a warm muggy humid South Florida, I’m Robert Worthington, and I promise to have yet another doozy to report on soon!  I’m keeping my head up, ears up, tail waging,  and I’m sniffing out my next deal!  When your part of the bloodhound pack, you never quit!

August 12, 2011

Mark Steyn: “If Charlton Heston was horrified to discover the Planet of the Apes was his own, Britons are beginning to realize that the remote desert island of ‘Lord Of The Flies’ is, in fact, located just off the coast of Europe in the northeast Atlantic.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’m getting quit of bitching at people, but I confess, always, to taking delight in well-written castigation. For eloquent excoriation, none surpasses that of Mark Steyn:

Within two generations of the Blitz and the Battle of Britain, a significant proportion of the once-free British people entrusted themselves to social rewiring by liberal compassionate Big Government and thereby rendered themselves paralytic and unemployable save for nonspeaking parts in “Rise of The Planet Of The Apes.” And even that would likely be too much like hard work.

Give the man your mind. He’ll give it back to you wittier, at least, if not wiser.

August 12, 2011

“This economic mandate represents a wholly novel and potentially unbounded assertion of congressional authority: The ability to compel Americans to purchase an expensive health insurance product they have elected not to buy, and to make them re-purchase that insurance product every month for their entire lives.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Dang. There goes the NAR’s chance to force every American to buy three or four more houses, thus to save the starving real estate brokers.

As President Obama himself has noted, there is something wrong with our politics when perfectly reliable campaign donors cannot despoil the taxpayers at will, without judicial interference…

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

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