Posts Tagged ‘facebook’

[Warning: There's some religion in this post.  If you don't want to read any of that, skip this.  It's not mostly religious, but I'd hate for you to wade into some unawares if you're strongly opposed to it.]

Debate on Facebook about goal setting, reposting here with additional commentary because Facebook isn’t really a good forum for this kind of discussion.

I have a problem with goal setting.  Not that I don’t set them; I do.  Occasionally I even reach the goals I set, though that’s far from common.  No, my problem is figuring out whether or not I should set them.

Here’s my dilemma.  I am an intensely religious person, and I believe that God through His son Jesus Christ is my model for how to behave (a model I do not reach, let it be said).  God didn’t set a goal to create the world in seven days.  What God purposes, He does.  Now, it is true that God is omnipotent, so He can do all He means to do, and I am not, so sometimes I fail.  But if Christ is the model, and He didn’t set any goals, then what is it that I am to take from this?

I’ve been instructed by my religious leaders, as well as good men and women that I respect, to set goals.  The general instruction is to set goals that will require me to stretch, to improve, in order to reach them.  That means they are, almost by definition, goals I am not sure I can reach.  If I were sure I could reach them, they wouldn’t be a stretch.  I might think I can reach them, they might be projectably feasible based on past performance, but if I know for sure I can reach the goal, then I’m not stretching.

There is, however, one category of goal that this does not apply to.  These are goals that are commandments from God.  All of those are reachable by definition.  God cannot and would not give commands to His children for them to do things that they cannot do.  So if my goal is to draw closer to Christ, I can do that.  If my goal is to deepen my spiritual commitment, I can do it.  I know what I have to do to make those things happen.

But if my goal is to lose 10 pounds, there’s hardly a guarantee that I can do it.  Perhaps I can, perhaps I can’t.  Ultimately, obviously, I can lose the 10 pounds by having surgery to remove a kidney, but that brings in another difficulty for me, and that is, should I be setting conditional goals?  As in, should I set a goal that I’m going to lose 10 pounds, but only if I decide that I really want to more than I want to do something else?  That doesn’t sound effective to me.

So I guess I have several problems.  One is that I hate to lose.  Not reaching a goal sucks, and it sucks more than reaching it feels good.  Two is that I’m not sure that setting a goal in the first place is a good thing for me to do.  I find no great satisfaction in doing so.  Three is probably semantic – I do make long lists of things to do every day, and I guess you could call that a goal, but what I’m mostly trying to do is remember all the stuff I promised I’d get done, not set any specific target.  Would I perform better if I did put some targets on there?  Four is that I don’t think much of setting goals over things I can’t control.  Setting a goal to run a 5 minute mile is great, but even if I train all day every day under the tutelage of Sebastian Coe I might still not be able to get there.  It reminds me of setting a goal to have three straight days without rain.  Five is that setting a goal makes that goal disproportionately important to me, meaning that sometimes my priorities get out of wack.  Six is that if I insist on my priorities in the face of the goals I’ve set, I am by default saying that I have a goal to do thus and so, but only if I really want to.

And yet, I still set goals.  I don’t set many, but I do set some, and I hate myself if I don’t reach them.  That, at least, I recognize as a character flaw, and that if I’m unhappy only I am to blame for that.

But I’d still like some help.  What do you do?  What strategies do you use that help you become a better person?  Do you reward yourself?  How do you do that?  Are your goals 1-0 (yes I got it/no I didn’t), or scalable (got most of the way there)?  How do you deal with losing?

I only address this topic because I can’t find a lot of good commentary out there about this specific subject.  I’m also no great expert; my experience with social media is pretty small compared to the Great Lords of Twitter and the Ancient Kings of Facebook.  I confess this.

On the other hand, since according to Mortgage Strategy only 19% of the real-estate industry is even kind of using social media (this from a tweet this morning), and from experience I can testify that 90% of that 19% is using it badly and doing harm to itself, I thought I might at least give my opinions about how social media might be used well in a real-estate context.  I am certainly using these tools better than most in my industry, and that has translated into gigs at Zillow and the Daily Herald Newspaper, so apparently my ideas do not entirely suck.  Take them for what they are worth.

Here’s how I got to writing this:

From Seth Jenson, a really good Realtor in Colorado: “Chris, what do you think about Twitter vs. Facebook? Do you think I need to be on both?”

Seth-

Whoo.  What a question.

Facebook is a terrific way for people to connect.  I’m no huge FB-er; I have about 400 friends, which is not a big number by any stretch of the imagination.  I don’t spend a lot of time trying to find friends on FB, or I likely could have a couple hundred more.  And maybe I ought to do that.  Probably I ought to do that.  But it depends on what I’m using Facebook for.

If I’m using Facebook to keep tabs on people I know – my family, my close friends here in town, a few of the guys I went to HS with – then I’m doing it the right way.  You can’t possibly keep track of the doings of 1000 people every day.  Impossible.  However, if one of the reasons for you to be on Facebook is that you want people to remember YOU, well, then you might want a few more friends.  You’d want to update your status at least once a day, and probably more than once.  These wouldn’t all be real-estate updates.  In fact, most of them would be about anything except real estate, and would be only for the purpose of strengthening relationships.  It is those relationships that bring the referrals that make you successful, and coincidentally, it is those relationships that make your life richer and more rewarding, so that’s a happy thing.  Facebook makes strengthening those relationships easier than ever, so I would definitely be on Facebook.

Twitter is very different.  I love Twitter, myself.  I like Twitter better than Facebook.  Where I post or comment about 5x a day on Facebook, I do that twice as much – or more – on Twitter.  Twitter is a research tool as much as it is a communications network.  I get a lot of my news from Twitter, most of my reading material, and have most of my online conversations there, even more than email.  Now, again, it depends on what you’re using the tool for.  Twitter can be a huge and pointless waste of your time.  It can also do you harm, I think.  But if you use it with respect, I think it has the potential to be incredibly valuable.

Here are some examples.  I am not a big noise on Twitter.  I have fewer than 200 followers.  I’m following only about 100 people.  I determined when I got involved that I wouldn’t try to amass a gigantic following until I had some idea what I was doing it for.  I didn’t know enough about Twitter to know what I was doing, so I figured I’d start by following some people that DID know, namely, those that have good blogs about social media.  So I followed Amber Naslund, Olivier Blanchard, Beth Harte, and some others, and learned about what Twitter could do, and more importantly, what I should NOT do on Twitter.

Then I started using the search functions of TweetDeck – TweetDeck is an indispensable tool for using Twitter – to follow mortgage news.  There were some interesting conversations that came out of that, which resulted in my following Tyler Osby, Dan Green, and Agentopolis and a few others.  They are doing most of the blogging and commenting about what’s going on in the mortgage industry.  There were two or three other topics that I thought would be good (hobbies, etc.) so I started running searches on those as well.  I’ve acquired my 160 or so followers through conversations, not spam.  In fact, most of those that are following me would unfollow if I used Twitter to promote myself ad-style.  But because I blog, many of them are reading what I write, and following them allows me to read what they write, get smarter, and engage them in conversation.  Again, for me it is about the relationships.  It’s made me better at mortgages, even though I haven’t spent a great deal of time on Twitter talking about mortgages per se.

Bottom line?  Yes, you should be on Facebook and on Twitter.  Figure out what you want these tools to do for you, and design a strategy to get them to do that.  Expect it to take time.  If you do it right, it will take a lot of it, and a fair amount of work as well.  Farming does.

Good luck.  Follow me at @chrisjoneslehi, and I’ll follow back.  You can friend me at www.facebook.com/chrisjoneslehi.

Cj

P.S. I’m thinking of changing my legal name to “Chris Jones Lehi”.  It’s just so dang much easier for people to find me that way.

Just kidding, Dad.

P.P.S. I’ll have Volume 2 of this post next week, with examples of what to do and what not to do on Facebook and Twitter, and how I think Realtors and mortgage agents can use those tools most successfully.  Stay tuned.  And for Heaven’s sake, get the opinions of some of those above that really know what they’re talking about.

I’m a recent Facebook convert, and because of the letter I got yesterday, I will be a dedicated FB user for years.  I think the fellows at FB have hit on something quite powerful, and I hope it makes them rich and happy.

Twenty years ago, approximately, I knew a fellow named Jim Hicks.  Haven’t seen him in two decades, but we hooked up on Facebook a month ago and have exchanged a few messages.  Then, yesterday, he sends me this:

Chris,

I thought about you just a minute ago when I notice about one of my FB friends joining a FB group came up on the Live Feed.

One of the things that is so shocking about this FB is seeing people become almost militant in their socio-political beliefs.

The people on my friendlist run the political spectrum from diehard christian conservative to very liberal democrat. Growing up where we did, I’m sure you’ve got as many different political beliefs represented on your friendlist as I do.

But what is shocking to me today is a guy I knew in High School (he was 2 years ahead of us on the football team) that is now living in California joining a FB group entitled “1,000,000 strong to Strip the Mormon Church of It’s Tax Exempt status” to which he comments “Bigots Suck”. I couldn’t believe it. (I thought he was a little too militant on the whole Obama thing, but this was just off the reservation).

Personally, I’m a conservative non-denominational Christian (much closer to Baptist) if someone had to brand me with a title. But for the life of me I’ve never seen this level of hate be so blatant since ….Nazi Germany, maybe?

I don’t know how aware you are of this kind of crap, I don’t even know how involved in the LDS church you are – but as one of the few people I know that is LDS, I felt led to let you know that not all “non LDS” folks are hatemongers against your church.

Truly, it breaks my heart.

Yours in Christ,

Jim

Many of you – most of you, I’d guess – know that I am a Latter-day Saint, what most people call a Mormon.  This isn’t an accident.  I profess this faith on purpose.  But as those of you that grew up with me in Virginia know, I’m a sucker for Catholic mass and a Baptist choir.  I know a great deal about “mainstream” Christianity, and respect those that profess it honestly.  I work with them and I love them for their commitment to Christ.  I also work with and love those that profess no religion, or a religion significantly different, though I don’t understand them.

There’s a huge amount of hatred in the world today.  And no matter what God you profess – and especially if you worship NO god – that’s a bad thing.  Jim Hicks showed me a ray of hope yesterday, and I won’t soon forget it.

And that’s why Facebook is so incredibly fantastic.