The bigger view

Sometimes it is hard to take the bigger view of a situation. It is easy to get bogged down in the details.

This picture of Bogue Sound looking east towards Morehead City is truly a large view. Yet when I am piloting my boat on the sound, I end up paying a lot of attention to the next channel marker.

If I do that consistently I generally stay out of trouble. Normally I take short trips on our skiff, but my career and life are much longer journeys. Yet in their cases it is even harder at times to rise above the details and focus on the big picture.

I recently was confronted with a situation where someone did something unethical. Not only was it unethical, but it harmed my income at a time when there is not a lot of income.

The experience that I have had in the business world let me back away from the situation and look at what was really important, my client. I did not lose my cool, I went forward with the situation until it resolved itself without me having to do anything other than the right thing for my client.

It was actually pleasing to watch the problem resolve itself without any real intervention.

The appropriate things ended up happening. I'm not sure if the unethical person learned a lesson, but certainly their behavior only ended up hurting them and the person who decided to play the game with them.

There was no collateral damage and for that I'm happy. Maybe being able to go for a walk on the beach makes it easier to see the big picture. That is one of the great benefits of living where we live.

Here are some shots of a perfect beach trip which might help some folks step back enough to focus on the big picture.

If that doesn't work, some visit us on the Crystal Coast and take a real walk along the beach.

Treating customers right

Most people are aware that the real estate business is not booming these days.

While the market is changing things are still challenging. We certainly are not the only industry under the gun. Airlines, automakers, and restaurants just to name a few are all having their problems surviving the economic downturn.

Realtors® are not different than others, our costs are rising, and our incomes have certainly tanked.

I have often quoted Dennis Waitley's famous phrase, "Crisis is an opportunity riding dangerous wings." I believe that change is inevitable in most business. You either change or you go out of business.

However, change has to be carefully considered. Need jerk change can often be harmful. We have become a very value conscious society. If you bump your prices up and don't deliver more value for the money, you will likely have a problem.

On Monday, I gave some potential long term clients a ride around the county. I probably spent $25 dollars in gas. Yet I was able to show them in a couple of hours what might have taken them a couple of days to find and see.

I didn't ask for a buyer's agency before driving them around because they aren't ready to buy. I could have charged them $100 for being a tour guide, but that didn't make a lot of sense either.

It made the most sense to do what I have being doing all along, differentiate myself through the value and hard work that I bring to my clients

Trying to provide value to my clients has served me well, and I hope that the word of the extra efforts that I provide my clients continues to spread.

In the long run that will be worth more than $25 for gasoline

The proof is in the sandwich

In the tomato business, I think the real proof is in the sandwich, but it does not hurt to have some nice numbers on the digital scale.

So far this is the largest tomato that we have harvested from our three plants this year. It weighed an impressive 1.335 pounds on the scale.

I also took a picture of the tomato beside a tape measure. It measured around five inches across and was about 3.5 inches high.

Still the end result, this plate of tomatoes, was the key to some great Bacon, Letture, and Tomato sandwiches which we enjoyed on a recent trip to Reston, Virginia.

I continue to be surprised that are people in the world who do not like tomato sandwiches. Even my own son won't eat them. It is a good thing he is my flesh and blood, or I would have been checked out for not loving tomato sandwiches.

At our house on the coast, there are not many days during tomato season, June 1- December 19 that we don't have a tomato in something. In the heart of summer that something is usually a tomato sandwich of some sort. I even like toasted bologna, cheese, and tomato sandwiches.

Then there are boiled ham sandwiches with Swiss cheese and tomatoes. Tonight we made a pasta dish with grilled Italian sausage, fresh mushrooms, asiago cheese, three cheese spaghetti sauce and of course some fresh tomatoes. It was great on top of some bow tie pasta.

I even enjoy tomatoes in omelets. The tomato scare has not caused us any problems, but we are at the point with our crop that we have to either find more people to take some of them or start canning or freezing some.

We are very proud of the tomatoes since they are the best tomatoes that we have ever grown and by far the earliest. We have already enjoyed them for a over a month. I just put another tomato plant in the ground last week with the hopes that we will have fresh tomatoes into January.

Who knows what will happen? I still would really like to beat my December 19 date from last year. It is a noble quest, fresh homegrown tomatoes from June 1 until January 15.

So if you see me around, be careful, I might slip a bag of tomatoes into your car.

The great coastal tomato crop

It is hard for me to not smile a little when I read about tomatoes disappearing from store shelves.

I took this picture about a week ago. It is a great start on our 2008 tomatoes especially considering the challenges others are facing. It is a very tough year even for small growers.

Tomatoes are among the easiest of vegetables to grow. They also have great diversity and taste if you grow them yourself.

We had practically given up growing tomatoes in Roanoke, Virginia where the deer seem to have defeated all attempts at having gardens.

With the well drained sandy soil of North Carolina's coastal plane, I just dig a hole and put in some top soil, Ozmocote, and water liberally. At some point I have to attack the nasty hornworms, and stake the plants.

All in all it is agreat way to help the food budget. My plants went into the ground on April 3 this year.

It did not seem long until June 1 when we picked the first tomato. We have been getting them in quantity for about ten days.

Maybe it is all the years I spent on the farm, but there is something very satisfying about bringing in a great crop even if it is just tomatoes.

Just tomatoes, what am I saying. There is no better use for bread than in a tomato sandwich.

I didn't know about the little micro-climate beside our garage when I bought the property, but I am glad it is there.

I know that my competition in the tomato contest is already hungry for the next year, and I think that I have the spot that will defeat these pretenders to the tomato crown.

The easy way in today's society

Sometimes I wonder if there is more free labor in the economy than paid labor.

While our beach towns still do lots of work promoting the area, there is a whole other world of blogs and free sites that will often sing the praises of an area for free.

I know that there are still photographers out there, but much of the photography that we see these days is done by amateurs like myself.

Not long ago I was writing for a free magazine. The theory was that my articles would bring recognition to me and that would be my pay. That works great but it helps if the magazine lasts more that six months.

We live in a world of free services like Gmail and Flickr. Sometimes folks think more of the free services than they do of the ones which come with a fee. A good example of that would be .Mac the $100 per services that many people believe are inferior to Gmail and other free services.

We even have people who want to sell their homes themselves. They can use Zillow and Trulia for sites like "For Sale by Owner."

All this is probably a healthy trend unless it get out of hand. I am a Realtor® which I consider to be one of the transitional professions. We work as independent contractors.

We get paid on what we sell. If we don't sell anything, we don't get paid. Actually it is worse than that since we have to pay fees every month to work. From those fees you might get a desk and some access to office equipment and some advertising support. You also end up sharing your commission with your company. In good times in works fairly well. These days it is a challenge.

Still I don't see the current real estate sales system changing massively I do see consumers making similar changes to what they did in the early days of computers. That could herald some real estate changes.

I doubt the changes will be the same as in the computer industry, but there are going to be some changes.

In the early days of computers, few people understood them so a local computer store was a source of not only computers but also knowledge. People came to the stores to get an education so that they could be informed consumers.

Stores paid sales people to answer questions and hopefully sell computers. As computers began to be available online and through mail order, people would come and learn all they could from a computer salesman in a store and then go order online.

This is one of the reasons that there are almost no computer salesmen left.

As a real estate agent, your knowledge of your local area is your greatest resource. When you have people who want to talk about an area, and the same people are unwilling to commit to work with you, you are likely be set up for hard fall.

People do the same thing with cars. They learn about them online, then visit the actual dealership to see the product and then order the product from an Internet dealer.

While a manufacturer might be providing much of the information about an automobile or a computer, the information on houses that are listed in MLS systems is there as a direct result of the effort of agents who list the house and are paid when the house is sold.

However, potential home buyers have figured out how to work the system. Buyer's agents only get paid when a client signs up with them and then buys a house.

Some clever real estate consumers are gaming the system and using buyer's agent as a free source of information about the area and about homes that are for sale.

If you drive around a potential client without getting a commitment from them, then you are likely providing information for free with little hope of getting paid.

People are getting their feet wet in an area by wading the shallows with the aid of buyers' agents.

I recently heard of a buyer's agent who would drive people around unless sign an agreement with him. On top of that he charges than a $300 fee.

There is no free lunch for most of us. Wasting the time of a professional without the intention of working with that professional isn't very fair.

Not ripple in sight

There are days when you feel extraordinarily privileged to be on the water.

We had one of those days last week when we came back from Bogue Inlet. Bogue Inlet is the water between the green arrow and Bear Island on the Google map.

Since it changes all the time, it doesn't look much like the Google map, but you get the general idea.

Bogue Inlet is where a lot of currents meet, and almost all of the time there are lots of waves. There are also lots of fish. The general area is a great place to fish, but navigation can be challenging.

There are days when it is just nice to skim across ripple free water at top speed. The White Oak River in the picture in the post offered us a very smooth ride and a lot of fun.

It was nearly pure fun since there no obstacles in our path because we know that water very well. The passengers, especially my wife, always enjoy a smooth ride.

The one problem is that avoiding the waves often means I am avoiding the best places to fish.

So there is a balance between finding water you can enjoy which supports fish you can catch.

Finding good fishing water with no waves is a little like finding markets where you can be successful with customers who readily buy your products. You can also look at smooth water as taking the easy way and keeping as many people as possible happy.

As is often the case in life, the areas with the most challenges are the places you find the biggest rewards. The bigger the fish, the greater the challenge.

Yet not everyone has to catch big fish. Many of us are happy with what we catch in the much calmer sounds. A lot depends on your stage in life. When you are trying to rise to the top, the risky waters with high rewards are appealing. Later in life, smooth sailing looks pretty good.

You may have fought as many battles as you can take. Perhaps the risky water belongs to others who still have a thirst for the challenges.

As you work the waters of business, sometimes it is good policy to try not to create a ripple because you want to be unnoticed. You just want to do your job without causing any problems. You might want to slide through a particularly touchy area without upsetting anyone.

You need to understand what waters work for you at different stages of your life and how best to navigate them.

The older you get, the more likely you are going to see situations which offer you a choice.

You can make some well-needed waves and still not change a situation. You can ride the waves and sometimes get to where you want or you can slide through a situation without a ripple.

I don't think there are any perfect rules. Now days as someone approaching sixty, I try to achieve as much overall good as possible, and if it can be done, to make sure whatever I do doesn't harm anyone intentionally.

I had a colleague the other day who made a mistake which resulted in some extra work for me.

There were some choices open to me, I could just tell our boss who would then correct my colleague. I could send an email note to my colleague and cc: our boss. Or I could do what I did which was do the extra work and just send a note to my colleague and suggest the problem get fixed before someone else notices.

Everyone who works in an office faces these choices. While there are times to make waves and stand up for what you believe, there are other times making as few ripples as possible is a good decision.

It is nice to out there working in the waves where all the opportunities live, but it can turn out to be a place where a lot of good people get hurt especially in very competitive businesses.

Unfortunately a lot of our corporations believe that internal conflict makes for better employees.

I think most companies are better served with a cooperative and supportive work environment. I have seen both types and the human cost of the dog eat dog inside the corporation is very high. It takes away people's humanity. A lot of people trade money for friends pretty quickly in today's corporate world.

In the end it is better for the company and the customer to have team members working together towards a common goal.

The fishing in that environment ends up being pretty good.

The power of being present

Sometimes you have done something so many times, that it is automatic.

In fact I often do things and then try to remember whether or not that I have actually done them. The more times you have done something, the easier it is to fall in this trap.

I think that is one of the advantages of pushing yourself to try new things. You get out of the rut and have to pay attention to what you are doing.

I actually like being challenged. I like to try new things, but life is not all new stuff.

Probably the most boring thing in life is sitting through a lecture on something that you already know and which is being read from a teacher's book.

I absolutely hate being in a situation like that. My brain immediately starts shutting down and sending signals that I need to grab a few winks.

Because I came close to perfecting the ability to sleep sitting up with my eyes open while in military school, I have to really try not to slip back into my evil ways.

It seems so wasteful to listen to useless material we have already learned. I have plenty of things that need to be done and sitting in classroom that is historically boring isn't the way to make things happen.,

Still I try to focus on the present. Just like when I am having a conversation with one of our kids, I make every effort to hear them out and give them my full attention.

I have found being present opens up many other opportunities for communication. Living in the moment with your brain in gear is one of the way to keep that brain healthy.

A few days ago I managed to tune out for a few minutes while sitting near the beach. It actually felt like I was clearing cobwebs from the brain.

The whole experience was magical. It made me really appreciate living so close to the beach.

I took some pictures before we slipped into meditation. I also posted some pictures of the adventure.