Cooperate With Those Who Have Both Know-How and Bail Money

“Cooperate with those who have both know-how and bail money.”

Those entertaining words of wisdom came from my Dad. Mind you, I hope he expected me to work well with the former, and I hope he didn’t really think I’d need the latter. Either way, I’m not totally sure, as he didn’t tell me directly. I found it scribbled on one of the hundreds of scraps of paper that contained poems, notes, editorials on life and other random musings he felt he needed to write down and that I have gone through over the past two months.

As most of you know, real estate is my full-time gig, but one I may have seemingly been working at part-time recently. Especially in the area of my activity in social networking. I understand that a large part of my chosen profession necessitates a connection to clients, prospects and industry peers via social networking. But to really do social networking right, well, you have to actually feel social. Sometimes, life, you know, “real life”, (not twitter or myspace or your blog), makes it where you just aren’t social. Interestingly enough, some of those non-social times are when you most may need to be social or to interact with others.

I haven’t posted in over three months, and I haven’t really been involved on twitter in almost four months. That “real” life thing kinda took over. So, if you are wondering if you could ever stop your twitter or facebook or friendfeed or other social media addiction Cold Turkey, it can be done. I just don’t recommend my way of doing so.

See, this year my wife and I celebrated the first Father’s Day of the rest of our lives. What I mean by that is that over the course of the past three months both of our fathers went into the hospital, succumbed to fatal illness and passed away. Within five weeks of each other. As one of the counselors said with a huge degree of understatement, “the world is a different place without your father.”

After some closure (it’s never really “closed”, is it…) of the services and Father’s Day, we are now picking up the pieces and getting back to work. We owe a huge debt of gratitude to all those who helped get us through these very trying times. We are also indebted to the great clients (they are now friends, really) who have stuck with us during this time as we diligently tried (but, with painful candor, sometimes failed) to maintain the level of service we are committed to providing.

I am dusting off the blog (and boy was it dusty) and adding some long-awaited features. Same with the website. I am updating twhirl so I can get back to twitter. I am even going back into facebook and friendfeed to get my (on-line) social life back in order. Social networking has its place… but don’t forget to enjoy real life while you can.

And remember, always cooperate with those that have both know-how and bail money.