The lost cause

Every day I get the emails.  Blogs with extremley compelling subject lines, "Why a seller could loose everything and it's your fault", "Banks are giving loans to street people", and titles that make you stop working to read.  I consider myself a work in eternal progress.  I'll never be done and I'm no master.  In the past 10 years Active Rain's contribution to my growth can't be overstated.  It's been the group session I've needed whenever I run into a Real Estate challenge.  I know I'm not alone.

The year is 2016 and I'm asking the Rainmakers, What is the purpose of Active Rain?   Is it a place for those in Real Estate to share ideas?  challenge the status quo?  Help other professionals through personal achievement or the unfortunate and hopefully rare misteps?    ActiveRain states, " Our members come to ActiveRain to share their best practices, learn from others sucess and get fre high caliber training through ActiveRain University."  That may have been the case years ago but now I would add a little to that mission statement.

Maybe it's a place to post nonsense to help your SEO?

Sometimes it appears to  be a place where agents embelish their own personal accomplishments in an effort to support an otherwise unfounded thesis.  Why go to the trouble of actually selling homes, or having customers when I can imagine, and write about what I'm sure that is probably like?  Maybe I can have a good idea, or at least a strong opinion and then make up statistics to entice others to agree, or comment on my blog.  It would be great to get more "points".  Who would it hurt anyway?  

Maybe I'm uptight.  I guess this is just a blog site and we shouldn't take it too seriously.   The goal is getting clients right?, so we should just understand the tacit agreement amongst agents.   We should tell all new AciveRain people to Pretend they're larger, more experienced than those reading the blogs, and then let the advice fly!

In fact, why stop on this site.  Agents should go out tomorrow and tell the public they've sold more houses than they have sold.  Agents should make up statistics about their history and support their conclusions with fabricated numbers just like they do on ActiveRain.  

What is the difference?