Category: ENGLISH

Town Founders were real estate developers

We used to call them our founders, and we honored them by erecting their statues in our town squares. Today we just call them “developers.” — Andrés Duany, Cofounder, and leader of the New Urbanism. The urban planner of Porta Norte.

It is human nature to resist change. When we were cavemen, if something changed in our environment, it may mean death (intruders, animals, etc.). We have evolved to resist change.

Today, real estate development is one of the most tangible ways a society changes, so society tend to resist it.

Real estate developers of the past were called Town Founders. They were the primary protectors of towns from intruders, animals, etc. by building forts, moats, walls, residences, commerce, etc. Interests were aligned, hence the excellent reputation of “Town Founders”.

So, continuing our survival patterns of resisting change without the added incentive of our survival (we don’t have our life at stake anymore), society tends to resist new developments. For example, you live in a house in a low-density area. If a developer wants to build a high rise, the community will fight them. The residents do not want the added traffic, construction noise, pollution, and the workers for two years in their neighborhood. The developer wants his project built. Short-term interests are opposed. We tend to think lowly of people who degrade our quality of life, hence the bad reputation of “greedy developers”.

The long-term interests of the neighborhood and real estate developers are aligned. Increased density makes us less reliant on the car by making it feasible for new businesses to survive. Increased demand leads to more products and services offered nearby.

The job of our modern-day Town Founders, real estate developers, is not to protect our lives anymore but to create a vibrant town were economic life, health, community, and cultural life thrives. If developers do not provide any of these, by all means, resist!

If you think someone is doing an excellent job of founding a town or improving our cities, help or join them. 😉

Train computer skills

Learning to use your computer better is a high leverage task that almost no one does. When we learn how to use our computers better, we save time. Computer programs give you actual real-world superpowers where you can do analysis, calculations, and exploration.

Let’s say you trained 1 hour a day on how to use programs like Gmail, photoshop, google earth, excel, Wix, Salesforce, QuickBooks, etc. better. Let’s estimate this hour saves you 1 minute of work per day for the rest of your life through automating processes or making you more agile using programs. It also makes you more productive. If you restrict your computer to work days, then you use your computer around 240 days per year, which gives you 240 minutes saved per year, which translates to 6 hours of work saved.

Every hour invested in training saves 6 hours of work within the next year.

Sometimes the result of the training might be zero minutes saved, but other times it may be 30 minutes saved or more. Every day you train, you learn how to learn a computer program better, so minutes saved per day or productivity should increase. The lower boundary of minutes saved per year is 0, and the upper limit is extremely high and growing.

What other tasks are as high leverage? Please, enlighten me.

How do you fill the last sentence?

Where are you?
How can I capture you?
I think to have graced it merely a handful of times
Is it love? Intimacy? Purpose? Religion? More?

Only you have the power to emulate ecstasy
We seek knowledge to try and acquire utter happiness,
But this is the same reason why we can’t
How can someone be completely content?
Is it only by temporary stretches of time?

The most thrilling experience?
To catch something perceived uncatchable
Thriving to seize it causes genuine fulfillment
But…what happens when you do?

Is the root of _____ eternal pursuit?

I wrote this poem in my last semester of college — in 2012. I was thinking a lot about what I should do next. You can find my answer in the link to this post.