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Concentrate on the Permanent Features
By Martin English | May 23, 2008
Urbandigs.com is a real estate strategy site that offers a “Buyers Tips and Tricks” area. A particular piece of advice they give about what to focus on when investing in a property id very telling:
The four permanent features that all buyers should focus on putting their money towards when deciding which product of the group to bid on continue to be:
a) views b) location c) natural sunlight d) raw space
…as these property features generally do not change! The only item that can be changed is natural sunlight and views if you happen to buy a property with a view of a lot that may ultimately be developed; and therefore eliminating or altering your view and natural sunlight. Other than that one risk, your pretty safe. These are the features I focus on when I do consulting for my buyer clients.
Focus on the permanent features. It’s not just good for real estate, though – there’s a lot of places that this applies to… From a recent post on Jeff Attwood’s CodingHorror:
The best programming books are timeless. They transcend choice of language, IDE, or platform. They do not explain how, but why. If you feel compelled to clean house on your bookshelf every five years, trust me on this, you’re buying the wrong programming books.
The point is that if you focus on permanent features, you focus on the things that truly matter over time. The constants in your field, in your life, are what define your values. So figure out the equivalent of views, location, sunlight, and space in your life, and concentrate on them.
This creates a structure, which in turn makes you more (not less) adaptable. This is because if all else fails, you can compare the ‘unknown’ to a set of values (just as a UNIX admin can compare the status of a system to his documentation). Without the value structure (or documentation), every new situation means you have to start from scratch at working out what to do.
If, on top of a lack of a framework, you have no sense of history (i.e. no record-keeping), you end up reinventing a (possibly different) solution every time a new situation arises. Consider the following extract from Neale Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, talking about borders and frameworks.
Randy hadn’t the faintest idea what these people thought of him and what he had done, but he could sense right away that, essentially, that was not the issue, because even if they thought he had done something evil, they at least had a framework, a sort of procedure manual, for dealing with transgressions. To translate it into UNIX system administration terms (Randy’s fundamental metaphor for just about everything), the post-modern, politically correct atheists were like people who had suddenly found themselves in charge of a big and unfathomably complex computer system (viz. society) with no documentation or instructions of any kind, and so whose only way to keep the thing running was to invent and enforce certain rules with a kind of neo-Puritanical rigor, because they were at a loss to deal with any deviations from what they saw as the norm. Where as people who were wired into a church were like UNIX system administrators who, while they might not understand everything, at least had some documentation, some FAQs and How-tos and README files, providing some guidance on what to do when things got out of whack. They were, in other words, capable of displaying adaptability.
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