Some of you told me that yesterday’s post on careers was actually quite sad. That it came across as if I were advocating for people, not to do what they love, but to instead do what makes them the most money. But that was not my intention.
There were a lot of reasons why I got into real estate development, and perhaps I oversimplified yesterday. But a lot of it actually came down to the fact that I’m passionate about building great cities (hence this blog).
And I thought it was ultimately unfair that some investment-banker-turned-developer, who doesn’t really care about cities, might end up having more say over the built environment than me, the architect.
So I decided to sacrifice designing individual buildings in the hope that I’d one day be able to give back to cities on a much larger scale. And I still hope to be able to do that.
In any case, to end the week on a more fun note, I thought I would do a post called Fun Friday and link to 2 city tours: one of Brisbane, Australia, and one of Porto Alegre, Brazil.
But these aren’t just any city tours. They are by local skateboarders showing you their city. I posted one for Toronto about 8 months ago, so some of you might be familiar with the series.
I love how differently skateboarders look at the urban environment. I hope you can appreciate it as well.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEFQLjnhKT4?rel=0]
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taF71igPZY0?rel=0]
A good friend of mine recently launched a new project called DSCRBD (pronounced ‘described’). The goal is to “curate interesting minds” through short social video clips. Think Humans of New York but only creative types and only short videos.
I think it’s a great idea. And I was fortunate enough to be one of the first test subjects. It was conducted as an interview between he and I, and we spoke for probably about 45 minutes on the sun deck of my building.
He then took that entire interview and distilled it down to only a few seconds, extracting what he found most interesting. Perfect for social media consumption.
Click the image above for my video. What I’m talking about is my approach to architecture, and how I ended up not becoming an architect, but instead becoming a real estate developer.
Today was my MBA convocation at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School. Though I actually finished my degree last year (with a bit of fast-tracking), I had to wait until today in order to formally graduate with the rest of my cohort. I did what’s called the 3-year morning MBA. What that means is that I took most of my classes at 7am.
The picture above is from our weekend retreat right before we started the program (I’m in the back row in the middle). It was taken in the summer of 2011. That feels like eons ago. It has been a tough slog.
So today I’m taking the day off from writing about cities. Instead, I’m just going to enjoy the day off and the closing of this chapter in my life. An MBA is something I had been planning on doing even while I was in architecture school–so it’s nice to be able to check it off. But as I told my parents today after convocation: you ain’t seen nothing yet.