I started a new French class his week. Most of my classmates are regulars, but since we have a new teacher, we were all asked to introduce ourselves. And to spice things up, we were asked to talk about whether we're glass half full or half empty kind of people.

When it came to my turn, and before I could answer, one of my classmates jumped in and said "Brandon est un optimiste." And you know what, this made me happy. I took it as a great compliment.

Because to be a real estate developer, I think you need to be an optimist. I have argued this before on the blog.

This is not to say that you don't need to carefully manage risk, and think about all of the things that can and probably will go wrong. It is say that the inertia working against you is so great, that you really need to believe in the future you are trying to create. If not, you're liable to not make it.

So this morning, when my partner Lucas showed me the below quote from Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, I immediately thought, "yeah, this is going on the blog."

"If you are allowed one wish for your child, seriously consider wishing him or her optimism. Optimists are normally cheerful and happy, and therefore popular; they are resilient in adapting to failures and hardships, their chances of clinical depression are reduced, their immune system is stronger, they take better care of their health, they feel healthier than others and are in fact likely to live longer.
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Optimistic individuals play a disproportionate role in shaping our lives. Their decisions make a difference; they are the inventors, the entrepreneurs, the political and military leaders – not average people. They got to where they are by seeking challenges and taking risks. They are talented and they have been lucky, almost certainly luckier than they acknowledge… the people who have the greatest influence on the lives of others are likely to be optimistic and overconfident, and to take more risks than they realize."

This excerpt is from Kahneman's book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. I haven't read it. But now I want to.

Adam Grant's recent NY Times article about languishing -- the psychological middle state that exists somewhere in between depressed and flourishing -- has been making the rounds online. Perhaps it is because COVID sucks and many of us can relate.

Either way, three points in the article really stood out to me (at least one of which, in my mind, directly ties back to real estate).

Firstly, I found it helpful to hear him describe what flourishing is. In his words, "flourishing is the peak of well-being: You have a strong sense of meaning, mastery and mattering to others." This resonates with me. I know that I am at my best when I'm accomplishing things and making progress.

Secondly, he puts forward a possible solution to languishing -- it's the concept of "flow." Flow is when we are absorbed in meaningful and challenging work and where, again in his words, "your sense of time, place and self melts away." This also resonates with me. I am a big fan of a flow (even if I didn't know what it was called).

Thirdly -- and this one is important as we all think about the future of work/office space -- focus is paramount to doing exceptional things! Here's an excerpt that I immediately paused on as I was reading the article:

Fragmented attention is an enemy of engagement and excellence. In a group of 100 people, only two or three will even be capable of driving and memorizing information at the same time without their performance suffering on one or both tasks. Computers may be made for parallel processing, but humans are better off serial processing.

For the rest of Grant's article, click here.

Before bed last night, I came across this New Yorker article from 2016 that I thought was fascinating and broadly useful for both life and business. In it, Maria Konnikova talks about how people learn to become resilient. And she starts by citing the work of a developmental psychologist and clinician who spent decades studying why some people seem to manage stress and trauma far better than others. Here is an excerpt talking about why that might be the case:

From a young age, resilient children tended to “meet the world on their own terms.” They were autonomous and independent, would seek out new experiences, and had a “positive social orientation.” “Though not especially gifted, these children used whatever skills they had effectively,” Werner wrote. Perhaps most importantly, the resilient children had what psychologists call an “internal locus of control”: they believed that they, and not their circumstances, affected their achievements. The resilient children saw themselves as the orchestrators of their own fates. In fact, on a scale that measured locus of control, they scored more than two standard deviations away from the standardization group.

It immediately reminded me of something that Steve Jobs once said in an interview back when more people wore buttoned up jean shirts. His comment was that one of the most powerful things you can learn in life is that much of what surrounds us was created by people who are no smarter than us. His point being that everything can be altered. We all have that ability. We are "orchestrators of our own fate."

The article goes on to argue that one of the ways we can exhibit a strong internal locus of control is by learning to view and respond to situations in a productive way. Put differently, whether or not we are subjected to shitty experiences matters less than how we ultimately react to and view those shitty experiences. If you can reframe and place in positive terms, then you can reduce any perceived stresses and become more resilient.

The good news is that, supposedly, these are skills that can be learned. So if this topic is at all interesting, I would encourage you to check out the full article. It certainly caught my attention before bed last night.