Brandon Donnelly

Daily insights for city builders, delivered every morning at 6 AM ET. I’m Brandon Donnelly — a Toronto-based real estate developer and founder of Globizen. I’ve been writing here since 2013.

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  • 13 thoughts on outlier success

    This recent post by Sam Altman (of Y Combinator) on how to achieve outlier success was just passed around our office. And it’s so fucking good that I decided to regurgitate it here on the blog by listing all 13 of his thoughts along with some of his most salient points. All of the words below are his (not mine), but most of his words are missing. I wanted to make a more condensed version so that you could easily print out this post and affix it to your desk. I am about to do that. Thanks for a great post, Sam.

    1. Compound yourself

    I think the biggest competitive advantage in business—either for a company or for an individual’s career—is long-term thinking with a broad view of how different systems in the world are going to come together. One of the notable aspects of compound growth is that the furthest out years are the most important. In a world where almost no one takes a truly long-term view, the market richly rewards those who do.

    2. Have almost too much self-belief

    Self-belief is immensely powerful. The most successful people I know believe in themselves almost to the point of delusion. Cultivate this early. As you get more data points that your judgment is good and you can consistently deliver results, trust yourself more. If you don’t believe in yourself, it’s hard to let yourself have contrarian ideas about the future. But this is where most value gets created.

    3. Learn to think independently

    Entrepreneurship is very difficult to teach because original thinking is very difficult to teach. School is not set up to teach this—in fact, it generally rewards the opposite. So you have to cultivate it on your own.

    4. Get good at “sales”

    All great careers, to some degree, become sales jobs. You have to evangelize your plans to customers, prospective employees, the press, investors, etc. This requires an inspiring vision, strong communication skills, some degree of charisma, and evidence of execution ability.

    Getting good at communication—particularly written communication—is an investment worth making. My best advice for communicating clearly is to first make sure your thinking is clear and then use plain, concise language.

    5. Make it easy to take risks

    It’s often easier to take risks early in your career; you don’t have much to lose, and you potentially have a lot to gain. Once you’ve gotten yourself to a point where you have your basic obligations covered you should try to make it easy to take risks. Look for small bets you can make where you lose 1x if you’re wrong but make 100x if it works. Then make a bigger bet in that direction.

    6. Focus

    Once you have figured out what to do, be unstoppable about getting your small handful of priorities accomplished quickly. I have yet to meet a slow-moving person who is very successful.

    7. Work hard

    I think people who pretend you can be super successful professionally without working most of the time (for some period of your life) are doing a disservice. In fact, work stamina seems to be one of the biggest predictors of long-term success.

    8. Be bold

    If you are making progress on an important problem, you will have a constant tailwind of people wanting to help you. Let yourself grow more ambitious, and don’t be afraid to work on what you really want to work on.

    9. Be willful

    People have an enormous capacity to make things happen. A combination of self-doubt, giving up too early, and not pushing hard enough prevents most people from ever reaching anywhere near their potential.

    10. Be hard to compete with

    Most people do whatever most people they hang out with do. This mimetic behavior is usually a mistake—if you’re doing the same thing everyone else is doing, you will not be hard to compete with.

    11. Build a network

    Great work requires teams. Developing a network of talented people to work with—sometimes closely, sometimes loosely—is an essential part of a great career. The size of the network of really talented people you know often becomes the limiter for what you can accomplish.

    12. You get rich by owning things

    The biggest economic misunderstanding of my childhood was that people got rich from high salaries. Though there are some exceptions—entertainers for example —almost no one in the history of the Forbes list has gotten there with a salary.

    You get truly rich by owning things that increase rapidly in value.

    13. Be internally driven

    The most successful people I know are primarily internally driven; they do what they do to impress themselves and because they feel compelled to make something happen in the world. After you’ve made enough money to buy whatever you want and gotten enough social status that it stops being fun to get more, this is the only force I know of that will continue to drive you to higher levels of performance.

    Photo by NordWood Themes on Unsplash


  • InfraScapes by Paolo Pettigiani

    I just discovered the work of Italian photographer, Paolo Pettigiani. He specializes in something called infrared photography, which is photography that captures the wavelengths of light that generally aren’t visible to us humans.

    Paolo shoots with a full spectrum Nikon D750. What this means is that the camera’s sensor is sensitive to, well, the full spectrum of light: UV, visible, and infrared. Using this photography technique, he has coined something he calls “InfraScapes.”

    Here are a few of his photos from Dubai (source):

    The reason these photos look the way that they do is because anything with chlorophyll — such as grass and trees — really reflects infrared light. The result is a generally muted landscape with pops of pink. Perhaps this could be used as a technique to visually evaluate the greenness of our cities.

    All photos by Paolo Pettigiani

  • 2019 Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureate: Arata Isozaki

    This week it was announced that Japanese architect Arata Isozaki has received the 2019 Pritzker Architecture Prize. The prize is generally viewed as architecture’s highest honor. (You also get $100,000.)

    He’s the 46th laureate and 8th Japanese architect to receive the honor. (As a side note, the only Canadian on the list is Canadian-born American architect Frank Gehry.)

    Here’s an excerpt from the announcement:

    Not only did he extend efforts to physically reconstruct his native hometown [after World War II] with buildings including Ōita Medical Hall (1959-60) and Annex (1970-1972 Ōita, Japan), and the Ōita Prefectural Library (1962-1966 Ōita, Japan, renamed Ōita Art Plaza in 1996), but also redefined mutual exchange between eastern and western societies, allowing Japanese vision to inform European and American design, particularly in the 1980s.

    His first international commission outside of Japan was the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, which was completed in 1986. He was also one of the first Japanese architects to start working in the West at this time.

    For the full media release, click here.

  • The holy grail of street paving

    Last weekend I went by Sidewalk Toronto’s “experimental workspace” at 307 Lake Shore Blvd East. It is open to the public every Sunday from 11am to 5pm if you’d like to drop in.

    This week they had their #BuildingRaincoat on display, which is an adjustable awning system designed to protect public sidewalks, mitigate the impacts of adverse weather, and improve outdoor comfort.

    Also installed were a number of the paving systems that they are currently piloting. They’re working with over 20 different vendors to try and create the “holy grail” of street paving.

    They define that as a system capable of the following four key features: modularity, heating, lighting, and permeability. Here’s an example of what one of them looked like (it was snowing at the time and, yes, Doc Martens):

    With modularity, the goal is to make it possible for a single person to be able to pull up and replace one of the hexagonal slabs. This would dramatically change how we repair and patch our roads. Supposedly, they’re also more resistant to cracks, which means fewer potholes.

    The key benefit of a heated paving system is an obvious one. When needed, their test system automatically heats the slabs to 2-4 degrees celsius in order to melt any snow and/or ice. That’s as warm as you need apparently.

    They have two heating systems running at 307. The first is hydronic (fluid in pipes just below the pavement) and the second is conductive heating (thin conductive film in or under the pavement).

    I’m sure many of you will be questioning the environmental and carbon impact of a heated public realm. And that is certainly a good question. But the status quo in this city involves about 131,000 tons of road salts per year. That’s a problem.

    The lighting feature is pretty neat because there are a variety of different use cases beyond just demarcating space. One example that Sidewalk gives is that it could be used in a bike lane to tell you how fast you need to ride in order to hit all green lights.

    Finally, permeability matters because it minimizes runoff and allows water to be absorbed in situ. The tradeoff is that it makes the slabs structurally weaker. So that is still being worked on.

    I am thrilled to see this sort of urban innovation taking place right here in the city. If you haven’t already, I recommend checking out 307.

  • The new American condo

    Every year since 1984, the National Association of Home Builders (in the United States) has commissioned a home with the goal of showcasing new trends and technologies in the industry. At the same time, it also serves as a kind of dream home. This is what one should aspire to achieve. The initiative is called the New American Home (TNAH).

    The first home was built in Houston by Village Builders. The architect was Booth/Hansen & Associates and the home was about 1,500 square feet. It cost $80,000. Last year the home was in Montverde, Florida and was about 10,690 square feet (6,676 square feet of air-conditioned space). Not surprisingly, these homes have grown over the decades.

    According to a recent New York Times opinion piece by Allison Arieff — called, The New ‘Dream Home’ Should be a Condo — the square footage of this New American Home has been steadily rising:

    This is, of course, reflective of what has been happening in the market as a whole. According to Arieff, the average size of a new U.S. home today is about 1,000 square feet larger than it was in 1973. The average space per human has increased from 507 to about 971 square feet. As our wealth has grown we have naturally become more consumptive.

    But as Arieff asks in her article:

    What if the next New American Home was a condo? And what if there was a new American dream, not of auto-dependent suburbia, but walkable urbanism?

    She then contrasts last year’s 10,000 square foot “Tuscan style” New American Home against this 6 unit urban infill condo project in Los Angeles, where the average home is about 1,800 square feet and the building in its entirety is around 11,000 square feet.

    Which one would you prefer?

    Charts: New York Times

  • [Video] Yearning for turning

    It is a beautiful snow day in Toronto today and so I thought we would switch gears a little.

    If you don’t care about snowboarding (or skiing), you may want to ignore today’s post and check back tomorrow. But if you do care, then you are going to absolutely love this video by KORUA Shapes. There’s something so magical about pairing the right song with the right video. If you can’t see it below, click here.

    I’ve been following KORUA for a number of years now. They make unique snowboard shapes with virtually zero graphics or ornamentation. The tops are white and the bottoms are red. Clean and simple. It’s all about the geometry of the boards and their performance. Their mission: “Simply for the sake of beauty and joy.”

    I think I’m going to try one out next season.

  • Open letter to Amazon

    Today the Partnership for New York City took out a full-page ad in the New York Times with an open letter to Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos, asking him to reconsider the decision to pull out of NYC. The letter was signed by a long list of prominent leaders in the city. Here is a copy (a PDF version can also be found, here):

  • Finding meaning in life and business

    I started my undergraduate degree as a computer science and physics student. But despite my love of technology (and physics, incidentally), I quickly realized that I didn’t want to end up as a software developer. I was interested in so many other things: art, design, business, real estate, entrepreneurship, cities, and so on. And at the time, I was struggling to remain focused on writing code.

    So by the middle of my second year, I decided to drop every single one of my classes and construct my own program until I figured out what I truly wanted to major in. My course schedule ended up spanning everything from the urbanization of ancient cities to the philosophy of aesthetics. It was a pretty great program if you ask me. But others wondered what I was doing.

    I did, however, already have leanings toward architecture. It felt like the perfect combination of art and science. And so while enrolled in my made up program, I started exploring the possibility of transferring schools and switching majors. Around this time I also started meeting with architects to try and learn more about the profession and see if this is something that I really wanted to pursue.

    I’ll never forget this one lunch. The architect I met with — who will, of course, remain nameless — told me very clearly: “You should do anything besides architecture. If you like drawing become an animator. If you like design, do graphic design. Just don’t become an architect.” Naturally, I came out of that lunch and decided to spend the next seven years getting two degrees in architecture.

    And even though I never became a licensed architect, and almost certainly never will, I would do it all over again given the option. I loved the journey and it is this circuitous journey that led me to where I am today, which is in a highly fulfilling career in real estate. I create new things and those things have the opportunity to improve people’s everyday lives. I’m grateful for that. But the path was anything but clear at the time.

    I am telling all of you this story because I was reminded of it when I read this fantastic article by Charles Duhigg called, Wealthy, Successful and Miserable. It is the story of how Charles, a Harvard Business School graduate, discovered that — despite obtaining boatloads of financial success — many of his classmates actually ended up miserable after school.

    Sure, we all need and deserve basic financial security. And when we don’t have it, money can really buy a great deal of happiness. But there’s lots of research out there, some of which I have written about before, that suggests that happiness quickly plateaus once our basic needs are met.

    As soon as we’re no longer worried about money, we actually crave other things from our paychecks. We want it to also be a source of purpose and meaning. To give one concrete example, the article cites a study about a set of enthusiastic and high performing janitors in a large hospital. What was ultimately found was that they saw their jobs not just as cleaning, but as a kind of healing for the patients. They had purpose.

    But what I found most interesting about the article was the discovery that finding happiness in life and business might require, or be aided by, a bit of struggle along the way:

    And many of them had something in common: They tended to be the also-rans of the class, the ones who failed to get the jobs they wanted when they graduated. They had been passed over by McKinsey & Company and Google, Goldman Sachs and Apple, the big venture-capital firms and prestigious investment houses. Instead, they were forced to scramble for work — and thus to grapple, earlier in their careers, with the trade-offs that life inevitably demands. These late bloomers seemed to have learned the lessons about workplace meaning preached by people like Barry Schwartz. It wasn’t that their workplaces were enlightened or (as far as I could tell) that H.B.S. had taught them anything special. Rather, they had learned from their own setbacks. And often they wound up richer, more powerful and more content than everyone else.

    We are, of course, talking about the “also-rans” at Harvard Business School. They’re no slouches struggling to find work. But I don’t think that negates the point being made here. It can be easy to get caught up doing what we think we ought to be doing when in reality we should be finding meaning in something we hopefully love doing.

  • Implications of new housing supply

    There’s a lot of debate within urbanist circles about whether or not supply alone can solve or at least mitigate housing affordability concerns. Richard Florida and others will say that, while beneficial, increasing supply isn’t the be all end all. We need to be building affordable housing.

    Edward Glaeser, Joseph Gyourko, and others have, on the other hand, argued that middle-income housing is a supply problem and that low-income housing is quite simply a demand-side problem, which could be solved through things like a housing voucher program.

    In other words, the cost of housing isn’t necessarily the problem, it’s the low income levels. One of the benefits of supplementing people’s incomes is that it empowers mobility. People can then move to where there are jobs, as opposed to being tied to a specific neighborhood or city.

    But this debate is arguably just about the extent of the supply benefits. Intuitively, it makes sense to try and match new housing supply with demand and economic growth. But how far can that take us, particularly in high demand and high productivity cities?

    Glaeser (Harvard) and Gyourko (Penn) have a relatively recent paper out called, The Economic Implications of Housing Supply, which looks at, among other things, the “implicit tax” imposed on development as a result of land use restrictions and other supply constraints.

    Here are two excerpts:

    We will argue that the rise in housing wealth is concentrated in the major coastal markets that have high prices relative to minimum production costs, and it is concentrated among the richest members of the older cohorts—that is, on those who already owned homes several decades ago, before binding constraints on new housing construction were imposed.

    But in a democratic system where the rules for building and land use are largely determined by existing homeowners, development projects face a considerable disadvantage, especially since many of the potential beneficiaries of a new project do not have a place to live in the jurisdiction when possibilities for reducing regulation and expanding the supply of housing are debated.

    If you’re interested in this topic (and sufficiently nerdy), you can download a PDF copy of the paper here.

    Photo by chuttersnap on Unsplash

  • Price of a new condominium in Toronto increased 12.5% over the last year

    This morning BILD and Altus Group released their January 2019 new home sales figures for the Greater Toronto Area.

    Here are the highlights:

    • 1,362 new homes sold in January 2019 across the GTA. This is up 14% compared to last January.
    • Of these, 942 (~69%) were condominiums (includes low, mid, and high-rise, as well as townhouses). And 420 (~31%) were single-family homes (includes detached, semi-detached, and freehold townhouses).
    • Condominium sales volume is sitting only about 5% below the 10-year average and the benchmark price increased this month to $803,638, which represents a 12.5% year-over-year increase.
    • On the other hand, single-family home sales are down about 53% from the 10-year average and the benchmark price decreased by about 8.1% compared to last year. It is sitting at $1,130,046.

    While there continues to be a bifurcation in the new home market, we are seeing improvements across the board and the data is consistent with Altus’ prediction that 2019 will see an increase in overall sales.

    It is also important to consider how geography might factor into the above numbers. Here are the January sales numbers for the last three years broken down by region within the GTA:

    Just under 80% of the new condominiums sold last month took place in Toronto, whereas only about 1.2% of the single-family homes sold last month took place in the city. You can count them on one hand. There were only 5.

    So rather than just look at this in terms of housing type, I think the other way to interpret the data is that it could suggest strong and continued demand for centrally located and transit-oriented communities.

    And that just so happens to translate into a condominium.

    Photo by Eugene Aikimov on Unsplash