Delayed Gratification

I was just thinking about the development differences of me and my son, as I was reading about retiring in the South Of France (dream not reality) and was thinking about a girl I met on Martha’s Vineyard who I exchanged letters with, and I would wait for those letters, day after day, walking to the mailbox at lunch of the farm in Edgartown on Martha’s Vineyard.  I remember at the height of our correspondence in the summer of ‘91, where my words tumbled onto the page, into an envelope, off to her mother’s home in Ohio.

She was the scion of a large mid-west banking family, attending Brown, and farming, like me, in the summers on the blue-blood enclave.  I would send those letters, and she would return hers, and the turnaround was weeks, with no expectation or knowledge of when a letter might drop.  Just a daily anticipation and then the infrequent arrival of a letter, which slowly faded to black as one of the writers lost the passion of the correspondence. This happened on Morning Glory Farm.

The dopamine drip of waiting on a letter is a lot different than opening your phone and sending a text or receiving a text, a notification, etc…  And I got to wondering on this Friday morning how that changes our wiring - learning to wait versus getting quick feedback.  In my business at least, and I think life in general, there is a benefit to having a muscle trained that knows how to wait, can navigate the impulses of ‘now’, is comfortable in the vast unknown.

Even for those of us raised in the pre-tech era, we have been pretty much re-conditioned to need immediacy and it takes a concerted effort to turn the devices off, power down go tech-dark, even for a few hours in the evening.

But the waiting on a letter that you don’t even know if it was ever sent, walking to the mailbox where you have that 2 second anticipation as you open the mailbox door before most times being disappointed, that’s a unique type of waiting and seeing.  I guess the point is a little bit - we used to have a lot more low-simmering disappointment woven into each moment of each day, when things weren’t at our fingertips, we did not live in the malleable and marginally phony online instagram world.

But even today, I remember those walks to the mailbox with a mixture of memory and shame for the unrequited nature of that one-sided letter-oriented romance with a girl way out of my league, which faded on its own timeline.

We are getting a lot of construction done.  But now it’s wet, and the sun isn’t shining, so it stays wet and saturated.  We need a week of sunshine.  But nevertheless, progress is everywhere.

It will be a big year of construction productivity.  I don’t know about construction profits yet; that we will have to wait and see, but if things come together, if the sales market rewards us for the risks we are taking, then it shall be a banner year.

Even if not a banner year, with the deals we have in place at this early juncture in the year, it will be a manageable busy year, and that's the worst case scenario.  I’m bringing $4m of new homes for sale to the market so there better be some buyers out there!  I’ve cashed out my stock market non-retirement accounts and brought this money back into the business so I can cushion my risks without borrowing at the cost of $8k-$12k a month.  Even though my business and my personal finances are separate, they all funnel to my personal net worth/wealth bottomline, so a dollar saved in interest wherever is a dollar more in my pocket.  With the world acting crazy, I doubt my market returns will be larger and expected to exceed my interest costs of 7+%. 

I remember sitting in the Starbucks in New Paltz in 2015 just reading the business pages of some newspaper and some whipper snapper University kid interrupts me and tells me to ‘buy crypto’.  I brushed him off of course, and of course he was right.  I could have been an early adopter even if I wasn’t ‘all in’.  The one caveat there would be there would be zero chance I didn’t lose or misplace my codes, passwords and security strings, causing imaginable grief at the locked up and untouchable bitcoin appreciation.

I was also at the table when AI was first being discussed mainstream with a girlfriend who worked at a startup in 2022

And I was sitting in the perfect seat for both cell phones and the internet in 1994-2002, as well as the Iphone, etc…

I think going forward I will be a little more open to these conversations I hear, and perhaps make small investments and let them sit and grow or fail.  You don’t have to be a believer and always right about these things to hedge your skeptical nature and make small bets on the future.

I got my wish - a cold but dry week that allowed a lot of progress.

First bicycle ride of the year with gear head from local bike store Xavier.

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