Don’t Flip

Okay, everyone, I'm probably going to piss someone

off with this. This is your heads up. Ethics are a long

game. When I first started coaching, approximately 1

million years ago, I wanted to use the word "pleasure," I

wanted to talk about pleasure, I wanted to talk about the ways

that we bring pleasure to each other, not sex, but pleasure.

Pleasure, the pleasure of grass between your toes, the pleasure

of warm sun on your face on a cold day, the pleasure of food

when you're hungry. I had a chemistry teacher in high school

who used to talk about the pleasure of getting to pee when

you need to pee. Like, basic, basic pleasure. And I wanted to

talk about the ways in which connecting to our own pleasure

makes us good leaders. I had a website. It's called The Power

of Pleasure and Leadership. Well, the first problem I ran

into was that I couldn't actually use the word pleasure

for pretty much anything; every time I tried to create like a

Facebook group with the word pleasure in it, it got flagged

for being I don't know, racy? Because I wanted to talk about

grass and bare feet? It took a long time, it took about twelve,

ten years maybe? Ten years from the inception of my business, I

started noticing that a lot of people were talking about

pleasure that a lot of people were talking about a lot of

things that I had tried to talk about and found that nobody

wanted to help me talk about them. In fact, when I first

started my business, I consulted some marketing experts, because

marketing wasn't a thing I knew anything about. And they all

told me that I had to get the word pleasure out of there,

because it was too scary. It was too hard for people to handle

that. They wouldn't hire me, they wouldn't be able to talk to

their friends about me it was going to make it impossible for

my business to grow. Maybe I should have known better, but I

was struggling. So I took their advice and redirected and

refocused and re-everythinged. But pleasure has never gotten

out of the root of what I do. And so now when I see businesses

cropping up that are about pleasure, and leadership or

pleasure in business, I think, uh huh. Yeah, I guess I was just

a little ahead of the game. I still talk about pleasure. I

mean, that's really what intensives and expansives, the

whole framework, that's what that's about, is about being

able to create a workplace where you feel good about being at

work, where you aren't miserable being at work, where you're

excited to be at work, I mean, come on, right? And that seems

of the pandemic, it, it seems a lot more obvious than it was

back then. But sometimes it's a long game. Sometimes you have an

idea, and it's too early for it. Sometimes you have an idea, and

you have to wait for enough other people to have the idea at

the same time. Sometimes you have an idea, and you have to

wait for a less marginalized person to have that idea out

loud first. Yeah, when first to market is not an advantage.

Because of who you are, or how you show up. That's, that's

tricky. But I'm off topic, because what I want to talk

about today is the way that we have to think about ethics as a

long process, we can't just think about what's ethical in

this moment although that's important, we also have to think

about the long impact, the long term impact, the long reach

impact. So imagine the impact of the ripples that go out from the

stone, not just the first two ripples, but all of the ripples

that go out from the stone into the pond, and then from the pond

to the shore. And from the surface of the water down, and

the impact of that stone landing in the water. And traveling

through the water and ending up on the soft muddy bottom of the

pond. You know with the kind of mud that squishes between your

toes. But to have that kind of relationship with the rock in

the pond and the ripples in the mud. You have to spend time with

the pond, you have to know the pond you have to walk across the

pond when it's frozen or dangle your toes in it when it's warm

and still in the middle of summer when nothing seems to be

moving, but it's a little relief from the heat. You have to know

what that mud feels like between your toes. Or know that you

don't want to know what that mud feels like between your toes.

You have to you have to know that there's that one fish that

swims through the middle but never quite close enough for you

to tell what it is. And then there are like at least two

frogs that grow and live along the edge of the pond but you've

never seen them, you've just heard them on a summer night

walking home slapping mosquitoes. You've got to know

the ecosystem of the pond. And so when I see

people in my neighborhood, I live in the Bay Area, and every

week it seems like somebody else is gut-rehabbing a house. And by

gut-rehab, what I mean is that they take everything, all the

woodwork, all the walls, sometimes even the floors out of

the house, they rip everything out of the house. And then they

put in new, usually less well constructed. I've never seen one

constructed better, less well constructed walls, mouldings,

everything. They rearrange the arrangement of rooms, they

change the heights and shapes and designs of the ceilings,

everything is different. And then they put it on the market

for a few hundred thousand dollar more than it was when

they bought it. Because that's the whole point. They're trying

to make a profit. They're flipping the house. This is not

a rehab, so we can live in it situation. This is a rehab so

someone else can live in it situation. And it's a nightmare.

I worked briefly in a fine woodworking shop. And I can tell

you, the construction they're doing in there is no good.

They're cutting corners, they're cutting costs. They're doing

everything they can to improve their profit margin and get in

and out of there as fast as they can. Because the way these

projects work is they get these short term what are called hard

money loans, where they can get the money on a very high

interest rate to buy the house cash and rehab it. But they have

to sell the house before that loan comes due. Because once it

starts coming due the payments are astronomical and it will

sink them almost immediately. So they're under a lot of pressure

to meet their deadlines. And there's so much wrong with it.

First of all, the houses they're doing this to were mostly built,

They're arts and crafts houses. This means that they have solid

plaster walls, beautiful mouldings, high ceilings, and

not just any kind of high ceiling but often coved

ceilings. And they have all kinds of interesting ventilation

and cooling built into them. And let me tell you why this matters

because a well built solid old building is way easier to heat

and cool than a modern building. Not because the insulation is

better, often that's the thing that really ought to be

improved, is the insulation. But because the shapes and designs

and airflow are all built without additional heating and

cooling in mind, or with very little. So you have things like

transom windows, clerestory windows, coved ceilings are

actually less echoey, than flat ones. The most echoey room in my

house is my office. This building was built and rehabbed

a flat ceiling. It's also the worst echo. There are all kinds

of reasons, all kinds of thought, all kinds of craft that

went into these buildings and when we rip it ou--, of course,

if it's destroyed, it's destroyed. If it's rotted, it's

rotted-- but when we rip it out, when it's perfectly good. We're

disrespecting, we're disregarding, all of that

careful craft and thought and handwork that went into it. We

do not know better, and especially most of these

flippers do not know better. It's not like somebody's coming

in having deeply considered what the best alternatives to those

old systems are. They're just tearing out the old systems and

replacing them with brute force. And brute force is pretty much

never the right way to do something. Pretty much never,

unless someone's dying, which no one's dying. These houses don't

need to be gut-rehabbed at all. They don't need to be

gut-rehabbed, they probably need some paint, they probably need

some plaster fixing. Maybe they need a new piece of woodwork

here or there. After a while things here tend to get dry rot.

But you're never going to get that quality of work back in a

house. Unless you're a multimillionaire and you have

all the time in the world. You could have that quality of work

if you simply didn't destroy it. And the dumpsters that they fill

with materials... there are other options. There are other

ways to do things that don't involve so much distruction.

There are small upgrades yes that are useful and important

like insulated windows, but the insulated windows can look like

the old windows or you can insulate the old windows in some

cases, it depends what you're dealing with. It doesn't, it

doesn't need to be like that. But the problem is that these

folks are not thinking about long term ethics. They're not

playing the long ethics game. They're playing the short profit

game, and that's a different game. It is, in fact, a game and

not a way of life. I would say that ethics, I said ethics are a

long game, but what I really meant was ethics, are a way of

life. Ethics are a thing that we do all the time through

everything. And we should not be, we should not be gutting old

construction for no reason. And your profit motive is not any

reason also, you're pricing people out and for why? Leave

that house on the market for someone else. Pick a business

that doesn't make people homeless. Ethics are a long

game, and flipping houses, is not it.