I purchased
a vinyl record recently. I don’t have a record player to play it on; but that
doesn’t matter. You see what mattered when I purchased this LP was that I felt
for the first time since the late 1980’s (when I bought my last vinyl LP) that
I was buying a tangible piece of art, something I wanted to own, to touch and
feel in my hands, something that gave me a sense of pride of ownership. I
already know the words and the melodies contained on the album because I
already own it as a MP3 which is synced with my iPad, iTunes (laptop and
desktop) and burned onto the hard drive of my car stereo system.
In fact the
sound is best in my car, turned up loud; my car stereo replaced my headphones
many years ago. I really don’t have time these days to sandwich my head between
headphones, and I have never once seriously considered sitting at my office
desk with sound blasting into my ears from iPod ear buds. In fact I don’t own
ear buds; I own a set of high end headphones, the ones I mentioned earlier, but
for the larger part of the last 10 years they have been gathering dust next to
my high end CD stereo system, another acquisition from the early '90’s which
sits quietly on top of my bookshelf.
The point is
this, change happens all around us all the time, slowly but ever evolving.
Sometimes, it appears to happen at a much faster pace than it ever did,
especially in the world we inhabit today. Change inevitably improves society;
it makes us more productive; provided we don’t get distracted. It helps us
become more specialized, provided we don’t forget that a broad knowledge of the
world we live in is always a good thing; and the explosion of social apps
connect us instantly with distant family and friends like never before.
But as
habits change all around us, we should not forget that the foundations laid down
by society over many generations, run deep and that they were created and
evolved for good reason. We shouldn’t be too quick to embrace without caution
the billion dollar apps that make life in the 21st century so
exciting. We should approach them with intrigue, and enjoy their benefits but use
them wisely to enrich and improve our lives while remaining aware of what makes
us human. As the great writer and poet Shakespeare said, ‘To be or not to be’;
we need to be just like we have always needed to be, for if we chose not to be
then we lose what we are as humans and life becomes less fulfilling in a
society changing quickly from a tangible asset basis of production to a society
of ownership of ones and zeros.
Let me
rationalize the contradiction which my recent purchase of a vinyl LP presents
in the digital era. When I recently attended a one day class for
commercial investment real estate analysis, I was told I didn’t need my
financial calculator for this class, all that I needed was my laptop and the ability to enter
numbers into a spreadsheet and ‘hey presto!’ out would pop the answer at the
bottom of the spreadsheet.
Now that’s
progress but wait a minute, is it? Just 10 years ago I had to calculate the
math with pen and paper helped along with my financial calculator and I had to
learn the methodology which would get me to the answer. I learned
how the problem could be analyzed and how the methodology solved the problem.
In doing so I understood the challenge and what the stream of numbers meant in
relation to each other. I’ve taken that understanding and have evolved over my
career my learning of the art and science of real estate analysis to provide me
with a strong foundation upon which to analyze problems.
It had
occurred to me many times in recent years leading up to my recent purchase of
the vinyl LP, that the thought process so critical to learning and solving is
being taken away from today’s generations by the highly evolved and efficient
apps that are in circulation.
Examples are
the pre-constructed spreadsheets (templates) designed to reduce errors, but
which in return remove the users mental understanding of their construction
(assuming they didn’t create the spreadsheet and are merely inputting numbers);
spell check on smartphones and iPads is useful but does this lessen our
ability to think about the construction of a word? The same can be said of
texting replacing traditional conversation and PlayStations and Xboxes replacing
the essential face-to face social skills our younger generations hitherto
developed through one-on-one interaction in real time, aka playing out.
Perhaps this
is why as business professionals, parents and members of society, we need to
remember the goodness that society created for us before the ones and zeros
took over.
I urge you
the next time you look at a financial problem to pick up a pencil, paper and a
calculator and see if you can work through the methodology of what you are
trying to do and understand what the spreadsheet is doing, you’ll be better for
it. If you need a refresher with the underlying methodology or wish to dig deeper into commercial real estate investment analysis, a good place to start is by taking one of the excellent four day education classes offered by CCIM here in the San Francisco Bay area as well as locations around the country. You might also turn off spell check for a while, cut down on texting and emailing,
and try picking up the phone instead.
At home, take your
son or daughter off the sofa and join a membership group which will teach them
skills, one example is scouting. Scouting is a great way to learn social and
life-skills which are as relevant; if not more relevant than they were 100
years ago when the program was first developed.
And that’s
why I bought the vinyl LP, it presented itself to me as a tangible reminder of
what came before the ones and zeros, and just like a lyric from one of the
tracks on my MP3 version, ‘It is what it is until it ain’t anymore.’