View from the Mountain

If you have finally learned the right way, is your knowledge already irrelevant to you?

It was five years ago yesterday that I wrote my first post on View from the Mountain.  It was entitled My Welcome to Windows.

A few months earlier, I had exited Apple so it seemed logical to buy a Windows machine to see how the rest of the world lived.  I had some other reasons, and Linux was one of them.

Since that post I have written thousands of posts.  Recently I have been hired to write some post about the Crystal Coast.  So in a sense I have traveled a long with my blogs.

I have written about just about everything from the high tech world of Apple to our family recipes. I just got a very favorable comment on our family hush puppy recipe this evening.

I feel that I have managed to keep View from the Mountain and my other blogs above board.

I have never hidden my opinions or what might be driving my opinions.  I have stuck to the facts as I see them.  It has been a very rewarding journey, and fortunately I continue to learn something new every day.

Today I think I stumbled up a very humbling fact.  My wife and I are homeowners.  That brings with it lots of privileges, but it is also a huge learning curve.  We have actually been homeowners for 38 years, but each home has been so different that the lessons we have learned have rarely been transferable to the next home.

There are some exceptions.  After all those years we are beginning to learn about hot water heaters and their dangers.  A home we own in Cornelius, NC recently had a cracked hot water tank.  By the time it was noticed, the water had seeped under the kitchen floors and ended up ruining the floors and the cabinets.  So the insurance folks have stepped in and are helping us get it back to normal.

After that incident my wife, Glenda, started worrying about our Roanoke based hot water heater which just happened to be twenty years old. Most hot water tank warranties today are for six years.  When she was changing the kitty litter box last night, she checked it and found it fine.

Just by chance, we were delayed in going shopping for the balance of Thanksgiving dinner this afternoon.  She decided to go look in the basement and look for suitable toys for our soon to be visiting granddaughter.  While she was there, she checked the hot water heater again and found water on the floor.

I immediately came down, shut the gas off, turned the water off, and got a hose and started draining the tank.  Then I began mopping up the water with towels as Glenda called a plumber.  The room with tank had a drain in it, unfortunately the floor took the water away from the drain towards the wall of the next room.  It was something we had not checked 20 years ago when we bought the house as new construction.

We were extraordinarily fortunate this afternoon.  The plumbers arrived within twenty minutes of being called at 2:30 PM.  By 5:30 PM Glenda was writing them a check for our newly installed hot water heater.  I had an aluminum pan put under this one, and a drain pipe from the pan to the room drain.

In 38 years of home owning, I have had one other hot water tank go.  It was when we were living on the farm in the late 70s.  I took it out and replaced it myself. That was back in the days of copper plumbing so I was even able to do that correctly and get no leaks.

Just as I have mastered this information about tank hot water heaters, I am fully aware that many new homes are being built with tankless hot water heaters.  I actually asked the plumbers about replacing my tank with one.  It turned out that the gas line to my tank was not nearly big enough so the installation would have taken a while, been more expensive, but more importantly, we have guests arriving tomorrow which sometimes is the story of my life.

So now I know everything that I should know about hot water heater tanks just as they are becoming obsolete.

As I ponder this I wonder how much stuff I have learned only to find out that by the time I have mastered it, it no longer matters to or sometimes to anyone?

I know that I figured out vegetable gardening just about the time we moved to the suburbs where we could not have a vegetable garden.

That would have been at the same time I had become an expert at making hay since for a decade I baled about 600 tons a year.  In the city there is no need for the ability to feel a handful of hay and know that it is ready to bale.

Then there was the world of computers.  At the peak of my ability to give presentations to convince high level CIOs that they needed Apple computers in their enterprise mix, I was no longer selling Apple computers.  Now I will admit that I was more than pretty good at doing that for much of my twenty years at Apple.  Still I really had it down pat by the end when I had been declared as surplus.

I could trot out other examples, but there is question that comes to mind.  It might be the heart of the matter.  Is there something inherent in knowing all that I need to know about a subject that predisposes me to no longer needing that information.

Did I become someone who had to move to the city because I had learned all that I could take about making hay?  Was there something in my presentations that signaled Apple that I needed to go.  That's hard to believe since Apple was fond of putting me on an airplane and flying me to California to give presentations to folks from other channels with which I had little to do.  Had growing all our vegetables for so many years made me secretly want to be in the city.

More importantly, is there something about my knowing everything about hot water heater installations that means we will sell this home and move to something with tankless hot water heaters?

I guess that could also signal a turnaround in the real estate market which would mean that I would not worry very much about hot water heaters.

There is one thing that is certain, this is the first post of my sixth year of blogging.  I plan to keep pondering the deep and the not so deep.

Sticking to your knitting

A few decades of experience in the business world has taught me the value of getting good at what you do. Depending on your skill level, the field you are tackling, and your ability to learn, becoming at expert can take months or even years.

Every time I changed jobs at Apple, I went through six months of extreme work to get to the top of my game.  In a highly competitive business environment, you cannot relax even when you really know your job, but you especially cannot relax when you are learning your job.

Often the challenge that is hardest to overcome is a manager unwilling to give you the time to master your job.  It is important to realize the distinction between a manager and a leader.  A leader is supportive in letting you learn your job but also is forgiving of the inevitable mistakes.  A manager will try to do your job for you and often try to embarrass you when mistakes are made.

You will go much farther with a leader than with a manager.  Unfortunately in today's business climate, leaders are in short supply because most businesses care more about their quarterly metrics than they do about establishing a business that will endure over the long term.

As an aside, you can find CEOs who act like managers.  Sometimes this causes a leadership vacuum below the CEO because anyone with skills that might challenge the CEO is driven off.  For an example of this you can ponder who is going to replace Steve Jobs at Apple.

So if sticking to your knitting is good why would someone go off and try something which requires them to struggle for six months in order to get good at what they are doing?  Is that not abandoning your knitting for something foreign?

First off sticking to your knitting is a broad term and can be taken to extremes.  If I had stayed in K-12 computer sales at Apple, I would never have become director of federal sales.  If I had stayed on the farm selling bulls and balers, I would have never made it to Apple.  While my transition to real estate has not been as financially successful as I would like, I am very good at the job now.  I learn something all the time, but that has consistent across my careers on the farm, in computers, and real estate.

If you want an excellent experience in finding a home with water access on the North Carolina coast, I can say with confidence that I can do that exceptionally well.

Second, we live in a world that is steadily changing.  If you had told me in 1982 that I would spend part of my career after Apple selling email, I would have looked at you with a blank stare.  I certainly did not know about email in 1982.  We have to change or one day we will wake up and find there is no market for buggy whips.

So to me sticking to my knitting is continuing to develop my skills at understanding the needs of my clients and learning how to better fulfill those needs no matter what service or product that I am selling.  Learning how to provide a customer with the right amount of information and interaction while sparking their interest in working with me has been consistent across all of my careers.

The challenge has been mixing the right amount of personal interaction with technology to keep the clients happy and allow me to make a living.  It is all about communication.

Where we are in the world real estate world is similar to many fields but probably real estate is a little more technology infused than most fields.

From web sites and social media to photos and virtual tours, real estate uses it all today.  Staying on top of all the technology is a huge challenge, but offers rich rewards to the clients who work with you.  Rarely are there questions that cannot be answered with stunning visual clarity or from online databases.

One of the nice things about real estate is that you do not have to worry about the manager and leader issues since to a large extent you are your own boss.

If you have a bad boss, you do not have to look very far to find the problem.

Experience has also taught me that it all looks better from the beach.

Responsibility for your actions

My mother taught me to never start a fight, but in the same breath to be ready to stand up for what I believe and accept the consequences of my own actions if I ended up in a fight.

That was great advice a long time ago, and to me it still rings true today.  Unfortunately there are a whole lot of people (and states) who want people to be protected even when they do stupid things.

In the same line of thought, we have the people who believe whatever they can get out of a company or another person with the threat of litigation is fair game.

However, life is not always smooth sailing like the picture above.

I am no great defender of corporations who can act like robber-barons, but there have to be some limits on both sides.

Some consumers get irrational, some get greedy, and plenty of us still get screwed.

I think we all have the right to quality services and products.  I have never worked for a company that tried to deliver something other than that.  From my own farm where I sold Angus breeding stock, to Vermeer balers, Apple computers, mail services from a startup to real estate services from a Crystal Coast firm, I feel that I have worked with companies that tried to fairly represent the capabilities of their products and services.

Yet in almost every case, I have seen clients who for one reason or another were unhappy with their products or services.  I can remember someone who bought a round baler from me and was not happy about the way the bales came out of the baler.  I worked hard to teach him the proper use of his baler and overcame the problem.  I had a college professor who bought a Mac was unhappy because he had five bad pixels on a screen of over 1,000,000 pixels. His expectations were higher than even the best of technology could deliver. Then there people who just could not figure out how to manage their mail accounts no matter how much you helped them.

Sometimes it is best to mutually agree to part company before things get nasty.  I have replaced computers just to defuse situations, but I have also had situations where people wanted a new computer just because they thought a big company was an easy target.

It is those people who make it hard for people with legitimate claims.  At a certain point, you read the reviews, talk to people, and place your bet with your money.  There are few purchases without risk.  No everything in this world comes with a guarantee.

I am not sure what kind of world we would have without any risks, but it is something we do not have to lose sleep over because it is not going to happen.

Buying real estate is a very complicated and much regulated process. Even ignoring the opportunity to look at many properties for comparison, there are multiple opportunities to be satisfied with your investment before you make the purchase.

However, it is a human process so there are always opportunities for mistakes.  Still when you consider you can hire a home inspector, a bug inspector, a septic inspector, an appraiser, a surveyor, and have the services of a Realtor®, there are a lot of ways to be as close to certain as possible about your future happiness before you pay your money when buying a home.

In spite of all the expert help, in the end, the final protection is the individual purchaser.  No one can weigh all of the data and information and decide what is right for you but you.

With that privilege also comes the responsibility to accept your purchase once you have made it.  I think there are great safeguards in place for home purchasers, but once you have bought it, it is yours.

One of my favorite clauses in the NC Offer to Purchase is the following.

CLOSING SHALL CONSTITUTE ACCEPTANCE OF THE PROPERTY IN ITS THEN EXISTING CONDITION UNLESS PROVISION IS OTHERWISE MADE IN WRITING.

The bold capitals are right out of the contract.  I have decided to use yellow highlighter on the phrase with my next contract.  I think the clause deserves it.

I suppose someone could mislead you as to what might be built next door to a home, but in this day of Internet searches, I would have a hard time thinking that is a good excuse.

We ended up buying our property on the NC coast at almost the peak of the market.  Could we have gotten it cheaper by waiting another year?  I have no doubt that we could have.  Had I been using someone other than a dual agent would I have gotten it cheaper, quite possibly?  However, it has been over three years, and I have seen literally hundreds of properties.  None of those properties have offered the same price/value ratio that I found in this home.

So I am happy with my decision to purchase.  It was a serious decision, and I take responsibility for it.

There are plenty of things that we buy which have few protections, but fortunately most of them are relatively inexpensive.

I have had plenty to say over cars, appliances, and computers over the years but they are still buyer beware. 

I cannot argue that Microsoft owes me for the time I have spent keeping my Vista computer going since I bought it in spite of a number of negative reviews.  However, a few people bought Macs because of my Vista reporting satisfaction is enough.

No one twisted my arm to buy a Vista machine or a property at the peak of the real estate boom, I did both on my own and take full responsibility.

And that is the way it should be.