This one goes a layer deeper. Because there is a second confusion hiding inside the first, and it costs people more money, more time, and more happiness than almost any other mistake I watch happen.

We confuse cost with value.

Say those two words to most people and watch what happens. Cost gets answered instantly. Cost is money. Cost is the expense. Cost is the number on the receipt, the line on the closing statement, the figure your brain grabs first because it is sitting right there, measurable and clean.

Value? Value takes a pause.

That pause is the whole article.

Two Hamburgers

Let me make this simple.

What is the value of a McDonald’s hamburger?

You know exactly what you’re getting. It costs a few dollars. It solves hunger. It is the same in Memphis and Miramar Beach and probably Mars when we get there. The cost is low. The value is... known. Predictable. Sufficient.

Now — what is the value of a hamburger at Pickles in Seaside?

The cost is very different. Several times different. And if you only looked at cost, the decision would be over before it started. A hamburger is a hamburger is a hamburger, right?

Wrong. And you already know it’s wrong.

Because the Pickles hamburger comes with the bike ride to get there. The salt air. The kids running on the lawn at the amphitheater. Sand still on your feet. The conversation at the picnic table that nobody is in a hurry to end. You are not buying a hamburger. You are buying an afternoon you will still remember in ten years.

What did the McDonald’s hamburger cost? Less.

What was it worth? Also less. Considerably less.

Cost is what you pay. Value is what you get. And the gap between those two numbers — positive or negative — is where every good and bad decision of your life actually lives.

Now Do the Beach Home

What is the cost of a beach home?

I can answer that one as an economist, and I have. Down payment. Carrying costs. Insurance. Maintenance. Opportunity cost on the capital. It is arithmetic, and the arithmetic is real. I will never tell you otherwise.

But now ask the other question. What is the value of a beach home?

Suddenly the spreadsheet goes quiet.

Because the value of a beach home is Thanksgiving with your whole family under one roof instead of three hotel rooms.

It is your grandkids learning to swim in the same Gulf you walk every morning. It is a place of refuge — and if you read the last article, you know that word is not decoration for me. It is the conversation you had on the porch that never would have happened in a restaurant. It is the version of you that exists at the beach and nowhere else.

None of that appears on the closing statement.

And here is the trap: because cost is measurable and value is not, people treat cost as real and value as fuzzy. They optimize the number they can see and ignore the number that actually matters. Then they realize it. Too late. Almost always too late.

I have never once heard someone at the end of their life say, “I’m so glad I saved that money instead of buying the place where my family would have gathered for twenty years.” Not once. I have heard the other sentence more times than I want to count.

The Part Where I Pick a Fight With My Own Industry

Now let me say something that will not make me popular at the next realtor convention. Most realtors could not care less about this distinction.

A client says “I want to spend less,” and the agent salutes. Lower cost, faster close, easy story to tell. Saving you money feels like service. It photographs like service.

But here is the question almost nobody in my industry asks: saving money at the expense of what?

Lower cost at the expense of bad value is not a win. It is a loss wearing a discount sticker. The house twenty minutes from the beach instead of three. The floor plan that means half the family stays home. The “deal” in the location nobody actually wanted. The agent who lets that happen — or worse, encourages it because it was easier — did not save the client anything. They cost the client the very thing the client was trying to buy - Value.

A professional’s job is not to find you the lowest cost. It is to challenge you, sometimes uncomfortably, on whether the cost you’re avoiding is buying you value or destroying it. That conversation is harder. It is also the entire job.

Why You Can’t Just Look Up the Answer

Here is where the behavioral economics comes in, and where this gets genuinely interesting.

Cost is objective. Value is not. Value should weigh much more.

The Pickles hamburger is worth more to me than to the person who hates sand. The beach home is worth more to the family that gathers than to the family that scatters. Your value and my value for the identical asset, at the identical cost, can be wildly different — and we are both right.

This is why every economic model of “rational” decision-making eventually breaks. The trade-offs are not standard. They are personal. Prospect theory tells us we feel losses about twice as hard as gains, so the visible cost screams while the invisible value whispers. Mental accounting tells us we put the purchase price in one bucket and the family memories in another and never let the buckets talk to each other.

The math can’t save you here. There is no formula where you plug in “Thanksgiving under one roof” and get a number back. So what do you do?

You talk it out. Really talk it out.

Not “what can you afford” — that’s the cost conversation, and it takes ten minutes. The value conversation takes longer. What are you actually buying this for? Who is going to be in it? What does the tenth year look like, not the first? What would you regret more — paying too much, or watching someone else’s family on the porch you almost bought?

We can never completely measure value. That is true. But unmeasured is not the same as unknowable. Value reveals itself in conversation — between spouses, between generations, between a client and a professional willing to ask the harder question.

The Bottom Line

You are most likely in a cost vs. value conversation if the first chat was about a buyer brokerage agreement. Cost is the easy number. It is sitting right there on the page, and your brain will grab it every time.

Value is the real number. It hides in the years after the closing. Coffee and conversation is required here.

Make decisions on cost alone and you will win a hundred small games and lose the one that mattered. Make decisions on value — clear-eyed about cost, but anchored to value — and the receipt becomes what it always should have been.

A footnote. Not the story.

It is not complicated. There is no app. There is no guru. There is a chair, a quiet hour, and a practice I have done long enough that skipping it feels like leaving the house without shoes. And somewhere in that hour, I do one specific thing to center myself.

I think about what I value.

Notice I did not say I think about what I’m thankful for. Those are not the same thing. And I’d argue the difference matters more than almost anything else in the gratitude industry wants you to believe.

Thankful Is Weather. Values Are Rock.

Here is the problem with “thankful.”

I am thankful for the blue sky this morning. I am thankful for white sandy beaches. I am thankful for the food on my table. All true. All good. And all of it can change by tomorrow.

The sky clouds over. The beach gets a red flag day. Thankfulness, the way most people practice it, is a weather report. It tells you what conditions you happened to wake up in. Useful? Sure. A foundation? No.

A weather report is not something you can build a house on.

So what is?

Values.

Values are rocks. They do not move because the sky changed. They do not rotate daily like a gratitude journal prompt. They are the things you would defend if someone tried to take them — and that word, defend, is the test. You don’t defend the blue sky. You can’t. But you absolutely defend what you value.

Let me show you mine.

I value my decision-making freedom. And I protect it. Fiercely. Every structure in my life — how I built my business, how I manage capital, how I schedule my days — exists in service of one outcome: nobody gets to tell me what I must do next. That did not happen by accident. It happened because I identified the value first and then made decisions that defended it now for at least the last 16 years. How I got to this place is a different story.

I value my homes. Not as line items on a balance sheet. As places of refuge — on 30A, and in Costa Rica. Places where family gathers. Places where the door closes and the world stays outside. I have written before that you cannot build sand castles with your grandbabies on a pile of Bitcoin. The homes are where the sand castles happen.

I value the beach and the water. Enough that I centered my entire life on them. Two residences, two countries, one common denominator: salt water within reach. That is not a preference. A preference is whether you like your coffee black. This is architecture. I built a life around it. Indeed I have built the Jabbour Luxury Group around it and invited in people that have these same values. Not the exact same places and not the exact same definition of Home or Beach and Water, but the same center of self. To value a life lived with some intention, Family, place, direction.

I value the love of my wife and my family. And I protect that too. Protect is the operative word again. You do not protect things you are merely thankful for. You protect what you cannot imagine living without. We have our moments. We have our challenges. We debate in business and in direction. That is the value of it too.

Four values. Four rocks. They were the same yesterday. They will be the same tomorrow.

Then There Are Joys

Now — what about gratitude? The daily stuff? The small recurring moments?

I don’t throw those out. I rename them. I call them Joys. This came from reading the books of Arthur Brooks that many call the “Happiness Guru”. I translated those readings into a few ways to think about this like. Haves and Wants and Values and Joys.

Joys are the things that repeat, that bring moments of happiness, and that we deliberately strive to repeat. Read that again. We strive to repeat them. That is what separates a joy from a pleasant accident.

I get joy from a walk on the beach. From a bike ride. From dinner with my wife. From working alongside my team. And yes — I get joy from success in my business, and maybe even more from watching my team members succeed as they grow into who they are becoming.

Here is the distinction in one line:

Values are what you protect. Joys are what you repeat.

Values are Life Pillars. Joys are the events that grow from that foundation of Pillars.

Why the Distinction Matters

You might be asking — does any of this matter, or is it just word games? It matters. Here’s why.

When you only practice thankfulness, you train your attention on conditions. And conditions are outside your control. The economist in me will tell you that anchoring your wellbeing to variables you cannot influence is a bad trade. You become a passenger in your own contentment.

But when you separate values from joys, something shifts.

Your values tell you what to protect. They become a decision filter. Should I take this meeting? Does it threaten my decision-making freedom? Should I chase this opportunity? Does it pull me away from the water, from the family, from the refuge? Suddenly half your decisions make themselves. The rock does the work.

Your joys tell you what to schedule. Literally. If the bike ride brings joy, the bike ride goes on the calendar. If dinner with my wife brings joy, it does not get bumped for a phone call. Joys are repeatable by design — so design your days to repeat them.

Thankfulness observes your life. Values and joys build it.

The Morning Practice

So tomorrow morning, try this instead of the standard gratitude list.

Ask two questions.

What do I value?

Write down the rocks. The things you protect. There should not be twenty of them. If you have twenty values, you have none. I have four.

What brings me joy?

Write down the rhythms. The repeatable moments. Then look at your calendar and ask the honest question — am I actually striving to repeat them, or am I just hoping they happen?

The blue sky will come and go. Be thankful for it when it shows up. But build on the rock. And repeat the rhythm. That is the practice. That is the whole thing.

Values and joys.

You crumple the paper. You look at the basket. You know exactly what you have to do.

And you hold on to it.

Not forever. Just long enough. Long enough to tell yourself you’ll throw it later. Long enough to set it down on the desk. Long enough to forget it was ever in your hand at all.

That’s avoidance. And it is dressed up as almost everything except what it is.

The Throw Is Not Optional

The whole premise of this series is that you don’t need a map. You don’t need a twelve-step plan. The body already knows how to walk down the stairs. The instinct already knows where the basket is.

But here’s the part that instinct cannot do for you.

It cannot release your grip.

You have to let go of the paper. That part is not automatic. That part is a choice. And when people avoid the next right step, it is almost never because they don’t know what it is. It is because they found a way to feel like they did it without actually doing it.

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The Email That Isn’t a Phone Call

Here’s a version I’ve seen more times than I can count.

Someone you’ve been in conversation with goes quiet. They stop responding. You know you should call. You know a call is the right move.

So you write an email.

Thoughtful email. Well-worded. Probably even a good email. And the moment you hit send, something interesting happens in your brain. It registers the action. It tells you the task is done. It files it away as completed.

You did not call.

You know you didn’t call. But the email gave you just enough cover to feel like you did something. And something feels better than nothing. Something feels like movement.

It isn’t.

The difference between the email and the phone call isn’t medium. It’s accountability. An email can be ignored. An email allows the other person to stay comfortable too. A phone call changes the dynamic entirely.

You call. They pick up. And they say — and I have heard this exact sentence — “Oh good, yes, I’ve been meaning to reach back out. I’ll be down next week. Can we meet?”

That’s it. That’s the whole story.

The email was not the next right step. The phone call was. And you wrote the email because the phone call was harder to avoid doing once you started it.

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What Avoidance Actually Looks Like

Avoidance in the context of this series is not laziness. Let’s be clear about that.

The people who avoid the next right step are often the same people who are extremely busy. Perpetually productive. Always doing something.

That’s the tell.

Avoidance hides inside activity. It hides inside the email you sent instead of the call you didn’t make. It hides inside the research you did instead of the offer you didn’t write. It hides inside the conversation you had about the decision instead of the decision itself.

You are moving. You are just not moving toward the thing.

Psychologists call this a substitution behavior. You replace a high-discomfort action with a lower-discomfort action that feels adjacent enough to pass. Your brain accepts it. Your calendar fills up. The real task waits.

Why We Do It

Let’s not pretend this is complicated.

The next right step usually requires something. Vulnerability. Commitment. The possibility of a no. The possibility of a yes that now makes everything real.

Throwing the paper means it either goes in or it doesn’t. You find out.

Holding the paper is safer. You can still imagine it going in. You can still believe the outcome you want is probable. The moment you throw it, probability collapses into a result.

So you hold on.

And you tell yourself you’re being thoughtful. Strategic. That the timing isn’t quite right yet. That you’ll circle back when conditions are better.

You won’t. The conditions will be whatever they are. And the paper will still be in your hand.

The Next Right Step Is Usually Obvious

That’s what makes avoidance so uncomfortable to admit.

It’s not that you don’t know what to do. You almost always know what to do. The next right step announces itself. It has been announcing itself. You’ve been walking past it for days, maybe longer.

Pick up the phone. Submit the offer. Have the conversation you’ve been drafting in your head for three weeks. Walk into the office and ask the question.

None of those require a plan. They require a release. They require you to let go of the paper and find out where it lands.

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Closing

The trash can theory was never about aim.

It was never about calculating the arc, accounting for the distance, optimizing the wrist angle.

It was about the throw.

You already know where the basket is. You’ve always known.

The only question left is whether you’re going to open your hand.

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The first group sees investments as categories. Stocks are stocks. Real estate is real estate. Businesses are businesses. Each category gets its own set of rules, emotions, assumptions, and beliefs.

The second group sees investments as economic systems. They look through the wrapper and focus on the underlying mechanics. What is the asset? What is the cost of capital? What is the expected return? What are the risks? How much equity is required? How long is the money tied up?

The distinction sounds small, but it has enormous consequences.

Suppose you purchase a stock for $47 and twenty months later it is worth $64. That investment generated an annualized return of roughly 20%. Most investors would look at that and be reasonably pleased. If they could repeatedly earn 20% annually over long periods of time, they would likely become quite wealthy.

Now suppose that same investor purchased the stock using a 50% margin loan at 6%. The annualized return on their equity jumps to approximately 34%.

At this point the conversation often changes. Some investors become uncomfortable. The word “margin” enters the discussion. Warnings appear. Risks are highlighted. People begin talking about leverage as though they have discovered a dangerous new chemical.

To be clear, leverage does create additional risk. If the investment declines in value, losses are amplified. That is true. It is also true that a chainsaw is more dangerous than a butter knife. Pointing out the existence of risk is not the same thing as performing an analysis.

What interests me is not the risk discussion itself. What interests me is how selectively people apply it.

Imagine instead that a builder acquires land and constructs a home. The total project cost is $4.7 million. Twenty months later the property closes net for $6.4 million. The gain is approximately $1.7 million before carrying costs and transaction expenses.

Most people would look at that transaction and immediately recognize it as a successful investment.

In fact, many people would admire it.

Some would tell their friends about it.

Others would wish they had participated.

Very few would react the way they reacted to the stock example.

Yet the first question any serious investor should ask is exactly the same question they asked with the stock.

How much equity was invested?

Because there is a substantial difference between a builder who writes a check for $4.7 million and a builder who contributes $1.5 million while financing the remainder through construction debt and banking relationships.

The project is the same.

The sale price is the same.

The timeline is the same.

The gain is the same.

Only the capital structure changes.

Strangely, when leverage appears inside a real estate project, many people stop calling it leverage and start calling it development.

When leverage appears inside a stock account, they call it speculation.

The mathematics are often remarkably similar. The emotional reactions could not be more different.

Why?

Part of the answer lies in familiarity.

People do not evaluate risk objectively. They evaluate familiarity objectively and then confuse familiarity with safety.

A thirty-year mortgage feels normal because millions of people have one. A construction loan feels productive because there is a physical structure being created. A margin loan feels speculative because most people have less experience with it.

The asset has changed costumes, but the audience suddenly believes they are watching a different play.

Behavioral economists refer to this tendency as mental accounting. We place money into separate buckets and then assign different rules to each bucket even when the underlying economics remain unchanged.

A dollar invested in a stock account becomes “risky money.”

A dollar invested in a home becomes “safe money.”

A dollar invested in a private business becomes “entrepreneurial money.”

A dollar invested in a vacation property becomes “lifestyle money.”

The labels change constantly. The mathematics do not.

This becomes particularly interesting when discussing real estate because many investors who would never consider borrowing against a stock portfolio routinely embrace leverage throughout every aspect of their property holdings.

They purchase primary residences with leverage.

They purchase second homes with leverage.

They purchase rental properties with leverage.

They refinance appreciated assets to access equity.

They obtain construction loans.

They establish lines of credit.

They pledge assets as collateral.

In other words, they use leverage everywhere while simultaneously insisting they are uncomfortable with leverage.

What they are actually uncomfortable with is a particular form of leverage that happens to reside inside a different mental bucket.

The same phenomenon appears when discussing returns.

If I tell someone that a stock returned 34% annually through intelligent use of leverage, they often become skeptical.

If I tell the same person that a developer turned a multimillion-dollar project into a substantially larger multimillion-dollar project over twenty months, they often become impressed.

The question I rarely hear asked in either conversation is the one that matters most:

What was the return on the equity?

Not the project size.

Not the headline number.

Not the sale price.

Not the gross profit.

What was the return on the actual cash invested?

That question cuts through nearly every illusion in investing.

It forces us to stop admiring the size of deals and start evaluating their efficiency. It forces us to stop confusing activity with performance. It forces us to compare opportunities on a common basis.

A stock does not care whether it is competing against another stock, a vacation rental, a development project, a private business, or a piece of raw land. Capital is capital. It will always seek the best risk-adjusted return available.

That is how sophisticated investors think.

They do not become distracted by the wrapper. They focus on the economics contained inside it.

None of this means you should rush out and borrow money to buy stocks. It does not mean you should become a developer. It does not mean every use of leverage is wise.

It simply means that intellectual consistency matters.

If leverage is reckless when applied to a stock, explain why it becomes prudent when applied to a home.

If leverage is prudent when applied to a home, explain why it becomes reckless when applied to a stock.

You may ultimately conclude that one truly is better than the other. There are certainly arguments to be made. Real estate has unique characteristics. Stocks have unique characteristics. Liquidity, volatility, taxation, management burden, and income generation all deserve consideration.

But at least start by recognizing that you are comparing variations of the same economic tool.

Too many investors never get that far. They evaluate the label before they evaluate the mathematics.

And that may be one of the most expensive habits an investor can have.

People misunderstand what “going low” means in the card game of Spades.

Going low does not mean recklessly throwing weak cards on the table and hoping for the best.

It means understanding the structure of the game well enough to survive coordinated pressure from every direction while still accomplishing your objective.

That is a very different thing.

In Spades, a Nil bid means you are attempting to take zero tricks.

The moment you declare it, the entire table changes behavior.

Everyone begins hunting you.

They study your vulnerabilities.
They pressure your weak suits.
They attempt to force mistakes.
They manipulate timing.
They engineer traps.

And if you are holding the Ace of Spades?

Forget it.

You are not going low.

You are lying to yourself about the cards you actually hold.

Because the Ace of Spades eventually wins.

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Maybe not immediately.
Maybe not on the first hand.
Maybe not on the second.

But eventually the structure of the game forces reality to reveal itself.

That is exactly what happens with lowball real estate offers.

People confuse low offers with strategic negotiation.

They are not the same thing.

A reckless lowball offer often signals that the buyer does not understand:

• market structure,

• seller psychology,

• inventory conditions,

• replacement cost,

• financing friction,

• or competitive positioning.

More importantly, it often signals the buyer does not truly understand their own objective.

Do they want to “win” a negotiation?

Or do they want to own the home?

Those are not always the same thing.

Behavioral economics teaches us that people frequently optimize for emotional victory rather than actual utility.

A buyer becomes obsessed with “getting a deal.”
They want validation.
They want to feel smarter than the seller.
They want to believe they extracted maximum leverage.

And in the process, they lose the property they actually wanted to live in.

That is not strategic behavior.

That is ego disguised as discipline.

Real negotiation requires proper card recognition.

If you truly want the house…
If the inventory is limited…
If the property fits your life…
If the location works…
If the carrying cost is sustainable…
If the replacement opportunity is uncertain…

…then you may already be holding the Ace of Spades.

At that point, pretending you can endlessly “go low” becomes dangerous.

Because eventually reality forces the hand to play itself.

The seller finds another buyer.
The market shifts.
Interest rates move.
The inventory disappears.
The family relocates.
The opportunity closes.

And suddenly the buyer who was trying to save 3% is now paying 8% more for an inferior property six months later.

Experienced negotiators understand something amateurs do not:

Your objective is not to win every hand.

Your objective is to position yourself to own the right asset under acceptable terms and then enjoy your life.

That requires emotional control.

Sometimes the strongest negotiation move is restraint.
Sometimes it is aggression.
Sometimes it is walking away.
Sometimes it is paying appropriately before someone else does.

But what serious buyers understand is this:

A proper offer is not weakness.

A proper offer is recognition.

Recognition of value.
Recognition of scarcity.
Recognition of timing.
Recognition of your actual goals.

In Spades, going low with the Ace of Spades in your hand is fantasy.

In real estate, trying to lowball the perfect house while three other buyers are circling the table is often the same thing.

Psychologists studying autobiographical memory, identity formation, and adolescent neurological development repeatedly found that music absorbed during adolescence becomes disproportionately durable because the brain is still constructing identity architecture during those years. Adrian North and David Hargreaves, whose work on music psychology became foundational in the field, described adolescent music preference as functioning almost like a “badge” of identity and social belonging. Other studies published through the Journal of Youth Studies and Psychology of Music similarly found that musical attachment during adolescence becomes deeply associated with peer affiliation, emotional intensity, and self-concept formation.

In plain English: your brain was under construction when those songs arrived.

Which explains why a sixty-year-old man can hear the opening five seconds of a Journey song and suddenly become medically incapable of acting normal in a grocery store.

He is not hearing music.

He is hearing himself before life started collecting receipts.

Neurological research on autobiographical memory supports this too. Daniel Levitin’s work in cognitive neuroscience observed that music encountered during adolescence and early adulthood tends to create unusually strong emotional retention because the brain encodes those experiences during periods of heightened neuroplasticity and emotional development. The song becomes less an audio file and more a retrieval system for identity itself.

And that same mechanism quietly explains almost every community argument in America right now.

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“I Wish Seaside Would Stay The Same”

No you don’t.

You wish you would stay the same.

That is the part people never say out loud.

When someone says:
“I left before Seaside became terrible,”
what they often mean is:
“I miss the version of myself that existed there.”

That is an entirely different statement.

Because Seaside did exactly what successful places do. It attracted demand.

Beautiful places do not remain hidden anymore. Not after Instagram. Not after remote work. Not after wealth migration. Not after every hedge fund manager in America discovered the emotional power of a $19 organic smoothie within walking distance of watercolor sunsets.

The very thing people loved about Seaside guaranteed its transformation.

Quiet became desirable.
Desirable became expensive.
Expensive became investment-grade.
Investment-grade became crowded.

Then everyone acts shocked.

As if economic demand should somehow politely stop directly outside their emotional comfort zone.

The Gravel Roads Outside Memphis

I remember people describing gravel roads outside Memphis like they were talking about Eden itself.

“It used to be beautiful out there.”

What they mean is:
“There was less around when I was younger.”

Those are not the same sentence.

The gravel roads became subdivisions. The subdivisions became shopping centers. The shopping centers became traffic. Then the people who benefited from the appreciation complain the place no longer feels authentic.

Authentic is one of the most abused words in modern real estate.

People almost never mean authentic.

They mean familiar.

Behavioral economists call this anchoring bias. Human beings evaluate present conditions against earlier emotional benchmarks even when the underlying economics make the change inevitable. The first emotionally meaningful version of a community becomes the standard against which every later version is judged.

And memory edits aggressively.

Nobody remembers the mosquitoes.
Nobody remembers the septic problems.
Nobody remembers there were three restaurants and two were terrible.
Nobody remembers wanting more development when property values were flat.

But forty years later suddenly everybody remembers themselves wandering untouched beaches discussing “community” while holding vinyl records and drinking coffee that cost nineteen cents.

Convenient.

Memory Is Attached To Identity, Not Geography

This is why the music research matters.

The song is tied to identity.
The town is tied to identity.
The season of life is tied to identity.

And once identity hardens, change starts feeling offensive.

Researchers studying place attachment have observed similar psychological patterns in communities. Human beings do not merely remember places objectively; they remember them autobiographically. The town becomes emotionally fused with youth, vitality, possibility, romance, freedom, and belonging.

People think they miss the town.

Often they miss the version of themselves that once existed inside the town.

That is why every generation believes it experienced the final authentic version of a place.

The funny part is that the older generation usually said the exact same thing about their version.

Today Is Someone Else’s “Good Old Days”

This is the part almost nobody thinks about.

Right now, somewhere in Seaside, some sixteen-year-old is hearing the soundtrack that will emotionally define the next forty years of their life. They are riding bicycles through streets another resident insists were ruined fifteen years ago.

And one day that teenager will become sixty years old and say:
“You should have seen this place back then.”

Just like everyone else does.

Because every generation mistakes their arrival point for the peak authenticity of civilization.

Meanwhile history just keeps paving roads and building coffee shops.

Real Estate Does Not Care About Your Nostalgia

Communities are not frozen paintings. They are economic organisms. Places either attract capital or repel it. They either evolve or decay.

People say they want appreciation, vibrancy, exclusivity, preservation, low density, economic growth, and affordability simultaneously.

That is adorable.

Most of those things directly conflict with one another.

The reason Seaside changed is because millions of people agreed it was valuable. That agreement gets expressed economically through pricing pressure, development pressure, infrastructure pressure, and cultural pressure.

That is not corruption.

That is demand.

Allow For Change Or Become A Museum Piece Yourself

There is nothing wrong with nostalgia. Some of it is beautiful. Some of it keeps us human.

But there is danger in confusing emotional memory with objective reality.

You can love what a place was without demanding it remain frozen forever in the exact emotional configuration that matched your youth.

Because whether people like it or not, today is already becoming someone else’s tomorrow.

And if you spend your entire life demanding the world stop changing so you can remain emotionally comfortable, eventually the world simply moves on without you.

Not cruelly.

Just efficiently.

“I enjoy earning one million dollars a year now.”
“I enjoy complete success now.”
“I live in abundance now.”

At first glance this appears harmless, perhaps even optimistic. Yet psychologically, improperly constructed affirmations may create internal instability rather than growth.

This is because the subconscious mind does not distinguish particularly well between aspiration, identity, and instruction.

Repeated thought becomes orientation.
Orientation influences attention.
Attention alters behavior.
Behavior eventually shapes outcomes.

The mechanism itself is neither mystical nor controversial. Human beings become sensitized to repeated patterns of thought. Neurologically, the mind begins filtering experience according to what it has been trained to notice. The reticular activating system — the attentional gatekeeper of the brain — gradually learns what is considered important.

The difficulty is that many affirmations are aimed at outcomes detached from structure.

This creates a peculiar psychological error:
the individual attempts to install a terminal identity before installing the behavioral architecture capable of supporting it.

A person may affirm wealth before affirming discipline.
Status before competence.
Recognition before contribution.
Revenue before professionalism.

The subconscious mind may still pursue the instruction. But without a properly ordered foundation, the path toward the stated outcome can become distorted.

One may achieve money while destroying health.
Acquire status while sacrificing integrity.
Generate transactions while undermining relationships.
Produce revenue while becoming psychologically exhausted.

The mind optimized for the stated metric because the metric itself became sovereign.

This resembles a poorly specified optimization problem in mathematics or economics. When a system is instructed improperly, it often satisfies the literal objective while violating the intended spirit of the objective.

Human beings are not exempt from this phenomenon.

A more stable model of affirmation begins not with outcomes, but with identity and process.

The sequence matters greatly.

Consider a new real estate professional entering the business.

An affirmation such as:
“I enjoy earning one million dollars a year now”
is psychologically premature.

The statement references a lag measure — an eventual consequence of hundreds of smaller behavioral systems functioning correctly over time.

A more coherent progression might begin elsewhere.

“I enjoy being a real estate professional now.”

This is subtle but important. The affirmation establishes identity before reward. It invites professionalism, responsibility, conduct, and self-perception into the structure of thought.

Only after identity stabilizes does the next affirmation become psychologically useful:

“I enjoy meeting people at open houses now.”

Notice the distinction. There is no desperation embedded in the statement. No demand for immediate conversion. No fixation on outcome. The affirmation merely conditions behavioral comfort with necessary activity.

Eventually another layer becomes appropriate:

“I enjoy working with two active clients per month now.”

At this stage the subconscious has already accepted:

• participation,

• professional identity,

• and social engagement.

The next affirmation therefore attaches itself to an increasingly stable internal structure.

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Over time these repeated instructions become less artificial. They begin as conscious repetition, but eventually migrate into baseline identity. Behavior changes quietly. One sleeps less impulsively. Follows up more naturally. Organizes time differently. Becomes less avoidant. The person often experiences these changes as spontaneous motivation, though they are more accurately understood as identity congruence.

The individual begins acting consistently with the installed self-concept.

Eventually the financial affirmation may become entirely appropriate:
“I enjoy earning one million dollars a year now.”

But now the statement rests atop a behavioral and ethical foundation capable of sustaining it.

The outcome is no longer detached ambition.
It is the natural extension of accumulated identity.

This distinction matters because human beings frequently overestimate the importance of goals while underestimating the importance of self-organization.

The mind obeys repeated instructions remarkably well.
The danger lies in giving it incomplete instructions.

Affirmations therefore should not be viewed as fantasy.
Nor should they be dismissed entirely as superstition.

They are closer to cognitive architecture.

And architecture, if constructed carelessly, can collapse under the weight of its own design.

The conversation always begins the same way.

“What are the carrying costs?”

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An understandable question. Webster’s Dictionary defines cost as “the amount paid or charged for something.” Economically, cost is measurable sacrifice. Money leaving your possession. Taxes, insurance, maintenance, interest expense, reserve allocations, opportunity cost of capital. Cost is arithmetic. Concrete. Immediate.

And because cost is numerical, the human brain treats it with great seriousness.

Value, however, is another matter entirely.

Webster defines value as “the importance, worth, or usefulness of something.” Notice how disturbingly vague that sounds to financially analytical people. There is no spreadsheet comfort in the word “worth.” No clean formula exists for measuring a quiet morning watching the Gulf before the rest of the family wakes up. Moody’s has not yet developed a rating system for grandchildren chasing ghost crabs at sunset.

So the modern mind defaults toward what it can count.

This creates a peculiar distortion in affluent society: people rigorously quantify cost while casually approximating value, despite the fact that value is the entire reason the purchase is being contemplated in the first place.

What is the value of this?

A man will spend three weeks calculating insurance exposure on a beach house and approximately three seconds considering the possibility that his children are growing up faster than his portfolio.

This is treated as prudence.

It is not prudence.
It is selective blindness wearing the costume of discipline.

The problem is that cost is visible while value is experiential. Cost arrives monthly in organized envelopes. Value arrives quietly, often disguised as ordinary life.

A sunrise over the Gulf with fresh coffee does not initially appear economically significant. Neither does a casual hot dog after the beach while sand is still stuck to your legs. Neither does hearing your daughter laugh from another room while the balcony door is open and the sound of the water drifts into the house.

In the moment, these seem almost offensively simple.

Years later, they become the architecture of memory itself.

And here lies the deeper issue: human beings consistently underestimate the long-term value of repeated peaceful experiences. We assume major life satisfaction comes from dramatic events when, in reality, most emotional stability is constructed from small recurring moments accumulated over time.

The beach house is rarely about the house.

It is about permission.

Permission to slow down.
Permission to sit still long enough to notice your own life.
Permission to remember that your children are not permanent residents of your home but temporary visitors passing through childhood on their way elsewhere.

Oddly enough, many highly successful people can model compound interest with stunning sophistication while remaining completely unable to understand compound memory.

The latter is far more powerful.

One extraordinary vacation is pleasant. Twenty summers in the same place become part of a family’s identity. The same ice cream shop. The same beach access point. The same chair facing the water every morning before anyone else wakes up. Eventually the property stops functioning as real estate and starts functioning as emotional infrastructure.

This is difficult for financially conditioned minds to process because modern culture treats enjoyment with suspicion unless it can be justified as productivity.

So people become trapped in endless optimization cycles.

Should we wait another two years?
Should we deploy the capital elsewhere?
What about the market?
What about insurance?
What about rates?

All fair questions.

But eventually one notices something unsettling: many people spend decades preparing to live and remarkably little time actually living.

Meanwhile, life proceeds with complete indifference to the spreadsheet.

Children grow up.
Parents age.
Knees deteriorate.
Friends move away.
Energy declines.
Time compresses.

And the beach remains sitting there every morning, entirely unconcerned with your internal rate of return calculations.

The subtle comedy in all this is that people routinely spend enormous sums on things that produce almost no enduring emotional return whatsoever. Luxury cars disappear into hedonic adaptation within months. Expensive dinners become vague memories by Thursday. Half the subscriptions in modern America appear to exist primarily to help people recover from the stress caused by the jobs required to pay for the subscriptions.

Yet somehow a peaceful place that repeatedly gathers the people you love into the same physical space is considered financially questionable.

Curious civilization we have constructed.

This does not mean cost is imaginary. Cost is very real. Florida coastal ownership requires genuine financial capacity and clear-eyed analysis. Romanticizing expenses is foolish. But reducing life exclusively to measurable financial efficiency produces another form of foolishness entirely — one far more socially accepted and therefore far more dangerous.

At some point an intelligent person must decide what wealth is actually for.

If money cannot occasionally purchase time, peace, memory, proximity, restoration, and human connection, then one begins to wonder whether the accumulation itself quietly became the destination instead of the tool.

And that, perhaps, is the most expensive mistake of all.

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Everyone wants yesterday’s price.

Not just in real estate, but in everything. They want Advanced Micro Devices at $3 in 2015, they want Microsoft Corporation at its public offering, and they want Seaside lots at 1987 pricing. What they are really asking for, though, is not the opportunity itself — they are asking for the outcome, stripped of the uncertainty that existed at the time.

That distinction matters, because the past only looks obvious after it has already worked.

Why the Past Feels So Certain

Behavioral economics addresses this directly through what psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky described as hindsight bias. In simple terms, it is the tendency to see events as having been predictable after they have already occurred. Once we know the outcome, we reconstruct the path as if it were inevitable.

Kahneman later summarized this tendency bluntly: people believe they “knew it all along,” even when they didn’t. The uncertainty, the conflicting signals, and the real possibility of failure all get edited out of memory.

That is exactly what happens with AMD. At $400 today, the move from $3 looks like a straight line. In reality, it was anything but. At $3, AMD was a distressed semiconductor company with legitimate questions about survival. The same distortion applies to Microsoft in the 1980s and to Seaside in its early years. None of these were obvious at the time.

The Seaside Example, Without Nostalgia

A buyer once said, “I wish I had bought in Seaside in the 80s or 90s.”

So we worked through the numbers, not to romanticize the past, but to compare decisions in their actual context.

In the more recent case, a property was acquired for $1,429,000, and redevelopment began in late 2017. The new construction cost another $1,429,000, bringing the total basis to approximately $2,858,000. The project was completed and sold in 2025 for $7,040,000. That outcome was not driven by luck or nostalgia; it was the result of acting decisively in a market that had already proven itself, with clear demand, established pricing, and a defined buyer pool.

Now compare that to the version people wish they had lived. A Seaside lot in 1987 might have cost $30,000, with construction around $125,000, for a total basis of roughly $155,000. Today, that same property might be worth $2,900,000.

On paper, the earlier entry looks superior. But that conclusion only exists because the ending is already known.

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What People Remove From the Equation

The comparison is not about which number is higher. It is about what each buyer had to believe at the moment they acted.

In 1987, Seaside was not an established luxury market. It was a concept. There was no certainty of long-term demand, no proven resale structure, and no clear indication that it would become what it is today. That buyer accepted ambiguity and illiquidity in exchange for a low entry price.

By contrast, the 2017–2025 redevelopment operated in a fully formed market. Demand was visible. Pricing was transparent. The risk did not disappear, but it changed form. It became execution risk rather than existential risk.

Those are fundamentally different decisions, even if they occupy the same piece of land.

The Second Bias at Work

The other force influencing this thinking is regret aversion, a concept formalized by economist Graham Loomes and Robert Sugden. Their work describes how people make decisions in ways that minimize the potential for future regret rather than maximize expected value.

In practice, this shows up as fixation on missed opportunities. People replay the decision they didn’t make, not because it was clearly correct at the time, but because the outcome is now known. The emotional weight of “missing it” becomes larger than the reality of the risk that existed when the decision was available.

This is why the statement “I wish I had bought then” feels so compelling. It is less about the investment itself and more about avoiding the discomfort of having been on the sidelines.

The Quiet Part Most People Ignore

The same person who says they would have bought AMD at $3 rarely accounts for how they would have behaved afterward. They assume perfect conviction, perfect patience, and the ability to hold through volatility. More often, they would have sold early, reduced their position, or never committed meaningful capital in the first place.

The fantasy is not just about timing the entry. It assumes flawless behavior over time.

That assumption is almost never true.

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Reality vs Realty

Both Seaside scenarios worked. One required vision in an unproven environment. The other required disciplined execution in a mature market. Neither was obvious when the decision had to be made.

What people actually want is something different. They want the return profile of early risk with the clarity of hindsight. Behavioral economics makes it clear why this happens, but it does not make it achievable.

The Only Question That Matters

The past is clean because it has already resolved. The present is uncomfortable because it hasn’t.

So the relevant question is not what should have been done in 1987 or 2015. It is what you are willing to do now, given incomplete information and real uncertainty.

Because ten years from now, today will look just as obvious as the past does now, and someone else will be saying they wish they had acted when the outcome was still unclear.

Detour to learn more

A buyer reviews a $4,150,000 beach home. They tour it more than once. They bring family. They measure views. They ask about rental history. They compare it against recent sales. Objectively, the value range supports the number. Nothing about the pricing is absurd. Nothing about the property is misaligned with the market.

And then the offer comes in at $3,900,000.

The gap is $250,000.

In isolation, this is not irrational. Negotiation is part of markets. Buyers test sellers. Sellers counter. That is not the interesting part.

What is interesting is what happens next. The seller holds firm. The buyer holds firm. The property sells to someone else near the original price. And the first buyer, who had the means and the desire, walks away without the house.

The stated reason is always valuation.

“We just don’t think it’s worth $4,150,000.”

But valuation here is rarely a spreadsheet problem. It is a psychological one.

Certainty and the Wire Transfer

Daniel Kahneman, in Chapter 29 of Thinking, Fast and Slow, describes what he calls the certainty effect: outcomes that are certain are weighted disproportionately relative to outcomes that are merely probable. The jump from 95% to 100% is not processed as a five-point improvement. It is processed as categorical. Absolute. Final.

In the luxury home context, the certainty is not about future market performance. It is about the wire transfer.

When a buyer agrees to $4,150,000, liquidity leaves the account. That movement is definite. It is observable. It reduces optionality. Cash becomes concrete.

The additional $250,000 above the buyer’s internal anchor feels like a guaranteed loss. Not a portfolio reallocation. Not a capital deployment. A loss.

Objectively, that framing is incomplete. The buyer is not destroying $4,150,000. They are exchanging liquidity for a hard asset—one that may hold value, may appreciate, and will certainly deliver immediate lifestyle utility. But the brain does not process the transaction as an exchange. It processes it as a subtraction.

And when loss feels certain, the human response becomes distorted. Gayle and I hold real estate. We never consider it anything other than a store of wealth that may go up and down.

The Risk of Avoiding Loss

Kahneman’s fourfold pattern suggests that when people face high-probability losses, they often become risk-seeking. They are willing to gamble to avoid the pain of certainty.

That is precisely what occurs in this negotiation.

Paying $4,150,000 feels like accepting a definite $250,000 concession beyond one’s internal estimate of value. Offering $3,900,000 introduces a gamble. There is a chance—however small—that the seller will accept. There is a chance the market will soften. There is a chance the property will linger.

The buyer prefers the gamble to the certainty.

What is rarely acknowledged is what the gamble includes: the risk of losing the home entirely.

In avoiding the certainty of paying $250,000 more, the buyer accepts the possibility of forfeiting the entire opportunity. “It wasn’t meant to be.”

Wealth and the Paradox of Proportion

In most of these cases, the $250,000 does not represent financial strain. It may constitute a modest percentage of net worth, or the equivalent of normal annual market volatility in an investment portfolio. The same buyer who hesitates over $250,000 in negotiation may absorb comparable fluctuations in equities without significant emotional distress. Indeed, they may suffer this fluctuation daily.

Why the difference?

Because market volatility is probabilistic and abstract. A wire transfer is concrete and visible. One is coded as risk; the other is coded as loss.

Loss aversion does not scale cleanly with wealth. Even substantial resources do not immunize against the psychological weight of a perceived overpayment. In fact, among self-made wealth in particular, sensitivity to “winning” and “losing” transactions can be heightened. The discipline that created wealth can, at times, interfere with the enjoyment of it.

The Misclassification of Lifestyle Value

There is another distortion at play, less discussed but equally important. Luxury and second homes are rarely pure investment vehicles. They are hybrid assets—part store of value, part lifestyle instrument.

Yet buyers often analyze them as though they are evaluating a bond or a stock.

The financial downside is modeled carefully. The potential for short-term price softness is scrutinized. Comparable sales are parsed to the thousand-dollar increment.

What is not modeled with equal seriousness is the gain.

Not appreciation. Not rental yield.

The gain of use.

The gain of summers when children are young enough to still want to be present. The gain of holidays that become tradition. The gain of proximity to water, to family, to a version of life that otherwise remains aspirational.

Those returns are probabilistic and intangible. Because they are not guaranteed, they are discounted. The spreadsheet captures the certainty of the price but cannot quantify the probability-weighted value of lived experience.

And so the buyer, in protecting against a certain financial discomfort, underweights an uncertain but meaningful human return.

The Decision in Retrospect

From a narrow financial lens, holding firm at $3,900,000 may appear disciplined. There is virtue in not abandoning valuation frameworks lightly. No market rewards indiscriminate overpayment.

But behavioral economics suggests that the frame matters.

If the $250,000 difference is framed solely as a certain loss, the buyer will fight to avoid it. If it is reframed as the cost of securing a high-probability lifestyle gain, the analysis shifts. The decision becomes less about winning a negotiation and more about allocating capital toward a defined life objective.

In practice, what often happens is simpler. The house sells. The buyer waits. Another opportunity eventually emerges, but not always at a better price, and not always at the same moment in life. Witness the expected large declines in home values people wanted here after the pandemic rise only to see that about 85% of the pricing gains have now held and quite well actually.

Time moves. Children age. Seasons change.

The $250,000 that once felt like a decisive stand fades into irrelevance. What remains is the unpurchased home and the experiences that never attached to it.

A Behavioral Observation, Not a Prescription

This is not an argument that buyers should ignore price discipline. It is an observation that in luxury markets, the dominant risk is often misidentified.

The buyer believes they are avoiding financial loss. In reality, they may be avoiding the certainty of commitment. They trade a modest, measurable financial discomfort for the illusion of optionality, underweighting the probabilistic but substantial returns of use and memory.

Kahneman would not suggest abandoning rational analysis. He would suggest recognizing when certainty and possibility are being overweighted.

In the context of a $4,150,000 beach home, the most significant loss may not be $250,000.

It may be the life that would have unfolded had the wire been sent.

What he would write at the end of the chapter might be

“They wanted to buy the beach house but felt it was 4% overpriced. Perhaps they should have considered the value of family and the rationality that 10 years on the home would be more valuable than it is today”

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This episode covers:Why traditional goal setting can fail when time assumptions are uncertainHow caregiving and loss reshape long-term decision frameworksThe role of “permission” in pursuing joy after difficult life eventsBehavioral patterns in decision-making under emotional and economic pressure

The connection between personal experience and professional advisory perspectiveWho this episode is for:Individuals navigating major life transitions or lossThose re-evaluating long-term plans or assumptions about timePeople seeking a clearer framework for decision-making under uncertaintyAnyone trying to reconcile emotional experience with economic behavior

Timestamps:

0:00 — Context: revisiting goal setting and integrity

1:08 — Introduction to The Caregiver’s Journey

1:42 — The five-year plan that didn’t exist

2:02 — Loss, preparation, and reality

2:17 — Writing and reflection over 12 years

2:44 — Living without a defined endpoint2:55 — Time, age, and perspective

3:09 — Permission to pursue joy

3:26 — Constraints, freedom, and economic reality

3:41 — Helping others navigate decisions

4:00 — Decision-making from alignment vs pressure

4:22 — Reframing joy after hardship

4:44 — Connecting life experience to economic behavior

5:06 — Why this perspective shapes the business

5:25 — The uncertainty of timeHashtags:#BehavioralEconomics

#DecisionMaking #LifeDecisions #MarketPsychology #Caregiving

They see polished video, constant posting, confident delivery—and assume competence.

The perception has shifted from:

• “This person closes deals”

To:

• “This person looks like someone who closes deals”

That distinction is not subtle. It is foundational.

Visibility has become a proxy for capability.

Visibility is easy to manufacture.

Competence is not.

What actually drives a successful transaction

A real estate transaction is not a performance. It is a sequence of decisions made under pressure.

It requires:

• Pricing judgment

• Contract structure

• Timing discipline

• Negotiation control

• Emotional management of both sides

Most of this work happens off camera.

The outcome of a deal is determined in moments the public never sees:

• How an inspection objection is framed

• When a buyer is told to walk away

• How a seller is repositioned after a failed contract

These moments do not translate well into content.

They are quiet, technical, and often uncomfortable.

That is where real value is created.

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How social media distorts the signal

Social media did not create bad agents.

It changed the signaling system.

Before:

• Reputation was built through transactions, competence, referrals, and time in the market

Now:

• Reputation can be simulated through consistency, aesthetics, confidence on camera—and a well-designed website with little or no volume behind it

The platforms reward:

• Frequency over depth

• Certainty over nuance

• Personality over judgment

As a result, the public is exposed to a curated version of the business that overweights presentation and underweights execution.

The signal is distorted.

Most consumers do not know how to recalibrate it.

Claims of individual high volume often mask team production. The persona is emphasized. Capability is inferred without investigation.

The rise of the Performance Broker

The Performance Broker is not defined by production.

They are defined by attention.

Record sales are claimed loosely. Listings are highlighted even when the outcome was driven elsewhere. Superlatives are used as positioning, not measurement.

Their business model often includes:

• Content creation as a primary activity

• Audience building as a core asset

• Monetization beyond transactions (courses, coaching, systems)

In many cases, real estate becomes one component of a broader media operation.

That is not inherently wrong.

But it is different.

The risk is when the audience assumes the visible activity reflects the core competency.

It often does not.

In most markets, a small percentage of agents drive the majority of meaningful transactions. The rest participate at varying levels—part-time, intermittent, or marginally productive.

Yet some of the most visible voices sit outside that top tier.

Why this matters to clients

Serious clients are not hiring entertainment.

They are hiring judgment.

When representation is selected based on visibility, a category error is being made.

A communicator is chosen over an operator.

The consequences are rarely dramatic. They are cumulative and often invisible:

• Deals that should have been avoided

• Negotiations that concede early without structure

• Pricing strategies that follow trends instead of reading conditions

• Listings taken at aspirational prices that fail to generate demand

These are not failures that go viral.

They are quiet losses.

Clients often do not realize what they lost.

In some cases, even obvious underperformance is rewarded with positive reviews, because the client lacks a benchmark for what effective representation looks like.

Where this goes next

The industry is not going backwards.

Content is now part of the business.

The question is not whether agents should use media.

The question is whether media is being used to explain competence—or to replace it.

Two paths are forming:

1. Agents who build attention and then try to learn the business

2. Agents who master the business and use attention to communicate it

These paths are not equal.

Over time, the market will sort them.

In the interim, the burden sits with the client to understand the difference.

Most do not.

That is where the opportunity—and the risk—sits.

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“Let’s just meet in the middle.”

It sounds reasonable. Fair, even. Balanced.

It is also, in most cases, completely detached from reality.

Not because compromise is wrong—but because the math behind it is misunderstood, and more importantly, because the numbers themselves are often meaningless.

The Setup Everyone Recognizes

A home is listed at $2,395,000.

A buyer comes in at $1,850,000.

Predictably, the seller doesn’t engage emotionally. They respond with structure. A counter at $2,350,000.

Now both sides feel like something has happened.

Lines have been drawn. Positions established.

And almost immediately, a quiet assumption enters the room:

“We’ll probably end up somewhere in the middle.”

So let’s do the math.

The gap is now between $1,850,000 and $2,350,000.

The midpoint is $2,100,000.

That becomes the gravitational center of the negotiation.

But here’s the problem:

Nothing about that number has anything to do with the value of the home.

The First Mistake: Negotiating Against Yourself

At this point, both parties are no longer negotiating the asset.

They are negotiating the spread between two arbitrary numbers.

• The list price is not necessarily value

• The offer is not necessarily value

• The midpoint is definitely not value

It is simply math.

And once both sides accept the premise of “meeting in the middle,” they have quietly agreed to something far more significant:

The outcome will be determined by arithmetic, not by value.

The Math Gets Worse, Not Better

If both parties keep “moving toward the middle,” something interesting happens.

The middle moves.

After several rounds—3, 5, 7 exchanges—the likely settlement range doesn’t stay anchored at $2.10M. It drifts. It creeps. It reshapes itself depending on who concedes, how often, and how aggressively.

This is where the amateur negotiator feels like progress is being made.

In reality, they are just iterating inside a system that has no connection to the underlying asset.

This is not strategy.

This is motion.

John Nash Would Recognize This Immediately

John Nash’s work, which earned him the Nobel Prize, wasn’t about splitting differences.

It was about equilibrium—outcomes shaped by strategy, incentives, and behavior.

In a Nash framework, rational players don’t blindly converge to the midpoint.

They look for moves that change the structure of the game itself.

John Nash won the 1994 Nobel Prize in Economics for his groundbreaking 1950s work on non-cooperative game theory, specifically defining the “Nash Equilibrium“. This concept determines that in any strategic interaction, players achieve an optimal outcome by not deviating from their strategy, assuming others keep theirs fixed.

Key Concepts of Nash Equilibrium (Game Theory):

• The “Nash Equilibrium”: A state where every player in a game is making the best decision they can, based on what they think everyone else will do. No player can improve their outcome by changing their strategy alone.

• Non-Cooperative Games: Nash focused on situations where individuals act independently and compete, rather than acting in collusion (unlike traditional, earlier game theories).

• Equilibrium Existence: He used advanced mathematics (topology) to prove that, even in complex, multi-player, non-cooperative games, there is always at least one stable equilibrium point.

• Beyond Zero-Sum: While early game theory focused on “zero-sum” (one winner, one loser), Nash expanded this to “variable-sum” games, where all players could potentially win, or all could lose, depending on their decisions.

Impact of Nash’s Work:

• Application: The Nash Equilibrium is essential to modern economics, political science, artificial intelligence, and evolutionary biology.

• Real-Life Relevance: It explains situations where rational individuals might not cooperate, even if it is in their best interest to do so.

Which brings us to the moment where the negotiation either stays amateur…

…or becomes something else.

The Pattern Interrupt

Let’s go back to our numbers.

• Buyer: $1,850,000

• Seller: $2,350,000

The amateur move is obvious:

Move halfway. Drift toward $2.10M. Continue the dance.

But what happens if the buyer does something different? Instead of moving toward the midpoint, they move through it.

The next offer comes in at:

$2,214,000 knowing that is the value of the home too or close to it.

Not random. Not emotional.

Deliberate. Of course if the buyer comes back incrementally the seller can move past the halfway point in favor of the buyer to get the same dynamic change in the conversation.

What Just Happened?

Two things, immediately.

First, the buyer (or seller) broke the pattern.

They are no longer participating in a “meet in the middle” sequence. The rhythm is gone. The predictability is gone.

Second—and more important—they just reframed the conversation.

That number is not halfway. It is value based presumably which is the subject of another paper - Why Everyone Ignores the Obvious Value - The Defeat of Low ballers and High ballers.

It is a statement.

“We are no longer negotiating your number versus mine. We are negotiating what this asset is worth.”

Whether that number is right or wrong is almost secondary. If it is the value to either party is what matters first, and if it is defensible based on economic analysis then it wins.

What matters is that the negotiation has shifted from arithmetic to value.

The Likely Outcome

At that point, one of two things happens.

If the seller is still playing checkers, they try to drag it back to the midpoint game. They respond with another incremental move, trying to restore the rhythm.

But if the seller understands what just happened, the conversation changes.

Now the discussion becomes:

• Why that number? Is it the Value?

• What supports it? Is it proper economically?

• What does the market say? Simple Price Per Square foot Reasonable?

• What are we actually trading here? Life’s Next Steps for a Seller, Sandcastles on the Beach for a Buyer.

And the final outcome depends on who can define and defend value. If the other side tries to reset the conversation back to the midpoint game, the disciplined move is simple: “thanks, but no thanks,” and walk away.

It no longer clusters around a mechanical midpoint.

It clusters around whichever side can better define—and defend—value.

That could be:

• Above $2.2M

• Below it

• Or nowhere near any “middle” that was originally implied

But importantly in this example, the next call will be from the seller’s representative trying to revive the deal. Stop playing checkers and play chess instead. But you might need a chess coach.

The Real Conclusion

“Meet in the middle” feels fair.

But fairness is not a pricing strategy. It is not the value of the home.

And the middle of two uninformed numbers is not insight—it’s coincidence. It is at best checkers.

Most negotiations fail not because people are unreasonable, but because they are solving the wrong problem and they are trying to solve it by going back and forth too many times.

They are solving for distance between positions instead of asking a much more difficult question:

What is this actually worth?

Both Buyer and Seller What is it Worth? What can be Rationally Defended?

Final Thought

The amateur negotiator moves toward the middle.

The professional negotiator decides whether the middle matters at all.

And sometimes, the most important move in a negotiation…

…is the one that makes the middle irrelevant.

We speak about “the economy” as if it is shared, observed evenly, and broadly understood. It is not. What most people experience is a localized version shaped by where they live, how they spend, and what they are repeatedly exposed to. Over time, that experience becomes internally consistent, and consistency creates the illusion that you are seeing the whole system.

We are all guilty of RAS Bias. But is it thoughtlessness? That is the real question.

Are you Seeing the whole system? No one is. I am not. You are not.

The reticular activating system (RAS) filters what you notice. It prioritizes what aligns with your environment and suppresses what does not. Over time, it becomes highly efficient at reinforcing a narrow field of view.

You are not observing the economy objectively—you are observing the version your life has trained you to see. Sometimes it is over zealous and sometimes those are limiting beliefs but not everyone can be a millionaire.

In places like 30A, Seaside, Brentwood, or Mountain Brook, that version works. Food quality is assumed. Time is supported by other people’s labor. Systems operate in the background. Nothing about this feels excessive. It feels efficient. That is how the distortion sets in—not through extravagance, but through repetition.

The Economy We Actually Live In

Gayle and I live inside a system. Along 30A and in Costa Rica, the work we do and the lives we lead exist in a narrow, high-functioning segment of the market. The homes, the transactions, and the people we interact with are not representative of the broader economy. We understand that. But we do not lack awareness because we train our RAS to remain aware of the broader need. We work and are concentrated in a slice where liquidity is strong and friction is low.

We buy groceries without recalculating each decision. We do not always think of others do we? We eat well without thinking through trade-offs. Our home is maintained. Our time is supported. It feels normal because it is consistent. And then we go to Costa Rica, and nothing materially changes.

Different country, different backdrop, same structure. The home is there. It is managed. Life continues with continuity whether we are present or not. That should clarify something.

We are not moving between different economic realities. We are carrying our position into different environments. Which means we are not interacting with the baseline economy in either place. We are operating within a contained layer of it. A good layer. A functional layer. But a limited one. We strive to remain aware of and to interact with all layers of the economy with humor and humility. That is where we begin to disconnect from some that chose stratification over participation.

The Economy We Don’t See

At the same time, there is another system operating under very different conditions. In that system, decisions are governed by constraint. Food is not assumed; it is managed. Variability in income or cost is not an inconvenience; it is destabilizing.

The margin for error is narrow, and small disruptions carry consequences that compound quickly. This is not abstract. It is logistical. And from within a system where those constraints are not present, it is difficult to fully understand how that works day to day. Not intellectually—mechanically.

Try running the math on maintaining a consistent, quality diet at lower income levels and the model does not reconcile cleanly. That gap is the point. Not because it is surprising, but because it is largely invisible. The same reticular activating system that allows our lives to function efficiently also filters out most of that reality. Not intentionally. Structurally. Is that OK?

The Problem Is Not the Bubble

Let’s be clear about something. There is nothing wrong with living well. There is nothing wrong with success, or with serving clients at a high level, or with operating in markets that function efficiently. That is not the issue. The issue is believing that what you experience is representative. It is not. Neither at the high end or the low end.

And if you do not correct for that, your understanding of the economy and indeed your understanding of the human condition will remain narrow, your assumptions will drift, and your decisions—whether personal or professional—will be built on incomplete information. That is not a moral failure. It is a perceptual one.

Reprogramming What We Notice—and What We Do

The reticular activating system does not change because you agree with an idea. It changes because you repeatedly expose yourself to something different until it becomes part of what your brain recognizes as relevant. You may have to program it. “I enjoy meeting new people everyday now”. That without limits will cause you to start encountering new people.

That applies directly to how we give. Most people treat giving as occasional, situational, or emotional. At the far end of the spectrum some view it as status.

It shows up when it is convenient, or when something feels immediate enough to break through the filter. That approach does nothing to change perception because it is not consistent enough to matter. If you are serious about seeing the economy accurately, then part of your identity—not your surplus, your identity—has to include participation in the part of the system you do not naturally experience.

Said more simply, buy the beach house but do not discard the people in the community that make it possible for you to exist here.

That means directing time, attention, and capital in a way that is structured, repeatable, and embedded into how you operate.

Organizations like the Point Washington Medical Clinic in Santa Rosa Beach

exist inside that reality. Its function is straightforward: it provides medical care to working individuals and families who do not have reliable access to healthcare despite being part of the same local economy that supports the communities we live in. These are not disconnected people. They are part of the underlying system that makes the visible one function.

When you engage with something like that consistently—not once, not symbolically, but as part of how you operate—you are doing two things at the same time. You are contributing in a way that matters, and you are retraining what you see.

Because now your RAS has something new to register. Now the other side of the economy is no longer theoretical. It is present. And that is a good thing. To be here is great. To integrate to the wider cause of the community is our goal.

Seeing Clearly While Living Well

You are not going to live forever. But by all means live well. I do not judge anything. Really.

I do not judge real estate professionals that have a different style of doing business than us…you know 100 phone calls a day and buy now now now and, well, go ahead and dance on the edge of stripes like some encourage these days.

Integrity is not good or bad. It is the ability for the outside world to be able to look at you and predict behavior.

That is the one variable in this that is not negotiable. Behavior,

The homes, the markets, the transactions—all of it exists within a finite window. It is entirely acceptable to live well within that window. But core behavior that points to integrity is who you really are.

There is no virtue in pretending otherwise. Try not to live inside a narrow version of reality and ignore the broader system that makes that life possible. It makes your integrity more approachable and more humble.

The economy you experience is real. It is simply not complete. Live in it and enjoy what you have created for your family. I am not saying money is bad…far from it.

Just remember where it is placed in thought.

And once you understand that, the question is no longer whether the system is divided. It is whether you are willing to structure your life in a way that reflects that knowledge—both in how you see and in how you give.

Because if giving is not part of how you are wired, it will remain occasional. And if it remains occasional, you will never actually see the system you are operating inside. You will just continue to benefit from it.

Negotiation in real estate is often framed around a simple concept: meet in the middle. But this assumption ignores how behavioral economics and game theory actually influence outcomes.

In this episode, the focus shifts from arbitrary pricing movements to a more disciplined approach grounded in value. Referencing concepts associated with John Nash, the discussion explores why most back-and-forth negotiations drift away from logic and toward inefficient outcomes.

This episode covers:

• Why “meeting in the middle” is not a reliable negotiation strategy

• How repeated counteroffers tend to push outcomes above the perceived midpoint

• The role of behavioral economics in buyer and seller decision-making

• Why negotiating based on numbers alone leads to poor positioning

• How anchoring to property value creates more efficient outcomes

• A simplified framework for structuring a decisive offer or counter

Core thesis:
Negotiation outcomes improve when both parties operate from a clear understanding of value rather than reacting to arbitrary price movements.

Who this is for:

• Buyers and sellers navigating high-value real estate transactions

• Anyone involved in negotiations where price anchoring distorts decision-making

• Individuals interested in applying behavioral economics to real-world decisions

Timestamps:

0:00 — Introduction
0:26 — Tax Day context and episode framing
0:37 — Negotiation myths in real estate
0:49 — Reference to A Beautiful Mind and John Nash
1:25 — The “meet in the middle” assumption
1:40 — Example: $2.4M listing vs $2.0M offer
2:15 — How midpoint thinking distorts value
2:41 — Game theory and repeated negotiation cycles
3:13 — Losing sight of property value
3:28 — Counteroffer sequences and shifting midpoints
4:44 — Why the midpoint rises over time
5:01 — Strategic insight: limiting negotiation cycles
5:09 — Commitment to value vs reacting to numbers
5:45 — Key principle: don’t negotiate numbers
6:07 — Example of value-based counter strategy
6:27 — Behavioral economics as the foundation

Hashtags:

#BehavioralEconomics
#NegotiationStrategy
#MarketPsychology
#DecisionMaking
#RealEstateTiming

People come to me.

Sometimes they know my story. Sometimes they only know a piece of it. Some know nothing of it. But again and again people who have lost someone or are in the process of loss find their way to me and ask some version of the same question.

How do you live after this?

And after many of those conversations I finally realized something very simple.

There are really only two possibilities in life.

Two.

Either we die and there is no existence, or we die and there is.

That’s it.

Those are the only two possibilities.

So think about it.

If a person we love dies and there is no existence after this life, then what is the point of mourning that loss forever and failing to live the only life we will ever know? And this again.

If they no longer exist, they cannot see our sorrow. They cannot know our pain. They cannot experience anything at all.

So why would we spend the rest of the only life we have refusing to live it?

But if there is an existence after this life, then what is the point of mourning endlessly because our loved one is gone?

If they continue on somewhere beyond this life, then they know something we do not yet know. They know that one day we will join them in something we cannot even comprehend. So magical what they have is that they certainly do not concern themselves with us because they know it is a fleeting step in a larger journey.

They worry not about us in the way we worry about them. They would not want us frozen in grief when we still have life left to live. Either way, the conclusion is the same.

Live.

Andy said it best to Red in The Shawshank Redemption:

“Get busy living, or get busy dying.”

Life deals each of us a hand of cards.

Sometimes the hand plays well. Sometimes it does not.

We do not get to choose the hand.

Stephen Colbert once said something that stayed with me when he spoke about losing his father and brothers as a young man:

“You cannot pick the things you are grateful for.” meaning you have to be grateful for you entire life….all of it.

Loss is one of those things.

But what we can choose is what comes next.

So this is what I tell people who come to me now carrying grief.

Give yourself permission to live a more joyful life than you had before no matter the circumstances of what you see as your loss. Because if the people we loved no longer exist, they cannot care whether we mourn forever.

And if they do exist somewhere beyond this life, then they already know something we will eventually learn.

They know we should live.

They know we should seek joy.

So seek more joy than you had before.

After all, the choice is simple.

Get busy living. Or get busy dying.

I want to thank my late wife Brenda for taking me on and bringing me along to make me a better man for my next life. I would like to thank my wife Gayle for understanding my thoughts of this and my wonderings about my life’s journey and for taking me into the future.

The End.