Oliver Foote

Get Lazy & Build Relationships

Update Dec 14, 2024: Added Newsletter Email Archive at End of Post.

I was having a discussion today with my co-workers and we were (very professionally, might I add) complaining about all the times people have asked us to do something that should have been understood to be the other (third party) persons responsibility. I recently had multiple experiences where I was roped into doing someone’s work for them. A good example of this is that twice in the last month I would probably have never received my a commission cheque if I hadn’t followed up and insistently asked to get paid (weeks after I was supposed to, might I add). So all of these things just stacked up and got me thinking. If there are so many people being so lazy out there and making good living wages just doing the bare minimum. Making other people do the work for them, am I missing something? Should I be more lazy? Another word for this type of lazy would be “delegating”, but I’m not sure where the lines are between, favours, delegation, just plain lazy. So I want to unpack this a bit and talk about what lines I think are reasonable and how to better delegate work if that is a part of your job. Getting people to do things is never easy.

Delegation, the thing that all managers have to do and will become very familiar with in their day-to-day work life. If you are trying to get someone to do something. What is the best way to do it? Well for starters, generally speaking, paying someone to do tasks is a good motivator. I work 100% for commission, so when I’m asked to do something I’ll take a bit more convincing, because if I can’t draw a line from point A to point B, and I find I’m quite generous with my time and my lines, the motivation to get that thing done just sometimes isn’t there, especially if I feel like I’m just handing out favours left and right. But I have come to realize that there’s a lot more to working on a team, even if it’s commission only, than just “how will this help me get paid.” It’s important to see the bigger picture, spend time planning for future business, and in general building good relationships with the people you work with so if you do need a favour they’ll be more willing to oblige. It always helps if there’s a trade of some kind. For example, I recently moved to Toronto and borrowed a truck from my company and proceeded to lose the gas cap (tired brain, left it as the gas station). In exchange for using the truck and the lost gas cap, I helped de-stage a few homes. Which to me was a decent enough trade to motivate me to be there.

If you have people who are working for a salary, you might be thinking, “well I’m paying them, they should just do whatever I tell them to do.” This is partially correct, but employees can sometimes box themselves in and think in the mindset of, “I was hired to do a certain thing for you, and anything outside of that is someone else’s job, so I won’t do it.” This again, is where good old trading comes in, people are selfish. Blame self-preservation. But even generous people can have a limit on how much “unrelated to their work BS” they’re willing to put up with. Therefore, if you can make it extremely clear, what someone will be getting or has already gotten, in exchange for them doing something that might not be in the job description for you, it becomes a lot easier to get them to do that thing. I would largely frown upon using a power imbalance to your advantage here, or threats, that’s a great way to build a culture where no one trusts anyone else. Think long term, be polite, and be helpful to others and they’ll do the same for you. There’s also something called building goodwill, some people will take advantage of it, but if you’re in a bit of a lower position, or you’re just starting out on something, you may find it a good idea to put up with a bit more BS. Because when you need a favour from someone higher up, they’ll be much more wiling to help you out, obviously safety first, don’t do anything unreasonable.

I’ll be honest, I’m a complete novice at this organizational behavior thing, I took one course in university about it, and it didn’t involve much psychology. More macro scale how companies behave, all of what I’ve written so far mainly comes from observations, chatting with others, and personal experiences working. On an individual level it’s much more important to have frank conversations with people about what they are thinking and how they are feeling about their work. Sometimes you may just be asking someone to do something that they are clueless about and they might not be willing to admit it because of their ego. Everyone can fall into little traps like this and it’s important to keep good relationships, ask people how they’re doing, and try to see the human behind the work.

I’m going to move on to somewhat of a tangent right now. But something that I find irritating when it comes to employment, is that people teach good management principles that are something along the lines of “help people, help them fail fast, people make mistakes and sometimes you have to fix them.” Some companies are just completely cutthroat and if you underperform their metrics it’s game over, but most will have some amount of leniency. The part that bothers me is when they’re hiring for an entry level position and require 5 years of experience, and during the interview seems like you’re expected to know how to do the job at their company already using their very specific software’s and systems that they’ve built internally. Let’s not even get into the online application portal hiring process. For the love of God, don’t spend a minute online until you know someone. You’re better off spending just an hour a day talking with people even loosely in the field your interested in vs. spending 4 hrs a day applying to jobs on portals where no one will ever read your resume. Give yourself a chance. Yes in the era of the internet and social media, I’m telling you the best way to get a job is talk to people. Interesting how that hasn’t changed.

Back to the regularly scheduled programming. So how do you harness your inner lazy to get more things done, and how do you stand up for yourself and your own productivity and time. Prioritizing is very important, you want to make sure you know what you are doing, and when you are doing it, so if someone asks you “hey can you do this thing for me,” you do not have to default to saying yes. I don’t want to sound like I’m telling you as an employee to NOT do what you’re being told to do, but I do want you to take responsibility for your own time. I think if you’re self employed this is extra important, health and fitness are important aspects of performing at your best, so schedule in that time, an appointment with yourself if you will. I now have a bit of a wonky schedule and work on specific days in Toronto and Mississauga. So if I’m asked to do something in the city on the day which I’m not available there “I’m all booked up.” Even if I end up not having much else to do in the other city on that particular day. Setting boundaries and lines for yourself is important. But it is also very important to be flexible to good opportunities when they present themselves. There’s a balance that needs to be walked, and depending on your job you may have more flexibility for one type of thing and less flexibility for another, you have to learn where it is important to move your schedule around and where it can wait.

By the same token, you’ll be surprised how many people are willing to help you simply if you’ve been helpful to them or you are a nice person. Just asking someone to do something will often result in them obliging even if it’s a slight inconvenience, no one wants to be perceived as unhelpful. Obviously, this can be taken advantage of and I don’t recommend doing so. But if it’s nothing too crazy, maybe you’re just asking for 5 minutes of advice, or you just want to learn something. Many people, even people who’s time costs more than your annual salary, are willing to oblige and help someone out if they’re asked nicely.

For example, if I see someone marketing a home in a way that I haven’t considered before, I’ll just give them a quick call and ask how they did it, if they’re a person with a collaborative attitude who wants everyone to do better, they’ll have no problem telling me exactly what they did. Complimenting someone on something they’ve done that you liked, and then asking for advice on how you can do it yourself, is probably the easiest way to get someone talking and willing to help. Remember, when building relationships it’s not about yourself, the more questions you are asking the other person about themselves, the more engaging they’ll find the conversation. People are extremely willing to help out if you take a genuine and personal interest in them and not necessarily in their work. Usually, work is just a small part of a person’s bigger life and getting to know not just their work but other things about them as a person can be very helpful in asking for favours and building good relationships in general. Like anything practice makes perfect when it comes to building relationships, start small, get a bit outside your comfort zone, and keep trying.

That’s all for now, this is a bit of a shorter one, had a big move to the big city recently (I smell opportunity!) and haven’t had much time to pump this out. But hopefully you are able to take a few things away from this and find that people are often more than willing to help out, as long as you are polite and come across and helpful yourself, and take an interest in the person behind the thing they do.

Keep investing,

-Oliver

Newsletter #27: How Being Lazy Can Help, Interest Rate Improvements, 2025 Market Acceleration

This Weeks Blog Post:

Get Lazy & Build Relationships:

Talking about how to get other people do (politely) do what you want them to do
Management strategies for employees
Learning to build relationships with people instead of wasting time in front of your computer

Read the full article here: https://oliverfoote.ca/get-lazy-build-relationships/

Trreb Market Stats Nov 2024:

Winter is slowly moving in, bring on the winter sports! In sharing some warmer news the Greater Toronto Area home sales increased strongly on a year-over-year basis in November. Many buyers benefitted from more affordable market conditions brought about by lower borrowing costs. The number of new listings were also up compared to November 2023 but by a much lesser annual rate. This is resulting in tighter market conditions and contributing to overall average price growth compared to last year. With the momentum we are experiencing I’m expecting a bit of a slow but steady market recovery in 2025.

There were 5,875 home sales through November, up by 40.1% compared to 4,194 sales reported in November 2023. Total active listings on the MLS® System amounted to 21,818, up by 30.2% year over year. November sales were up month-over-month compared to October. The average selling price was up by 2.6% compared to November 2023 to $1,106,050 in the GTA overall.
Toronto’s Regional Real Estate Board Chief Market Analyst, Jason Mercer, recently stated that on a seasonally adjusted basis, the average selling price edged slightly lower compared to October. Although market conditions have tightened, particularly for single-family homes, the detached home market in particular experienced average annual price growth above the rate of inflation, particularly in the City of Toronto. However, the condominium apartment market continues to experience lower average selling prices compared to a year ago. Condo buyers are benefitting from a lot of choice, giving them negotiating power. This will attract renter households into homeownership as borrowing costs trend lower in the months ahead.

I wish you and your family a fantastic holiday season and I look forward to connecting with you very soon. Happy Holidays!!

Other News:

It appears that despite the proposed tariffs from our neighbors to the south, the Bank of Canada may still be on track to cut interest rates tomorrow (Dec 11, 2024), with some predictions anticipating another 0.5% cut, looking at 5 year bond yields after a bit of a pop post election they have begun to trend back down to the lows we saw in October 2024. If this trend continues going into the holidays and the New Year, we can expect buyers to be pleasantly surprised by how much their purchasing power on a fixed mortgage has improved.

Above chart from marketwatch.com

On top of this a slew of NEW mortgage rules will be coming into place on Dec 15, 2024 (you can learn about them at my YouTube presentation here: https://youtu.be/8XyHEV1c7R4) which for first time buyers will instantly provide them with an improvement to their purchasing power as well.
You can see below the difference that a 1% change in interest rates makes to the potential mortgage amount someone can afford on the same 3200 budget.

With low-down payment mortgages being allowed up to 1.5 million dollars this also will improve affordability in some slightly more expensive markets and bring a wider array of potential buyers to those homes.

Above chart made by yours truly.

Stock Market Performance as of Tuesday Dec 10, 2024:

S&P 500: 6,044.60 (+27.44% YTD)
NASDAQ: 19,687.07 (+33.33% YTD)
S&P/TSX Composite: 25,565.73 (+22.49% YTD)

Macroeconomics Statistics:

Canada’s CPI Inflation Oct 2024: 2.0% (0.0% Change from Sept 2024)
Current BoC Benchmark Interest Rate: 3.75% (0.5% Decrease on Oct 23, 2024, next decision: Dec 11, 2024)
Unemployment Rate November 2024: 6.5% (0.1% Decrease from Sept 2024)

Greater Toronto Area (GTA) Real Estate Stats – November 2024:

November 2024 Average Selling Price All Home Types: $1,106,050
Y-o-Y (comparing Novembers) % Change in Average Selling Price: +2.6%

YTD Number of MLS Sales: 64,277
YTD % Change in MLS Sales (compared to this time last year): +2.7%

Y-o-Y (comparing Novembers) % Change in MLS Sales: +40.1%
Number of MLS Sales in November: 5,875
Y-o-Y (comparing Novembers) % Change in Active Listings: +30.2%
Number of Active Listings in November: 21,818

Inventory Available: 3.71 Months (Increase from 3.5 Months in November 2024)

Market Type: Buyers Market

Thanks for reading and have a great week! -Oliver Foote

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“Do What You Love” is Backwards: Stay Focused, Learn to Fail

Update Dec 14, 2024: Added Newsletter Email Archive at End of Post.

The Modern Challenge of Finding a Career:

Many young people, myself included, have a hard time trying to figure out what to do with their lives. I’m usually a proponent of try as much as you can until you find something that sticks, but this is much harder to execute in reality than it may initially seem. Changing from thing to thing to thing can be exhausting in the same way that just sticking with the first thing you find and end up hating going into work every day is exhausting. So what is the answer? If doing something you hate is exhausting, and trying to find something you love is exhausting, what are you supposed to do? That’s the topic I’m going to try and tackle today. Not necessarily an easy topic to discuss, but I think I have some insights that may be somewhat helpful to the directionless or those who want to change direction.

Why “Do What You Love” Sucks:

I’m first going to start with the common wisdom of “do what you love.” I’ve been hearing this for quite some time, and after trying to do just that, I actually think this statement is backwards and that “do what you love” is not great advice. Why? Well if you’ve ever tried to make a living off a hobby that you enjoy doing in the few spare hours off work, you’ll quickly learn that making money, and doing something for fun, for most of us, are two different worlds. When you try to make money off something you are doing for fun, it can often cease to be fun, and I think this is especially true for creative endeavours. If you are a painter, or you make trinkets or cookies in your free time, and you try to mass produce paintings and trinkets, you’ll soon find yourself burnt out from needing to paint every second of the day in order to keep up with the demand for your art (best case scenario). If you aren’t accustomed to the pace of painting all day long, and you don’t have a way of continuing to make it interesting for yourself, you may find yourself no longer interested in that thing. There are those few people in the world who make a living off their music, or their art, or some other creative endeavour, but there are thousands and thousands more who are “starving artists.” So unless you have an unrivaled thirst to out practice and outwork basically every single competitor, or some unrivaled business acumen, you might want to continue doing that thing as a hobby.

Why You Shouldn’t Start a Business Based on “Do What You Love”:

I spoke in my pervious article (Employed Vs. Self-Employed Work) about what people overlook when they are starting a business, and I discuss the huge challenges with being self-employed. If you do choose to “do what you love” as your own business, you need systems in place, you’ll spend a lot more time just managing the business than you want, and you’ll have to become a jack of many trades rather than being able to focus on your craft. This can be managed and software nowadays is a godsend, but I still caution people who want to leave stable work for effectively contract jobs because you really are going to be working 24/7 rather than just 9-5. I see these advertisements for Realtor school quite often on my Google ads (presumably because I spend a lot of my time looking at houses and economic data), and I always laugh at their tagline “escape your 9-5, take control of your own schedule”. Which loosely translates to, “you’ll now be working 9-9 most days, oh also doing open houses on weekends, and if you’re doing this business right, you’ll likely be fielding calls or making calls most hours of the day. You’ll have to try and find new business every day and you’ll spend the majority of your time just looking for clients rather than working for them.” If you want something to be completely engaged in, then by all means, do the self-employed game, maybe you’ll love it, but if you want balance in your life, maybe don’t. You can create some amount of balance once you’ve established yourself, have a client base, and know how to delegate, but at the start you will be working your butt off to make ends meet with lackluster results unless you’re truly exceptional. Usually it takes people 5-10 years before they can slow down a bit and take back some control of their schedule, and some people never manage to. So, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

How Building Your Skills Leads to Love:

Now, I’m going to somewhat contradict the above paragraph. Because I’m going to talk about the right way to “do what you love”. Since I mentioned this phrase is backwards you’re probably wondering what I think is the right phrase. I think it’s something along the lines of “work hard, learn a skillset, do disciplined practice, become an expert, and finally, love the result.” It’s so much easier to love something you’re good at, that you’ve practiced at, and that you want to keep pushing the boundaries in. This perspective is not new to me, but it has been reinforced by a few books I’ve been reading recently the first is The Algebra of Wealth by Scott Galloway, which I think is a great introductory finance book and money book in general. The second is Grit by Angela Duckworth (a bit late to the party I know). I think that both of these books overarching ideas when it comes to a career is focusing on becoming good at the thing you are doing, and reframing “failure” as something that helps you get better and better.

It’s Supposed to Be Hard:

Often when you are learning something new, it’s going to be hard, it’s going to suck, and you’re going to want to quit. In Grit Duckworth interviews many Olympic swimmers and one of them says (I’m paraphrasing), “honestly, going to practice is hard, and I frequently don’t want to go, and I often find myself thinking about quitting.” She then goes on to say that a top performer attitude is doing the hard thing anyway. They are focused on the top level goal of getting to the Olympics and winning medals. They have a compass that guides all of their lower level motives. She stresses the importance of finding your one overarching life compass that doesn’t change. When it comes to putting in the hard work that is hard to do every day, she stresses the importance of routine. It’s much easier to do the hard thing if you have a routine and do it at the same time every day, so you don’t have to “re-convince” yourself to do the hard thing. Just showing up is half the battle. Lastly, the importance of long term commitment. The good old 10,000 hours (or 10 years) of practice to become an expert is something that can be hard to remember when you’re in the trenches doing the hard work, but nothing replaces disciplined practice. Probably the most important trait or feeling you need to have towards the work you are trying to do is the desire to be constantly getting better. If you have no drive or “grit” to improve on the last thing you did then you’ll quickly lose the motivation you need to keep moving. This is where other people are extremely helpful and getting quick feedback on what you’ve done is extremely important too. You should have a coach or mentor figure who can help you set goals for disciplined practice, and then can give you feedback on what you’ve done so you can improve quicker. You should also spend some time reflecting on your practice and resting, don’t overdo it every single day. Even Olympic athletes have a daily training limit. If you do all these things, and are focused on challenging yourself, building a skillset though putting in multiple repetitions, getting feedback, and have an compass guiding your lower level goals. Then you are on the path eventually loving what you do.

Finding Your “Life Compass”:

Many people after reading this might say, “that’s great Oliver, but I don’t have a compass, and quite frankly I still have no clue what I want to do.” There are a few things you can do to try and some questions you can ask yourself to try and find your compass. Think back to what you enjoyed in high school, as this often tends to be the start of what people’s “career discovery” phase. Think about things that you are generally good at, ask friends and family if you can’t think of anything. If you are still having trouble this is where the exploring phase can work well. But you have to spend time actually trying things, not just reading about them. It can take a while before you develop a true interest in something so don’t give up on something after 1 day of it being challenging or not working out the way you thought. The most important thing, and this is advice I often struggle to follow myself, is to put yourself out there. If you don’t have your compass, you need to be spending time to find the compass. If you have the compass, you need to be spending time to build good habits and a system that will help you “train” in order to become a “professional” at your chosen career path. All of this is hard, all of this will be a huge exercise in failure. But if you work through the challenges, learn from your failures, and defeat the fear of failure (you don’t know till you try) you’ll make great progress towards you overarching goal.

Reframing Failure: Failing is Awesome!

As a side tip from another book, try to reframe failure as being “awesome”, like “hell yeah, that was hard as hell, I just fell flat on my face, I’m ready to get out there and do it again!”. I think the advice of finding what you love as a function of practice, training, and hard work, rather than simply a function of “do what you love” or “do what you’re interested in” is much sounder advice. In simple terms I think people should “do what they are good at, and practice to become an expert.” This advice builds resiliency in children, teaches them to have grit, and to not be afraid of failure (weird how that happens as you get older). I completely understand why many student nowadays are having a hard time unfreezing themselves from paralysis by analysis. They’ve learned to avoid failure at all costs, and especially with the internet and everyone’s lives being online, it can be extremely damaging and unforgiving to fail in public. If you fail a course at school, or do poorly on one test, your chances of not getting into the best university could be lost, so the pressure is high, and the consequences of failure are high as well. Which is the exact opposite approach we should be teaching. It’s good to experiment, it’s good to try new things, it’s good to iterate, and importantly one of the best ways to avoid a future failure when you need to perform, is by failing so many times in private that it’s unreasonable you’ll be unsuccessful (i.e. doing lots of math problems, or making hundreds of cold calls, or lots of songs, or lots of paintings). Fail so much, and become so good, learn from your mistakes, that when you do put your practice to work, even a bad day will still be a good result. We need to be providing more and more opportunities for students to fail in private, and more importantly emphasizing that practice is important in every aspect of life; a career is no exception. I even believe that failing in public can be a great lesson, but I think too much negative feedback when someone is just starting out can be destructive to the motivation to do that thing in the long run, and it can be hard to come back from too much hate about the path you want to pursue. So in the beginning maybe some sheltering from failure is justified. But over time, once they’ve built the failure muscle, and understand that failure is awesome, and decide to just give things a go and focus on constant improvement, the negative feedback becomes easier to deal with as competence grows, and funnily enough, the failures might decrease, at which point I encourage constantly pushing the needle to get better and better. I strongly believe that if we were pushing this kind of advice, rather than “do what you love”, people would be loving what they do a whole lot more, and the generation of directionless young people would have a much easier time finding their direction.

Thanks for reading, I hope that you found this article helpful or interesting. Feel free to email me, I’m always interested in hearing what other people think about these articles. As always,

Keep practicing,

Oliver Foote

Newsletter #19: Is “Do What You Love” Good Advice? The US Stock Dip, Toronto July Real Estate Stats

This Weeks Blog Post:

“Do What You Love” is Backwards: Stay Focused, Learn to Fail:

Figuring out what you want to do with your life can be a challenge at the best of times
My take on becoming an expert, and learning to love what you are doing
Pulling ideas from Grit by Angela Duckworth and The Algebra of Wealth by Scott Galloway

Read the full article here: https://oliverfoote.ca/do-what-you-love-is-backwards/

Economic News:

I’m actually going to start by talking about the recent dip in the US stock market. I was asked what happened and why there was a sudden drop in prices, the answer seems to be that a bad jobs report came out with the US unemployment rate, in one month from June to July it rose by 0.2 percent to 4.3% y-o-y. The number of unemployed American’s increased by 352,000 in one month. A year ago the unemployment rate was 3.5%.
The trend has been increase unemployment in the US since about February of this year, while Canada’s unemployment rate rose a lot sooner but also affects 10x fewer people. So a big move like this in the US can be viewed by the markets as a somewhat slippery slope for the economy if the trend continues to worsen. This large change was not priced into the market, but now the market is pricing in some larger drops in the unemployment rate. So if this turns out to have been a 1 month anomaly of an event then I expect the markets to recover from their recent dip.
Tiff Macklem, governor of the Bank of Canada has made is clear that if inflation remains at current levels and doesn’t show signs of running away again, he is likely to cut rates again in 2024, and a Reuter’s poll is showing 2 more rate cuts in 2024, which would be a total of a 1% drop in interest rates. Canada is also struggling a bit more than the US with the employment rate, and there have been some signs that employers have been less willing to hire, seasonal student work has been especially hit this year. This is likely going to factor into the decision to bring rates down further in an attempt to avoid a recession (although I’m of the belief that there is a “silent recession” going on).

Toronto Real Estate Market July 2024 Stats Update:

With the heat of the summer and the recent cuts to interest rates by the Bank of Canada the volume of sales in July ticked up over last year. Sales volume has begun to rebound since 2022 when the Bank of Canada was combating inflation and raising rates, sales are up almost 10% compared to July 2022’s figures. Even with the growth in sales volume, buyers continue to benefit from more choice with the number of active listings up 55% to 23,877 over last July. With a better-supplied market, prices, on average, have remained relatively flat compared to the same period last year.
Even with an increase in volume of sales, the average selling price of $1,106,617 represented a small decrease of 1.1% over July 2023. TRREB’s Chief Market Analyst Jason Mercer recently stated that as more buyers take advantage of more affordable mortgage payments in the months ahead, they will benefit from the substantial build-up in inventory. The above average available inventory of homes for sale will initially keep home prices relatively flat. However, as inventory is absorbed, market conditions will tighten in the absence of a large-scale increase in home completions, ultimately leading to a resumption of price growth.

Market Performance as of open Tuesday August 6, 2024:

S&P 500: 5,240.03 (+10.48% YTD)
NASDAQ: 16,366.85 (+10.84% YTD)
S&P/TSX Composite: 21,979.36 (+5.30% YTD)

Canada CPI Inflation June 2024: 2.7% (0.2% Decrease from May 2024)
Current BoC Benchmark Interest Rate: 4.50% (0.25% Decrease on July 24, 2024)
Unemployment Rate June 2024: 6.4% (0.2% Increase from May 2023)

Thanks for Reading, Have a Great Week!

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