Creativity is a sign
What are you creative on?
We are all creative, but in what areas of your life are you endlessly creative? What type of problems?
Creativity is getting ideas and getting things done.
Creativity is on the other side of commitment.
Creativity means solving problems and finding “creative” solutions that most people would not think of.
But the idea isn’t enough. You must feel the energy and responsibility to bring it to life.
Let me give you an example.
Francis Greenburger is a real estate investor who owes part of his success to his ability to come up with creative financial solutions to get deals done. I explained one of them before. But here’s another one.
When he and his partners were developing the 1000M skyscraper in Chicago, they had already gotten through the humps of zoning, approvals, design, and lining up financing for a roughly $465 million project, but they had a huge problem: they weren’t selling enough apartments, and those sales were what gave the lenders confidence to actually fund the construction. They had almost $100 million of condos under contract, but that was still only 23 percent of the building, and the buyer deposits couldn’t even be used to build the thing because they had to sit in escrow. They tried hard to sell the units, spent a ridiculous amount on marketing, made concessions, and still the sales weren’t where the lenders wanted them. [1]
To say the lenders were nervous was an understatement. If they pulled the funding, nothing would get built, and good luck going back to the market later trying to raise hundreds of millions for the skyscraper that already failed to get financed the first time.
So now they had to find another source of money to make the lenders comfortable enough to move forward. One option was what’s called preferred equity. Basically, an outside investor comes in and puts a big chunk of money into the project. Their money is riskier than the bank’s loan, so they demand a much higher return for it. The bank might be lending at something like 4 percent, while these investors wanted something closer to 14 percent. That was incredibly expensive money.
And this is where Francis starts getting creative. Instead of accepting that as the price of money, he asks where the preferred-equity firms get their money in the first place. From investors. And Time Equities already had thousands of investors of its own. So why pay another firm to take money from investors and then give it back to you at a huge markup? Why not go directly to your own investors? The problem was that their investors were used to buying equity, not lending money into a construction project, so then Francis had another idea: create a different product for them, debt instead of equity, with a clear five-year exit. Now they just had to raise around $90 million in nine months, even though raising $130 million from the same general pool had taken them two years before. [2]
They actually launched the investment offering, and construction started. But then COVID happened, and Goldman Sachs, the investment bank that was helping finance the construction of the skyscraper, got cold feet and stopped releasing further funds. Construction came to a halt. So now they had another problem. They eventually decided to abandon the condo strategy altogether and turn the building into apartments for rent. This made financing easier because, instead of depending on selling individual condos before construction, lenders could now look at how much rental income the completed building was expected to generate to determine how much they were willing to lend. [3]
And then Francis had another idea to make the financing work.
What if they sold the land underneath the skyscraper?
Not the building itself, but the land it was sitting on. They could sell interests in that land to investors and lease it back, allowing them to continue developing the building while the investors collected rent on the land.
And here’s where it gets interesting. There’s this thing called a 1031 exchange, where people who sell an investment property can postpone paying capital gains taxes if they reinvest the proceeds into another qualifying property. So there were investors sitting on money from selling their real estate who needed somewhere else to put it, and Francis realized he could give them exactly that. Instead of just asking people to invest in his risky skyscraper, he could offer them ownership in the land underneath it, which could help them defer their taxes and provide rental income. [4]
So suddenly the investors didn’t need to demand a ridiculous return to make the deal attractive. The tax advantage was part of what made it attractive.
Time Equities marketed a $72.4 million investment in the land, offering investors a 5 percent annual return. And they actually completed the land transaction in December 2021, the same month they secured a new $304.5 million construction loan. [5]
Now think about that. Francis said buildings like this might make 6 percent on a good day, while traditional investors wanted 12 to 18 percent. The math simply didn’t work. So he found investors who valued the tax benefits enough to accept a lower return, making a possible project that otherwise wouldn’t have been financially viable. [6]
And the building actually got built. In 2024, people started moving into 1000M. [7]
It would have been so much easier to just give up. Oops, sorry, we couldn’t find the financing. We tried. The sales weren’t there. The capital was too expensive. Goldman stopped funding the building. Let’s go back to New York and find another project.
No, man. He just wasn’t willing to do that until he knew for himself that he had tried everything. And as Francis himself put it when talking about all the things that can go wrong with a project like this, “you just sort of have to will your way through them.” [8]
The “Oh, I tried and it didn’t work” is cap. How hard did you try? And I know this because I’ve said it many times myself. Oh, I tried. But did I actually try? Or did I do the most obvious thing a few times and call it trying?
I think about my own life. I’ve had problems, and in some areas, I just have this ease in solving them. For some reason, I get a million ideas and then I go and do them.
Most recently, a friend and I came up with this ridiculous project, and we needed to market it. For three weeks, I just kept having idea after idea for how to get people interested, sometimes several in the same hour, and then actually going and doing them. We got over 50 companies involved, nearly 100 people signed up, and even ended up in the newspapers. And then the cherry on top: I had an idea for a short film, got the actors, shot it, made it, and the video went viral.
Let me give you another example.
When Aaryaman and I were working on Curiosity @ Illinois, we had built this website that let students discover more than 60,000 classes at the University of Illinois by building, professor, time, and so on. We wanted to know what was happening in all those classrooms around us, because wouldn’t it be cool to just walk into some random class and learn something you never knew existed?
We thought it was amazing.
But nobody cares about your amazing website just because you think it’s amazing.
We needed people to care.
And I remember during one of our late-night coding sessions, I had this idea for a video. What if we made a short film about a guy trying to impress a girl by guessing what class another student had just come from? He would use our website to find the class, impress the girl, and get the date.
And instead of calling the video something like “Introducing Curiosity @ Illinois,” which nobody would care about, we called it “How to Impress Any Girl at UIUC.”
So we wrote the script, went around campus trying to find people to act in it, got rejected by something like 15 people, eventually found our actors, filmed the thing, and Aaryaman edited it. We launched the website with the video, shared it everywhere, and within days it had hundreds of thousands of views across social media. [9]
Now, why did I think of that?
I don’t know.
But I think one of my abilities is to understand something, which could be a project, product, business, idea, whatever, and somehow still remember what it was like to not know anything about it, or even worse, not care about it.
Because once you care deeply about something, it’s very easy to forget that other people don’t.
And I seem to have this ability, or empathy, sensitivity, memory, whatever you want to call it, to put myself in the position of someone who doesn’t know or care and figure out how to explain it in a way they understand, get interested, feel something, and hopefully take action.
And then the ideas start coming.
Was that a natural ability? I have no idea.
Somehow my life put me in positions where I needed to understand people without necessarily understanding their words. Imagine being in high school and not understanding a single word of what people are saying, and being scared some kid might drug you or something. You develop your spidey senses. That’s just one example. When verbal language isn’t really an option, you start paying attention to other things: how people walk, how they look at you, how they say something, the emotions behind what they’re saying, the way they behave when they’re with one person versus another.
You start picking up on things that perhaps other people don’t even notice because they don’t have to.
And then, on top of that, I’ve spent countless hours writing essays, probably over a hundred in the last five or six years, writing a few books, making videos, interviewing people, among other things.
Do I have those skills because I’ve spent so much time doing these things, or have I spent so much time doing these things because I have those skills? Both are the wrong questions. I was simply compelled to do those things, so I did, and I ended up spending a lot of time doing them, and then maybe I became “good.”
I can tell you about other areas where that magic wasn’t there no matter how much I tried. Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, while interesting and fascinating, but in a class setting, I couldn’t do it. Another example is electrical circuits homework problems. I found both things super interesting, but give me a test or homework and say, ‘Here, solve this,’ and creative solutions wouldn’t always arrive the way finding a new frame to solve a problem in other areas of my life might, like coming up with ideas to sell something, solving bullshit bureaucratic problems, and getting people to care about stuff.
So I don’t know. If you’re thinking about what you want to do with your life, or whatever, consider this question: Where in your life do you find creative solutions to problems that perhaps aren’t obvious to most people?
There lies a hint, and it’s up to you if you want to read it. We get so many hints and clues, it’s unbelievable, yet we blind ourselves, which is the most confusing thing in the world. Growing up is a process of learning to see, but at the same time learning to see the things we see but somehow decide not to see.
Turn on the lights.
If you’re into interesting ideas (like the one you just read), join my Updates, and I’ll send you new essays right when they come out.
Notes
[1] And they really did try. By the end of 2018, they had spent more than $30 million designing and marketing the project, with only about 75 condos under contract at prices averaging at or below cost. Francis brought in this guy Javier Lattanzio, Time Equities’ director of sales, a former professional tennis player who had helped sell Francis’s skyscraper in New York, to help sell the condos. And man, this guy was intense hahaha.
Javier started flying to Chicago every week, was shocked to discover the sales office was CLOSED ON MONDAYS, started following up on every deal, pressuring the salespeople, and even pushing Francis himself and the other investors to accept lower offers.
He described how the team probably saw him: “Here was this fucking guy coming from New York to push people to do something that they already knew how to do.”
And then there’s this line from Javier:
“I can’t accept mediocrity. I can’t take it. It drives me insane—insane.”
Eventually, the Chicago sales team got so annoyed with his visits that they complained, and he was told, “Maybe you shouldn’t go there anymore.” Javier replied, “Fine, I won’t go there anymore.”
During the ten months he had been involved, they made 54 sales. From December 2019 through March 2020? Zero.
You can read more details in Autobiography of a Skyscraper, pp. 63–67 and 87. I loved this part of the book, and it made me laugh out loud multiple times.
[2] All of these details come from the incredible and original Autobiography of a Skyscraper book, particularly pages 69–72.
You can also hear him talk about some of these financial puzzles in this interview.
[3] Here’s an article from 2020 about Goldman Sachs stopping the funding. They had already started working on the foundation!
And here’s another article from December 2021 explaining how they restarted construction after changing the building from condos to rentals and securing a new $304.5 million loan.
So they basically had to figure out how to finance the skyscraper all over again.
[4] Francis explains the whole land and 1031 exchange idea himself in this interview, around 26:20–32:20. What I find fascinating is that he wasn’t just looking for investors willing to accept less money. He figured out that there were people who wanted to buy real estate for tax reasons, and he could offer them exactly that by structuring an investment around the land underneath the skyscraper. He even says this was one of his ten most creative financial solutions.
Here’s another favorite of mine, from Risk Game:
“I came up with a technical solution around the problem involving a wrap mortgage. If I were the holder of the wrap mortgage, and so responsible for the underlying mortgages, the AG would most likely go for it. When Bob called me to discuss the matter, he suggested the exact same solution. There weren’t too many people who could have come up with that idea. Smitten, I wondered about Bob for my COO.
I couldn’t ask him whether he wanted a job because I was buying a building from him. So instead, I asked him if he knew anybody who would be suitable for the job. If he wanted to blink, he could, and that was exactly what he did.”
—Francis Greenburger & Rebecca Paley, Risk Game: Self Portrait of an Entrepreneur.
[5] I actually found the original advertisement! Time Equities was advertising this $72.4 million investment in the land in an October 2021 real estate investment magazine. Check out page 9! They’re offering a 5% annual current return, paid quarterly, with a projected four-year holding period.
If you look at Time Equities’ own investment track record, entry 117, you’ll find 1000 South Michigan Land, a $72.4 million investment acquired on December 21, 2021. That same month, they also secured the $304.5 million construction loan. They actually pulled it off.
[6] Francis explains the math himself around 27:55–29:25 of this interview. He says residential buildings might make 6% on a good day, and that 7% would be heaven. Meanwhile, the preferred-equity investors wanted 12–18%.
How the hell are you supposed to make that work?
That’s why he needed to find a CREATIVE SOLUTION!!! Again, creativity is a sign.
[7] And here’s the official announcement of 1000M’s grand opening. The first residents moved in on May 1, 2024. After all those years, all those financing problems, and even a pandemic, people were finally living in the building.
[8] That’s Francis himself in this interview, around 15:50. He’s talking about how the costs, lenders, and market conditions can change at any moment and potentially kill the entire project. I love that he describes getting through all of that as having to will your way through it.
Of course, plenty of real estate developers keep pushing and end up losing millions. Sometimes a project simply doesn’t make financial sense.
But Francis kept finding new ways to make the numbers work. He started asking different questions, looking at what investors wanted, and finding opportunities where nobody else seemed to see them.
I mean, who would have thought that selling the land underneath a skyscraper could help solve its financing problems?
[9] I wrote about the Curiosity @ Illinois story in Chapter 21.4 of The Jailbroken Guide to the University, “The Platform That Let Students Follow Their Curiosity—Until the University Noticed.” Including how we came up with the video, spent hours trying to find random people willing to act in it, and eventually got it made.