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F R OM T H E F O U N D E R
Change for the sake of change
A s I write this, my wife and I are currently in the process of moving from a beautiful, large, well-designed mid-century modernesque house in suburban Fayetteville into a more than 150-year-old Victorian on a busy street downtown. How can you use change in your AEC firm to awaken your creativity and that of your people? Maybe it’s time to really think about that.
On some levels, that may seem crazy. Our current place really doesn’t need anything. It’s the most comfortable and well-laid out, spacious, and light home I have ever owned. It doesn’t need anything, there’s a place for everything, and we love our neighbors. Why move into a place that is fairly crusty and needs considerable work to bring it up to our standards? Sure – economically, it is a great deal. It’s cheaper than our house and has a couple extra lots facing a side street that are really valuable (even though we have no intentions of selling them). It will be beautiful with its 12-foot ceilings and we have a lot that will allow us to easily build a new super garage and office. It will be great once done, but what a lot of work and hassle to get there. It’s stressful for my wife. I’m tired and I don’t always like change. But THAT is precisely WHY we needed to do this.
Change – that is change for the SAKE of change – is good. It’s good for us to go through this even though we had no need to do it. This move has done something for me – besides helping me close my activity rings on my Apple Watch every day because of the work involved. Sure, it will be healthy to go through all of our stuff and thin that down some. But more than that, the change has energized me. I have found myself thinking about what we will do with this new house and site every day. We have attacked the project. We planned all of our changes and have 10-15 people working daily so we can get it in halfway decent shape before moving in next week. We have already transformed the yard by clearing out dead trees and hundreds of feet worth of gigantic,
Mark Zweig
See MARK ZWEIG , page 12
THE ZWEIG LETTER DECEMBER 13, 2021, ISSUE 1420
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