Everything I Do Is the Same Move
The first semester I taught real estate finance, I inherited a series of slide decks from the previous professor.
There was a syllabus, a set of learning objectives, and a carefully constructed deck for each class. My job, as I understood it, was to deliver the material.
I discovered almost immediately that I could not teach someone else's slides.
Not because the content was wrong. Because the framing was not mine. I could present it, but I could not make it real. The moment a student asked a question that went slightly off script, I needed something more than the next bullet point.
So I rebuilt everything.
I took each learning objective and asked what it actually meant underneath the academic language. I took each concept and asked how I would explain it to someone sitting across from me at a job site or in a deal meeting. I put it into my own language, which forced me to understand what I thought the concept actually was.
That process took an absurd amount of time. We joked later that, given adjunct pay and the hours I put in, I had basically paid Georgetown for the privilege of teaching the course.
But it taught me something I did not fully understand until much later.
The thing that changed the room was rarely the slide I had rebuilt. It was the moment I stopped following it.
It was the war stories. The real projects. The deals that worked, the ones that did not, and the moments where theory met reality and produced something unexpected. When I talked about something I had actually done, the students leaned in differently. The questions got sharper. The concept became something they could hold.
Eventually I understood that the war stories were not supplementing the teaching. They were the teaching. The academic structure was the scaffolding. The practitioner experience made the idea legible.
One of those moments was cap rates.
The sentence I eventually landed on was simple: cap rates are a proxy for risk.
It took me far too long to get there, not because the concept is especially complicated, but because years of industry language had become so familiar that I had stopped seeing what sat underneath it.
Teaching forced me to translate the concept back into something usable.
And once I saw that, I started recognizing the same move everywhere else.
In a deal meeting, it might be asking which assumption has quietly become a fact.
In an organization, it might be noticing that the stated problem is real, but something underneath it is actually driving the outcome.
In an advisory conversation, it is often the question that seems slightly beside the point until it turns out to be the only question that matters.
The Near Enemies framework grew out of that same habit of mind.
I used to describe Near Enemies mostly as strengths that had crossed a line. That still happens. But I now think the more useful question is what has been given authority to decide what.
A strength gets a job it cannot actually do. A proxy gets mistaken for the thing it was meant to represent. A metric, assumption, feeling, or protective response starts answering a question that belongs somewhere else.
That is the jurisdiction problem.
And the diagnostic move is remarkably consistent: get underneath the vocabulary. Ask what is actually operating. Ask what job it has been given. Ask whether it gets to decide the question in front of you.
Then put the decision back where it belongs.
That is what I do through Residy. It is what I teach. It is what Near Enemies is trying to make visible.
For a long time I treated those as separate workstreams: teaching, advisory work, a framework, a book. A portfolio of things that happened to overlap.
They are not separate.
They are the same move in different rooms.
Find what the apparent problem is obscuring. Name what is actually operating underneath. Give it language precise enough to use.
Once I saw that through-line, a lot of things that had felt fragmented became coherent.
What is the move you keep making across different parts of your work that you have not fully named yet?