Better Lucky Than Good!
The two-road chance and the lucky find
The Story
All industries have little phrases that serve as shorthand. For example, in real estate, if a developer tells you that their site is located at the corner of “First and Main,” they are talking, maybe even bragging, about a prime location. Another example is the saying, “Better lucky than good.” The idea is simple: a pragmatic developer can set aside ego and be quite happy earning a big profit, even if a project’s success had little to do with their own brilliant strategy, leadership, and decision-making. Here’s a story that illustrates the idea.
In the fall of 2022, a Minneapolis real estate development company called Sherman Associates purchased a vacant, 550,000 square foot Wells Fargo operations center in downtown Minneapolis for $6.4 million—basically land value—calling the 2.5-acre, full city block site a “blank canvas.” In early 2023, Sherman announced plans for a $400 million project called “Harmonia” that would include the demolition of the existing building and the construction of three new towers filled with commercial office, retail, and market-rate and mixed-income housing. The basement levels of the existing building would be used to provide 1,000 parking spaces, and the complex would be united by a public plaza called “The Yards,” which would provide seating and patio space for restaurants. Soon after, local celebrity chef David Fhima joined the project, agreeing to open a flagship restaurant and help fill the other spaces to create a “vibrant food and beverage district.” In early 2024, Sherman rebranded the project as “Washington Yards,” kicking off marketing and presales while announcing that the housing and hotel components had been eliminated and that there was a slight chance that the existing building could be reused. Construction was originally scheduled to begin in 2023, but was delayed due to rising interest rates and construction costs. In January 2025, Sherman announced that it would “strategically position the property for its highest and best use,” and then, in August, came a big pivot, when the firm announced that they were now marketing the site as a “fully entitled (no approvals required) data center asset” and “a scalable redevelopment opportunity in a fiber-dense location with an immediate path to power.” What happened?1
Well, interest rates, inflation, and related delays made new construction increasingly less viable, while rapidly developing trends made the old data center useful and valuable again—as a data center. We are all familiar with the massive, resource-intensive, and sometimes controversial data centers being planned and built in suburbs, exurbs, and rural areas. Smaller urban data centers, however, offer some unique advantages. First, while hyperscale data centers require all new infrastructure and enormous quantities of power and water for cooling, urban data centers are located in places where the infrastructure grid and resources already exist, providing easy access to power, water, and fiber-optic networks. But the big advantage is that data centers in urban locations reduce what is called “latency,” or the delay between a user’s request and the system’s response time. Latency decreases with distance, so urban data centers have shorter response times than rural data centers, which is crucial for certain urban uses, including high-speed trading, video streaming, AI demand, and self-driving cars. And data centers are valuable, too. A Minneapolis office building with an improved data center sold for $235 million in 2026, more than eight times its 2025 assessed value. This contrasts with the many other downtown properties (in Minneapolis and throughout the country) that have traded at fractions of their previous sale prices. For example, the 31-story Ameriprise Financial Center in Minneapolis recently sold for $6.25 million, representing a 97% markdown in value from its $200 million sale price in 2016. (Whether or not data centers will help us solve the larger vacancy problem in our downtowns is a subject for another time.)2
For Sherman Associates, the data center is now “the leading driver of the vision,” and in addition to 70,000 SF of existing data center space in a 3-level basement, there is also the opportunity to expand the facility to accommodate growing demand. According to Sherman, this latest vision is the “best and fastest way to facilitate new investment at the site, based on market conditions and financial feasibility.”3
The Theory, and some Mythology
This essay is about luck, but before we get to that, let me rewind a bit. Developers are entrepreneurs, and I devoted an early chapter of my book, How Real Estate Developers Think, to entrepreneurship. There already exists a broad and deep canon of scholarship exploring the economic history, socialization, and genetics of the entrepreneur, including personality traits, which I explored in a recent episode. But I devoted a later section of that book to the idea of the entrepreneur as trickster. While the tricksters of mythology are chaos agents, boundary-crossers, liminal figures, and holy fools who speak unnecessary truths, their modern counterparts are creators of culture, disruptors of the status quo, unconventional problem-solvers, and drivers of innovation. They are also often perceived as inhabiting an ethical gray zone, where the thin dividing line between culture hero and bad actor is whether or not their trick works, a paradox that Pablo Picasso captured when he said, “Art is a lie that tells the truth.” In his brilliant book, Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth and Art, Lewis Hyde uses stories about trickster figures from Greek, Norse, Hindu, Yoruba, Native American, and other mythologies to illustrate the origins of creativity. Hyde’s book is rich with ideas, but since one of the trickster’s greatest skills is making his own luck, I want to summarize just two of Hyde’s many ideas and observations that help explain the difference between dumb luck and smart luck: The “two-road chance” and “the lucky find.”4
The Two-Road Chance
Hyde starts with the two types of chance described by French biochemist and Nobel Laureate Jacques Monod in his book, Chance and Necessity. The rolling of dice or spinning of a roulette wheel are what Monod called “operational chance,” where, as Hyde says,
“The event may be complicated, but it unfolds along a single path.”
This is what Hyde calls “one-road chance.” Monod’s “Absolute chance,” however, is where,
“Chance is obviously the essential thing…inherent in the complete independence of two causal chains of events whose convergence produces the accident.”
Hyde calls this “two-road chance,” and offers this example: A person is driving to work but running late, having returned home to retrieve their forgotten umbrella. At the same time, an aggravated person throws a glass of water out a window at a howling cat, causing the cat to run away. But then the startled cat runs across the street in front of the car, and the driver swerves, causing an accident. The two chains of events, late driver and startled cat, are entirely separate, but the accident happens where those two paths intersect—at the crossroads. Hyde offers another, ancient, and more ambiguous example of a two-road chance in Aristotle’s story of a farmer who, upon digging a hole in his field, finds treasure (road one) buried by the previous owner (road two). But the farmer comes by the treasure not through the usual means of work, gift, sale, or theft, so what are we to think of his fortune? Says Hyde,
“We are in a shady area here, and shady language is in order. ‘It fell off a truck’ is the American version of the more ancient ‘I found it at the crossroads.’”
The Lucky Find
Another Frenchman, chemist and microbiologist Louis Pasteur, famously said in a speech,
“Chance favors the prepared mind.”
Pasteur was making the point that the more training, knowledge, and skill a person possesses, the better prepared they are to identify an opportunity that might not be apparent to others. This is what Hyde calls “the lucky find.” Pasteur was drawing upon his own experience because, while studying cholera in birds, one Monday morning in the lab, he found a culture that had been forgotten and left out over the weekend. But when he injected this weakened culture into chickens, they became immune to fresh cholera bacteria, and that is how Pasteur discovered the “attenuated vaccine”—the type of vaccine still given to (most) children today for mumps, measles, rubella, chicken pox, and yellow fever. Hyde says that, like Pasteur,
“Tricksters are lucky, but not in the traditional sense, rather, because they are prepared to receive luck,” and, “The agile mind is pleased to find what it was not looking for.”
Bringing these two ideas together, Trickster creates his own luck by looking for opportunities at the borders, the intersections, the crossroads, and the joints, says Hyde, concluding that,
“What a lucky find reveals is neither cosmos nor chaos, but the mind of the finder.”
The Lesson
When it comes to my own experiences of good luck, I’ve always liked the ancient saying,
“Every now and then, even a blind pig finds an acorn.”
But that’s dumb luck, and I would never suggest that Sherman Associates benefited from “dumb luck.” Rather, theirs is a tale of two projects—a more traditional redevelopment plan that faced the headwinds of rising interest rates and construction costs, and the rapidly growing demand for urban data centers—meeting at a crossroads. But Sherman was prepared for chance: they had acquired a large urban site at a prime location, at First and Main, at the intersection, crossroads, joint, or border between the downtown office core and the dense Mill District residential neighborhood along the Mississippi River, a site that was well-positioned to serve either or both types of demand. Further, since Sherman bought the vacant property at a low price, they stood to profit from the relatively simple and low-cost reuse of the building—which they had originally planned to demolish—for its original purpose. And in the four years since Sherman purchased the property, it had already risen in assessed value from $6.4M to $10.5M, so, assuming carrying costs weren’t too high, it was also what developers like to call “a good deal.” And that can’t all just be attributed to dumb luck.
But wait, Fortuna, the Roman goddess of luck, fate, and chance, is not finished with Sherman yet! On April 23, 2026, the Minneapolis City Council announced it was considering a moratorium on the development of new data centers within the city until their impacts could be better understood. I don’t know what effect, if any, this will have on Sherman’s plans (the property presumably remains entitled for use as a data center), but it may inject some uncertainty into the process. It also serves as another example of Hyde’s two-road chance, and who knows what we will find when the growing demand for data centers in the city and a very progressive, often anti-business city council majority soon meet at a crossroads.5
“We therefore get this paradox: with smart luck, the mind is prepared for what it isn’t prepared for. It has a kind of openness, holding its ideas lightly, and willing to have them exposed to impurity and the unintended.”
- Lewis Hyde
Luck is where opportunity meets preparation.
Seneca
Kelly, Briana, “Sherman Associates taps David Fhima for new downtown Minneapolis development,” Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal, 10 January 2023; “Sherman’s biggest downtown Minneapolis redevelopment begins leasing, rebrands,” Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal, 1 February 2024; “What happened with the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal’s 2024 real estate sites to watch,” Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal, 7 January 2025.
Galioto, Katie, “Data center in downtown Minneapolis Sleep Number building fuels $235m sale,” in The Minnesota Star Tribune, 19 February 2026; Anderson, Caitlin, “Data goes downtown: a top-dollar deal shows there’s a place for urban server farms, but they may not work everywhere,” in Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal, 19 February 2026.
Kelly, Briana, “Downtown Minneapolis data center plan replaces Sherman’s $400M mixed-use vision,” Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal, 19 August 2025.
Brown, Peter Hendee, How Real Estate Developers Think: Design, Profits, and Community, Philadelphia, Penn Press, 2015; Hyde, Lewis, Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998.
Winter, Deena, “Minneapolis considers moratorium on data centers,” The Minnesota Star Tribune, 24 April 2026.