A residential flat in Little Venice, Maida Vale, had a recurring heating fault that nobody could diagnose. It had defeated everyone who examined it, and it had followed the flat through two sales. A problem serious enough that people would rather move on than take it on.
The consensus answer was a full rewire and an entirely new heating system. That is tens of thousands of pounds and weeks of disruption, and it is what you recommend when you cannot find the cause: replace everything, and the fault goes with it. It is also an admission of defeat dressed up as a solution.
Botan’s only role, initially, was to let the plumber in. Rather than hand the problem back, he brought in a tradesman he trusted and started at the beginning: following every cable and every pipe in the flat, one at a time, to see where each of them actually went. They converged behind a single partition wall.
So he opened it — offering to pay for the repair himself if he turned out to be wrong, at a point in his life when he could least afford to.
There was a hidden switch behind the wall. The fault was resolved, he was paid to make the wall good, and more problems started coming his way. The property career started there.
What changed my thinking
What changed my thinking was how ordinary the method turned out to be. Everyone before me had given up — not because the fault could not be found, but because finding it meant tracing every cable and every pipe in the flat, and that is slow, boring work with no guarantee at the end of it. I did exactly that, and everything led to the same wall. So I knocked it down.
I did not out-think anyone. I kept going past the point where it stopped being interesting. I have found since that this is most of the job.
Botan Hourami