Three rare and powerful skills: 1. Understanding how people justify their beliefs in a way that makes you respect their delusions. A rare and useful skill is understanding that people you find to be deluded likely suffer from the same shortcomings you do. Historian Will Durant wr … | Continue reading
An asset you don’t deserve can quickly become a liability. Maybe your portfolio surged during a bubble, your company hit a monster valuation, or you negotiated a salary that exceeds your ability. It feels great at the time. But reality eventually catches up, and demands repayment … | Continue reading
Fifty-four years ago this month, in a push for publicity, The Sunday Times offered £5,000 to whoever could sail solo nonstop around the world the fastest. It was technically a race, but that was an afterthought, as no one had ever completed the feat. There were no qualification r … | Continue reading
Will Smith writes in his biography that: Becoming famous is amazing. Being famous is a mixed bag. Losing fame is miserable. The amount of fame almost doesn’t matter. It’s the trajectory that people cling to. Same with money. I think for a lot of people the process of becoming wea … | Continue reading
I want to try to explain part of why the world seems so crazy these days. Evelyn Marie Adams won $3.9 million in the New Jersey lottery in 1986. Four months later she won again, collecting another $1.4 million. '‘I’m going to quit playing,’’ she told the New York Times. ‘‘I’m goi … | Continue reading
“The older I get the more I realize how many kinds of smart there are. There are a lot of kinds of smart. There are a lot of kinds of stupid, too.” – Jeff Bezos The smartest investors of all time went bankrupt 20 years ago this week. They did it during the greatest bull market of … | Continue reading
Michael Jordan said he had to reconstruct his body when he went from basketball to baseball back to basketball. Baseball favored strong arms and chest; basketball required a leaner figure with a stronger core and legs. Part of the reason Jordan’s basketball return was rusty was b … | Continue reading
The night before the D-Day invasion, a nervous Franklin Roosevelt asked his wife Eleanor how she felt about not knowing what would happen next. “To be nearly sixty years old and still rebel at uncertainty is ridiculous isn’t it?” she said. It is. But my God, we do. And in strange … | Continue reading
Reggie Vanderbilt was born into a family of bitter feuds, fragile egos, and impossible expectations. Everything went downhill from there. When Reggie’s great-grandfather, Cornelius “Commodore” Vanderbilt died in 1877, the New York Daily Tribune wrote an editorial predicting the l … | Continue reading
A lot of good ideas are ignored because they’re only occasionally useful. No one wants to bring them up because there are so many counterexamples of times they were wrong. One I thought about recently after watching a few friends manage their careers is the value of staying put. … | Continue reading
One hundred billion people have walked this planet. Nearly eight billion of them are alive today. Each has a story, few have a microphone. Each has seen something different and thought something unique. Most know something you can’t fathom, and you have experienced stuff they wou … | Continue reading
We were so close. Just when Covid-19 appeared to be fading, the largest military conflict since World War II broke out in Eastern Europe leading to devastating consequences for millions of people, spiking commodity prices, weaker equity markets, and geopolitical uncertainty. Unsu … | Continue reading
We’ve used The Villain Test as part of the investment philosophy at Collaborative Fund for more than 10 years by asking ourselves: would a ‘villain’ invest in this company if their motive was one of pure self-interest? Thinking through the financial and social implications of a … | Continue reading
A few lines I came across recently that got me thinking: “It is far easier to figure out if something is fragile than to predict the occurrence of an event that may harm it.” – Nassim Taleb “Survival is the ultimate performance measure.” – Vicki TenHaken “Everything feels unprece … | Continue reading
Elon Musk said he had lunch with Charlie Munger in 2009. Munger allegedly told the whole table all the ways Tesla would fail. It “made me quite sad,” Musk tweeted last week. “But I told him I agreed with all those reasons & that we would probably die, but it was worth trying anyw … | Continue reading
Elon Musk said he had lunch with Charlie Munger in 2009. Munger allegedly told the whole table all the ways Tesla would fail. It “made me quite sad,” Musk tweeted last week. “But I told him I agreed with all those reasons & that we would probably die, but it was worth trying anyw … | Continue reading
A couple things I’ve been thinking about in the last week: The world breaks every decade or so. There are so few exceptions to this it’s astounding. What Covid-19 and the Ukrainian invasion have in common is that both have happened many times before but westerners considered them … | Continue reading
Historian Stephen Ambrose writes about World War II soldiers who left basic training full of bravado and confidence, eager to fight when they join the frontline. Then they get shot at, and everything changes. “There was no way training could prepare a man for combat,” Ambrose wri … | Continue reading
A few lines I came across recently that got me thinking: “It is far easier to figure out if something is fragile than to predict the occurrence of an event that may harm it.” – Nassim Taleb “Survival is the ultimate performance measure.” – Vicki TenHaken “Everything feels unprece … | Continue reading
Derek Thompson is one of my favorite writers. His columns at The Atlantic explore everything from movies to why people are quitting their jobs to Covid stats. He does it in a way that I think is the highest form of good writing and thinking: with insights that are both obvious an … | Continue reading
Forecasting is hard. And not because people aren’t smart, but because trivial accidents can be influential in ways that are impossible to foresee. I did a talk with a high school class last week and someone asked how I decided to become a writer. I said I didn’t, it was never pla … | Continue reading
Forecasting is hard. And not because people aren’t smart, but because trivial accidents can be influential in ways that are impossible to foresee. I did a talk with a high school class last week and someone asked how I decided to become a writer. I said I didn’t, it was never pla … | Continue reading
Scott Adams, the Dilbert creator, says he doesn’t have any extraordinary skills. He’s a pretty good artist. He’s kind of funny, an OK writer, and decent at business. But multiply those mediocre skills together and you get one of the most successful cartoonists of all time. A lot … | Continue reading
One of my great privileges is living in Los Angeles, close to the Pacific Ocean. I often swim in the ocean, and thanks to the amazing California weather, I get to do this year-round. The physicality of the practice is one thing, but reflecting on my life, I think I am infinitely … | Continue reading
A lot of things don’t make any sense. The numbers don’t add up, the explanations are full of holes. And yet they keep happening – people making crazy decisions, reacting in bizarre ways. Over and over. Historian Will Durant once said, “logic is an invention of man and may be igno … | Continue reading
In honor of the holiday season, I wanted to do some reflecting on family and the memories I’ve compiled over the years. For some reason, the concept of “dad jokes” kept popping into my mind. Looking back, I don’t recall my dad making too many of these charmingly awkward quips. It … | Continue reading
There is no shortage of the word “unprecedented” when describing the last two years. Despite the initial caution around capital markets, venture deal activity and valuations continue to show strength. These unprecedented times have led to some record-breaking years and quarters f … | Continue reading
The Patriarch. An incredible biography of Joseph Kennedy, who lived one of the most interesting lives in American history. It begins: “Had Joseph P. Kennedy not been the patriarch of America’s first family, his story would be worth telling. That he was only adds to its drama and … | Continue reading
They’re relevant to everyone, and apply to lots of things: Who has the right answers but I ignore because they’re not articulate? What haven’t I experienced firsthand that leaves me naive to how something works? As Jeff Immelt said, “Every job looks easy when you’re not the one d … | Continue reading
Two little stories from nature that teach us a few things about investing: 1. Extremes lead to extremes. California has been devastated by wildfires for a decade. Back to back, year after year. Long-term droughts turned forests into dry tinder. So everyone was elated when 2017 br … | Continue reading
A friend recently sent me a video of an interview with Tony Hawk. It was from 2009, before the release of what was his latest video game. This interview was shot ten years after Hawk became the first skateboarder to successfully land a 900, and more than ten years before skateboa … | Continue reading
People tend to know what makes them angry with more certainty than what might make them happy. Happiness is complicated because you keep moving the goalposts. Misery is more durable. So you can move the needle a lot by focusing on what not to do in life. A few little things to av … | Continue reading
When you speak to folks with niche passions about how they got into their craft, their stories are often similar. They stumbled upon it, and it stuck. It’s usually something like, “I discovered my love of music as a kid while playing piano with my dad.” Or, “I started making film … | Continue reading
The biggest risk to an evolving system is that you become bogged down by experts from a world that no longer exists. The more evolution you have, the more you should expect that expertise has a shelf life. That’s always been the case and will always be. It’s just hard to accept b … | Continue reading
There are two ways to measure how you’re doing: Against yourself and against others. Internal vs. external benchmarks. There’s a time and a place for both, but I’ve come to appreciate how much happier you can be if you appreciate when internal benchmarks should get the spotlight. … | Continue reading
“You can’t produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant. It just doesn’t work that way.” – Warren Buffett Someone hired a social media consultant at an old employer. During a three-hour session she walked us through hashtags, what time of day you should post on Twit … | Continue reading
The biggest takeaway from history is that the characters change but their behaviors don’t. The technologies, trends, tragedies and winners – the events that take place – are always in flux and can be nearly impossible to predict. But the behaviors that drive people into action, i … | Continue reading
Jack Welch allegedly passed a note across the table to Jerry Seinfeld. “$5 million per show” it said. Extending Seinfeld for a 10th season would have earned Jerry $110 million. He declined. He was done with the show. That someone could quit when the show was doing so well baffled … | Continue reading
The biggest takeaway from history is that the characters change but their behaviors don’t. The technologies, trends, tragedies and winners – the events that take place – are always in flux and can be nearly impossible to predict. But the behaviors that drive people into action, i … | Continue reading
“You will probably work for a protocol someday.” These are among the last words I say to students at the end of my course on the crypto economy. When I began teaching the course in 2017, it sounded absurd to many of them. Today, less so. Crypto economies have already begun to sha … | Continue reading
Not realizing that inarticulate, uneducated, obnoxious, unqualified, and crazy people sometimes have the right answers. Comparing reality with an idealized alternative. Overestimating the extent to which your insights are different from your peers. Assuming other people think abo … | Continue reading
Not realizing that inarticulate, uneducated, obnoxious, unqualified, and crazy people sometimes have the right answers. Comparing reality with an idealized alternative. Overestimating the extent to which your insights are different from your peers. Assuming other people think abo … | Continue reading
John D. Rockefeller was the most successful businessman of all time. He was also a recluse, spending most of his time by himself. He rarely spoke, deliberately making himself inaccessible and staying quiet when you caught his attention. A refinery worker who occasionally had Rock … | Continue reading
A big lesson from history is how chance encounters lead to both magic and mayhem in ways that would have been impossible to predict. Let me show you three times history hung by a thread. Giuseppe Zangara was tiny, barely five feet tall. He stood on a chair outside a Miami politic … | Continue reading
George Carlin once joked how easy it is to spot stupid people. “Carry a little pad and pencil around with you. You’ll wind up with 30 or 40 names by the end of the day. It doesn’t take long to spot one of them, does it? Takes about eight seconds.” Like most comedy it’s funny beca … | Continue reading
George Carlin once joked how easy it is to spot stupid people. “Carry a little pad and pencil around with you. You’ll wind up with 30 or 40 names by the end of the day. It doesn’t take long to spot one of them, does it? Takes about eight seconds.” Like most comedy it’s funny beca … | Continue reading
Wealth is easy to measure but hard to value. When George Vanderbilt moved into Biltmore – the largest home in America at 178,000 square feet – one newspaper in 1899 wondered what the point was. The goals of the country’s richest during the Gilded Age, it said, seemed to be “devot … | Continue reading
“One of the most persistent fallacies is the reflexive association of wealth with wisdom,” Ed Borgato once wrote. Wealth might be a sign of good decisions, but can those decisions be repeated? And do good decisions in one field translate to wisdom in other areas of life? Maybe, m … | Continue reading