- The plans were useless, but the planning was indispensable.Even when nothing goes according to plans (it never does), the planning stages at least give you a framework and a familiarity with the problems you'll be facing.
- "If you trust in yourself . . . and believe in your dreams . . . and follow your star . . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy."
- “You wouldn't worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do.”
- "If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the people to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea."
- Rules for Happiness: something to do, someone to love, something to hope for.
- "Ever loved someone so much, you would do anything for them? Yeah, well, make that someone yourself and do whatever the hell you want."
- "It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not weakness. That is life."
- Be soft. Do not let the world make you hard. Do not let pain make you hate. Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness. Take pride that even though the rest of the world may disagree, you still believe it to be a beautiful place.
- "It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."
- "There are many talented people who haven't fulfilled their dreams because they over thought it, or they were too cautious, and were unwilling to make the leap of faith."
- The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.
- "You try. You fail. You try. You fail. But the only true failure is when you stop trying."
- “We judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their behavior.”
Monday, September 14, 2015
Thursday, May 14, 2015
Earth
From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.—Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, 1997 reprint, pp. xv–xvi
Tuesday, April 28, 2015
77 Reasons You're Awful at Managing Money
Taken from
http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/02/10/77-reasons-youre-awful-at-managing-money.aspx
Here are 77 reasons why people are awful at managing money.
1. You let your political views guide your investments without realizing that the market doesn't care who you voted for or which cable news outlet you find more honest.
2. Your definition of "long term" is the time between now and the next bear market, whenever that is.
3. You suffer from the Dunnig-Kruger effect, lacking enough basic financial knowledge to even realize that you're making mistakes. People's lack of understanding about things like compound interest and inflation can lead them to believe they're making good financial decisions when in reality they're tripping over themselves with failure.
4. For every $1 raise you receive, your desires rise by $2 or more.
5. You spend lots of money on material stuff to impress other people without realizing those other people couldn't care less about you. You'd be shocked at how few people care where your purse was made or how much noise your car makes.
6. You are unshakably certain about things you know very little about, particularly regarding monetary policy.
7. You have never been able to predict what the market will do next. This doesn't deter you from trying to predict what the market will do next.
8. You don't learn vicariously from other people's financial problems. By the time you get the hang of making smart money decisions, your life expectancy rounds to zero.
9. You think you're young, invincible, and don't need health insurance. Then icy sidewalks, moving cars, and rapidly dividing cells prove you wrong.
10. You get upset when you hear on TV that the government is running a deficit. It doesn't bother you that you heard this on a TV you bought on a credit card in a home you purchased with a no-money-down mortgage.
11. You take out $200,000 in debt to earn a degree in a subject you're not interested in, doesn't offer marketable job skills, and for which you have no intention of working in -- all by age 22.
12. You're part of the roughly half of Americans who can't come up with $2,000 in 30 days for an emergency, even though you're also part of the roughly 100% of Americans who will need to come up with $2,000 in 30 days for an emergency at some point in your life.
13. The single largest expense you'll pay in life is interest. You'll spend more money on interest than food, vacations, cars, school, clothes, dinners out, and all forms of entertainment. You do this because you don't save enough and demand a lifestyle you can't actually afford. The future owns your income.
14. You're thrilled that the credit card you're paying 22% interest on offers 1% cash back on all purchases.
15. You spent the last five years arguing why Keynesian/Austrian economists were all wrong. The S&P 500 (SNPINDEX: ^GSPC ) spent the last five years rallying 177%.
16. You think dollar-cost averaging is boring without realizing that the purpose of investing isn't to minimize boredom; it's to maximize returns.
17. You work in a stressful job in order to make enough money to have a stress-free life. You see no irony in this.
18. You're a pessimist in a world where far more people wake up in the morning trying to make things better than wake up thinking we're all doomed.
19. You try to keep up with the Jonses without realizing the Jonses are buried in debt and can probably never retire.
20. You think $1 million is a glamorously large amount money when it's what most people will need to cover their definition of a pretty mediocre retirement.
21. You associate all of your financial successes with skill and all of your financial failures with bad luck.
22. Rather than admitting and learning from your mistakes, you ignore them, bury them, make excuses for them, and blame them on others.
23. You anchor to whatever price you bought a stock for, without realizing that the market neither knows nor cares what you think is a "fair" price.
24. Your perception of history extends back about five years. This leads you to believe things like bonds are safe, the average recession is as bad as 2008 was, and we're in a new normal of high unemployment.
25. You come from a low- or middle- income household, don't qualify for scholarships, and think it's reasonable to attend a private college.
26. You aced your SATs and went to an Ivy League school. You think this qualifies you to be a financial genius without realizing that the single most important skill in finance is control over your emotions, not control over a Greek formula.
27. You say you'll be greedy when others are fearful, then seek the fetal position when the market falls 2%.
28. You worship "legendary" investors whose only real skill is marketing themselves. Their career track record probably lags a money market fund.
29. You think you can be a successful day trader when the hedge fund you're competing with can read a news report, figure out what it means, and place a trade, make a profit, and exit that trade in literally the time it takes you to click on said news report.
30. You let confirmation bias take control of your mind by only seeking out information from sources that agree with your pre-existing beliefs.
31. You think you're too young to start saving for retirement when every day that passes makes compound interest a little bit less effective.
32. You spend a month researching the best washing machine, then invest twice as much money in a penny stock based solely on a tip from a person you don't know and shouldn't trust.
33. You're investing for the next 50 years but get stressed when the market has a bad day.
34. You're willing to work hard for $15 an hour, but too lazy to spend four minutes to fill out your company's 401(k) paperwork that could result in thousands of dollars of free money from matching contributions.
35. You think you're doing great by building up an emergency fund that covers three months of living expenses when the average duration of unemployment these days is more like nine months.
36. You check your brokerage account more often when the market is going up than going down.
37. You size up the potential of investments based on past returns, rather than investments that (A) you understand, (B) have a competitive advantage, (C) fit your goals, and (D) sell for an attractive valuation.
38. You take something as mind-numbingly complex as the global economy and try to distill it down into small, elegant sound bites.
39. You don't respect the idea that "do nothing" are two of the most powerful words in investing.
40. You purchased investments from a guy wearing boat shoes with no socks, a blue shirt with a white collar, or suspenders This rarely ends well.
41. You feel especially smart after last year's 30% market rally without realizing that you had nothing to do with it.
42. You surround yourself with 18 hours a day of live market TV in a game that requires decades of doing almost nothing but waiting.
43. You seek advice from a doctor to manage your health, an accountant to do your taxes, a lawyer to manage your legal problems, a plumber to fix your plumbing, a contractor to build your house, a trainer to help you exercise, a dentist to fix your teeth, and a pilot to fly when you travel. You wouldn't consider doing it differently. Then, with no experience, you go about investing willy nilly, all by yourself.
44. Hindsight bias fools you into thinking you saw the last financial crisis coming. Worse, this fools you again into thinking you'll be able to predict the next one.
45. You think financial news is published because it has useful information you need to know. In reality, it's published only because the publisher knows you'll read it.
46. You forget that the single most valuable asset you have as an investor is time. A 20-year-old has an asset Warren Buffett couldn't dream about.
47. You don't realize that the guy giving advice on TV doesn't know you, your circumstances, your goals, or your risk tolerance. He doesn't really care about you, either. He just wants to be seen on TV.
48. You have a financial plan without realizing that life neither knows nor cares about your plan. Whatever your plan is today, reality will surely look far different tomorrow.
49. You start saving a little bit of money. Great! It's better than nothing, but I see a lot of people who are proud of their savings when in reality it's an infinitesimally small percentage of what they'll need to retire. As the saying goes, "Save a little bit of money each month, and at the end of the year, you'll be surprised at how little you still have." If you think saving 30% or more of your income is insane, run the numbers. It might be close to what you'll need to retire happy.
50. You think it's impossible to live on less than $35,000 a year without realizing that literally 99% of the world does, even adjusted for purchasing power parity.
51. Your definition of a middle-class lifestyle is a 3,000-square foot home, more bathrooms than family members, three SUVs, private colleges, annual trips to Hawaii and Vail, Evian water, and yoga lessons. (Seriously, just stretch in your own living room.)
52. You can't acknowledge the role luck plays when making the occasional successful investment. (Also true when worshiping investors who made one big call that happened to be right.)
53. You suffer from hard-core belief bias. It's the tendency to accept or reject an argument based on how well it fits your pre-defined beliefs, rather than the objective facts of the situation. Pointing out that inflation has been low for the last five years is still met with suspicion by those who believe the Federal Reserve's actions must be causing hyperinflation.
54. You think the hybrid car is a better financial deal because it gets better gas millage, even though it costs $10,000 more than a comparable gas-engine model. You'll probably need to drive for a decade before the hybrid upgrade pays for itself, but in reality you'll trade the thing well before then.
55. You hate finance, think it's confusing, and don't want anything to do with it. You do, however, love money. You see no irony in this.
56. You think the stock market is too risky because it's volatile, without realizing that the biggest risk you face isn't volatility; It's not growing you assets by enough over the next several decades.
57. You've never been to a poor country, robbing you of the realization that the world doesn't care how entitled you feel, what you think is "fair," or what a real financial hardship is.
58. You think blowing money on frivolous stuff impresses people, when in reality it makes you look like an insecure, pompous, jerk. (This is particularly common among young people who come into money for the first time.)
59. You're unable to realize that a 10% return for 20 years generates more money than a 20% return for 10 years. Time can be a more important factor than return when building wealth -- and it's the one thing you have control over.
60. You don't respect the mountains of evidence showing that once basic needs are met, the amount of happiness each additional dollar of income provides diminishes quickly. This causes you to spend most of your life chasing "the number" you think will make you happy, but probably won't.
61. You think paying your financial advisor and other money managers 2% a year seems reasonable, without realizing that it'll probably eat up one-third or more of your long-term returns.
62. You think of the stock market as numbers that go up and down rather than an ownership stake in real businesses with real assets.
63. You think renting a home is throwing money away when for many it's one of the smartest financial decisions they can make.
64. Your investment decisions are guided by what the economy is doing, when the two really have very little correlation.
65. When planning for retirement, you don't realize that your life expectancy might be 90 years or more. Retire at 65, and you could spend more than one-third of your life living off your investments.
66. You're unable to have a good time going for a hike, a bike ride, a swim, reading a book, or anything else that's free (or cheap). Having cheap hobbies is a large, yet hidden, asset on your personal balance sheet.
67. You work so hard trying to make money that you don't have time to think about, or plan, your finances. This is the equivalent to spending so much time buying exercise equipment that you have no time to exercise.
68. To paraphrase Carl Richards, you ignore history, basing your actions on your own very limited experience.
69. You worry about things you can't control, and things that are not relevant to your own finances.
70. You went to college at age 18 not because you were ready but because everyone else was. It's probably one of the most expense things you'll ever do, and you totally caved to peer pressure.
71. You think that not changing your opinion about markets, the economy, and your investments is somehow noble, when it's really just shutting your brain off to the reality that things are always changing.
72. You ignore that how elderly Americans who have seen it all view money is almost the opposite of how most young Americans view money. This goes back to not learning vicariously.
73. You're uncomfortable with the idea that the biggest news story of the next decade is almost certainly something no one is talking about today, and the big stuff everyone is talking about today is probably meaningless.
74. You underestimate how fast a company can go from "blue chip" to bankrupt.
75. You don't realize that when you say you want to be a millionaire, what you probably mean is that you want to spend a million dollars, which is literally the opposite of being a millionaire.
76. You're unaware that the business models of the vast majority of financial companies rely on exploiting the fears, emotions, and lack of intelligence of its customers.
77. You nodded along to all 77 of these points without realizing I'm talking about you. That goes for me, too.
http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/02/10/77-reasons-youre-awful-at-managing-money.aspx
Here are 77 reasons why people are awful at managing money.
1. You let your political views guide your investments without realizing that the market doesn't care who you voted for or which cable news outlet you find more honest.
2. Your definition of "long term" is the time between now and the next bear market, whenever that is.
3. You suffer from the Dunnig-Kruger effect, lacking enough basic financial knowledge to even realize that you're making mistakes. People's lack of understanding about things like compound interest and inflation can lead them to believe they're making good financial decisions when in reality they're tripping over themselves with failure.
4. For every $1 raise you receive, your desires rise by $2 or more.
5. You spend lots of money on material stuff to impress other people without realizing those other people couldn't care less about you. You'd be shocked at how few people care where your purse was made or how much noise your car makes.
6. You are unshakably certain about things you know very little about, particularly regarding monetary policy.
7. You have never been able to predict what the market will do next. This doesn't deter you from trying to predict what the market will do next.
8. You don't learn vicariously from other people's financial problems. By the time you get the hang of making smart money decisions, your life expectancy rounds to zero.
9. You think you're young, invincible, and don't need health insurance. Then icy sidewalks, moving cars, and rapidly dividing cells prove you wrong.
10. You get upset when you hear on TV that the government is running a deficit. It doesn't bother you that you heard this on a TV you bought on a credit card in a home you purchased with a no-money-down mortgage.
11. You take out $200,000 in debt to earn a degree in a subject you're not interested in, doesn't offer marketable job skills, and for which you have no intention of working in -- all by age 22.
12. You're part of the roughly half of Americans who can't come up with $2,000 in 30 days for an emergency, even though you're also part of the roughly 100% of Americans who will need to come up with $2,000 in 30 days for an emergency at some point in your life.
13. The single largest expense you'll pay in life is interest. You'll spend more money on interest than food, vacations, cars, school, clothes, dinners out, and all forms of entertainment. You do this because you don't save enough and demand a lifestyle you can't actually afford. The future owns your income.
14. You're thrilled that the credit card you're paying 22% interest on offers 1% cash back on all purchases.
15. You spent the last five years arguing why Keynesian/Austrian economists were all wrong. The S&P 500 (SNPINDEX: ^GSPC ) spent the last five years rallying 177%.
16. You think dollar-cost averaging is boring without realizing that the purpose of investing isn't to minimize boredom; it's to maximize returns.
17. You work in a stressful job in order to make enough money to have a stress-free life. You see no irony in this.
18. You're a pessimist in a world where far more people wake up in the morning trying to make things better than wake up thinking we're all doomed.
19. You try to keep up with the Jonses without realizing the Jonses are buried in debt and can probably never retire.
20. You think $1 million is a glamorously large amount money when it's what most people will need to cover their definition of a pretty mediocre retirement.
21. You associate all of your financial successes with skill and all of your financial failures with bad luck.
22. Rather than admitting and learning from your mistakes, you ignore them, bury them, make excuses for them, and blame them on others.
23. You anchor to whatever price you bought a stock for, without realizing that the market neither knows nor cares what you think is a "fair" price.
24. Your perception of history extends back about five years. This leads you to believe things like bonds are safe, the average recession is as bad as 2008 was, and we're in a new normal of high unemployment.
25. You come from a low- or middle- income household, don't qualify for scholarships, and think it's reasonable to attend a private college.
26. You aced your SATs and went to an Ivy League school. You think this qualifies you to be a financial genius without realizing that the single most important skill in finance is control over your emotions, not control over a Greek formula.
27. You say you'll be greedy when others are fearful, then seek the fetal position when the market falls 2%.
28. You worship "legendary" investors whose only real skill is marketing themselves. Their career track record probably lags a money market fund.
29. You think you can be a successful day trader when the hedge fund you're competing with can read a news report, figure out what it means, and place a trade, make a profit, and exit that trade in literally the time it takes you to click on said news report.
30. You let confirmation bias take control of your mind by only seeking out information from sources that agree with your pre-existing beliefs.
31. You think you're too young to start saving for retirement when every day that passes makes compound interest a little bit less effective.
32. You spend a month researching the best washing machine, then invest twice as much money in a penny stock based solely on a tip from a person you don't know and shouldn't trust.
33. You're investing for the next 50 years but get stressed when the market has a bad day.
34. You're willing to work hard for $15 an hour, but too lazy to spend four minutes to fill out your company's 401(k) paperwork that could result in thousands of dollars of free money from matching contributions.
35. You think you're doing great by building up an emergency fund that covers three months of living expenses when the average duration of unemployment these days is more like nine months.
36. You check your brokerage account more often when the market is going up than going down.
37. You size up the potential of investments based on past returns, rather than investments that (A) you understand, (B) have a competitive advantage, (C) fit your goals, and (D) sell for an attractive valuation.
38. You take something as mind-numbingly complex as the global economy and try to distill it down into small, elegant sound bites.
39. You don't respect the idea that "do nothing" are two of the most powerful words in investing.
40. You purchased investments from a guy wearing boat shoes with no socks, a blue shirt with a white collar, or suspenders This rarely ends well.
41. You feel especially smart after last year's 30% market rally without realizing that you had nothing to do with it.
42. You surround yourself with 18 hours a day of live market TV in a game that requires decades of doing almost nothing but waiting.
43. You seek advice from a doctor to manage your health, an accountant to do your taxes, a lawyer to manage your legal problems, a plumber to fix your plumbing, a contractor to build your house, a trainer to help you exercise, a dentist to fix your teeth, and a pilot to fly when you travel. You wouldn't consider doing it differently. Then, with no experience, you go about investing willy nilly, all by yourself.
44. Hindsight bias fools you into thinking you saw the last financial crisis coming. Worse, this fools you again into thinking you'll be able to predict the next one.
45. You think financial news is published because it has useful information you need to know. In reality, it's published only because the publisher knows you'll read it.
46. You forget that the single most valuable asset you have as an investor is time. A 20-year-old has an asset Warren Buffett couldn't dream about.
47. You don't realize that the guy giving advice on TV doesn't know you, your circumstances, your goals, or your risk tolerance. He doesn't really care about you, either. He just wants to be seen on TV.
48. You have a financial plan without realizing that life neither knows nor cares about your plan. Whatever your plan is today, reality will surely look far different tomorrow.
49. You start saving a little bit of money. Great! It's better than nothing, but I see a lot of people who are proud of their savings when in reality it's an infinitesimally small percentage of what they'll need to retire. As the saying goes, "Save a little bit of money each month, and at the end of the year, you'll be surprised at how little you still have." If you think saving 30% or more of your income is insane, run the numbers. It might be close to what you'll need to retire happy.
50. You think it's impossible to live on less than $35,000 a year without realizing that literally 99% of the world does, even adjusted for purchasing power parity.
51. Your definition of a middle-class lifestyle is a 3,000-square foot home, more bathrooms than family members, three SUVs, private colleges, annual trips to Hawaii and Vail, Evian water, and yoga lessons. (Seriously, just stretch in your own living room.)
52. You can't acknowledge the role luck plays when making the occasional successful investment. (Also true when worshiping investors who made one big call that happened to be right.)
53. You suffer from hard-core belief bias. It's the tendency to accept or reject an argument based on how well it fits your pre-defined beliefs, rather than the objective facts of the situation. Pointing out that inflation has been low for the last five years is still met with suspicion by those who believe the Federal Reserve's actions must be causing hyperinflation.
54. You think the hybrid car is a better financial deal because it gets better gas millage, even though it costs $10,000 more than a comparable gas-engine model. You'll probably need to drive for a decade before the hybrid upgrade pays for itself, but in reality you'll trade the thing well before then.
55. You hate finance, think it's confusing, and don't want anything to do with it. You do, however, love money. You see no irony in this.
56. You think the stock market is too risky because it's volatile, without realizing that the biggest risk you face isn't volatility; It's not growing you assets by enough over the next several decades.
57. You've never been to a poor country, robbing you of the realization that the world doesn't care how entitled you feel, what you think is "fair," or what a real financial hardship is.
58. You think blowing money on frivolous stuff impresses people, when in reality it makes you look like an insecure, pompous, jerk. (This is particularly common among young people who come into money for the first time.)
59. You're unable to realize that a 10% return for 20 years generates more money than a 20% return for 10 years. Time can be a more important factor than return when building wealth -- and it's the one thing you have control over.
60. You don't respect the mountains of evidence showing that once basic needs are met, the amount of happiness each additional dollar of income provides diminishes quickly. This causes you to spend most of your life chasing "the number" you think will make you happy, but probably won't.
61. You think paying your financial advisor and other money managers 2% a year seems reasonable, without realizing that it'll probably eat up one-third or more of your long-term returns.
62. You think of the stock market as numbers that go up and down rather than an ownership stake in real businesses with real assets.
63. You think renting a home is throwing money away when for many it's one of the smartest financial decisions they can make.
64. Your investment decisions are guided by what the economy is doing, when the two really have very little correlation.
65. When planning for retirement, you don't realize that your life expectancy might be 90 years or more. Retire at 65, and you could spend more than one-third of your life living off your investments.
66. You're unable to have a good time going for a hike, a bike ride, a swim, reading a book, or anything else that's free (or cheap). Having cheap hobbies is a large, yet hidden, asset on your personal balance sheet.
67. You work so hard trying to make money that you don't have time to think about, or plan, your finances. This is the equivalent to spending so much time buying exercise equipment that you have no time to exercise.
68. To paraphrase Carl Richards, you ignore history, basing your actions on your own very limited experience.
69. You worry about things you can't control, and things that are not relevant to your own finances.
70. You went to college at age 18 not because you were ready but because everyone else was. It's probably one of the most expense things you'll ever do, and you totally caved to peer pressure.
71. You think that not changing your opinion about markets, the economy, and your investments is somehow noble, when it's really just shutting your brain off to the reality that things are always changing.
72. You ignore that how elderly Americans who have seen it all view money is almost the opposite of how most young Americans view money. This goes back to not learning vicariously.
73. You're uncomfortable with the idea that the biggest news story of the next decade is almost certainly something no one is talking about today, and the big stuff everyone is talking about today is probably meaningless.
74. You underestimate how fast a company can go from "blue chip" to bankrupt.
75. You don't realize that when you say you want to be a millionaire, what you probably mean is that you want to spend a million dollars, which is literally the opposite of being a millionaire.
76. You're unaware that the business models of the vast majority of financial companies rely on exploiting the fears, emotions, and lack of intelligence of its customers.
77. You nodded along to all 77 of these points without realizing I'm talking about you. That goes for me, too.
Friday, April 17, 2015
A Better You
Reference - DanielBMarkham
- Shiny things are nowhere as much fun after you get them as before, even if they have some value. So yes, that Kindle or iPad or whatever will have a real use, and you will be marginally happier with it than without, but not as much as you think
- Shiny things are nowhere as much fun after you get them as before, even if they have some value. So yes, that Kindle or iPad or whatever will have a real use, and you will be marginally happier with it than without, but not as much as you think
- You can talk yourself into (or out of) anything. The only difference between smart people and other people is that smart people do this with bigger words and more complex arguments. Be confident, but also assume that you are broken in ways you can never spot. Find some ways to get a checksum on life decisions every now and then.
- You don't need very much at all. Maybe a laptop computer and a couple changes of clothes. Pictures and videos of your life. That's about it.
- Nothing will ever replace experiences. No matter how big the car, nice the house, or professional-looking the suit, it's never going to be as much fun or mean as much later as the experiences you have in life. And it's not just having the experience, it's looking forward to them, and planning them, and making pictures, movies, and blogs out of them. The best part, oddly, may be the planning. So planning a 200-dollar trip to the beach in the Fall with people you love may give you many hours of happiness this summer -- along with the fun of the trip itself.
- Learn to keep picking topics and immersing yourself in them. Most everybody will say to drop out and become part of the system -- 9-5 job and TV/games/internet in the evening. If you want a life you could sleep through, that's fine. But if you want a life you can tell stories about, keep reinventing yourself. And that means constantly learning.
- Lots of shit in life that once looked dumb or stupid opens up into this huge panorama of beauty once you learn the rules. In so many things you are like the guy who never saw a baseball game going to the world series. You kind of get it, but it all seems silly. You don't know the rules. Decide to learn how to appreciate music, for instance. Get a few college lectures on tape, get some good music to listen to, hang out with folks who are music connoisseurs. The more you know about various art forms, the richer your life is.
- Forget philosophy and meaning-of-life shit. You're too young. For now, you are what you do. Go do something worthwhile
- Stick to a daily exercise routine at all costs
- If you are changing and getting better, that means you are changing friends too. This was very difficult for me, but you can't hang out with the same folks and expect to become a better person. There are exceptions, of course, but to a large degree your life is controlled by whom you choose to be friends and hang out with. Be aware that you don't want to be the same person at 30 as you were at 20. I'm not saying be an asshole -- keep being friendly by all means -- but be very careful who you hold yourself up against as "normal"
- Dating is a numbers game, like a lot of other things. Learn the skills of dating and don't sweat picking up chicks (or guys)
- Concentrate on your weaknesses. Make them stronger. When you get to your 30s you can work from your strengths, but there has to be some time in your life to work on shit you suck at, and for me it was when I had the most motivation, my 20s.
- Speaking of which, you have to learn management. No matter what you do, there will be a manager. Even if you don't want to be one, you have to understand what the job is like to help out your manager. Being a good leader means being a good servant. This concept sounded easy (or facile) to me in my 20s, but proved hard to apply in practice.
- You are never ready for kids. Have them early while you have energy. Read all the books about kids if you must, but realize that creating a replacement is about the most biologically easy thing you could do. After all, evolution has been working on making you a great gene transferral and primate-raising machine, so don't get paranoid and neurotic about all the latest parenting fashion. Use some sense.
- Everybody wants to be a rock star and win the lottery. Nobody ever does, and the ones that do end up destroying their life. Realize slow success is a million times better than overnight success.
- Much of the stuff in life that normal people do is geared around killing time by distracting you with shiny things of no value. You may never be able to fight this completely, but you should at least deeply understand it and how it affects your goals
- Create. With a passion. There are two major kinds of people in this world, consumers and creators. The herd will push you to consume, life will push you to consume, consumption is the easy and default path, but true joy and a full life come from creating. It does not matter one bit how many people like what you create, just create. Write. Blog. Make videos. Make a movie. Write a program. The longer the format and the more creativity involved, the more you are going to turn on and exercise key parts of your brain. Nobody wants to be 80 and only have stories of being at the office, but fuck, if you were at the office creating something at least you tried to make a difference. I'd rather be that guy than the one who watched Sumo wrestling everyday (or played 20,000 hours of WoW during his 20s) The only thing you're going to have at the end of your life are the decisions you made, the things you created, and memories. Learn to maximize these things.
Tuesday, March 3, 2015
Project managers, ducks, and dogs!
The below article is copied from
https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2013/06/05/duck/
There's a story I read on one of the Stack Overflow type sites a couple of years ago about a "duck". It was an answer about terms people have invented in the world of programming, and it went like this.
A company was working on a game called Battle Chess. It looks like an ordinary chess game at first, but there are some extras which become apparent as you make moves. When you select a piece and tell it to move, it morphs from a statue into more of an animated figure, and walks to the next spot. Then it goes back to being a statue.
So far, that's nice, but there's more. What happens when you make one piece encounter another? Ah, yes, that's when they fight. Both pieces come to life and start duking it out right there on the chess board. Obviously, it can only "win" according to the rules of the game, but you get to watch them hack and slash at each other.
I think the rook actually picks up and eats the queen, but it's been many years so don't hold me to that. I know there must have been a bunch of combinations of animations which I never saw.
Anyway, about the duck. As the story goes, the artists had created all of these animation cycles for their game, and it had to pass through the review stage of a project manager. One of the artists knew the way these guys tended to want to "leave their mark" on things, and did something a little extra.
Apparently, the queen was given a little companion. As she came to life and moved around, so did the duck. It would just follow her around the board.
Supposedly, the PM saw this and said "it's great... just remove the duck". So, the artist went in and removed the duck (which had been carefully placed to make that easy), and that was that. The sacrificial duck kept the meddling manager away from the stuff that was important.
When I first read this story, I figured it only applied to artistic situations like that. I've since thought about it some more and now believe it can come up far more often.
Have you ever noticed how some people want to "touch" everything which is being done on a project, even if it has nothing to do with them? It need not be huge, but it seems like they want to have just a small deviation applied to all potential changes. It's almost like they want to be able to point at any given part and say "I'm the reason that happened".
It reminded me of something else. Think about what dogs do when you take them out into the world. Show them a tree or a fire hydrant, and I bet they're going to mark it. Walk a little bit more, and find another tree or similar post, and I bet the dog will mark it, too. It's like they keep something in reserve so they can keep marking as they go.
Given this, what exactly is the difference between these people and dogs who claim territory by lifting their legs on things?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)