I was up almost all night baking and cooking so my part of Thanksgiving dinner today was ready without having to rush. I finished the corn chowder my brother made me promise half a dozen times I was going to make, then followed it with a granny smith apple pie that my mom wanted, the…
Following the post on the Dies Irae Principle earlier, I started thinking about the role of sound in regulating mood. Thirteen years ago, I was sitting in my undergraduate freshman music theory class, having moved thousands of miles away from home to begin university. At the time, I had enrolled in the Bachelor of Music…
I’ve been thinking about how differently people see the world and how that influences their view of events. Something that rolls off one person’s back can cause another to spend a week sobbing in bed, barely able to contain their grief or embarrassment. What is a minor setback to one person can be a career-ending…
Mozart penned one of his greatest symphonies as a result of dire financial need – something he wouldn’t have had to if he would have humbled himself and admitted that someone he considered evil, Voltaire, had something to teach him when it came to wealth management.
We talked about theft a couple of years ago but it’s on my mind, again. I still struggle to come to terms with it, despite overwhelming, conclusive evidence that it is true: A small percentage of the population will steal, simply if given the opportunity. They won’t even need the stuff. They may not even want…
I’ve watched in fascination over the past couple of years as German conglomerate Joh. A Benckiser has been quietly buying up the world’s leading coffee brands, acquiring Caribou Coffee for $340 million, Peet’s Coffee & Tea for $974 million, and my personal obsession, Douwe Egberts for $9.8 billion, among others. The firm is the personal holding company of…
Over the past 24 hours, I needed to run some fairly intensive server processes for a business that I still oversee myself as it’s mostly automated. I managed to make it so efficient that I turned 21.18 gigabytes of data into 176.9 megabytes of data; a reduction of 99.17%. I still have quite a bit…
Mail Bag: Will The Business World Look Down On Me? There was an interesting question sent to my inbox dealing with what are perceived as societal handicaps or disadvantages, and whether or not it will influence your career. I thought it might be a good chance to talk about the theory of interchangeable capital, which…
Aaron, Caleb, Tara, and I are in downtown Kansas City because later this evening, we are meeting Matthew and his wife Jaclynn at the Lyric Opera of Kansas City to see the premier of Mozart’s The Magic Flute. Arriving early, we realized we hadn’t eaten anything and picked a nearby restaurant that had decent reviews; the Providence New American Kitchen at the Hilton President.
One of the biggest mental model obsessions I’ve had for the past few years – so consuming that I rarely even mention it in public, and hardly ever on this site as I am still working on fully grasping the implications and mechanics – is something called signaling theory. The gist of signaling theory is that at all times, in all situations, you are broadcasting aspects of your identity, beliefs, personality, and lifestyle to the people around you, often with significant social implications. It exerts such a strong pull on civilization that I consider it second only to the social proof mental model in importance. It interacts with other mental models so efficiently, it often goes unnoticed.