A week ago, I decided to pack up all of the high-end coffee equipment temporarily, put it in the cabinets, and break out an old-school style percolator; the type that my grandparents used when they were first married in the 1950s and 1960s. There was something wonderfully imperfect about it. A few coffee grinds inevitably…
Mental Model: Cui Bono Lucius Cassius Longinus Ravilla was a famous Roman judge, who, according to Marcus Tullius Cicero, was regarded as an “honest and wise” man. He was known for a habit of constantly asking the question, “Cui bono?“, which roughly translates into “who benefits?”. In a crime or a political scheme, Lucius Cassius…
his article deals with people who want to be rich. Not just financially independent or reasonably well-off, but actually rich relative to the average American; the folks who want to be able to write a check for a Lexus or live in a nice house, in a neighborhood with great schools, without worrying about it, while watching their net worth climb year after year, decade after decade. The strategy involved for that type of success is slightly different in that it requires you to often build off a foundation that I call your primary economic engine. But I’m getting ahead of myself …
Last week, Simon Cowell’s new show, X-Factor, called one of my companies, Mount Olympus Awards asking if we could outfit the varsity jackets for Marcus Canty’s performance of Bobby Brown’s hit “Every Little Step I Take” on tonight’s live show. Most of the time, letterman jackets with custom chenilles take 4 to 6 weeks, but…
This Halloween evening, I am sitting at one of the desks in my home, drinking a cup of Costco coffee, and penning About.com content for the Investing for Beginners site. I’m going to try and pre-write the next few months’ worth of articles and set them to automatically publish themselves due to the upcoming time crunch…
Yesterday, we took a look at the worst paying college degrees. Today, I want to look at a list of the best paying college degrees. It is clear that, like all things in a free society, supply and demand determine payoff. Engineers rule the day when it comes to making a wise investment in education,…
You know I’m a big proponent of following and monetizing your passion. If you want to be an artist, you should be. If you want to be a social worker, you should be. The key is, you make that decision knowing what it entails. The probabilities are substantial that you are not going to make as…
Earlier this year, I was watching Gossip Girl and suddenly the characters on screen were wearing varsity jackets. I immediately called the office and demanded to know why we hadn’t been the one that made the products. The response? “We were.” There have been a few other moments like that in the past couple of months…
Mental Model: The Hundredth Monkey Effect In social evolution, there is a mental model that describes the moment that knowledge, behavior, or belief reaches a tipping point (when the “100th monkey” is added), and instantaneously spreads throughout society so that it reaches the rest of a population without being taught, becoming common. The original research…
Yesterday, I explained how most of the people in the Occupy Wall Street protest haven’t yet realized the struggle isn’t between the rich and the poor – it is between the knowledge workers and manual workers, which Peter Drucker predicted in startling detail decades ago. Charles Hughes, a professor at Henderson State University, had…