In an interview called “JK Rowling: A Year in Her Life”, that covered the period during the last year when she finished the final Harry Potter book, the interviewer asked Rowling, “How would you like to be remembered?”. Her response was poignant. As someone who did the best she could with the talent she had.…
I think the major tipping point in terms of wealth creation and financial freedom probably comes somewhere around $650,000 in productive assets with little or no debt. That isn’t an arbitrary amount of money. It comes down to a function of economics. That is an important distinction – your house, car, and furniture aren’t productive…
I was enjoying a discussion with someone about hyperrealism around the time I wrote last night about my love for the works of Eric Christensen, Pedro Campos, Steve Mills, and Nathan Taylor, when they kept insisting that stil life paintings, particularly those that are close to a photograph, lack emotion. (I completely disagree – the…
Hyperrealism is my favorite style of painting. Then again, I’ve always felt like life, as it is, is beautiful. Life, in all of its messy, unpredictable madness of patterns and light, din and music. It is difficult to explain, but when I see a certain style of painting in the hyperrealism genre, I instantly get the…
There is something to be said for the concept of having a tangible, physical representation of your “body of work”. Take J.K. Rowling. Her entire fortune and career have been built upon 4,175 pages – each of which started out completely blank and that she filled with ideas – spanning seven books. It has been…
What man has done, man may do. – Proverb On May 6th, 1954, at Oxford University’s Iffley Road Track, Roger Bannister became the first recorded man in history to run a mile – exactly 5,280 feet – in less than 4 minutes. His time, 3:59:04, was thought unachievable. Men had tried countless times and failed.…
In 1928, Irving Fisher published The Money Illusion (seriously, buy it – it’s only $7.95), which discussed the human fallacy of thinking about things in the nominal currency of your home country instead of in terms of purchasing power. The concept phrase “money illusion” was coined by legendary investor and economist John Maynard Keynes. The…
The older, more experienced, and wealthier I am, the more I am convinced that the average person has no business managing their own money. People are too busy living their lives and getting ahead in their careers to focus on growing their capital. As a result, they make stupid decisions that cost them enormously in the long-run.
The Graham-Newman Corporation was a stock company that essentially served as a hedge fund through which legendary investor Benjamin Graham managed money for his shareholders. It is the same firm where Warren Buffett worked in his twenties before moving back to Omaha and establishing the original seven partnerships upon which his fortune is based. According…
I found myself in a situation today that illustrated the powerful concept of a specific mental model known as the illusion of choice. This theme, of course, is familiar to anyone who has watched The Matrix trilogy, from the scene wherein the architect explains that the key to keeping humanity subdued is providing a system that presented the illusion of choice.