With the holidays concluded, too many Thanksgiving, Christmas, and reunion dinners to count, endless nights with family and friends, and the bulk of the busy season behind us in the businesses, we spent today in our pajamas as the snow fell outside, cooking a pot roast and working on some projects we wanted to finish. (Technically, we still have one Christmas celebration left, which was postponed until later this week.)
For the past hour, my mind has been on the power of some businesses to capture annuity streams that pay dividends for years, even decades or generations, with very little additional work. When you can get one of these in your portfolio, they pump out wealth as long as you update them every once in a while. They are the closest thing to geese laying golden eggs that exist outside of fairy tales.
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.
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…
I’ve never smoked. I hate the taste of alcohol. I’ve never done drugs. I did well in school and became successful at an early age. I save way more than I spend, growing my family’s investments every year. I’m far more productive than the typical person in my country. Specifically, the average American spends a staggering…
Yesterday, I mentioned that we should make some sort of stew or pot roast so the house was filled with the warm, inviting scent of roasting meat and vegetables for most of the day. I didn’t think anything of it, and figured it would happen later in the week, but upon waking this morning, I heard grocery bags being unloaded and discovered the process had already begun to try a new pot roast recipe that included carrots, celery, potatoes, parsnips, beef broth, chicken broth, a finish of red wine, herbs, and a few other ingredients. As I’ve sat here going through some work I need to finish, the fragrance keeps getting stronger; it feels like a home should.
After writing about mental models earlier today, it made me realize how this approach to life becomes second nature to examine your own thoughts and feelings as they happen so you are self-aware of the subconscious triggers that are pulling your thought processes in one direction or another. In that respect, even a video game can be useful as a tool.
Many decades ago, Oxford Philosophy of Language Professor J.L. Austin and Columbia philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser reportedly had this exchange: “In English,” Professor Austin said, “a double negative forms a positive. However, in some languages, such as Russian, a double negative remains a negative. But there isn’t a single language, not one, in which a double positive can…
