I’ve seen a lot of rumblings on the Internet over the past few months about writing in cursive. From people complaining on Reddit that it is the most useless skill they have to the media uproar in the George Zimmerman trial when it was discovered that star witness couldn’t read cursive and had to have…
I spent the past few days updating some of my own internal case studies, spreadsheets, and other documents, as well as wrapping up a few things that needed to be crossed off the agenda for the private businesses. I ended up putting together a collection of visual references covering some of the long-term holdings I keep for my household, among them Nestlé SA following my post on Monday.
The honey bee dance, also known as the honey bee waggle dance, is one of the most amazing things found in nature. To understand why it is so important, you need to appreciate how much we depend on the honey bee, how complex its hive behavior is, the specialization of tasks, and the ways in…
Warning: This is the working essay I promised to release earlier tonight. It deals with certain common cult beliefs that arise throughout human history and civilizations. It contains mature themes, images, and concepts. It was written for myself as a way to process and understand these recurring patterns. Due to the length of the essay, I…
One of the most important lessons I learned very early in life came from a series of psychology studies that I read for entertainment. It talked about how the big troubles we face – the death of a loved one, the loss of a job, the foreclosure of a home – are often overcome because our natural defense systems activate, causing our behavior to moderate with time so that we accept what has happened, rebuild, and put it behind us. The things that cause unhappiness that is both severe and chronic are not these major shocks; they are the small irritations that build up and wear away at you like Chinese water torture.
In the 1920s and 1930s, a banker named Pat Munroe in the small town of Quincy, Florida noticed that even during the depths of the Great Depression, otherwise impoverished people would spend their last nickel to buy a glass of Coca-Cola. With good returns on capital, and a once-in-a-century valuation so low that the business was trading for less than the cash in the bank, “Mr. Pat”, as he was called, encouraged everyone he knew to buy an ownership stake in the firm. He would even underwrite bank loans, backed by Coca-Cola stock, for his responsible depositors to encourage people to acquire equity.
With the benefit of hindsight, I now realize that the curriculum committee in my small farm town growing up was made up of visionary geniuses. Either that, or they were a bunch of eccentrics who were paranoid about everything. Maybe both.
In the post this morning about Brands and Brand Equity, I mentioned the Chick-fil-A scandal in passing; particularly how it has experienced a 50% drop in brand perception over the past few weeks as the scandal unfolds. One of the questions was too expansion to deal with in the comments thread so I put it…
After writing We All See, Smell, Hear, Taste, and Feel the World Differently, I have been running different exercises and simulations in my life to add to my knowledge of other people’s perspectives; how they go through the world and how those input filters influence cognition. One of the tools has been image filters to see…
This mail bag question has to do with marriage and figuring out the answer to the oft-posed question, “When is the best age to get married?” … Dear Mr. Kennon, Your writing has helped me so much since I first found it. My question isn’t exactly related to money or investing but I want to…