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At the beginning of a football season, football fans blow everything out of proportion. One bad series by the defense is indicative of a whole season of woe and doom. Three touchdowns in the first half by the offense and suddenly the Super Bowl seems a mere formality. It’s much the same with the vast
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“The English language is a rascal.” I came across a post over at Kottke today that blew my mind in a way that was at once disturbing and fantastic. The whole point of the post was to show that there is a very specific order for adjectives when we string more than one of them together
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My wife, bless her, does not drink coffee. She hates coffee only slightly less than she hates cigarettes–which is a lot–and is, curiously enough, repulsed even by the SMELL of coffee. But coffee is one of the world’s greatest gifts, in my opinion, so I ask her almost every day if I can make her
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I’m feeling under the weather today, and it reminds me of how often I take for granted the simplest treasures in life, physical health included. Let’s resolve to breath more fresh air, and in doing so realize that it is a great gift.
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It’s amazing how excited people get for football season. By early-September it has reached nothing short of fever pitch. There is a lesson here in the importance of planning things to look forward to–it’s not just the thing itself that brings us joy, but the looking forward to the thing.
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Did you know that you can buy a stroller (for a baby) made by Aston Martin? Did you know that it would cost you $4,000? I present this, for now, without comment. We’ll come back to it momentarily. Sometimes, when I tell people about the sort of work I do, I get the sense that some view
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People who are wealthy don’t like to think of luck as having played much of a role in their wealth, and this is understandable. Human nature dictates that we like to take all the credit for the good things that happen to us, and none of the credit for the bad things. But how realistic
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The thing about measuring growth, whether it’s the height of your kids or the amount of your investments, is that the more often you do it, the less it seems growth occurs. But of course measuring has absolutely zero effect on growth. It does seem to have a very real psychological effect on the way you perceive
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Sometimes complex systems–like the human brain, or the universe that quantum physics studies–display what are called “emergent properties.” The phenomenon the term describes goes something like this: Suppose you have a widget that seems to be doing something fairly simple, and then you get a bunch of those widgets and put them together. You might understandably expect that when you did
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Next time you have a decision to make about a big purchase (whatever that means for you), ask yourself this: Will this make me feel the need to apologize to other people when they find out I’ve purchased it? I’m not sure, but maybe this question will force us to do a couple of things:
Meaningful Returns 