Full Width 
Shortcuts 
Sign Up 
Log In 
Articles 
Reading List More from Molson Hart's Blog - Molson Hart
People who succeed via analysis of numbers and facts need to learn that understanding of people can make that analysis unnecessary and can even outperform it. Examples: 1. Amazon did not make money between its 1994 founding through 2002. There was no financial or business fundamentals analysis that could’ve led you to buying the stock, which would launch AWS and FBA in 2006. The only way you could’ve profited from the 4000x share price growth between Dec 31 2002 and today was to figure out that Bezos was one of the greatest of all time and was pouring his best years into the company. 2. I was once doing a reference check for a new employee. You can make a quantifiable prediction of employee quality by creating a points system for traits correlated with future work quality. On paper this employee did not appear to be so great, however his reference, who was an accomplished businessman in his own right without an agenda stopped me and said “Hire this guy. Just do it. Trust me.” He was right. 3. Careers and health are complex systems. We can come up with rules of thumb like “work hard” or “exercise”, but, generally we know a lot less about what leads to good outcomes in these fields than we do in chemistry and mathematics where there are higher degrees of predictable certainty. When an older businessperson who has survived and thrived through multiple recessions tells you, someone much younger, less experienced, and successful, to do something like “call them” or “go to this event”, you just need to do it. When your grandmother tells you to stay slim, exercise, and spend time with friends, you just need to do it. There is no fact or data based analysis to support these recommendations, but decades of experience, of seeing people fail in business or die early and those who didn’t, inform these powerful inexplicable recommendations. Yes, facts and numbers are great, but they will only take you so far. Master the understanding of people and know when their recommendations outperform what we call rational analysis to go even father. And note that these two methods are even more powerful when combined. Trust me.
Brontosaurus skeleton at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History (allegedly) Let’s pretend for a moment that brontosauruses are made up, despite them being accepted by the public and scientific community, having ample evidence for their existence, and appearing in museums all over the world. Let me show you how this could come to be: Smart, but young, naive, and generally conformist people enter academia to study paleontology (the study of fossils) They learn about brontosauruses: They were up to 7 stories tall They weighed up to 70 tons They have no back teeth and swallowed all their food whole They would eat rocks to help with their digestion Their long necks were to "reach marshy vegetation some distance away or to reach leaves higher up in trees" (Encyclopedia Britannica) No skull has ever been found The bones you see in museums are mostly not real. They're casted. They get a PhD about how their poop is the size of a 737 Then one day they have a thought “you know…there’s a lot of stuff about brontosauruses which is pretty unbelievable” and they make a list They write a paper and submit it to a paleontology journal. If the paper is right, the journal must disband and all the people who work for it will lose their life’s work, so it gets turned down. The skeptical paleontologist turns to the press, but all the more senior paleontologists say that the skeptical guy is crazy, so now our skeptic’s reputation is ruined The skeptic can’t attract funding because they can’t get published and they’re a kook according respected paleontologists No museum will air the possibility that brontosauruses are fake because it’s one of the main reasons why people go to museums If the skeptical paleontologist is smart at all, they will see all this and they won’t say anything. They want to keep their PhD, their role in the group, and their prestige. It takes a unique and rare person to go against the flow and call something out like this and even if they do, their views mostly won’t be heard. Of course, I’m just joking around. Brontosauruses are real. But if they weren’t, the brontosaurus would be an uncoordinated conspiracy.
1. Empathy 2. Dexterity 3. Persuasion 4. Musicality 5. Confidence 6. Ambition 7. Grit 8. Creativity 9. Flexibility 10. Energy 11. Individualism 12. Willpower 13. Stoicisim 14. Objectivity 15. Allure
There is investment advice in the book of Jewish religious law (the Talmud). It advises that you keep 1/3rd of your wealth in business, 1/3rd in land, and 1/3rd in gold. It's genius. Why? First, it's simple. Second, business, and, to a lesser extent, land, (but not gold, usually) can make you wealthy. But the real genius is its protection against RISK. Think about the bad luck that can happen to you throughout your life and how a Talmud portfolio of business, land, and gold would perform in reply. 1. Health problems might wipe out your gold and prevent you from operating your business, but even a sick person can collect rent from their land. 2. Divorce may result in your losing your land and gold, but no significant other wants to run your business. 3. Theft may cause you to lose you gold and business, but it's hard to take your land. 4. Anger the wrong person in government and you can lose your land and business, but you can almost always keep your gold. 5. Lawuits may result in the loss of your gold and land, but no litigant wants to run (or can run) your business. 6. Inflation can end your business and depending on what type of "gold" you use, can harm that as well, but land will hold its value. There are many more things like this from invasion to natural disaster, and this Talmud portfolio, while conservative, almost always manages to survive. Yes, it's no longer 500 AD, and technology has changed the nature of business, land, and gold, but the principles remain strong. Life is so complicated. Maybe the Talmud portfolio isn't the proft-maximizing perfect one for this time in history, but you'll do fine with it and it'll almost certainly never leave you broke. Citations: Talmud - Wikipedia The Talmud Investment Strategy (investorhome.com)
More in finance
The formerly anti-government bitcoin movement abandons its principles in favor of number-go-up, applauds federal plan to stockpile seized crypto with no clear benefit to national interest
Today, in the Calculated Risk Real Estate Newsletter: 2nd Look at Local Housing Markets in February A brief excerpt: NOTE: The tables for active listings, new listings and closed sales all include a comparison to February 2019 for each local market (some 2019 data is not available). Here is a look at months-of-supply using NSA sales. Since this is NSA data, it is likely months-of-supply will increase into the Summer. There is much more in the article.
Plus! Divided Attention; Demand; Buying Low?; The Stuff Tax; Mispriced Derivatives
From the BLS: Job Openings and Labor Turnover Summary The number of job openings was little changed at 7.7 million in January, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Hires held at 5.4 million, and total separations changed little at 5.3 million. Within separations, quits (3.3 million) and layoffs and discharges (1.6 million) changed little. emphasis added This report is for January; the employment report last Friday was for February. Click on graph for larger image. The number of job openings (black) were down 9% year-over-year. Quits were down 3% year-over-year. These are voluntary separations. (See light blue columns at bottom of graph for trend for "quits").
We're prone to addiction, and addiction is highly profitable. They know it, and we know it. We inhabit an Addiction Economy. We all know the cure for addiction is to go Cold Turkey: drop the denial and delusion of control, and excise the source of the addiction from one's life. This is of course not easy; it's agony on multiple fronts, for we've come to depend on the source of addiction for dopamine hits, pain management, and distraction from our troubles and travails. Sources of addiction that tie into our identity and need to be recognized and valued are especially pernicious, as these are what make us feel that we exist in a meaningful way. We're talking of course about social media as the source of our most compelling and tenacious addiction, for social media is the means by which we say "I exist, my opinion matters, I matter, and here is the tangible evidence, everyone can see my selfie, photo, tweet, post, note or comment, and since everyone has a device to access my opinion, I can imagine multitudes seeing it, for I can see it." In a physical world where we're invisible and don't matter, the universal, tangible visibility of social media is addictive, for there is no substitute for it in the real world in which we're anonymous and invisible. Try getting your photo or opinion in the Mainstream Media, on network TV or in a mass media publication. Unlike these rigorously gated forms of media, social media is open to all, an irresistible opportunity to stake a claim to becoming visible. There is nowhere in the real world to express oneself with such ease. Shouting on a street corner will get attention, but not the sort most desire. Standing up in a public hearing will provide three minutes of public exposure, but this only whets the appetite for a wider audience and a more substantial self-confirmation. But this confirmation of selfhood is a chimera. That others see our selfie, photo, opinion or post is no substitute for relationships in the real world, and the relationship we have with ourself, in which our integrity and actions earn our self-respect, regardless of what others see or don't see and what they think or don't think about us. Our worth has nothing to do with visibility, and neither does our identity. Let's stipulate that the phone is a mechanism of addiction, but it can be used sparingly for non-addictive practicalities. Sales people may well spend much of their day on their phone communicating with clients and making cold calls. Brief SMS texts serve as efficient communications, as do quick emails and phone calls. The iPhone software identifies this communication as social, which confuses it with social media. Practical communication isn't social, it's communicating essential information in the most efficient manner. The mobile phone also serves as a business tool--doing a bit of online banking, mapping a route, etc.--and as a modest platform for creating content: recording an idea or melody, sharing an idea for a podcast, etc. But how much of our staring at the little screen is essential communication and creation, and how much is time wasted on social media or other distractions? Here are two screenshots of our household phones. The first records total use through mid-afternoon (3:14 pm): 3 minutes. The workday is largely done and essential communication took a few minutes. Here's a weekly total: 2 hours and 22 minutes for the week, or 20 minutes average per day. Some days might require a long phone conversation, or numerous texts, but others don't require much in the way of essentials. The phone's addictive feature is its constant pinging, demanding "look at me!" as apps notifications are constantly nagging us to generate income for the platform by opening the app and giving it our attention, for the Attention Economy depends on our engagement as the source of profit. So Cold Turkey the notifications: delete the apps, turn off notifications, mute the device. Also delete / Cold Turkey the social media apps and notifications. Consider social media as a snack designed to addict you to something that tastes good but is ruinously toxic, even as it generates billions of dollars in profits for the pushers / dealers. Technology is a useful servant but a terrible master. Addiction itself is slippery; we deny we're addicted (I can stop any time), and maintain the fiction that we're in control even as we compulsively stare at our phone dozens (or hundreds) of times a day. The phone and every app are engineered to be addictive. For each of us, it's our rational understanding of the mechanisms of addiction and our will versus thousands of people working feverishly to break down our rationality and will by appealing directly to our insecurities and dopamine circuitry. Social media is intentionally designed to reward our addictive behavior because this behavior generates tens of billions of dollars in profits for the purveyors. The algos track what you click on, and give you more of that, notify you when a "friend" posts anything, cheer you on when your post gets a "like," and so on. The mechanisms of addiction are all in plain sight but we fall for them anyway because our insecurities and dopamine circuitry are so easy to manipulate. The endless feed / scroll is addictive. They know it, we know it, but we're snared anyway. The way out is Cold Turkey. The other common addiction based on products engineered to be addictive is our addiction to junk food, snacks and fast food. Once again, thousands of people are tasked with engineering and marketing these products to light up our dopamine / pleasure circuitry as the means of maximizing private profits. Our health is being ruined, slowly but surely, as the inevitable consequence of milking our dopamine circuitry for profits. Once again, the only real solution is Cold Turkey: eliminate all junk food, snacks and fast food from our lives. If there are no snacks in the house, we won't consume them. It's that simple. So go Cold Turkey on buying bags of addiction like this: And only have real food like this in the house. Need a snack? Then have a banana or apple or carrot or a few unprocessed peanuts. Everyone complains that there's no time or energy to prepare a real-food meal. Yes, modern life is a pressure cooker. But how much time do we spend every day compulsively staring at a screen, not for essential communication but for all the other digital snack food we're being prompted to consume? It's not going to make the cover of a magazine, but a can of plain black beans, some corn tortillas, a jar of salsa, some chopped up lettuce, a few olives and carrot sticks is a taco / burrito meal of real food that we control, unlike an ultra-processed substitute. Preparing a meal isn't a substitute for staring at a screen; it's the real world. There is no substitute for real food and the real world. Preparing a stir-fry meal is pretty quick. Yes, it take some prep, but the process of prepping meat, onions and vegetables is a form of meditation on the real world that heals our compulsions and addictions. We could sit and meditate to clear our minds or we can prepare a meal, which serves the same purpose. One of the most perniciously addictive qualifies of engineered, ultra-processed junk food is that it ruins our taste for real food. Junk food / snacks are addictive because they're loaded with completely unnatural concentrations of sugar, salt and low-quality fats. An apple is sweet, and so is a fresh carrot. But are they as sweet as breakfast cereal? No. Everyone says real food is too expensive. Yes it is, but what are your life and health worth? We complain about the cost of food but manage to throw away a significant percentage of all the food we buy. We also tend to eat too many low-nutrition calories. Buy on sale, waste nothing, eliminate low-nutrition calories, and costs become more bearable. We're prone to addiction, and addiction is highly profitable. They know it, and we know it. The only real way out is to go Cold Turkey and eliminate the sources of addiction from our lives. This is painful, as the pushers and dealers know oh so well, as we've lost our taste for real food and the real world. To recover our taste for real food and the real world, there's one path: Cold Turkey. The pushers and dealers insist it can't be done. Of course they do. They're terrified by the prospect of their tens of billions of dollars in Addiction Profits slipping away as those whose health they're diminishing choose health over addiction. Cold Turkey (Plastic Ono Band, 5 min) My recent books: Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases originated via links to Amazon products on this site. The Mythology of Progress, Anti-Progress and a Mythology for the 21st Century print $18, (Kindle $8.95, Hardcover $24 (215 pages, 2024) Read the Introduction and first chapter for free (PDF) Self-Reliance in the 21st Century print $18, (Kindle $8.95, audiobook $13.08 (96 pages, 2022) Read the first chapter for free (PDF) The Asian Heroine Who Seduced Me (Novel) print $10.95, Kindle $6.95 Read an excerpt for free (PDF) When You Can't Go On: Burnout, Reckoning and Renewal $18 print, $8.95 Kindle ebook; audiobook Read the first section for free (PDF) Global Crisis, National Renewal: A (Revolutionary) Grand Strategy for the United States (Kindle $9.95, print $24, audiobook) Read Chapter One for free (PDF). A Hacker's Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet (Kindle $8.95, print $20, audiobook $17.46) Read the first section for free (PDF). Will You Be Richer or Poorer?: Profit, Power, and AI in a Traumatized World (Kindle $5, print $10, audiobook) Read the first section for free (PDF). The Adventures of the Consulting Philosopher: The Disappearance of Drake (Novel) $4.95 Kindle, $10.95 print); read the first chapters for free (PDF) Money and Work Unchained $6.95 Kindle, $15 print) Read the first section for free Become a $3/month patron of my work via patreon.com. Subscribe to my Substack for free NOTE: Contributions/subscriptions are acknowledged in the order received. Your name and email remain confidential and will not be given to any other individual, company or agency. Thank you, Dave B. ($100), for your outrageously generous subscription to this site -- I am greatly honored by your steadfast support and readership. Thank you, Shift Frequency ($25), for your marvelously generous subscription to this site -- I am greatly honored by your support and readership. Thank you, Do El ($36), for your magnificently generous subscription to this site -- I am greatly honored by your steadfast support and readership. Thank you, Susan H. ($10), for your very generous contribution to this site -- I am greatly honored by your steadfast support and readership. Go to my main site at www.oftwominds.com/blog.html for the full posts and archives.
