Building Wealth- Income and Expenditure Of course the math is simple- if you want to build wealth, there are only two main ingredients. 1) Make more money than you spend, and save the difference. 2) Get a decent rate of return on your savings. Most of this blog focuses on step 2. For step 1 which I touch on only from time to time, I largely avoid the topic of income, as that’s something that is closely tied to one’s profession. This specific post will quickly outline two ways to improve your savings rate. Income One way to boost income is with a second job. For me, that income is currently blogging and writing freelance investing articles. I know a retired engineer that spent most of his long career moonlighting as an emergency driver after work. When it comes to a second “job”, bringing in a second stream of income while doing something you like can be rewarding. Expenditure One thing about me, is that I’m not particularly frugal. I recommend the “10 rule” when it comes to buying things. So what are your thoughts? Dividend Monk
5 Steps to Transform Yourself into Higher Self The last week or so I have been engulfed and suffocating in negativity. Everywhere I look these days information is streaming in; all about death, war, pestilence, toxins, destruction, disease..well you get it. It all felt so much out of my control and dis-empowering. Then there is the other side of the spectrum, the world where I perceive my brothers and sisters to reside. The world of unrelenting and all consuming love. Where festivals with uniting music, light, dance, superfoods, acceleration, meditation prevail and the world feels like she is healing through the act of just being. Then today I had a breakthrough, like the two hemispheres of my brain, the yin and the yang finally harmonized in that cranium of mine and the truth started pouring out inspired by a fantastic interview with Eisenhower’s great granddaughter. We are living in the grand cleansing. We must merge hemispheres. Hi everyone, my name is Jocelyn Daher and I am a team member and writer for Spirit Science.
Stoicism for Modern Stresses: 5 Lessons from Cato The philosophical school of Stoicism is, I believe, the perfect operating system for thriving in high-stress environments. For entrepreneurs, it’s a godsend. Both Seneca and Marcus Aurelius have been extensively written about elsewhere. But what of Cato, about whom Dante said, “And what earthly man was more worthy to signify God than Cato?” One of my favorite anecdotes of Cato is from Plutarch. “Seeing the lightest and gayest purple was then most in fashion, he would always wear that which was the nearest black; and he would often go out of doors, after his morning meal, without either shoes or tunic; not that he sought vain-glory from such novelties, but he would accustom himself to be ashamed only of what deserves shame, and to despise all other sorts of disgrace.” The following article was written by Rob Goodman and Jimmy Soni. Both exemplify the power of Stoicism when applied to a world of modern noise. Enter Rob and Jimmy Julius Caesar wanted to end him. Why does he matter today?
Neuroskeptic 10 Questions: On Finding Your ‘Soul-Life’ in a 130-Year-Old Book Brooke Williams and Terry Tempest Williams are two of our generation’s greatest gifts. Brooke is the author of four books, and he offers deep meditations on wilderness and wild lands, as well as working actively in defense of the pristine, most recently with the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance. Terry is legendary for her intensely personal explorations of nature and life and the human resonance between the two, and she’s the author of the critically acclaimed Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place and numerous other books. The couple, who divide their time between Castle Valley, Utah, and Jackson, Wyoming, were in a book shop in Maine when Terry stumbled across a volume called The Story of My Heart. Recently, I caught up with the two to learn more about how and why The Story of My Heart got under their skin, and what lessons it has for us today. 1. Brooke Williams: The Story of My Heart, I believe, comes from the collective unconscious, into which Jefferies was able to tap.
Elementary Worldly Wisdom A Lesson on Elementary, Worldly Wisdom As It Relates To Investment Management & Business Charles Munger, USC Business School, 1994 I'm going to play a minor trick on you today because the subject of my talk is the art of stock picking as a subdivision of the art of worldly wisdom. That enables me to start talking about worldly wisdom—a much broader topic that interests me because I think all too little of it is delivered by modern educational systems, at least in an effective way. And therefore, the talk is sort of along the lines that some behaviorist psychologists call Grandma's rule after the wisdom of Grandma when she said that you have to eat the carrots before you get the dessert. The carrot part of this talk is about the general subject of worldly wisdom which is a pretty good way to start. So, emphasizing what I sometimes waggishly call remedial worldly wisdom, I'm going to start by waltzing you through a few basic notions. What is elementary, worldly wisdom? What are the models?
The Wisest Entrepreneurs Know How to Preserve Equity Harry Campbell So you want to be an Internet billionaire. It’s not just about having a great idea and building a world-class business at light speed. A review of recent initial public offering filings for Internet start-ups shows that the founders of Groupon and Zynga — and by other indications, Facebook, which has yet to file — have had to do more. These entrepreneurs appear more savvy than earlier Internet moguls, but their success owes thanks in large part to an old guard in Silicon Valley that is eagerly advising the new generation on the pitfalls. Success can spell the difference in billions. The multibillion-dollar difference is a result of a start-up’s need for capital at the embryonic stage. But the business is merely an idea at this stage and usually not a proven success. Decisions that entrepreneurs make early in terms of financing can affect how much money they will reap later. In Groupon’s case, Mr. In Zynga’s case, Mark Pincus created the company in 2007.
How Mind-Wandering and “Positive Constructive Daydreaming” Enhance Creativity and Improve Our Social Skills by Maria Popova The science of why fantasy and imaginative escapism are essential elements of a satisfying mental life. Freud asserted that daydreaming is essential to creative writing — something a number of famous creators and theorists intuited in asserting that unconscious processing is essential to how creativity works, from T. S. Eliot’s notion of “idea incubation” to Alexander Graham Bell’s “unconscious cerebration” to Lewis Carroll’s “mental mastication.” In a recent paper titled “Ode to Positive Constructive Daydreaming” (PDF), published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, writer Rebecca McMillan and NYU cognitive psychologist Scott Kaufman, author of Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined, revisit Singer’s work to deliver new insights into how the first style of Singer’s mind-wandering, rather than robbing us of happiness, plays an essential, empowering role in daily life and creativity. My highlights from Anaïs Nin's diary, illustrated by Lisa Congdon. Thanks, Scott Myers
Is Stanford Too Close to Silicon Valley? Stanford University is so startlingly paradisial, so fragrant and sunny, it’s as if you could eat from the trees and live happily forever. Students ride their bikes through manicured quads, past blooming flowers and statues by Rodin, to buildings named for benefactors like Gates, Hewlett, and Packard. Everyone seems happy, though there is a well-known phenomenon called the “Stanford duck syndrome”: students seem cheerful, but all the while they are furiously paddling their legs to stay afloat. Innovation comes from myriad sources, including the bastions of East Coast learning, but Stanford has established itself as the intellectual nexus of the information economy. The campus, in fact, seems designed to nurture such success. On a sunny day in February, Evan Spiegel had an appointment with Wendell and Nasr to seek their advice. Spiegel needed some business advice from campus mentors. Stanford University opened its doors in 1891. William F. This was not to be a satellite campus.
The Harder I Work, The Luckier I Get Overnight success. It’s one of the biggest myths in the tech industry. It’s an ongoing struggle to overcome this bias. If you take a snapshot during an extraordinary surge in valuations, M&A activity, IPOs and thus wealth creation you’d echo John Doerr’s famous quote from 1999 that, “The Internet is the greatest legal creation of wealth in history.” So which is it? Rapid success stories happen, true. And even the best teams combined to create big innovations sometimes don’t time markets well, are surprised by unexpected technology breakthroughs by competitors or just don’t find the magic the leads to mass customer adoption. Would Zynga have been the smashing success it has become if it weren’t perfectly timed to ride on the back of Facebook’s growth? So I have always been a big believer in luck as a component of success. Later in life I learned of the famous Samuel Goldwyn saying, “The harder I work, the luckier I get.” Less than 100 people read that original post 2 years ago.