I love you mom. Walk Good. 28all. Eya. *JD*

The Warm-Up: 

“Been scared and battered. / My hopes the wind done scattered. / Snow has friz me, / Sun has baked me, / Looks like between ‘em they done / Tried to make me / Stop laughin’, stop lovin’, stop livin’-- / But I do not care! / I am still here!” ~Langston Hughes, Still Here

The Core: 

“A life spent looking for shortcuts is a long road to nowhere.” ~Naval Ravikant

“Spend less time convincing people who cant see your vision, and more time building the future with those who do.” ~Orange Book

“You will never appreciate a FaceTime call until it’s the closest thing you have to actually being with the person you miss…” ~@poemsporn_

“Sometimes you block your blessings by allowing people to be in your life that should have been gone a long time ago.” ~Stephan Labossiere

“Don’t force relationships. Love yourself, become a better person. Don’t force financial success. Invest in yourself, learn more valuable skills.” ~Orange Book

“I used to think communication was the key until I realized comprehension is. You can communicate all you want with someone but if they don’t understand you, it’s silent chaos.” ~Anonymous (@poemsporn_)

“Money is a fish. Information is a fishing rod. Only one of them will feed you for a lifetime. In the world we live in, we all have access to information, but most of us still don’t understand the true value of it.” ~Steven Bartlett

“One of the most beautiful feelings is when you see a friend succeed and feel nothing but love for them. Your emotional maturity supports their growth, and the energy you receive gives you the power to make your next moves.” ~Cory Allen

“Success people have mental issues, bad habits, gaps in their knowledge, moments of self-doubt, procrastination issues, imperfect routines, insecurities, and imposter syndrome too. But they also know that all of these things are perfectly normal. That is the difference.” ~Steven Bartlett

“The Advice Paradox: Taking more advice leaves you less well-equipped. Most advice sucks. It’s well-intentioned, but it’s dangerous to use someone else’s map of reality to navigate yours. Winners learn to filter and selectively implement advice—take the signal, skip the noise.” ~Sahil Bloom

“You don’t hate people. That’s your pain talking. You love people. You hate the fact that the genuine strength of your love has been manipulated, mishandled, or misunderstood in the past which makes you fearful to love and trust to that extent now.” ~Morgan Richard Olivier, The Tears That Taught Me

“So many people miss their calling because they settle for opportunity…God’s Calling vs. Man’s Opportunities. God’s calling for you is divine. Opportunities are a dime a dozen. Callings are God given and God ordained. Opportunities can be crafted and created. But here’s the big difference between these two: Opportunities can be taken away, but Callings cant be stopped.” ~Chris Durso

“Is this shit real? Should I pinch you? / After all the things that we been through, I got you, yeah / Look what you’ve done, look what you’ve done / Look what you’ve done for me now, yeah / You knew that I was gon’ be somethin’ / When you’re stressed out and you need somethin’, I got you, yeah / Look what you’ve done, look what you’ve done / Look what you’ve, look what you’ve…” ~Drake, Look What You’ve Done

Last Set:

“People who cannot suffer can never grow up, can never discover who they are. That man who is forced each day to snatch his manhood, his identity, out of the fire of human cruelty that rages to destroy it knows, if he survives his effort, and even if he does not survive it, something about himself and human life that no school on earth—and, indeed, no church—can teach. He achieves his own authority, and that is unshakable. This is because, in order to save his life, he is forced to look beneath appearances, to take nothing for granted, to hear the meaning behind the words…” ~James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

Food For Thought:

“Some thoughts on recent results in the stock market. If you are an investor (as opposed to a speculator) remember that you are buying partial stakes in *businesses.* Would you be comfortable owning the business for years to come if there were no stock price? Being a thoughtful business analyst requires understanding the basic unit of analysis. You want the operations to create value, which means that investments (tangible or intangible) earn a return > the cost of capital. Profits per se are not the key, it’s unit economics. Be mindful to separate fundamentals (how the business is likely to perform) from expectations (what's priced into the stock). This is very hard to do when stocks move up or down a lot in a short period. Assess where expectations are mispriced. Recognize that lower asset prices, all things being equal, imply higher expected returns. Real yields are up. Important for the marginal dollar to invest. It’s easy to get drawn into focusing intently on macro. And there is no shortage of pundits telling you what will happen next. But there’s a large literature that shows that experts are poor predictors. Be macro aware and macro agnostic. Think probabilistically. No one knows. COVID was an exogenous shock that made it really hard to manage companies and investment portfolios. We are now seeing the impact of management actions during COVID, some of it good and some of it not so good. But the shock was a real management challenge. Warren Buffett recommends reading 3 chapters on investing, and this is not a bad time to revisit them. Chapter 8 (Mr. Market metaphor) and Chapter 20 (Margin of Safety) in Graham’s The Intelligent Investor, and Chapter 20 (Expectations/behavioral) in Keynes’s General Theory. Robert Sapolsky is one of the world’s experts on stress. He notes that the stress response is /generally shortsighted, inefficient, and penny-wise and dollar-foolish.’ Stress shortens your time horizon, which can be deleterious to long-term thinking.” ~Michael Mauboussin

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