In finance, there is a concept known as total return. The goal of total return is simple: To tell you what the overall results were to you, the owner, during a time period you held an asset. This includes any fluctuations in the liquidation value of the asset itself, profits produced by the asset and distributed to you as dividends, spin-offs from activity split off from the asset, etc.
I had some work to do but I just couldn’t focus. Still, I wanted to be productive. We had a giant bag of Granny Smith apples, butter, sugar, brown sugar, flour, and other ingredients left over from Thanksgiving, so I decided to mess around with apple pie recipes. The flavor turned out beyond my expectations.…
Going through the messages that are sent to me, a small percentage of you need to hear this. You have to take responsibility for where you are in life. You cannot control what happens to you – and sometimes terrible, horrible things do happen that you will never fully get over – but you can…
The Thanksgiving Dinner Feast Was Awesome As host to the family Thanksgiving dinner this year, we spent the 36 hours before the day itself sleeping off an on to get everything ready. The sheer amount of flour, white sugar, brown sugar, cinnamon, eggs, white wine, and heavy cream we went through was staggering. The counters…
It is done! The Thanksgiving dinner menu has been set (and a shout-out of heartfelt thanks to blog reader Andrew Brown, who corrected my calendar mistake and made me realize I had far fewer days to prepare than I thought). [mainbodyad]My week is booked with responsibilities for work, and the spouse also has a…
I’ve made no secret of my love of employee-owned businesses. If you want to find the best working conditions, the highest pay, the best employee benefits, and the most cohesive strategies, all else equal, you are going to find them working for a company that has no outside shareholders and is instead owned by the…
Mental Model: Mere Exposure Effect or the Familiarity Principle The mere exposure effect, also known as the familiarity principle, describes a phenomenon that causes humans to rate or feel positively about things to which they are frequently and consistently exposed, including other people. All else equal, you will buy products, invest in stocks, frequent establishments,…
It’s time for some mental model homework. It isn’t often that I read a news story that causes me to grieve. Yet, that is exactly what is happening with the revelations coming out about General Petraeus, the disgraced CIA director and former military commander who had to resign after it was revealed he cheated…
Feel good story for the day: Peyton Manning, the 36 year old legendary quarterback, bought 21 Papa John franchises in the Denver area a couple of weeks ago, according to Bloomberg. It looks like he is borrowing from the Jamal Mashburn and Ulysses Bridgeman, Jr. playbook. Those two former sports stars took their paychecks and, as…
As I go through the results of the 2012 election cycle from a wide range of sources across the political spectrum, including The Wall Street Journal, Fox News, and The Center for American Progress, I am getting … concerned. We need an opposition party in the United States. It creates debate so only the best ideas win, it keeps politicians more honest than they would otherwise be, and it keeps the boat in a narrow center lane so we don’t veer off into extreme in either direction. The Republican party has been taken over by radicals, resulting in a catastrophic demographic and values problem that is now causing it to fail at that vital mission.