As the American Civil War dawned, William Tecumseh Sherman, the man who was to be called the “first modern general”, remarked to a Southern friend: You people of the South don’t know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end. It is all folly,…
DetailsThere are a lot of things you can take from corporate America and apply to your personal life. One of my favorites is a cost/impact analysis. If you are having difficult sorting all of the work and projects you need to finish, one way to make the decision easier is to draw a box and…
DetailsA $1.00 bill in 1971 has the purchasing power of only 18¢ today. A £1 bill in Great Britain has the purchasing power of only £0.09. That is, if you put money in a coffee can in 1971 and buried it in the back yard, you’ve lost 82% of your purchasing power in the United…
DetailsIn an interview called “JK Rowling: A Year in Her Life”, that covered the period during the last year when she finished the final Harry Potter book, the interviewer asked Rowling, “How would you like to be remembered?”. Her response was poignant. As someone who did the best she could with the talent she had.…
DetailsI think the major tipping point in terms of wealth creation and financial freedom probably comes somewhere around $650,000 in productive assets with little or no debt. That isn’t an arbitrary amount of money. It comes down to a function of economics. That is an important distinction – your house, car, and furniture aren’t productive…
DetailsI was enjoying a discussion with someone about hyperrealism around the time I wrote last night about my love for the works of Eric Christensen, Pedro Campos, Steve Mills, and Nathan Taylor, when they kept insisting that stil life paintings, particularly those that are close to a photograph, lack emotion. (I completely disagree – the…
DetailsHyperrealism is my favorite style of painting. Then again, I’ve always felt like life, as it is, is beautiful. Life, in all of its messy, unpredictable madness of patterns and light, din and music. It is difficult to explain, but when I see a certain style of painting in the hyperrealism genre, I instantly get the…
DetailsThere is something to be said for the concept of having a tangible, physical representation of your “body of work”. Take J.K. Rowling. Her entire fortune and career have been built upon 4,175 pages – each of which started out completely blank and that she filled with ideas – spanning seven books. It has been…
DetailsWhat man has done, man may do. – Proverb On May 6th, 1954, at Oxford University’s Iffley Road Track, Roger Bannister became the first recorded man in history to run a mile – exactly 5,280 feet – in less than 4 minutes. His time, 3:59:04, was thought unachievable. Men had tried countless times and failed.…
DetailsIn 1928, Irving Fisher published The Money Illusion (seriously, buy it – it’s only $7.95), which discussed the human fallacy of thinking about things in the nominal currency of your home country instead of in terms of purchasing power. The concept phrase “money illusion” was coined by legendary investor and economist John Maynard Keynes. The…
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