Substack Library
GlossaryIt’s the Followers that Scare Me
April 27, 2023If someone forwarded this to you, my name is Paul, you can read about me here. This Substack grows via word-of-mouth, so please forward to your friends. If you like this writing, you will enjoy my books Master, Minion and Raising a Thief as well as the podcast. Subscriptions are a vote of confidence, book reviews help lead others to my books.
Notes On 660 Months
April 6, 2023If someone forwarded this to you, my name is Paul, you can read about me here. This Substack grows via word-of-mouth, so please forward to your friends. If you like this writing, you will enjoy my books Master, Minion and Raising a Thief as well as the podcast.
Cultivating Optimism
March 29, 2023If someone forwarded this to you, my name is Paul, you can read about me here. This Substack grows via word-of-mouth, so please forward to your friends. If you like this writing, you will enjoy my books Master, Minion and Raising a Thief as well as the podcast.
Be Wary of Lingo
March 8, 2023For those of you seeing these posts for the first time, my name is Paul and I’m a writer and investor. You can read more about me here. Readers enjoy my books, Raising a Thief and Master, Minion and I think you will too. You can support my team with a paid subscription. For those of you in Connecticut, I speak tomorrow night at the Westport Book Shop, an organization with a great mission.
When Facing Tribulation
January 11, 2023We all encounter tough challenges along the way. Everyone. The question is how to struggle through them with a degree of grace and poise such that it draws people in rather than repels them and isolates you.
The Flow and Eddies
December 23, 2022This year’s posts began with The Barbell as Medicine and will end on a metaphor—we are all in a river with eddies. The goal is to get as much out of the ride down the river as we can and do our best to avoid those eddies. The river flows at a fast clip, there is a waterfall at the end. That’s true in our own lives but also for countries and investing.
Our Problem-Solver Within
November 17, 2022Our brains do the work we give them. How is complicated, even mysterious, and the unconscious plays a critical role, particularly in creativity. With surprising speed, as the work shifts brain function shifts, evidenced by Ukrainian software engineers who rapidly went from coding to killing. Since leaving the corporate world, I gave my brain a different problem to solve and I suspect what I’ve observed since provides a lesson for anyone trying to tap their own creativity, which is what today’s post is about.
Post Destructive Leaders
November 17, 2022Countries get off track. It happens. While there are many things that lead a country to get off track—economic crises, extreme income inequality, simmering ethnic hatred—at the end of the day countries are people and people, us, are prone to avarice, xenophobia, delusion and rage and sometimes as a species we select leaders that reflect these unproductive ways of behaving.
Ego, Self-Doubt, Survival
November 17, 2022I made a bad trade this week, which has led me to reflect on risk taking in general. The interesting thing with managing money is that unlike in other spheres of life— parenting, many forms of work, spirituality—you can keep score and track the quality of your thinking. In the sixteen years I’ve been tracking my investment results, $1 grew to around $3 averaging around 8% per year with low volatility. While more has gone right than wrong, I remember the trades that are wrong more acutely than the ones that were right. I think this is wiring, at least for most people. I don’t recall most of the time I’ve spent behind the wheel of a car, but the few times I’ve been in car crashes I recall quite vividly.