Some Things I Read Recently
This post is 1,639 words, a 8-minute read. Enjoy!
At the bottom of the Weekly Wednesday Newsletters, there are things that I enjoy and recommend others to check out. Today, I am the top 5 things I have read recently with excerpts from them. Enjoy!
Ben Carlson shares thoughts on navigating the challenging periods of life in Some Things I'm Thinking About:
Simple matters more when things get hard. Simple beats complex for a variety of reasons. It also makes life easier when life gets harder. You don’t want your financial life to be complicated when life gets messy.
My lists are changing. The list of things I don’t care about is growing exponentially. There is a lot of bullshit in the world I’m more or less done caring about. The list of things I do care about is shrinking, but my feelings for the important things are growing stronger by the day.
I’m embracing the mundane. I needed to get out of my own head this week so I’ve been trying to enjoy life’s simple activities — taking the dog for a walk, shoveling the driveway, cleaning the house, organizing a closet or two, watching an old movie, etc.
Sometimes you need to live in the present to stop obsessing about the future and sometimes you need to live in the present to stop obsessing about the past.
Life events are the risks that matter. The most meaningful questions are always about life events — getting married, buying a house, having kids, getting divorced, changing jobs, retirement, death and all of the other stuff life throws at you.
Derek Thompson writes in The Political Fight of the Century
Donald Trump has promised a “golden age of America.” But for all his bluster about being the champion of an American century, Trump’s actual policies point to something different: not an expansive vision of the future, but a shrunken vision of the present.
Throughout the opening months of his administration, the Trump White House has consistently pointed to existing shortages to demand new sacrifices. The administration says America cannot afford its debt, and therefore we cannot afford health care for the poor. The administration says America doesn’t have a healthy economy, and therefore we have to accept economic “hardship.” The administration says America doesn’t have enough manufacturing, and so we must suffer the consequences of less trade. The administration says America doesn’t have enough housing, and so we need fewer immigrants. The administration says American scientists aren’t focused on the right research, and so we have to gut our federal science programs. Again and again, Americans are being fed the line that everything that we don’t have requires the elimination of something that we need.
Kyla Scanlon put into words what I feel about the current administration in FAFOnomics: How Chaos Became America's Economic Strategy:
Yes, America needs change. But change without wisdom isn't reform, it's recklessness.
And of course, there is an important point to all of this, which is that it is all noise. It’s what Tyler Cowen and Ezra Klein have both pointed out as strategic chaos: overwhelming the public's already limited capacity for attention until exhaustion sets in. It's the attention singularity that I wrote about last week in action, where power, narrative, and wealth merge into a self-reinforcing system of perpetual disruption.
Welcome to FAFAnomics - F*ck Around and Find Out Economics, something that feels like the policy equivalent of a TikTok influencer doing increasingly dangerous stunts off the side of a building for views. The goal isn't good governance; it's capturing attention at any cost. And it's working! While we debate whether each new crisis is legal, ethical, or even real1(as we should) the broader transformation of American fiscal policy continues.
But beneath the daily drama, even if it’s all some joke or a way to drive attention, a fundamental restructuring of America's relationship with the world is taking place. To understand it, we need to start with the most basic question facing our economy: Can America do it all alone?
Josh Brown gives great life and investing advice in Give It A Minute:
Greed? Envy? Fear Of Missing Out? Yes, all of those things. When the stock was ripping to 120, 150 seemed like a sure thing, so you can sort of understand it. “If I don’t get in now and it keeps going, I’ll never forgive myself.”
To which I have learned to say, over 25 years in this business, “Give it a minute.”
Giving things a minute doesn’t mean always being right. It does mean missing out on some opportunities. Think of the people who said “give it a minute while Bitcoin was breaking above $60,000 for the first time. Or the people who were giving Nvidia a minute in early 2023 before it 5x’d again. It’s not a silver bullet.
But I have found that giving it a minute has been a far better approach to investing than “fuck it, get me in” over long stretches of time.
...
I’ve been around long enough to have seen a great many things run their course. Very few things remain in permanent uptrends, in markets or in life. Eventually, ideas hit resistance. People’s careers hit resistance. Friendships fall apart. Partnerships dissolve. Market forces dissipate. Technological advantages are flattened. Brands fall out of favor.
George Orwell wrote about this in an essay shortly after World War II and his polemic contains a quote that applies to a great many things. “Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.” I think about this idea all the time from an investing point of view. It’s a universally valuable idea.
...
The world is a complex place and nothing can remain absolutely invincible for long. Because the conditions that contributed to the optics of invincibility are always in flux. The most powerful trends are built on more brittle foundations than one might suspect from only observing them on the surface. But the timing of these things. That’s the tricky part.
Johnathan Clements gives 13 of the best Personal Finance advice I have ever read in Advice for the Kids. Here are some of my favorites:
1. Be an optimist. When you buy bonds, you rent out your money and get interest in return. But when you purchase stocks, you become an owner—and owning is the road to wealth. Sure, if the global economy collapses, you’ll end up broke. But so will everybody else, including those conservative folks who spent their life cowering in bonds and cash investments. Think of owning stocks as “heads I win, tails everybody loses.”
Moreover, over the long haul, losing strikes me as unlikely. Every morning, billions of people around the world wake up, trying to figure out how they can make their life better. Buying stocks is a way to profit from that energy and dynamism.
4. Use your superpower. Are the talking heads prattling on about a possible market crash? That might be unnerving if you plan to spend all your savings in the next few years. Otherwise, ignore such nonsense. Instead, think and act like a truly long-term investor—something even most professional money managers fail to do, because they’re worried about their year-end bonus and about losing clients. The ability to play the long game is the everyday investor’s superpower, but one that’s used all too rarely, alas.
8. Have each other’s back. None of us wants to ask family members for money if we find ourselves out of work or facing unexpectedly large bills. But it’s good to know that last resort exists. Be each other’s safety net, making it clear you stand ready to help if things get rough.
11. Humans are hardwired to worry. Blame this on our loss aversion, which isn’t just about money. Everywhere we turn, we see the possibility that we’ll be on life’s losing end, and yet most of the time things turn out fine. My advice: Be aware of risk—but don’t go into full-worry mode unless it’s truly warranted.
To that end, don’t read too much into texts and emails, especially those from colleagues. Most people aren’t artful in their use of language, so their intent may be muddied, and things will likely be even worse if you try to read between the lines. Instead, until people prove themselves untrustworthy, give them the benefit of the doubt. That attitude will make the world seem like a more pleasant place, and you’ll spend far less time fretting unnecessarily.
An extra from Morgan Housel on Minimum Level of Stress:
In each case, the world can get better but people don’t feel it – they can even feel like they’re going backwards – because once a problem is solved it’s replaced by a new one, often with the same level of anxiety, fear, and anger.
A few things I keep in mind:
In a way, the best definition of progress is when you’ve knocked out the major issues and are left dealing with lower, less-severe ones.
Stress is an innovator. Nothing incentivizes like worry, so we should never want a world where people see everything as perfect.
People are problem solvers. It’s a great characteristic and the source of all progress. But when solving problems is core to your identity, you occasionally see trouble where none exists.
Being angry can be an intoxicating feeling. It offers a sense of moral superiority, because when you accuse others of causing problems, you’re implying that you are better than them. It feels great, and in a strange way some people love being pissed off.
The dumber the disagreements, the better the world actually is.
I hope you enjoy reading these as much as I did. I will see y'all next time Remember
Generosity>greed
God Bless You
✌🏾