Past Midway Ramblings on Business & Life

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Fun – Part 4 – The Importance of Memories & Imagined Futures

This is the fourth part in a four-part series. A brief recap… Post 1 – I discussed the three components of fun: Part 1 – Anticipating the fun (expecting the Future) Part 2 – Doing the fun (in the Present) Part 3 – Remembering the fun (looking back at our Past). Posts 2 & 3 – I developed and discussed the Totality of Fun, a framework of how we perceive Fun, and described how...

The Totality of Fun – Continued

This is the third part in a four-part series. My first post on this topic introduced the three component parts of fun. The second post in this series introduced the Totality of Fun and discussed Part 2 Fun in more detail. Today, I finish my thoughts on the Totality of Fun by elaborating on Part 1 and Part 3 Fun. I also highlight how all this leads into a particular dilemma with Alzheimer’s, a...

Making Good Decisions – Advice for My Younger Self

Adults frequently inform students there are no multiple-choice exams in real life. They are wrong. Life is in fact a series of multiple choices. It just requires creativity to ask the right questions and understand the available choices, analytical thinking to reason through potential outcomes, and intuition to select the best answer (because in some cases, intuition outperforms logic). You’ll...

Middle School Boys

When I attended Central Middle School in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, our principal, Mr. Stockstill, called all the boys from all three grades (6th, 7th, 8th) into the gymnasium for a special assembly. An unprecedented move. Once there, we learned, in a bit of a circuitous way, that after-hours the previous day, two boys had urinated on the side of the red brick school building outside of the shop...

Efficient Markets, Pricing Anomalies – Chicken Little & Donkeys

When I was completing my MBA in Finance at the Stockholm School of Economics in the late 1990’s, the rumor was that one of our professors had discovered a pricing anomaly in the Stockholm Stock Exchange and had made a sizable amount of money in a pure arbitrage play. Because the details were scarce, I wondered if this was true. And, more importantly, why can’t this happen to me? It did. Read on…...

4-Plex – Flood

Part 4 of a 5-part series… This is a continuation of the story about the 4-plex we owned in Austin, TX. The one with the crystal meth, swarming bees, grow lights, electricity theft & spy cameras. Same property. Water Damage We also had a flood. Not the natural kind where a stream crests its bank during a heavy rain and water creeps in the front door. No. We had the toilet kind. Overflowed for...

Productivity

Do a little bit all the time instead of a lot some of the time.

Consistently making incremental progress is the most effective method to longer-term productivity. I have heard it said that we tend to overestimate what we can accomplish in the short-term and underestimate what we can accomplish in the long-term. True.

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Developing Talent

Your goal, for each member on your team, is to develop them – for them, not for you. Openly communicate that your aim is to provide a fantastic growth experience for your team that boosts their resume to go on and do great things beyond your company. Counterintuitively, actively building peoples’ business acumen and skills with a view to propel their careers, even outside your organization, not...

No One Else Is Doing It

If the market you want to enter is wide open, without competition, you might pause to ask yourself why. There may be a legitimate reason. It is possible to be too avant-garde. Completely original ideas without pre-existing competitors are difficult businesses to start. On top of everything a new business must do right to succeed, you really don’t want to add “educate the customer” to your TO DO...

Defining Success

You must define, early on, what success for your company means to you. You are not required to measure success by revenue, profit, growth, number of employees or any of the traditional metrics. You may have a different view from common, societal definitions of a successful company. As the owner, you get to decide the success criteria, within the boundaries of corporate survival. While different...

Adjacent Possible

In his book, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, Steven Johnson talks about the “adjacent possible”. The adjacent possible, as the name suggest, entails all the near-collision ideas that might form with a simple, first-order combinations of previously existing concepts, ideas, products or services. Although important, the adjacent possible requires no monumental leaps...

Trade Skills

Business is competitive. We compete on price, skills, service, quality, speed, efficiency, demeanor and likability. Of these, one of the most fundamental ways to compete is on skills. Do you know your business, your market and, more importantly, your customer and their business and their end markets? There’s no substitute for actual time in the trenches doing the dirty work of learning your trade...

Your Business Idea

Just as my experience with PEI was the culmination of applying an interest in databases with my experience in finance, your best ideas will likely come from your area of expertise. This is where you have the greatest chance of executing successfully. From within your area of expertise, your idea will either be a product/service/tool you wish you had, or it will be a more efficient way/process of...

Bear Endings

May 2002. London. After only 13 months with Bear Stearns, my desk phone rang. It was the corner office. The Assistant was calling to tell me that “Jeremy would like to meet with you in the conference room.”. Just minutes before, even though we all knew layoffs were on-going, I had been helping a more junior Analyst named Allen work through a financial model. Although work had all but ceased on...

What Game Are We Playing?

“Should I go for 3-of-a-kind or the full-house?” I thought aloud. I was home from college for Christmas break. Between semesters. Final exams behind me. Eight family members gathered around the kitchen table to play Yahtzee (the dice game) at my grandparents’ house. I sat on the end of the table, closest to the door. To me, Yahtzee was an exercise in statistical probabilities mixed with pure...

My Father’s Eulogy

It is a strange thing to miss your own father’s funeral. Today is the second anniversary of my father’s death. He passed away while my family and I were in transit to visit family in Sweden. Mom waited until we had completed our first flight and were about to board our trans-Atlantic flight before telling me that Dad was nearing the end. Mom knew I would have stayed, had I known, and she wanted...

Playing to Win

The kids and I used to wrestle on the living room floor when they were younger – when I was younger. All three were afforded the same wrestling opportunities, but Soren (my son) seemed to enjoy it more than his sisters. Boys sometimes have extra physical energy demanding an outlet. Because Soren was smaller than me, I wrestled with him down on my hands and knees. This enabled Soren to develop his...

Social Security Status

Although Covid, money printing, inflation, and geopolitical complexities dominate the media and our collective conversation, we seem to have lost focus on the Social Security Program. Why? Because it’s boring, in comparison. Nevertheless, a Social Security implosion looms on the near horizon. Consequently, I thought we should resurface this conversation, between panics. The main problem, Social...

Precious Time

Years ago, I was on the phone with a customer. During the conversation, we spoke briefly about our families, as sometimes happens, especially with long-term customers. “Do you have kids?” he asked. “I do. Three,” I replied. “How old are they?” “10, 7 & 4… girl, girl, boy.” “I remember when my son was four…,” his sentence trailed off as he began to reminisce of things that once were. Nostalgic...

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