Wisdom....................

 

I am not at all persuaded by skepticism.

-Arnold Kling, from this substack edition

He wasn't always right..........

 

After two delightful days, Van Buren told Jefferson that he had to return to Washington for a committee meeting.  A disappointed Jefferson told him not to fuss over dreary state affairs.  Punctuality, he said, was "a losing business."

-James M. Bradley, Martin Van Buren: America's First Politician

Once again, the magic of compounding......

 We tend to overestimate what we can do in a day, and underestimate what we can achieve in a decade.  Miraculous things can be accomplished if you give it ten years.  A long game will compound small gains that will be able to overcome even big mistakes.

-Kevin Kelly, Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier

On the magic of compounding.............

 It’s not until you consider the time factor of compounding that you realize maximizing annual returns in a given year and maximizing long-term wealth are two different things.

Carl Richards once made the point that a house might be the best investment most people ever make. It’s not that housing provides great returns – it does not. It’s not even the leverage. It’s that people are more likely to buy a house and sit on it without interruption for years or decades than any other asset. It’s the one asset people give compounding a fighting chance to work.

-Morgan Housel, from this post

Time: the great leveler.....................

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said:  Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

'My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!'

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

-Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias

Life its ownself...........................

..................................may be found on the back roads.

Saving grace...............................

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Am I the only one ...................

.......................who thinks that most of the the problems we create in trying to solve problems we've created - or otherwise encounter - are caused by our confusion over "time frames"?

"People will be right for the wrong reasons and wrong for the right reasons but markets don’t care about these things over shorter time frames. Over any given year a great process can produce subpar results while a terrible (or no) process can produce phenomenal results. Bad decisions get rewarded all the time but luck doesn’t last forever in the markets. Eventually a good decision-making process will win out but over a one-year time frame anything can happen."

-Ben Carlson, as culled from this smart list of ten things investors can expect in 2018.

With three hours to spare..............

I conducted a time-and-motion study of all my investment and management responsibilities;  it showed it would take me about 165 hours a week to achieve the level of excellence that I would be satisfied with in overseeing both our investments and management.

-Ray Dalio,   Principles

Wonder if blogging equals frittering...?

 “My advice therefore is that one should not force anything; it is better to fritter away one’s unproductive days and hours, or sleep through them, than to try at such times to write something which will give one no satisfaction later on.”

-Austin Kleon, channeling Goethe's checklist

On unfolding..........................

"Everything under heaven is a sacred vessel and cannot be controlled. Trying to control leads to ruin. Trying to grasp, we lose. Allow your life to unfold naturally. Know that it too is a vessel of perfection. Just as you breathe in and breathe out, there is a time for being ahead and a time for being behind; a time for being in motion and a time for being at rest; a time for being vigorous and a time for being exhausted; a time for being safe and a time for being in danger.”


-Lao Tzu, as channeled by Wayne Dyer


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Leisure.......................

It will be said that, while a little leisure is pleasant, men would not know how to fill their days if they had only four hours of work out of the twenty-four. In so far as this is true in the modern world, it is a condemnation of our civilization; it would not have been true at any earlier period. There was formerly a capacity for light-heartedness and play which has been to some extent inhibited by the cult of efficiency. The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake.

-Bertrand Russell, as extracted from his 1932 essay "In Praise of Idleness"

Rebelling..........................

People who are recognizably human have walked the earth for roughly two hundred thousand years.  During those millennia, we survived by continuously adapting to our fickle environment.  We braved harsh winters and punishing landscapes, and feared animals much fiercer than we were, bowing to nature, whose spell overwhelmed us, whose magnificence humbled us, and around which we anxiously rigged our lives.  After a passage of time too long to fully imagine, and too many impression-mad lives to tally, we began rebelling against the forces of nature.  We grew handy, resourceful, flexible, clever, cooperative.  We captured fire, chipped tools, hewed spears and needles, coined language and spent it everywhere we roamed.  And then we began multiplying at breathtaking speed.
-Diane Ackerman,  The Human Age:  The World Shaped By Us

Timeless.............................

...............Michael Wade posts 21 Things I Wish I Knew In My Twenties.  Some of us sixty-somethings still have a lot of work to do.  Thanks Michael.

What's the rush..............................?

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