In praise of Tim Cook......................

 

....................................and restraint:

   While there are many who compare Tim Cook to Steve Jobs and find him wanting on vision and flair, I am grateful, as an investor in Apple, for the restraint and discipline that he brought to the job. That gratitude will stay intact even if Apple's caution on AI turns out to be a mistake, since the restraint and rectitude that Cook brought to his job are management qualities that significantly undervalued. I don't teach from or write cases, but I would love to see more business school cases about CEOs like Cook who are not easily swayed by the temptation of more growth and ego-driven acquisitions. I loved the Steve Jobs movie, but I don't expect to see a Tim Cook movie anytime soon, and while that is understandable, it also explains why we will continue to have too many CEOs at companies viewing themselves as saviors, gambling shareholder money on turnarounds and rescues, when the better pathway would be acceptance and shrinkage. I believe that investors lose more money from companies trying to do too much rather than from them doing too little, and from overreaching than from underachieving.

-Aswarth Damodaran, from this essay

The 85% rule.....................

 

If you push and strain at maximum effort at all times, you set yourself up for burnout and bad results.

When you adopt a mindset of smooth, balanced, relaxed effort, you stay in the game long enough to let compounding work its magic. You achieve higher heights.

-Sahil Bloom, from this effort

gather strength...........................

 

 I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. 'Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death.

-Thomas Paine, The American Crisis, No. 1, 1776

when slow is fast.....................

There is nothing heroic about quick fixes, hacks, or silver bullets, especially given they rarely, if ever, work.  Most breakthroughs rest upon a long-standing foundation of steady and consistent effort.  For so many of the meaningful endeavors in our lives, the best way to move fast is to go about it slowly, to proceed with a gentle yet firm persistence.

-Brad Stulberg, The Practice of Groundedness: A Transformative Path to Success That Feeds—Not Crushes—Your Soul 

Staying calm is a super power............

 Think about all the bad news, economic or otherwise, of the past twenty-two years that might have caused you to stop investing, or to pull your money out of the market.  Just as a reminder: the Dow was 10,540 at the end of January, 2000.  It is 32,134 today.   For a more readable copy of the chart, go here.

The hardest work.....................

      The biggest challenge in the stock market is not Mr. Market or Mr. Value.  The biggest challenge is neither visible nor measurable; it is hidden in the emotional incapacities of each of us as investors.  Investing, like parenting teenagers, benefits from calm, patient persistence and a long-term perspective and constancy of purpose.  That's why "know yourself" is the cardinal rule in investing.

     The hardest work in investing is not intellectual; it's emotional.  Being rational in an emotional environment is not easy, particularly with Mr. Market always trying to trick you into making changes.  The hardest work is not figuring out the optimal investment policy; it's sustaining a long-term focus—particularly at market highs or market lows—and staying committed to your optimal investment policy.

-Charles D. Ellis,  Winning The Loser's Game:  Timeless Strategies for Successful Investing

Unmoved....................................

      It is said of Cato that even from his infancy, in his speech, his countenance, and all his childish pastimes, he discovered an inflexible temper, unmoved by any passion, and firm in everything.  He was resolute in his purposes, much beyond the strength of his age, to go through with whatever he undertook.  He was rough and ungentle toward those that flattered him, and still more unyielding to those who threatened him.  It was difficult to excite him to laughter, his countenance seldom relaxed even into a smile; he was not quickly or easily provoked to anger, but if once incensed, he was no less difficult to pacify.

     When he began to learn, he proved dull, and slow to apprehend, but of what he once received, his memory was remarkably tenacious.  And such in fact, we find generally to be the course of nature; men of fine genius are readily reminded of things, but those who receive with most pains and difficulty, remember best; every new thing they learn, being, as it were burnt and branded in on their minds.  Cato's natural stubbornness and slowness to be persuaded may also have made it more difficult for him to be taught.  For to learn is to submit to have something done to one; and persuasion comes soonest to those who have least strength to resist it.

-Plutarch's Lives, Translated by John Dryden, from the chapter, Cato The Younger

Ryan Holiday on....................

........................................................................doing your job:

"Everything we do matters — whether it’s making smoothies to save up money or studying for the bar — even after we’ve already achieved the success we sought. Everything is a chance to do and be our best. Only self-absorbed assholes think they are too good for whatever their current station requires."

--------------------------------------------------------------

"The great psychologist Viktor Frankl, survivor of three concentration camps, found presumptuousness in the age-old question: “What is the meaning of life?” As though it is someone else’s responsibility to tell us. Instead, he said, the world is asking you that question. And it’s our job to answer with our actions.

"In every situation, life is asking us a question, and our actions are the answer. Our job is simply to answer well."

Entrench.........................

     via

Sober second thoughts.........

     As the first president to have gone back to work after his tenure, Adams had given himself the opportunity, as none of his predecessors had, to benefit from a "sober second thought."  He had changed the meanings Americans attached to him.  No longer the dynastic New Englander who represented an archaic Federalist America, Adams had become the dauntless standard-bearer of the very modern cause of abolitionism.  At the same time, his rootedness in the republican principles of the founders also placed him on a pedestal in the national pantheon.  Indeed, the very fact that he had not changed, that he had stood for principles when they were despised and lived to see them vindicated, offered the most powerful evidence of his greatness of character.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Yet the report represented a remarkable evolution in Adams' own thinking - and this at the age of seventy-six.  He had long worshiped the Constitution almost as holy writ, yet he now accepted that it had been warped by the compromise with slaveholders.  In a letter to William Seward in May 1844, Adams wrote that all the injustices with which American society was beset had been caused by "that fatal drop of Prussic acid in the Constitution of the United States, the human chattel representation."


-both excerpts from James Traub's,  John Quincy Adams: Militant Spirit

Don't...............................

thanks

tenacem........................

Iustum et tenacem propositi virum
non civium ardor prava iubentium,
non vultus instantis tyranni
mente quatit solida.

"The man who is tenacious of purpose in a rightful cause is not shaken from his firm resolve by the frenzy of his fellow citizens clamoring for what is wrong, or by the tyrant's threatening countenance."
-Horace

Democracy as an experiment......................Or, "You're as good as I am"

    "Few people take the trouble of trying to find out what democracy really is.  Yet this would be a great help, for it is our lawless and uncertain thoughts, it is the indefiniteness of our impressions, that fill darkness, whether mental or physical, with spectres and hobgoblins.  Democracy is nothing more than an experiment in government, more likely to succeed in a new soil, but likely to be tried in all soils, which must stand or fall on its own merits as others have done before it.  For there is no trick in perpetual motion in politics any more than in mechanics.  President Lincoln defined democracy to be 'the government of the people by the people for the people.'  This is a sufficiently compact statement of it as a political arrangement.  Theodore Parker said that 'Democracy meant not 'I'm as good as you are,' but 'You're as good as I am.' ' And this is the ethical composition of it, necessary as a complement of the other; a conception which, could it be made actual and practical, would easily solve all the riddles that the old sphinx of political and social economy who sits by the roadside has been proposing to mankind from the beginning, and which mankind have shown such a singular talent for answering wrongly.  In this sense Christ was the first true democrat that ever breathed..."

-James Russell Lowell, excerpted from his essay, Democracy

Life is a whole.....

"......One of the great dangers we face in the modern world

is an inappropriate compartmentalization of our lives.

     "We can draw a distinction between the public and the

private, between what is professional and what is personal,

but I've come to believe that the most fundamental virtues

and principles in both domains are the same.  In addition,

I am convinced that it's dangerous to try to make exceptions

to those ways of living and treating others we've found to

be binding in one domain.  Life is a whole, and must be

approached as such."

-Tom Morris, If Aristotle Ran General Motors

On concentration................

"He was one of the world's greatest men, and was made great by one single rule.  Oh, that all the young people of Philadelphia were before me now and I could just say this one thing, and that they would remember it.  I would give a lifetime for the effect it would have on our city and on civilization.  Abraham Lincoln's principle for greatness can be adopted by nearly all.  This was his rule:  Whatsoever he had to do at all, he put his whole mind into it and held it there until that was all done.  That makes men great almost anywhere."

Russell Conwell, Acres of Diamonds

Great Speeches..................

The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. gave a transformative
speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.
The date was August 23, 1963.  King, the public face of the
Civil Rights movement of the 1960's, was a student of Gandhi's
non-violent "soul force" approach to change.  As such, words,
both spoken and written, were one of his most powerful tools.
King was a craftsman.  Listen and read.  Judge for yourself.

The video below contains his whole "I have a Dream" speech.
The text is here.  Two excerpts here:

But there is something that I must say to my people who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice. In the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.

We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force. The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. They have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom. We cannot walk alone.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow jail cells. Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive.

Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed. Let us not wallow in the valley of despair.

I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal."