Old school..................

 

‘Old school’ means living by timeless principles. Who does not value punctuality or resourcefulness under pressure? These are never obsolete; they are the foundation of ease of working and ease of living.

-Nicholas Bate, from here

a craft.....................

I start my valuation classes with a question of whether valuation is an art or a science, and I argue that it is neither; it does not have the precision that characterizes a science and unlike an art, it does come with principles that constrain you on what you can and cannot do. I describe valuation as a craft, where you learn as you value companies, and in the process, there are times where you question how it is practiced, and try to find ways to do it better. I have learned my share of lessons in the four decades that I have practiced valuation, and I have often abandoned standard practices, in the hope of developing better ones.

-Aswath Damodaran, from this episode

Old school.....................

 

The American university is broken. The people running the universities know it, which is why they have redoubled their efforts to make sure you can’t do anything about it.

-Colin Redemer, from this essay

via

Tiny lessons..............

 

Success is creating dramatically more value for the world than you create for yourself.

-Vlad Tenev

nibbles....................

 

     Robert Pirsig honors the aggravation.  "Motorcycle maintenance gets frustrating," he writes. "Angering. Infuriating. That's what makes it interesting."  His approach is to inspect the aggravation itself.  He proposes that when you're baffled, it means your current theories about how to proceed aren't working.  You have to empty your mind of them, Zen-style, which takes time.  He advises:

     Just stare at the machine. . .Watch it the way you watch a line when fishing and before long. . .you'll get a nibble, a little fact asking in a timid, humble way if you're interested in it... 

     After a while you may find that the nibbles you get are more interesting than your original purpose of fixing the machine. . .Then you're no longer strictly a motorcycle mechanic, you're also a motorcycle scientist, and you've completely conquered the gumption trap of value rigidity.

     Three terms for his last sentence bear examining.  Pirsig's technique for becoming a "motorcycle scientist" is through studying how he arrives at solutions.  By "value rigidity" Pirsig means "an inability to revalue what one sees because of commitment to previous values."

-Stewart Brand, Maintenance: Of Everything

Having been in a ................

 

............. "fee for services" business for 9/10 of my professional life, this is a wonderful post.

In other words, a reasonable fee is poetry and prose, logic and magic. You can get too logical. Put down that calculator and consider feelings and status.

On the importance of value................

 

If time=money, your earning potential is limited. If value=money, your earning potential is unlimited.

-Nicholas Bate, from Rule 4 of 7 about money

Can I get an amen................?

 

The ultimate goal of human action is always the satisfaction of the acting man's desire.  There is no standard of greater or lesser satisfaction other than individual judgements of value, different for various people and for the same people at various times.  What makes a man feel uneasy and less uneasy is established by him from the standard of his own will and judgment, from his personal and subjective valuation.  Nobody is in a position to decree what should make a fellow man happier.

-Ludwig Von Mises,  Human Action: A Treatise on Economics

value.....................

 

The thing that is least perceived about wealth is that all pleasure in money ends at the point where economy becomes unnecessary.  The man who can buy anything he covets, without any consultation with his banker, values nothing he buys.

-William Dawson, The Quest of the Simple Life

your personal balance sheet..........

 

The most valuable financial asset is not needing to impress anyone.  

Not needing to impress other people, especially strangers, is an asset on your personal balance sheet that can be more valuable than anything else.

When you don't feel the need to impress other people, your desires fall. When your desires fall, your satisfaction with what you already have grows.  It is really that simple.

-Morgan Housel

warned......................

 

But a value system which glorifies wealth and accumulation, which builds itself on a platform of want, which inflames and creates more of it daily through a marketing machine that colonizes the human mind—this is what every spiritual tradition in history has warned against, and with good reason.

-Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

creators of value..............

 

     Becoming an entrepreneur and starting a business completely changed my life.  Almost everything I had believed about business was proven wrong.  The most important thing I learned in my first year at Safer Way was that business isn't based on exploitations or coercion at all.  Instead, I discovered that business is based on cooperation and voluntary exchange.  People trad voluntarily for mutual gain.  No one is forced to trade with a business.  Customers have competitive alternatives in the marketplace, team members have competitive alternatives for their labor, investors have numerous alternatives to invest their capital, and suppliers have plenty of alternative customers for their products and services.  Investors, labor, management, suppliers—they all need to cooperate to create value for customers.  If they do, the joint value created is divided fairly among the creators of value through competitive market processes based approximately on the overall contribution each stakeholder makes.  In other words, business is not a zero-sum game with a winner and loser.  It is a win, win, win, win game—and I really like that.

-John Mackey and Raj Sisodia, Conscious Capitalism: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business

About anger.................

 

I don't believe in anger anymore.  Anger was good when I was young and full of testosterone, but now I like the Buddhist saying, "Anger is a hot coal you hold in your hand while waiting to throw it at somebody."  I don't want to be angry, and I don't want to be around angry people.  I just cut them out of my life.  I'm not judging them.  I went through a lot of anger too. They have to work through it on their own.  Go be angry at someone else, somewhere else.

-Eric Jorgenson, channeling Naval Ravikant

one archetype......................

 

     Over the years, Franklin had been developing a social outlook that, in its mixture of liberal, populist, and conservative ideas, would become one archetype of American middle-class philosophy.  He exalted hard work, individual enterprise, frugality, and self-reliance. On the other hand, he also pushed for civic cooperation, social compassion, and voluntary community improvement schemes.  He was equally distrustful of the elite and the rabble, of ceding power to the well-born establishment or to an unruly mob.  With his shopkeeper's values he cringed at class warfare.  Bred into his bones was a belief in social mobility and the bootstrap values of rising through hard work.

-Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

Not so subtle parenting......

 

     This was obviously directed at an audience beyond that of his son, who was already 40 and the governor of New Jersey.  There was, however, a subtext directed at him:  William had taken on airs since becoming governor, and he was far more enamored of the aristocracy and establishment than his father.  The autobiography would be reminder of their humble origins and a paean to hard work, thrift, shopkeeping values, and the role of an industrious middle class that resisted rather than emulated the pretensions of the well-born elite.

-Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

the time value of money................

 

For Turgot, as sum of money delivered immediately and the promise of the same amount of money at some future date could not possibly have the same value.  Time preference explains why Aristotle was wrong.  Interest is the difference in monetary values across time, the rate at which present consumption is exchanged for future consumption.  Interest represents the time value of money.

-Edward Chancellor, The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest

Stories..........................

 

Stories that stir our emotions involve situations that feature both sides of a debate—the good and the bad, the positive and the negative, and the light and the dark sides of humanity.  Real-world conflict between positive and negative emotions brings up the issues of values, which make a story engaging.

-Kevin Ervin Kelley, Irreplaceable: How to Create Extraordinary Places That Bring People Together

a Medium of Exchange.................

 

"The dollar has lost 96% of its purchasing power over the last century."  This statement is the most misleading claim in all of finance.  Full stop.

     The collapse of purchasing power of the US dollar is used to scare investors, sell dubious products, and fool people into believing nonsense.  . . . 

     Let's begin with the biggest issue:  The US dollar (USD) is not a long-term Store of Value.  That was never its intended purpose.  Rather, the USD is a Medium of Exchange.  There is an enormous difference between these two cases, and those who seek to mislead people rely on their not understanding the difference.

-Barry Ritholtz, How Not to Invest: The Ideas, Numbers, and Behaviors That Destroy Wealth—and How to Avoid Them

an idea.............................

 

That is the continual manifestation, within each of us, of the Divine Word that generated the cosmos when time and space themselves began.  That is the initial biblical characterization of the spirit of what is highest; the initial manifestation of the spirit of the one God.  This is a stunning idea, a revolutionary idea, a world-ordering idea, a civilization-engendering idea—an idea that is a precondition for optimized psychological and social order alike. It is from that presumption of our implicit individual value—to say it again—that we derive our infinite set of natural rights (and, let us not forget, as we are so prone to, natural responsibility).

-Jordan B. Peterson, We Who Wrestle with God: Perceptions of the Divine

that divine proposition.....................

 

     Is the idea of man as an image of God not utterly preposterous?  How could flawed man, even the lowliest man or woman, possess a direct relationship to the divine?  Man, with his propensity for decrepitude, suffering, and death; his self-evident insignificance contrasted with nature and the cosmos; the brevity of his life—why attribute value to something so fleeting in its existence and contemptible in its inadequacy?  But, in the absence of that divine proposition, where would we be? . . . How could we possible manage without the tradition of inalienable rights and intrinsic individual responsibility that is the logical consequence of that axiomatic proclamation of our sacred worth?

-Jordan B. Peterson, We Who Wrestle with God: Perceptions of the Divine