Why fit in when you were born to stand out – Dr. Seuss

Today you are you! That is truer than true! There is no one alive who is you-er than you!

You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose.

The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.

Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.

A person’s a person, no matter how small.

You’re off to Great Places! Today is your day! Your mountain is waiting, So… get on your way!

Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.

Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.

Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple.

Think left and think right and think low and think high. Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try!

And then there is a meeting :)….

“the meeting which is called not because there is business to be done, but because it is necessary to create the impression that business is being done. Such meetings are more than a substitute for action. They are widely regarded as action.” [John Kenneth Galbraith about president Herbert Hoover’s meetings with top business leaders in the wake of the stock market crash of 1929]

7 generations…

According to some aboriginals if 7 generations later nobody remembers what you did – you have done nothing 😦

Compounding is key…

Take someone who invests eight years till s/he’s 27 and invests a total of $28,800, or $300 a month, and then just leaves it there—doesn’t add another penny. S/he’ll have nearly 2 million when s/he retires at 65 if the market continues to compound like it has (at 10% or more annually on average).

If her/his buddy doesn’t start till s/he’s 28 and s/he invests $300 a month, s/he’ll have invested $140,000 by the time s/he retires at 65. But her/his compounding returns will end up at almost $300,000 less than her/his friend. She’ll be investing longer and more—and s/he’ll end up with less…so is in life of compounding…if one assumes 10% + returns 🙂

150 years…and what a difference it makes :)

In 1871, 42 per cent of Canadians were 14 years and younger and 3.6 per cent of the population was older than 65. The average age was 23.4, life expectancy was 40 years and only one-third of Canadians reached the age of 65. Today, the average age is 41, life expectancy is more than 82, and 90 per cent of the population can expect to reach 65 years of age.

“We’re going to win so much, you’re going to be so sick and tired of winning.” Donald Trump

After repealing Obama Care, sick maybe, tired ?…How about letting Donald Trump explain in his own words..

As far as I’m concerned, your premiums, they’re going to start to come down. We’re going to get this passed through the Senate. I feel so confident. Your deductibles, when it comes to deductibles, they were so ridiculous that nobody got to use their current plan—this nonexistent plan that I heard so many wonderful things about over the last three or four days.  After that, I mean, it’s—I don’t think you’re going to hear so much….

And I think, most importantly, yes, premiums will be coming down. Yes, deductibles will be coming down. But very importantly, it’s a great plan. And ultimately, that’s what it’s all about.

Really, that’s it? no tremendous, fantastic…just ‘great’, right?

First time…

Similar news broke in Japan 10 or 20 years ago, followed by more interesting tidbit of info (sales of diapers to adults were higher than to babies)….

“For the first time in history, the percentage of seniors in the population (16.9 per cent) now exceeds the share of children (16.6 per cent) [in Canada], new census data reveals.”

[The Star]

Interesting piece from Matt Levine (Bloomberg) on Radical Transparency

Radical transparency.

Here is a story — on LinkedIn, of course — about the time that a Bridgewater Associates employee named Jim Haskel sent an email to founder Ray Dalio saying “you deserve a ‘D-‘ for your performance today in the meeting … you did not prepare at all because there is no way you could have and been that disorganized.” Of course Dalio loved it:

Dalio not only embraced this email, but shared it internally within the company and went on to show it to the more than 1,800 attendees of TED.

“Isn’t that great?” Dalio said of the email, to laughs in the crowd. “That’s great. It’s great because I need feedback like that. And it’s great because if I don’t let Jim and people like Jim express their points of view, our relationship wouldn’t be the same.”

From the outside, it always seems to me like Bridgewater’s radical transparency exists, as it were, in quotation marks. There is a lot of strenuous performance of openness and egalitarianism. The idea of this story is that Dalio has such natural, unpretentious, tell-me-anything interactions with his employees that they feel comfortable sending him harsh honest emails like this. Which is true. But also, when they send him those emails, he turns them into a TED talk. I never do that when my friends send me blunt emails. (Should I?) If you send your boss an email criticizing his performance, and he says “you’re fired,” that is one kind of power move. But if he says “ho ho ho, you old rascal, well done,” and then tells a room full of chuckling TED listeners about his benign tolerance, that is a different kind of power move. I think I find it more intimidating? But I don’t work at Bridgewater.

Anyway Dalio is on Twitter now, which is going to be great for him. If you like getting negative feedback, you’ll love Twitter! Maybe next year he can give a TED talk about mean things that people have tweeted at him.

Rules of Three…

if facing threatening conditions, a human being has three minutes to find breathable air, three hours to find warmth and shelter, three days to find water and three weeks to find food [from “The most sophisticated people you never knew” – J.S. Lewinski (BBC Travel website]

United Airlines managed to put ‘the hospital’ in hospitality