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“Earning, Learning, Sharing, and Caring”

I’m still working 12+ hours a day, but I’m also napping for about a half-hour at least twice and sometimes three times.

I don’t mind the napping per se. I quite enjoy it. But I don’t like the reason: I’m finding that every three or four hours I am besieged with a serious bout of brain fog, which makes it impossible for me to work, thus forcing me to lie down and rest. This is not a symptom of age. In every other metric of aging, I’m at least 10 years younger than my age would otherwise suggest. I’m convinced that my brain fog bouts are the result of protein spikes from COVID-19 shots. I was hoping they would go away, but they are increasing. I’m going to investigate the various vaccine “cleanses” that have been advertised to see if that can help. (Friday, September 19, 2025)

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I had a good meeting with WMB and PF yesterday about my idea for a new non-profit project. It would be a foundation whose mission would be to teach entrepreneurship and wealth building secrets to people who had no education in accumulating wealth and no experience in starting businesses.

I have accumulated a truckload of educational materials that could serve as the foundation’s core curriculum. Between the two dozen books I’ve published, the 17 that are half done, the 2,000+ essays, speeches, interviews on business, finance, entrepreneurship, and wealth building, we have a library of valuable information. It would be a shame to leave all that monetizable material sitting in drawers and on shelves gathering dust.

PF asked me why I wanted to start yet another big project at this time in my life. I admitted that I wasn’t sure, but the prospect of doing it was exciting, and I had a gut feeling that doing it as a non-profit was the way to go. It would make it clear that its purpose was education, not profit. And that would give it credibility. And that would make it easier to market. Plus, if it had a sensible, achievable mission, like we have with Fun Limón, it’s quite possible it would live on long after I’m gone. When I said that, I realized the answer to PF’s question. I see it as a legacy – something of me that might endure. Oh, well, we’ll see how that goes. (Saturday, September 20, 2025)

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SM tells me that the Legacy stock portfolio, which he and several other stock-expert friends put together for me in 2016, has done well since inception. Over the last nine years, it has grown into several approaches – the very conservative collection of stocks we assembled first, followed by several others that included industry-dominating, low-risk stocks that have boosted performance above the core collection.

That was good to hear. I designed the portfolio to keep pace with the market’s long-term ROI, but with less risk. The fact that it’s done better than that makes my heart happy and trips the marketing lobe of my brain to think about how we can make money selling that fact. Then the part of my brain that contains my conscience says, “Past performance doesn’t predict future performance.”

I mentioned, in the August 13 issue, that I made a bundle on a small investment I made in three cryptos several years ago. My Japanese readers want to know which crypto coins they should buy now. The problem is that I did not buy those coins as an investment. Or as a long-term store of value. I bought them even though I had (and still have) the view that cryptocurrencies have a dim future. They have been great for a handful of speculators who got in on the right side of hundreds of trades in the past year, but I don’t know enough about trading or the market for trading cryptos to take a chance with them now. “If you wrote a report on cryptos, it would sell,” SM advised me. I told him I’d think about it. And I will. (Monday, September 22, 2025)

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Add one more “pleasure” to my theory about The Sustainable Pleasures in Life. My original concept was that there were three such pleasures – working on something you value, learning something you think is worth learning, and sharing the products of the work you do and the knowledge you acquire. Last night, I was thinking of the trick of using rhyme to make commercial phrases more memorable. And that gave me earning instead of working, which gave me earning,learning, and sharing. I couldn’t think of a rhyming substitute for sharing, but when I came to caring, I realized that, too, is a sustainable pleasure. As in the pleasure you get from selfless love – i.e., the way most people love their children… most of the time. So now I have four sustainable pleasures: Earning, Learning, Sharing, and Caring. Is that too much? (Tuesday, September 23, 2025)

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Another busy week, but mostly enjoyable and reasonably productive days. Saturday evening was a great start, with a trip to the Florida Museum of Art for an opening of an exhibit of Latin American art, which was edifying and hilariously pretentious. [Note to self: Write about that.] Next was my weekly meeting with Number Two Son to go over my and my family’s investments, followed by a meeting with Dominick, my principal broker, a meeting with the CFO of A, my largest client, a half-dozen business meetings, a board meeting for my museum of Central American art, a meet-up with a former mentee turned multimillionaire, a call with AL about our mutual interest in bad movies… and lots more that I can’t remember. (Wednesday, September 24, 2025)

Mark Ford

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