From My Work-in-Progress Basket

Can You – Should You – Value Knowledge in Dollars and Cents?

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Friday, September 28, 2018

Delray Beach, FL – I try to limit my wealth-building and business advice to what I know to be true from experience. That’s because I am skeptical of advice derived solely from thinking.

When I first began to read business books, long after I’d retired the first time, I was surprised to find that many of the bestsellers were authored by academics who had no actual experience. Their arguments were sometimes convincing. But most often they were not. They contradicted the lessons I’d learned.

As for books and speeches and essays about investing, some of them, like Warren Buffett’s advice, made great sense. And those were based on experience. The others, based on theory, were sometimes persuasive. But when I put the advice to work I was almost always disappointed.

All that is to say that I want to discuss a theoretical issue today. If you have my bias towards experience-based knowledge, this may seem like bullshit to you. But I think it’s actually very important. So here it is…

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Notes From My Journal

A Passing Jealousy

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Thursday, September 20, 2018

Delray Beach, FL– Walking to my office, a woman passes me, going the other way. She is attractive. Tall, lean, and handsome. And I notice that she is dressed attractively too, in a linen skirt and matching jacket.

She pays no attention to me. She is looking ahead, walking with a confident gait, speaking animatedly into her phone. I hear one phrase: “I mean… you can’t wear it all at the same time, can you?”

And that sends me spiraling into that existential despair. No, not despair. More like ennui. No, not ennui. But a pang. A reminder of how much I’m missing.

“I mean… you can’t wear it all at the same time, can you?”

I’m not judging her, as they (imprecisely and insistently) say these days. I’m jealous of her. Truly.

She is living in a world I do not, have not, and never will inhabit. Yet it’s a full world and it seems to me to be in many ways a happier one than mine.

I try to imagine what things in life I loved that much – what material objects gave me such pleasure that such an idea would have occurred to me.

I am a little sad that I have never felt that way: that I wanted to have it all but at the same time.

Of course, that world is entirely open to me. I have only to wish to enter it to become a denizen. Why don’t I?

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From My Work-in-Progress Basket

The Miracle of Compound Knowledge

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Thursday, September 20, 2018

Delray Beach, FL – I have a little gift for you. A simple idea that can mean the difference between struggling and being immensely successful. It is a very small idea that will be worth a great deal to you if (a) you really understand it, and (b) you make it a part of your life.

The idea in a nutshell: Knowledge is a form of wealth. Like wealth, it provides dividends if it is invested. Over a long period of time, those dividends compound. Eventually, they become gargantuan.

Let me explain.

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