Have you heard about drownproofing? It’s a training exercise used by Navy SEALS.

Your feet are tied together.
Your hands are tied behind your back.
Then you’re pushed into a swimming pool.

Yikes.

So what happens when you’re tied up and pushed into deep water? The natural reaction is reaction. You thrash around trying to keep your head above water.

Counterintuitively, the way to survive the drowning is not reacting.

You calmly sink to the bottom of the pool,...

KEEP READING

What’s the best country to live in?

Ask 10 different people and you get 10 different answers.

It’s like asking, “What’s the best investing strategy?” There’s no right answer. No wrong answer. Just different answers. A function of who you ask.

A stock picker says stock.
A realtor says rental property.
An indexer says an index fund.
A venture capitalist says startups.
A dividend investor says dividend stock.

The American author F. Scott Fitzgerald maybe said it best:...

KEEP READING

When you’re young you often take big dumb risks. You just don’t know it at the time. Most times you don’t get hurt.

Hopefully, as you get older, you realize this. That just because you didn’t get hurt doing something dumb doesn’t mean you didn’t take a big risk and get away with it.

When I was 28 years old I flew to Ghana. It’s a small west African country. I traveled the country by bus.

One...

KEEP READING

I walked into a tattoo shop down the street to get my first tattoo. It was going to say memento mori. In latin: “Remember you will die.” It’d be a permanent reminder that time is precious.

Nobody working in the shop says anything to me. I sit down and start leafing through those books of ready-made tattoos.

Tattoo machines are buzzing away in the background, laying down lines of permanent ink, and...

KEEP READING

Someone with a high-paying job tells me their job is stressful and they want to do something fulfilling.

“I’ve spent the last decade of my life investing in my skills, and finally landed a six-figure job. To my despair, it means nothing. I’m paid the same as my peers who prefer to do as little as possible, while I lose sleep at night wondering how I can do a better job the next day. There...

KEEP READING

Maybe the biggest mistake investors make is buying shares of Apple or Zoom or whatever and then hoping the price goes right up.

It’s why you sometimes hear that the stock market is just a big casino.

Because some investors are just buying “prices” and then hoping to sell their prices at some higher price to someone else who’s then hoping for the exact same thing.

Which is gambling.

A more reliable way to make money investing is...

KEEP READING

You know those people whose lives are transformed by changing their diet or daily journaling or meditating or something like that?

It wasn’t the meditation or whatever that changed their life. No, it was cultivating the discipline to do that thing day after day and week after week and month after month.

Because nobody on the planet tries meditation for seven minutes one Saturday morning and their life miraculously changes. In reality, it’s often a hard journey.

You...

KEEP READING

Benjamin Franklin was arguably the most successful person who lived in colonial America. There are many lessons to learn from his biography, but the following nugget of wisdom about choosing principles over luxury is timeless.

The story goes that a man came to Franklin wanting to publish an article in Franklin’s newspaper, The Pennsylvania Gazette. Franklin thinks the article is malicious, and so he subjects himself to a little test:

“To determine...

KEEP READING

You’re at a blackjack table in Las Vegas.

The guy sitting next to you has a 10 of hearts and 7 of spades. Now, everyone knows when you have 17 that you stand, but this guy asks the dealer for a hit.

The dealer flips over a 4, and so the guy gets 21. Blackjack!

Nice hit, huh?

Well, the casino loves gamblers like him, because if someone always hits on 17 they’ll lose money. The probability of...

KEEP READING

In 2016 I handed my boss a two-word resignation letter. “I’m resigning.”

That letter was maybe the best thing for my investment portfolio. When you don’t get a paycheck anymore it forces you into decisions.

Need cash for bills? Take some profits.
Want to buy a new stock? Gotta sell something.
Increase the size of an investment? Figure out what to trim.

Incidentally, this is what business owners do. What companies pay CEOs for. To decide how...

KEEP READING