- History Investor
- Posts
- Do Less, Do More
In partnership with
Happy Friday — and welcome all new subscribers!
I’ve managed to get sick — thanks to a toddler I love very much. I hope everyone here is doing much better than me — but let us all know in the Poll below!
Was this email forwarded to you? If you enjoy the article, please consider subscribing. Thank you!
On My Mind
I often fall into the trap of trying to do too much.
It is easy to look at 24 hours in a day, say that is nowhere near enough time to do everything you want to do but you are going to try anyway, stuff your schedule full of idealistically optimized tasks, fail miserably at roughly all of them, and then feel bad about it when you are trying to sleep that night.
Then, something happens in life — like an insane deadline at the office — and suddenly those 24 hours nearly completely disappear. You have all of ~0 hours left each day to accomplish everything your mind says you should.
You are forced to remember the word prioritization. It is a word that hurts — but you haven’t any choice, so you do only the things that must be done. You feel a bit of anxiety and stress because of what you leave behind. But, one foot in front of the other and, eventually, you survive.
And survival feels good enough. You get past whatever stole those 24 hours — and you get some or most of them back.
And then, often quite quickly, you forget that painful word prioritization. You are back to jamming too much into those 24 hours, and that same bit of anxiety and stress find you again.
More hours didn’t improve your life. With less hours, you survived. With more, you drowned. It was never a question of how much time you had — it is about whether or not you can face that word, prioritization.
To quote Ryan Holiday of the Daily Stoic:
Each of us needs to take the time to set our priorities straight and to understand our limits... The key isn’t to always do more, more, more, but sometimes to do less so that we can do more of what we care most about.
Also, from Seneca, in the Quote below 👇
Support: Betterment
(Disclaimer: I am reimbursed per click in this section, which helps offset the costs of running on Beehiiv. I’ve used Betterment for >6 years. Thanks!)
Ease into investing
Ease being the key word. With automated tool like portfolio rebalancing and dividend reinvestment, Betterment makes investing easy for you, and a total grind for your money.
Quote of the Week
“Tranquility lies in not undertaking tasks, either in public or private, that are either numerous or greater than our resources.”
— Seneca
Poll of the Week
Last Week
Question: What time do you tend to wake up?
Results: I’m in the 5am crowd… somewhere between 5:00am and 5:30am. Before my son was born, I was up at 4:15am every morning and in bed by 8:30pm. That no longer works…
🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ At / before 4 am
🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 5 am
🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ 6 am
🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 7 am
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 8 am
🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ At / after 9 am
Things to Read
Untouched Rainforest | From The Secret Garden by Andy Wright, 2018
The story of the Mount Lico expedition began six years ago when Bayliss, a conservation scientist and butterfly expert, happened to spy a small forest atop a mountain using Google Earth…
While locals were aware of Mount Lico and used the natural resources of surrounding forests, its tall, sheer walls meant that it was nearly impossible to access, which made it likely that the land on top was untouched by humans. However, scientists would later find out that someone had been up there at least once.
You Will Be Wrong | From The Folly of Certainty by Howard Marks, 2024
Sometimes things go as people expected, and they conclude that they knew what was going to happen. And sometimes events diverge from people’s expectations, and they say they would have been right if only some unexpected event hadn’t transpired. But, in either case, the chance for the unexpected – and thus for forecasting error – was present. In the latter instance, the unexpected materialized, and in the former, it didn’t. But that doesn’t say anything about the likelihood of the unexpected taking place.
Winners Win | From The Quality Factor by Byrne Hobart, 2024
A surprising stylized fact about markets is that, in general, it pays to own stocks that have high margins, stable earnings, and low leverage. You can hardly finish saying the intuitive explanation—that these are better businesses that will profitably grow in size over time—without interrupting yourself to ask why that wouldn't be instantly reflected in their valuations. The claim behind the quality factor is not just that these companies will do well, but that they'll continue to do better than investors expect…
Authoritarian | From The Real North Korea by Andrei Lankov, 2014
All of which is why we may soon be entering a golden age for truly psychotic totalitarian regimes. The Kim Il-Sung of the future won’t need an army of peasants expecting tile roofs if he has an army of killer robots, and ChatGPT is much cheaper than a full-time propaganda minister.
Depending on how good AI gets, it will sharply reduce the number of people required to run an effective regime. In the limit, you can imagine a single mad king with no human servitors at all, just a computer as his grand vizier. There would be no limit to how brutal or crazy this guy could get, no limit to what he could do to his populace for fear of triggering a revolt amongst his own bodyguards.
He would also be able to read the minds of dissidents. A singularity is another word for a black hole from which there is no escape. Kim Il-Sung was born a century too early. In another few decades the Eternal President might really have been able to build his eternal paradise. Sweet dreams.
Visuals
Fewer Unicorns Being Minted
Daily S&P500 Returns Since 2020
If you found today’s issue interesting, more than anything, I would appreciate you forwarding it to someone that might also enjoy it. It is a big deal to me whenever someone reads my work, so I appreciate your support.
Have a great weekend,
EJ
Twitter / X: @HistoryEJ
Disclosure: Nothing in this article constitutes investment advice. More detailed disclosure here.
Reply