I like most of Dana Stabenow’s work, and while I didn’t particularly like Dead in the Water, I did enjoy some of the quotes in the book, such as, “Always perform the work that has to be done without attachment,” which comes from the Bhagavad Gita, of which there are many translations (such as this one, this one, and this one).
“If you are motivated by a wish to help on the basis of kindness, compassion and respect, then you can do any kind of work, in any field, and function more effectively with less fear or worry, not being afraid of what others think or whether you will ultimately reach your goal.”
~ the Dalai Lama, in this tweet
I don’t know the original source of this image of Darth Vader and Yoda balloons, but I post it here because I’ve been seeing many photos from the Albuquerque Balloon Festival the last few days.
“Seize the time. Live now. Make now always the most precious time. Now will never come again.”
~ Jean-Luc Picard
I recently had a discussion with two people I’m working on a book with, where they are essentially very active reviewers. I like to write with enthusiasm, so I made a particular statement in the book. One person said they thought it was motivating — which was my intent — but the other person said it made them wary. I thought it was fascinating to get such different perspectives.
When I was meditating this morning I remembered going on a first date with a girl in high school. We went to a nice restaurant — it had tablecloths and silverware — I don’t currently remember the name of, and sat across from each other at a small, round table.
After a very short while a young boy came up to us and asked, “Are you on a first date?”
My date and I looked at him and said, “Yes, we are.” I started to look around to see where the boy came from, but I couldn’t figure that out.
“It’s okay if you sit closer to each other,” he said.
“Really,” we replied, looking at each other and smiling with surprise.
So I got up and moved my chair around the table until my date and I sat next to each other. “Is that good,” I asked.
“Much better,” he said. “This way you can hold hands.” And then he left.
“Better to be on the edge of a party, don’t you think?” I’m not very good with idle chit-chat in the middle of parties, but I enjoy good conversations around the edges.
~ a favorite scene from Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
James Garner passed away in July, 2014. I know he was in many good movies and tv shows, but I’ll always remember him in The Rockford Files. Every episode had at least one car chase, cigarette smoking, a phone call from a pay telephone, and drinking. In most episodes he was helping a “damsel in distress,” in which he often held her elbow (or upper arm) as they walked. I won’t say it was a great show, but for some reason (him), you just watch it. It was one of the first shows I watched when Netflix came around.
“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.”
~ Steve Jobs
About eight weeks ago -- May 20, 2012, to be exact -- I started a simple exercise and diet program. I was having several health problems, including constant severe headaches, blood pressure spiking to 150/100 for some reason the doctors hadn't figured out, my thyroid was failing (we knew that, and were treating it), and I also knew about a prostate problem. I generally felt like crap, and because of the headaches I was barely able to work 20 hours a week, constantly laying in bed trying to ride out the pain.
June 2, 2016: I don’t think my chest is as hairy as Steve Carell’s, but I got three chest-waxings at the hospital last week, and it is really, really painful. (They put the heart monitor leads on, take them off, put them back on, etc.) Someone told me Mr. Carell did this for real for the movie. If so, wow, that’s dedication.
These are some terrific words from a blog post titled, I’m Not The Radical Left, I’m The Humane Middle:
I believe in full LGBTQ rights.
I believe we should protect the planet.
I believe everyone deserves healthcare.
I believe all religions are equally valid.
I believe the world is bigger than America.
I believe to be “pro-life,” means to treasure all of it.
I believe whiteness isn’t superior and it is not the baseline of humanity.
I believe we are all one interdependent community.
I believe people and places are made better by diversity.
I believe people shouldn’t be forced to abide by anyone else’s religion.
I believe non-American human beings have as much value as American ones.
I believe generosity is greater than greed, compassion better than contempt, and kindness superior to derision.
I believe there is enough in this world for everyone: enough food, enough money, enough room, enough care — if we unleash our creativity and unclench our fists.
After reading this Farnam Street blog post about using a decision journal, I tried to use his PDF but I didn’t like the way it was formatted. So I re-typed his decision journal template and re-created it as a Word document. I thought I’d also share it as HTML here in case anyone wants an easier way to re-created it themselves.
Without the underlines and checkboxes, here is a decision journal template that you’re welcome to copy and paste to make your own decision journal. I added a few items to the original decision journal, and I encourage you to add (and remove) whatever works for you.
Here’s the decision journal template, which is currently 99% based on the Farnam Street PDF:
Decision #:
Decision:
Date:
Time:
Mental/Physical State:
The situation/context
The problem statement or frame
The variables that govern the situation include ...
The complications/complexities as I see them
Alternatives that were considered but not chosen
The possible range of outcomes
What I expect to happen and the actual probabilities
The decision (discussion)
Review date (six months after the decision):
What actually happened:
What I learned
As you’ll see in the example that follows, depending on your decision at hand it can make sense to rearrange the “discussion points.” I also added a section for “The Decision” because there wasn’t a section for what you actually decided in the Farnam PDF (or I didn’t interpret it that way). (I think The Decision itself deserves some discussion.)
Now that you’ve seen what a decision journal looks like, let’s take a look at an example of how to use a decision journal. For the purpose of this example my question/decision is, “As of today (March 22, 2018), should I buy Facebook stock?”
Decision #: 1
Decision: Should I buy Facebook (FB) stock today?
Date: March 22, 2018
Time: 4pm
Mental/Physical State:
The situation/context
This is a summary of where Facebook’s stock is right now, using Fastgraphs:
As that chart shows:
From Yahoo Finance, this image shows Facebook’s stock and the S&P 500 over the last three months, with FB in blue:
I covered these under the Situation/Context question, so I won’t repeat those here. Okay, a few additional points:
The big thing is that FB needs to find a way to show they are trustworthy. This requires a series of actions followed by PR. In Warren Buffett’s way of thinking, this is a solvable problem, but will Zuckerburg & Co. do the right thing?
In addition to FB-specific problems, the general state of the stock market, the President, and the Fed are all factors.
(Note that this is a great place to use something like a “spectrum diagram,” where you have Worst Case on one end and Best Case on the other end.)
I won’t show the details here, but an important part of this decision is digging into FB’s financials, i.e., attempting to make a forecast of future revenues and cash flows, etc. As just one example, using a Buffettology style formula, with the current stock price at $164 and EPS at $5.4, the initial rate of return is only 3.3%, nothing to get excited about.
My decision is to postpone this decision for now and revisit it, perhaps weekly. I think this is a solvable problem for Facebook and it could make them a better and more trustworthy company in the long run, but I’m postponing the decision for now because:
None. I always look at other stocks, but this decision is just about whether I should buy FB stock right now.
In the long term I expect FB to make changes and have at least a small PR campaign to reflect those changes. Everything that’s happened over the last 2-3 years is a major threat to the company. A few years ago it was hard to imagine a large percentage of people deleting the Facebook app or quitting Facebook, but to some extent Facebook has become boring and many people seem to use it less already, and then there is all of this negative stuff over the past few years.
The best part of FB for me right now are some of the groups I belong to, such as the groups for people who have mast cell disease. It‘s hard to imagine everyone in the world switching to some other service, re-creating all the groups, getting all the members to follow them, etc.
Even without the groups, I’d say that Facebook has a wide moat. They have everyone’s data for the last 5-10 years. It would be hard to say, “Hey, let’s all move to SomeUnknownCompetitor, I’ll re-friend you over there.” The reality is that whatever that business is, they’ll rely on advertisements as well.
I think the mostly likely thing to happen is:
At some point I expect that everything related to Trump will be resolved, Pence will take over, and after some considerable uncertainty, the market will go back up because it won’t be subject to Trump’s inconsistent behavior.
Probabilities:
Review date (six months after the decision): This doesn’t really make sense for a “Postponed” decision
What actually happened: TBD
What I learned: TBD
As you saw in that example, it can make sense to re-arrange the discussion points depending on the problem/decision at hand. Also note that the questions are just intended to stimulate your thinking. If there’s something in your mind that doesn’t fit into the given questions, create your own “Miscellaneous” or “Other” section and put your thoughts down there.
It’s also worth stating that I’ve been discussing this with other people for the last couple of days, and through those discussions I knew I wasn’t going to buy Facebook stock right now, but working my way through this process made me do a little more research, including the charts and Morningstar data shown.
Another important point for me is that by doing this electronically, it’s easy to come back and update this decision every week or two until I finally decide to buy in, or not.
Finally, you’re free to agree or disagree with my decision-making process regarding Facebook’s stock. The point isn’t whether you agree with me, it’s about working through the process to try to make intelligent decisions, especially when they’re important. For me, I almost always invest at least $10K at a time, so decisions like these fall into the “big decision” category.
In summary, I hope this decision journal template and example are helpful. As I mentioned earlier, feel free to copy the template and modify it as needed for your decision making purposes.
From a friend on Facebook, this is a great way to look at the two possibilities about climate change:
Your choice.
So I pour some root beer in a Ball jar glass I use to drink from. I put some ice in it, then set it on the counter because I realize I left my glasses in the bedroom. In the bedroom I hear a cracking noise from the kitchen, but when I come back I can’t figure out what it was, so I assume it was the ice cracking in the root beer.
I pick up the Ball glass, take it to the computer area, then realize I now left my glasses in the kitchen. So I start walking to the kitchen, and the bottom of one of my feet feels a little wet. I can’t make sense of that, unless the Ball glass already started perspiring and dripped.
I come back to the computer area and find a little puddle of root beer under my glass. “Oh,” I think, “the root beer must have overflowed after I put the ice in. Strange I didn’t feel it on my hands.”
So I pick up the Ball glass and think, “Huh, that’s a lot of root beer under there,” so I take it back to the kitchen to rinse the glass under the sink. When I put the glass under the sink the bottom explodes and falls out.
Notes from September 24, 2016:
Doctor: I’d like to collect a bone marrow sample ...
*Al runs out of the hospital in a hospital gown, screaming like a little girl*
(later, after they caught me)
Doctor: The next time you break out in a rash, hives, or blisters, I want you to have those biopsied.
Me: Is there going to be any part of our relationship that doesn’t involve a lot of pain on my part?
Doc: Yes, pee in this cup, and we’ll look at it under a fluorescent light to see if you have the same disease that King George III had.
Me: The crazy one?
Doc: Yes.
Me: Cool.
“There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die.”
~ Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Once I ended the four-plus weeks of a low-iodine diet, I found myself craving pretty much any kind of cheese, but one in particular: The mizithra (myzithra) cheese they use at The Old Spaghetti Factory to make a meal that’s named something like, “Homer’s Brown Butter and Mizithra Cheese” pasta.
I talked to an incredibly knowledgeable man at the Whole Foods store here in Superior/Louisville, Colorado, and he told me mizithra cheese is very expensive and hard to find (as a result of limited supply and increased demand), but that this cheese would be very similar. He was right. I’ve made my own browned butter sauce with some of this cheese, and it’s just as good as the Spaghetti Factory, and much less expensive.
If you’ve ever had a Siberian Husky, you’ll probably find that these drawings and captions are accurate. (Image from snowdog.guru.)
The Dancer Upstairs may be a little slow for most other people, but it’s one of my favorite movies (except for the dog parts).
Released in 2002, it was the first or second movie I saw Javier Bardem in, and when you watch it not knowing who he is, you say to yourself, “This guy has it,” that special something that makes you want to watch. As a friend once said, Tom Hanks is like that; if they made a movie about a guy stranded on an island and he was the only one in the movie, she’d watch the movie just because it was him (as did many other people).
