Benjamin Franklin started writing his autobiography in 1771, which should give you a sense of how much he had accomplished even before the Revolution. Perhaps I disagree with Toynbee on this, but I think you are a product of your economic era, and I can’t help but read his Autobiography to find precedents for the …
Every year or so I revisit an essay in Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History. A Study of History is Sapiens before Sapiens, a bold attempt to declare what history is and what it means, written over a 50+ year span between 1920-1972. That sort of book puts off a lot of people – “who …
This weekend, a law clerk at a bankruptcy court messaged me. She’s planning on moving on to a law firm in the coming years, and wanted tips on how to plan ahead to be smart about investing. That kind of experience could easily net her a job that pays $200,000. So what should someone do …
Continue reading “What every attorney should know about investing”
Remember the second core premise of this guide: contribution to communities is what creates opportunities. In order to contribute, you must understand what is being done and where you fit in. You find out what is being done in the field you’re looking at by talking to people. Reading news articles and industry publications are …
Continue reading “How to build conversations into industry knowledge”
“Civil War” is a contradiction in terms, and the war itself was a series of strange turns and ironic events. The two most important Union generals couldn’t be more different. George McClellan was destined for greatness. He was admitted two years early to West Point, graduated second in his class, and went on at the …
You probably read a lot of books too. My reading philosophy is evolving, but I believe in re-reading the books that have impacted you the most – there’s more there. I’m okay with reading a lot of books. Paying $12 to get one good idea that benefits you for a lifetime is a great deal. …
Picture yourself standing in the woods. The world is unstructured. You could act on it any way you want. Pick up a leaf. Drop a leaf. We must make a decision to create structure. Structure narrows the set of possible actions. Structure gives our creative energy a channel to flow through. Not all actions are …
For the last month, I’ve started going for a walk in the morning with my girlfriend. It’s roughly the first thing I do in the morning. I don’t really like doing it. But I feel a pang if I don’t do it, and I dread waiting for it, so I just do it. But I’m …
I planned on writing something else today, but then I got this message: I had a post on LinkedIn that went viral, a week later it has 2200+ reactions and 190,000 views. I had noticed that personal finance and investing are evergreen topics for which there is no satiation. People always want to understand what …
I’m a product of the 90’s, and I owe a lot of my sense of humor to The State. The cast was a bunch of young NYU students, the funny theater kids. They had a wicked sense of humor and pierced through the mainstream with satires of Hallmark sentiment and “very special episodes” of lame …