John Gardner worked as a director of Shell Oil, American Airlines, New York Telephone and Time Inc, in the nonprofit world as a foundation president, in federal government as a cabinet officer, in the military as a Marine Corps officer and member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Air Force. The paragraphs below are clips from a speech he gave at age 79 :
“When you reach middle age, when your energies aren’t what they used to be, then you’ll begin to wonder what it all added up to; you’ll begin to look for the figure in the carpet of your life. I have some simple advice for you when you begin that process. Don’t be too hard on yourself. Look ahead. Someone said that “Life is the art of drawing without an eraser.” And above all don’t imagine that the story is over. Life has a lot of chapters.
It isn’t a bad idea to pause occasionally for an inward look. By midlife, most of us are accomplished fugitives from ourselves. The things you learn in maturity aren’t simple things such as acquiring information and skills. You learn not to engage in self-destructive behavior. You leant not to burn up energy in anxiety. You discover how to manage your tensions, if you have any, which you do. You learn that self-pity and resentment are among the most toxic of drugs. You find that the world loves talent, but pays off on character.
You come to understand that most people are neither for you nor against you, they are thinking about themselves. You learn that no matter how hard you try to please, some people in this world are not going to love you, a lesson that is at first troubling and then really quite relaxing. Those are things that are hard to learn early in life, As a rule you have to have picked up some mileage and some dents in your fenders before you understand. As Norman Douglas said “There are some things you can’t learn from others. You have to pass through the fire.’
So you scramble and sweat and climb to reach what you thought was the goal. When you get to the top you stand up and look around and chances are you feel a little empty. Maybe more than a little empty. You wonder whether you climbed the wrong mountain. But life isn’t a mountain that has a summit, Nor is it — as some suppose — a riddle that has an answer. Nor a game that has a final score.
Young people run around searching for identity, but it isn’t handed out free any more — not in this transient, rootless, pluralistic society. Your identity is what you’ve committed yourself to. It may just mean doing a better job at whatever you’re doing. There are men and women who make the world better just by being the kind of people they are –and that too is a kind of commitment. They have the gift of kindness or courage or loyalty or integrity. It matters very little whether they’re behind the wheel of a truck or running a country store or bringing up a family.”
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Our egos are hardwired to fall into the trap of confounding luck and skill. Suppose you decide to drive drunk and you make it home safely. That was a bad decision with a good outcome. One week later, after a good night of drinking Zinfandel, you ask a designated driver to drive you home. The driver gets into an accident. That was a good decision with a bad outcome. (Setting aside that you drank Zinfandel, which clearly is a horrible decision.)
Because of randomness, outcomes are often silent on the quality of decisions. Worse, they can mislead. In a world in which we can’t predict much of the future, good decisions can lead to bad outcomes, and bad decisions can lead to good outcomes. In the business of investment management, we say there’s “randomness.”
This problem is acute in the investment world. You can make money, at least for a while, by making bad decisions like holding a concentrated portfolio or investing in fads. If you don’t examine your process and the quality of your decisions, in other words, if you only focus on outcomes, you may think you’re an absolute genius. But you’re unlikely to be a successful investor in the long run.
Annie Duke’s excellent book, Thinking in Bets, has become required reading in the investment world. Duke is a business consultant and ex-professional poker player. She explains that we instinctively associate good results with good decisions and bad results with bad decisions. She calls this instinct “resulting.” But in poker and many aspects of life, “winning and losing are only loose signals of decision quality.”
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Nostalgia for terrible things may sound absurd, but many people experience it, for reasons that speak to the way people make meaning of their lives. The central reason for this phenomenon, according to researchers who study nostalgia, is that humans look to our past selves to make sense of our present. Reflecting on the challenging times we’ve endured provides significance and edification to a life that can otherwise seem pointlessly difficult. The past was tough, we think, but we survived it, so we must be tough too.
To be sure, part of the explanation is that people tend to romanticize the past, remembering it more rosily than it actually was. Thanks to something called the “fading affect bias,” negative feelings about an event evaporate much more quickly than positive ones. As a difficult experience recedes in time, we start to miss its happier aspects and gloss over the challenges. And nostalgia is usually prompted by a feeling of dissatisfaction with the present, experts say, making the past seem better by comparison.
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It used to be assumed that the financial memory should last, at a maximum, no more than 20 years. This is normally the time it takes for the recollection of one disaster to be erased and for some variant on previous dementia to come forward to capture the financial mind. It is also the time generally required for a new generation to enter the scene, impressed, as had been its predecessors, with its own innovative genius.
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The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself. How did a successful, financially sophisticated banker gamble his community’s money away? The behavioral psychology case studies around crypto are simultaneously heartbreaking and endlessly fascinating.
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Japan has experienced severe economic stagnation for two decades, but it is still a desirable place to live and work. Why? The major costs of living, like housing, energy, and transportation are not particularly expensive compared to other highly-developed countries. Infrastructure in Japan is clean, functional, and regularly expanded. There is very little crime or disorder, and almost zero open drug use or homelessness.
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Tuna Thoughts 