3 Things 12-30-24
Happy New Year (In Two Days)!
Thing One
A Thought For The New Year
The following is an excerpt from a book called, Personality Isn’t Permanent, by Benjamin Hardy:
“According to Cal Newport [author of the book, So Good They Can’t Ignore You], the idea of finding your passion is based on self-absorption. People want to find work they are passionate about because they’ve been taught that work is all about and for them. The most successful people in the world know that work is about helping and creating value for other people. As Newport states, “If you want to love what you do, abandon the passion mindset (‘what can the world offer me?’) and instead adopt the craftsman mindset (what can I offer the world?’.
There’s one final problem with trying to discover yourself: It leads you to becoming incredibly inflexible to situations that feel difficult, complex, or outside your innate strengths.
Rather than adapting to difficult situations, we lazily apply labels to ourselves such as “introvert” to justify our lack of willingness, openness, and commitment in various scenarios. As a result, we fall to the level of our labels rather than rise to the level of our commitment. In turn, we avoid conflict, difficulty, and newness, boxing ourselves into a shallow perspective of ourselves. We stunt our growth. We only do what brings instant gratification and immediate results.”
A new year is upon us and it’s time to make our resolutions. If you do that kind of thing, whether you make a public show or keep them to yourself, perhaps you could try a different approach this year:
1) Peel off your labels and discard them forever.
2) Commit.
3) Watch it all manifest.
Happy New Year!
Thing Two
Education And Investing
The following is from an article in the Wall Street Journal written by Barton Swaim. The text in quotations is from two professors, Benjamin and Jenna Storey, at Furman University:
Many critiques of liberalism and modernity quickly become critiques of the free market. It’s a tempting solution because the market is something you can change or rearrange by force of law. The Storeys don’t take that view. “The problems we’re facing right now are not fundamentally economic problems,” he says. “They’re fundamentally educational and philosophical problems. The way forward is a multigenerational project, and it’s going to begin in schools.”
Amen. Considering all the data, it's hard not to argue that the stranglehold that public school systems have on our children's education must be relinquished - unless you're someone who is currently benefitting from the system and can't see how you'd benefit more from a new one. It should be noted here that this is not teacher-bashing at all. Although there must inevitably be bad teachers, like there are bad things in every category of things, the assumption going in is that most teachers are good and can help educate our children. It's the system that is rotten. In the new system, choice needs to be paramount - for the teachers and the students. If we're going to improve the financial outcomes of "marginalized people", we going to have to improve the educational outcomes of those same people.
The chart below from Pew research helps frame the challenge. We know that the most affluent among us are invested in the markets. Overall, it’s 58% of households, which is good, but we must get to work educating the rest. At least initially, that education will have nothing to do with teaching about the benefits of owning stocks and bonds. But we'll never get to those subjects with people who can’t read and write.
Please tell that to the next person who suggests that the way to prosperity is by taxing the rich. Explain to them that it's about the creation of wealth, not the confiscation of it. And then let them know that increasing taxes doesn't create wealth it just takes wealth from one pocket and puts it in another to be spent. Then, if you can get them to at least accept that premise, share with them the chart below and explain to them that almost half the country isn't investing. And then tell them that rather than vilifying the rich and discouraging them (by the various disincentives to accumulating wealth that are being proposed by politicians), we should be encouraging more people to learn how to become wealthy. That will have the added benefit of revealing to anybody who's paying attention, that things like skin color and birth class aren't the real barriers to individual prosperity. The lack of knowledge is.

Thing Three
Just A Thought
"What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we begin from." - T.S. Elliot
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