Welcome to the first of many bi-weekly doses of what I found interesting in the week.
If you are new here, you can expect three links like these to something I care deeply about and find interesting. These can range from essays, podcasts, book reviews, etc.
Finance Professor and Economist Mihir Desai penned this short article on the concept of Optionality.
This emphasis on creating optionality can backfire in surprising ways. Instead of enabling young people to take on risks and make choices, acquiring options becomes habitual. You can never create enough option value—and the longer you spend acquiring options, the harder it is to stop.
You will never know when you will enter the midlife crisis. That is the whole point of it it comes out of nowhere.
Midlife is not a crisis. Midlife is an unraveling.
By definition, you can’t control or manage an unraveling. You can’t cure the midlife unraveling with control any more than the acquisitions, accomplishments, and alpha-parenting of our thirties cured our deep longing for permission to slow down and be imperfect.
Deeply personal Brené Brown talks about hitting that Midlife crisis and finding out that the Universe wants you not to shy away from your deepest intuition. She argues that the Universe—and Life, for that matter—comes from you, not at you. It’s working for you and not against you.
The late great Charlie Munger gave a speech called “Practical Thought about Practical Thought”.
In this, he goes through what he would do if he had $2 Million. How he would strategize his business using elementary mental models and practical psychology. He takes the example of the fictional company Glotz, a beverage-making company. Today we know that company to be Coca-Cola.
On June 13th, 1986, Charlie Munger gave one of his first speeches to the class of Harvard School in LA. In the speech, the following line is a good place to end:
“There once was a man who assiduously mastered the work of his best predecessors, despite a poor start and very tough time in analytical geometry. Eventually, his own work attracted wide attention, and he said of his work, “If I have seen a little farther than other men, it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants.” The bones of that man lie buried now, in Westminster Abbey, under an unusual inscription: “Here lie the remains of all that was mortal in Sir Isaac Newton.”
From Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Essential Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger