Force yourself and the people who work for you to do
difficult things. It’s usually easy to make
things go well if you’re willing to do difficult things. We must act as
trainers in gyms act in order to keep each other fit. That’s what’s required to
produce the excellence that benefits everyone. It is a law of nature that you
must do difficult things to gain strength and power. As with working out, after
a while you make the connection between doing difficult things and the benefits
you get from doing them, and you come to look forward to doing these difficult
things.
Ray
Dalio, Principle nº75
Ray Dalio has
written a pdf called "Principles" to share his life and business
management principles with his employees.
PS If you do difficult things you will have less competition. You will fail more but when you win yon can make a lot. In training you have to do intervals if you want to progress. It's not easy to do interval's, you have to leave the comfort zone.
"I'm glad the mostly trendless market of 2012 is behind us. Good
times tend follow bad so we're due. In this business, longevity is
key. You must experience a variety of markets: The print money
phase when you can't wait to see how much money you made
overnight. The chop phase when you sit mostly out of the market
wondering if there will ever be any opportunities. And, something
in between where you make a little but then give it up-rinse and
repeat-and wonder if you'll every make any progress. If you
survived 2012, then pat yourself on the back. Your expectations
have been tempered and it won't go to your head when the
market begins to trend. There are two types of successful people
in this business: 1. Those who start during great times but
abandon a simple methodology and begin chasing rainbows as
soon as conditions change. Then, around 10 years later, they
realize that there is no Holy Grail. They then come back to the
simple methodology they started with and grind it out. 2. Those
who start during mediocre conditions and wonder if they'll ever
make a buck consistently but hang in there until conditions
improve. And when conditions do improve, they know that they
won't last forever so it doesn't go to their head. So, if you started
last year and are still here, congratulations! You might have just
shaved 9 years off of your learning curve."
- Dave Landry
PS Last year was a very humiliating year because nothing worked as expected. Last year not to lose money was a wonderful thing. Eventually the markets would be easier to read and the people who stay the course would profit from it.
No fiat money has lasted for as long as a century. The US has had prior experience with fiat money -- the Civil War Greenbacks, the "Bills of Credit" of the original American colonies, the ill-fated Continentals during the Civil War. None of these have survived, and neither will the Federal Reserve notes that we now refer to as "dollars."
I dislike falling back on the morality argument, but consider this. I may work a lifetime for five million dollars. Yet some academic working for the Federal Reserve can press some keys on a computer and create ten billion dollars instantly without working up a sweat. Is the ten billion dollars he creates moral money? Did anyone work for the money? Did anyone take a risk for the money? Did anyone drop a bead of sweat for it? No, then I claim it is immoral and actually evil money, and as such it is doomed. The only power evil has is the power to destroy itself. I affirm that the Federal Reserve note is doomed. When the Federal Reserve note goes down the drain, all fiat money in the world will go down with it. Today information travels around the world with the speed of NOW. People around the planet will see that fiat money is a fantasy and a counterfeit fraud foisted upon them by unconscionable and unscrupulous bankers. It is then that the crowd will turn to gold, in much the way that people turned to gold back in 1978 to 1980.
Richard Russell
PS I'am not here yet. if the market forces are left alone i think we will witness deflation. There is too much of everything in the world, too much supply! Too many factories, to many worker's too many product. In this kind of world you would expect prices to go down, some players would close shop and the demand supply equation would rebalance at a cheaper price. But governments in the world don't want to hear about factories closing, they want to win the next election! We have a fight that could end as the great Richard Russell says with Gold as the only currency standing alone. But as i said at the moment we have a fight going on.
Those who work in an office often feel that, despite the proliferation of contrived metrics they must meet, their job lacks objective standards of the sort provided by, for example, a carpenter’s level, and that as a result there is something arbitrary in the dispensing of credit and blame. The rise of “teamwork” has made it difficult to trace individual responsibility, and opened the way for new and uncanny modes of manipulation of workers by managers, who now appear in the guise of therapists or life coaches. Managers themselves inhabit a bewildering psychic landscape, and are made anxious by the vague imperatives they must answer to. The college student interviews for a job as a knowledge worker, and finds that the corporate recruiter never asks him about his grades and doesn’t care what he majored in. He senses that what is demanded of him is not knowledge but rather that he project a certain kind of personality, an affable complaisance. Is all his hard work in school somehow just for show—his ticket to a Potemkin meritocracy? There seems to be a mismatch between form and content, and a growing sense that the official story we’ve been telling ourselves about work is somehow false.
PS This days there are many jobs that you can't explain to your mother. If you are a plumber you can explain what you do. It didn't work and now it's working.
Nassim Taleb explains the (old, wise) idea of a barbell, or bimodal, strategy as it applies to investments as so: The lion’s share should be allocated extremely conservatively, while the small remaining proportion (perhaps ten percent) should be allocated to the risky business.
That way, roughly ninety percent of the portfolio is (actually) safe, while, therefore, at most ten percent may be lost and much more may be gained.
PS Good point here if you want to make 5% you should put the bulk of your money in safe asset's that can pay 2% and 10% in "crazy" investments that can pay more than 30%. Why is this wise? Because when you buy a Mezzanine product (Nice name that says a little risk) that is designed to pay 5% when there is a crisis (1998,2008, etc...) there is a big migration and the Mezzanine is no longer low risk!
