“You’re free when no one can buy your time.” – Farnam Street
April was an interesting month. The biggest realization for me – which seems to be happening to lots of folks – is that “working from home” has some downsides that appear to be accumulating over the last twelve plus months. These, I think, are exacerbated by quite a few exogenous stressors still out there (no, the pandemic is not over). These have be gradually wearing on me, hopefully hit a low point in April, and have made me evolve my thinking on permanent work from home. You will see quite a few reads below relating to my exploration of some of those topics and the broader influence of the pandemic.
Updated stats through April:
| Read Articles | Books | |
| January | 65 | 4 |
| February | 49 | 1 |
| March | 64 | 3 |
| April | 53 | 2 |
| May | ||
| June | ||
| July | ||
| August | ||
| September | ||
| October | ||
| November | ||
| December | ||
| Total | 231 | 10 |
Here are my most influential reads – in no particular order:
- First-Quarter Roundup: Boom for Small Stocks, Bust for Treasuries – “Various reports put Hwang’s losses at $8 billion in just 10 days, perhaps the biggest hit ever taken in so short a time.”
- Lessons on winning and losing as an investor from “The Art of Execution” – “Shor’s most powerful point is that investment performance is largely dictated by what an investor does after they buy a stock, specifically by how they deal with both losing and winning positions over time.”
- Outgrowing software – “At a certain point, everyone has grown up with this stuff, everything is a software company, and the important questions are somewhere else.”
- Affluent Americans Rush to Retire in New ‘Life-Is-Short’ Mindset – “Their potential exodus from the corporate world, combined with a sharp increase in the number of business owners seeking to retire sooner than they anticipated, is a worrying phenomenon for companies that rely on their accumulated expertise.”
- Welcome to the YOLO Economy – “Raises and time off may persuade some employees to stay put. But for others, stasis is the problem, and the only solution is radical change.”
- The discard pile – “Walking away from something that we’re used to, even if it’s unjust or inefficient or ineffective–it usually takes far too long. Fear, momentum and the status quo combine to keep us stuck.”
- A Hater of Passive Investing Joins an ETF Firm to Wage His War – “In a nutshell, his theory is that passive investing is inflating a historically-unprecedented equity bubble that will crash when inflows inevitably flip to outflows.”
- 3 Valuable Techniques To Stop Yourself From Overthinking – “Our delayed return environment strongly influences our modern lives. We face lots of uncertainties every day, and being worried and overthinking is part of our nature.”
- An uncertain future – “I love old houses but my personality isn’t suited for them. They stress me out. (My ex-wife and I owned an old house too — she still lives there — and it caused me endless stress, as well.)”.
- Delight in Uncertainty – “Commit to dancing with it. Turning away from the uncertainty gives you certain predictable results in your life. What would it be like to do something different? Commit to doing something different: face it, be with it, dance with it.”
Note: This is based on when I read the article, not necessarily when it was first published. Unfortunately, my backlog of things I would like to read always seems to dwarf the amount of time I can devote to reading.