This week’s highlights: Selling a Fake Country, multidisciplinary thinking and the Subantartic Islands
Photo by Saad Chaudhry on Unsplash
Issue 454
Happy Friday!
6″ of snow last week, and another 6 in the forecast for the weekend – an atypical start to the winter here in Nashville.
Original Content:
- Mission Statement Conversations Are Beyond Important But Hard to Have. Structuring dialogues and creating space for rich, mission-oriented discussions to begin to emerge is challenging
What I’m Reading:
- Hare With the Amber Eyes. Edmund de Waal is a world-famous ceramicist. Having spent thirty years making beautiful pots―which are then sold, collected, and handed on―he has a particular sense of the secret lives of objects. When he inherited a collection of 264 tiny Japanese wood and ivory carvings, called netsuke, he wanted to know who had touched and held them, and how the collection had managed to survive. And so begins The Hare with Amber Eyes, this extraordinarily moving memoir and detective story as de Waal discovers both the story of the netsuke and of his family, the Ephrussis, over five generations.
Best,
David
Food for Tood for Thought
- TheHustle – The con artist who sold rich investors a fake country. Nearly 200 years ago, Gregor MacGregor pulled off one of the most brazen real estate scams in history.
- BBC Future – The forgotten medieval habit of ‘two sleeps’
- Wired – I Spent Hundreds of Hours Working in VR. Here’s What I Learned
- NashPost – IKEA to open nation’s first pick-up location in Nashville – Just for the Nashville readers
Business and Markets
- II – Michael Mauboussin Is Unshaken. The head of Consilient Research at Morgan Stanley explains the power of narratives, his approach to fundamental analysis, his faith in markets and multidisciplinary thinking, and what moved him to write his latest book.
- NYP – Inside the ‘$500M’ Bel Air mansion heading to foreclosure auction – These things always feel predictable, right?
- Oaktree – Selling Out – Howard Marks new quarterly memo
- WSJ – Retirement Funds Bet Bigger on Private Equity. Costs and transparency issues don’t deter pensions hungry for yield
Science, Technology, and Culture
- Input – After ALS struck, he became the world’s most advanced cyborg. Scientist Dr. Peter Scott-Morgan is pushing the boundaries of what it means to be human.
- Jalopnik – Bring A Trailer Is The New King Of Car Auctions. What started as a newsletter of fixer-upper auto listings is now outselling Mecum and Barrett-Jackson
- Verge – Black + Decker’s $300 Bev vacuums up a Keurig-shaped hole in the robot bartender space – This is just cool tech
- Travel and Leisure – Remote Learning. The rugged Subantarctic islands have attracted hardy travelers for decades
My Book:
When Anything is Possible – Wealth and the Art of Strategic Living
The book is about how we shift from focusing on the things we want to avoid, to the things we want to accomplish with our wealth. Doing so requires a person to articulate 3 key items – Wealth Structure, Wealth Identity and ultimately a Wealth Strategy. The book walks through each of these items in great depth, and guides the reader through a process to develop each.
If you are interested in learning more, visit here and download a free chapter.