This week’s highlights: Urban Firestorms, Tiffany Meets the French, and Richard Mille
Issue 453
Happy Friday and New Year!
Greetings from a cold and snowy Nashville – not as bad as the pic above, but still pretty chilly!
Original Content:
- What I Read in Q4’21 – I published a curated top ten for all of 2021, but here’s the final run down from Q4.
Best,
David
Food for Tood for Thought
- NYMag – The Return of the Urban Firestorm. What happened in Colorado was something much scarier than a wildfire.
- SA – How To Be Successful – Here are 13 thoughts about how to achieve such outlier success. Everything here is easier to do once you’ve already reached a baseline degree of success (through privilege or effort) and want to put in the work to turn that into outlier success. [1] But much of it applies to anyone.
- DakshanaFoundation – Annual Report 2020. Investor Monish Pabrai’s Dakshana Foundation is revolutionizing providing educational access in India to the top flight universities. This report is a fascinating look at how they operate. Since 2007, Dakshana Scholars have been accepted to the Indian Institutes of Technology at a rate of 61%. “Not too shabby – considering that the IITs accept under 2% of applications.
- SFGate – ‘What Austin felt like 10 years ago’: Is Nashville the next hot spot in the Bay Area exodus?
- II – ‘It Takes More Than Money’: Inside AllianceBernstein’s Efforts to Retain Diverse Talent Amid the great resignation, the asset manager’s two-year-old coaching program is yielding good results.
Business and Markets
- II – How Blackstone Chose Its Heir Apparent —Without the Usual Hunger Games. Jon Gray’s rise to the top of the world’s largest alternative-asset management firm felt inevitable. That was the point.
- WealthManagement – New Study Links Private Equity Ownership to Advisor Misconduct. Academics at the University of Oregon found that private equity–backed RIAs had a 147% increase in the percentage of their advisors committing misconduct after the takeover.
- WSJ – Tiffany’s New French Owner Brings a Makeover—and a Culture Clash
- Guardian – How Shein beat Amazon at its own game – and reinvented fast fashion. By connecting China’s garment factories with western gen-Z customers, Shein ushered in a new era of ‘ultra-fast’ shopping
- Bloomberg – How Shopify Outfoxed Amazon to Become the Everywhere Store. Tobi Lütke transformed the Canadian upstart into an e-commerce giant by being the anti-Bezos. How long can the formula keep working?
Science, Technology, and Culture
- Hodinkee – Richard Mille Looks Back On The Meteoric Rise Of His Brand. “I was convinced from the start that this was going to be an extraordinary adventure.”
- Bon Appetit – Sommelier Tries 16 Celebrity Wines
- ScientificAmerican – The James Webb Space Telescope Has Launched: Now Comes the Hard Part. After years of delay, the most ambitious observatory ever built has at last left Earth. It now faces a high-stakes series of deployments in deep space
- A2G – Smart Casual Dress Code: A Modern Man’s Guide For 2022
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.