Notes From My Journal

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The Things That Make Life Meaningful 

“Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.”  – Cicero

 

Typically, we take our biggest blessings – our health, our freedom, our friendships, and the miracle of our very existence – for granted. Ironically, gratefulness for those blessings arrives only in their absence.

Many self-improvement gurus recommend taking some time out every day to acknowledge these benefits. I have done that. I drew up a list of about a dozen really important things that I should be grateful for, starting with my existence and then followed by my mental health, my physical health, my marriage, my children, my extended family, my career, etc.

For years, I read this list out loud first thing every morning, trying to will myself into a state of gratitude. It rarely happened.

The problem, I think, is that these very important things are so abstract. My rational brain recognizes their importance, but my limbic brain is busy wanting to get on with my life.

Recently, I’ve found a better way. I extended the list beyond the important things to the less-important things, including some that are downright trivial. And then, rather than starting at the top – with the most important things – I start at the bottom.

 

For example:

 

The Preciousness of Little Things 

 

  1. Waking up next to someone I feel lucky to be living with, even if she’s upset with me and giving me the silent treatment.
  2. Stepping out on the bedroom porch and looking at the ocean.
  3. My morning shower: that luxurious blanket of hot water that gently eradicates the aches and pains of yesterday’s exercise and loosens up my neck and shoulders.
  4. A favorite article of clothing I “gift” myself with each day: a well-worn pair of jeans; a comfortable pair of shoes; a watch or bracelet.
  5. That first cup of black coffee and a slice of bread and peanut butter.
  6. The 15 minutes I spend each morning looking over my schedule and daily agenda and imagining how much I’m going to enjoy getting my work done.
  7. Having the option to spend the next hour or two focusing on work that really matters to me.
  8. Paying happy attention to any of the 100+ works of art that line every wall and alcove.
  9. Listening to a good book on my way to work.
  10. The hour I spend playing Brazilian Jiu Jitsu from 11 to 12 each day.
  11. After lunch, my first cigar. Usually a Padron Aniversario.

Etc. etc.

 

Those are the quotidian pleasures. There are also many occasional ones, such as…

* Solving The New York Times crossword on Sundays.

* Friday afternoon “xtreme” bocce ball games with friends at Veteran’s Park next to the Intracoastal.

* Friday nights with friends at my Cigar Club, a warehouse I converted into a “man cave” several years ago. The happiest nights are when, after boring ourselves silly for an hour or two, our spouses drop in to liven things up.

* Giving tours of Paradise Palms, the botanical garden I’ve been building in West Delray Beach these past several years.

* Hanging out with the extended family every Sunday.

Etc. etc.

I’ve found that it’s easier for me to be thankful for the small things in the morning and then move on to the bigger things as the day ages.

 

The Homework Assignment That Will Change Your Life 

Today, make a list of at least a dozen smallish things you enjoy. Ignore the “important” things that you feel you should be thankful for. Focus on the smaller things that you actually enjoy.

Then, starting tomorrow, spend your “gratitude” time thinking about how much you enjoy these small gifts. Keep at it for a few weeks and you will find that you will become grateful, too, for the bigger things – eventually even the amazing and blessed fact of your existence!

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Worth Reading

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Essays of E.B. White

384 pages

Published 1977 by Harper Perennial/Modern Classics

It was the third book in a small stack of old books that sat on the corner of my writing desk. I have three writing surfaces: This desk here at the beach house. A small, round table under a gazebo overlooking the Pacific Ocean in our home in Nicaragua. And a bar top at my Cigar Club in Delray Beach.

Each has a similar stack of books on it – books pulled from the shelves in the past several weeks, spurred by something I’d read or heard, waiting till I had time to read them.

This book, Essays of E.B. White, seemed the perfect elixir for the stress I was feeling. I knew White as the co-author of the classic Elements of Style, which I’ve read at least a dozen times, and I knew he wrote essays for The New Yorker, back in its glory days. I had no idea he was also the author of Charlotte’s Webb and Stuart Little.

Since my time was limited, I read only a half-dozen of the essays, but they were all Malted-Milk-Balls fun to read.

I think my favorite essay (so far) is “Death of a Pig,” White’s account of his efforts to save a sick pig that he’d bought and raised to be butchered. Here’s an excerpt:

“The scheme of buying a spring pig in blossomtime, feeding it through the summer and fall, and butchering it when the solid cold weather arrives, is a familiar scheme to me and follows an antique pattern. It is a tragedy enacted on most farms with perfect fidelity to the original script. The murder, being premeditated, is in the first degree but is quick and skillful, and smoked bacon and ham provide a ceremonial ending whose fitness is seldom questioned.”

And here’s an excerpt from “The World of Tomorrow,” on the 1939 New York World’s Fair:

“The truth is my ethmoid sinuses broke down on the eve of Fair Day, and this meant I had to visit the Fair carrying a box of Kleenex concealed in a copy of the Herald Tribune. When you can’t breathe through your nose, Tomorrow seems strangely like the day before yesterday.”

And here’s one from “Some Remarks on Humor” (written as part of a preface to A Subtreasury of American Humor):

 “Analysts have had their go at humor, and I have read some of this interpretive literature, but without being greatly instructed. Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.”

 

Interesting Fact: Before his death in 1985, E.B. White suffered from Alzheimer’s disease, and his son, Joel, would read his books back to him.  Since he couldn’t remember writing some of them, he would sometimes criticize the writing, saying it wasn’t good enough. If he liked what he heard, he’d ask Joel who wrote the book. Upon hearing that he was the author, he’d reply with, “Well, not bad.”

From The Washington Post: “Some of the finest examples of contemporary, genuinely American prose. White’s style incorporates eloquence without affection, profundity without pomposity, and wit without frivolity or hostility. Like his predecessors Thoreau and Twain, White’s creative, humane, and graceful perceptions are an education for the sensibilities.”

From San Francisco Examiner: “The abiding spirit of these essays is humane, compassionate, traditionalistic. No matter what his subject, White always keeps his eye on the long view and the larger perspective. There are times when I feel his work is as much a national resource as the Liberty Bell, a call to the best and noblest in us.”

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Worth Watching

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How Green Was My Valley (1941)

Directed by John Ford

Starring Walter Pidgeon and Maureen O’Hara

If you are in the mood for something nostalgically uplifting, I’d recommend How Green Was My Valley.

I saw it last week for the second time in more than 40 years. I remembered it as sentimental. It is. But a sentimental pleasure from beginning to end.

Based on the1939 novel by Richard Llewellyn, the film tells the story of the Morgans, a hardworking mining family in Victorian Wales.

Directed by the great John Ford, it stars Walter Pidgeon and Maureen O’Hara. Also on the marquee: Anna Lee, Donald Crisp, and Roddy McDowall.

How Green Was My Valley is, at one level, a social critique of the English mining industry at the height of the Industrial Age. That didn’t work for me. The direction and execution of the story was too romanticized to stir up any serious sympathy for the working class. And yet, on some cheesy, corny, emotional level it was fun to watch.

Interesting Fact: The film won 9 Academy Awards, including Best Picture (over Citizen Kane, The Maltese Falcon, and Sergeant York). It still gets a high (89%) approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

From Empire: “This John Ford film is typically epic with a faithful screenplay to Richard Llewellyn’s famous novel. Strong performances from Crisp and O’Hara, although McDowall as the young lead gives a particularly memorable performance, while the setting shows Wales at its most beautiful.”

From Variety: “Performances are impressive all the way: fine yet forceful, punchy yet almost underplayed in their deeper meanings, gay and bitter, romantic and frustrated in properly arresting shades and moods, colors and contrasts. All the way it’s an exposition of the cinematic art that pars the best.”

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From My Work-in-Progress Basket

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“A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth.”

 – Diane Setterfield

 

When Considering Stock Investments, Don’t Trust the Stories 

Forty-five years ago, my partner came into my office, beaming with excitement.

“I know you don’t invest in stocks,” he said. “But let me tell you a story…”

Along with about a dozen other investment newsletter publishers and financial journalists, he had been invited down to some Latin American country – it might have been Costa Rica – to inspect a new technology. It was a mineral-processing machine, one that was able to extract gold dust from volcanic ash.

He was skeptical at first, he told me, but when he saw the machine operating with his own eyes, he immediately invested in the company that owned it.

First, he said, they listened to a presentation by a geologist who provided proof that there was gold content in the ash and explained how the extraction worked. Someone else, a professor of geology, provided a short history of past efforts to reclaim gold from sand and explained how this was different. And finally, they were taken to the site where it was all taking place, a fenced-off area near the ocean where the extractor had been installed. At one end of the machine, local workers were shoveling in volcanic-rich sand. At the other end, gold dust was being excreted. And if that wasn’t proof enough, an independent geologist was there to confirm the quality of the gold.

He could see from the expression on my face that I wasn’t buying it.

“Hey. I told you,” he said. “I saw it with my own eyes!”

“I’ll send you the reports,” he said, and stomped out of the room.

There is nothing that inspires us more than a good story. My partner’s disappointment with my reaction was an understandable response to his conviction. He had heard a story, one that seemed implausible, traveled all the way to Central America to check it out, and had concluded that it was legit. It was a bonanza! And I couldn’t see it! He was already counting the money he was going to make by investing in it. And he wanted me to be excited, too.

Despite my reluctance, he brought the story to a half-dozen investment writers that worked for us at the time. Some of them, like me, didn’t believe it. But some did. And one of them wrote about it in one of our publications. A few months later, the story was in the mainstream press. But not as a big discovery. It turned out to be a complete fraud.

The fraud was uncovered by a competitor of ours, a publisher who had also been invited down to witness the amazing machine… but he happened to be fluent in Spanish. And, as  he told me later, when he asked one of the workers how many hours a day he worked, the man said, “Oh, we only do this when the Gringos come into town.”

“Why didn’t you say something?” I asked him.

“Your partner really went for it,” he explained. “I didn’t want to hurt his feelings.”

Stories sell. The brokerage industry understands that. And that’s why, when you get a call from your typical stock broker, he will gloss over the facts in order to give you a full account of the story behind the stock.

There are actually three very common stories that stock promoters tell:

* The revolutionary technology: It might be a new kind of microchip or a cure for cancer. Stories about world-changing innovations are intrinsically compelling. Written well, they have the emotional impact of a good movie.

 * The soon-to-be-signed contract: Nothing great is going on with the company now, but they are about to make a deal with some huge, usually undisclosed, partner that will send their sales soaring… and, thus, the price of the stock.

 * The legend does it again: The company’s president or founder was “behind” one of the biggest growth stocks in the last 10 years. Now he is turning his attention to a new business that nobody knows about but you.

As a marketing advisor to the investment publishing industry for nearly 40 years, I know the power that such stories can have. My clients use stories to sell investment publications, and stockbrokers use them to sell stocks.

When you buy a financial magazine or newsletter that disappoints you, you can always get your money back. (At least you can with my clients.) But if you buy a stock based on a story and you don’t like it, you are stuck with what could be a very bad investment.

Stories are compelling, but know this: There is no correlation between the quality of a story and the quality of the investment it represents.

And that’s why, when it comes to investing, you should take a very skeptical view of stories. Rather than be swept away by a good story, ask questions – lots of questions – and buy in only based on the facts.

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Worth Considering

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3 Facts, 3 Numbers, 3 Thoughts 

 

THE FACTS  

* New Mexico is testing a unique way to encourage drivers to slow down: A stretch of Route 66 – the “Musical Highway” – contains rumble strips that play “America the Beautiful” when a car passes over them at the legal limit of 45 mph.

  * A new CDC study (published in the Journal of Clinical Infectious Diseases) revealed that in December of last year, about 2% of all blood donated on the West Coast contained COVID-19 antibodies. This suggests the virus had found its way to the US before China alerted the world, and a month before the first case was identified in the US.

* Koala fingerprints are so similar to human fingerprints that they could easily be confused. “Although it’s extremely unlikely that koala prints would be found at the scene of a crime, police should at least be aware of the possibility,” says Maciej Henneberg, a biological anthropologist and forensic scientist at the University of Adelaide in Australia. At press time, Amaru did not know whether Professor Henneberg was joking.

 

 

THE NUMBERS 

* 35 – the number of dollars paid to graphic design student Carolyn Davidson in 1971 to design Nike’s “Swoosh” logo – a symbol of what has become the most valuable apparel brand in the world. (According to The Motley Fool, the brand is worth $34.8 billion.)

* 65 – the percent of global Bitcoin mining power that is located in China. Crypto mining is the process by which specialized computers are used to support, encode, and protect digital currency transactions. It is also the only way to acquire cryptocurrencies (e.g., Bitcoin) without putting any money down. China’s domination of the Bitcoin market stands to further their push to become the world’s dominant economic power by backing their Yuan with gold and Bitcoin, potentially replacing the dollar in the future.

* 3.75 billion – the number of years it will take for the Andromeda galaxy to collide with our own. According to NASA, the Andromeda is on a collision course with the Milky Way at a rate of 68 miles per second.

 

 

THE THOUGHTS 

* “The higher we soar, the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly.” – Friedrich Nietzsche

* “To thrive in life you need three bones. A wishbone. A backbone. And a funny bone.” – Reba McEntire

* “Our culture is fast becoming one that rewards failure rather than success, luck rather than skill, weakness rather than strength, neediness rather than deservedness, and arrogance rather than humility.” – Michael Masterson

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Tuesday, December 15, 2020, Delray Beach, Florida


Notes From My Journal

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I’m on cloud nine today…

I’m on cloud nine today.

As you know, I got the COVID bug about 5 months ago. Since then, I’ve tested negative for the virus twice and positive for antibodies twice.

On our way to the Miami airport to fly to Nicaragua for the Thanksgiving holiday, K and I took the antibody test again.

She tested positive, but I tested negative!

I was hugely disappointed because K had made it clear that if I did not have antibodies I could not train in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. (If you have to pick an activity most likely to pass along a virus, it would be Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, a form of wrestling generally done in a closed environment, with lots of sweating and close contact.)

I normally wrestle six days a week. And it is the single thing I most look forward to in the morning, because it feels – to me – like playing. So the thought of giving it up for the second time since getting the virus was downright depressing.

Plus, it meant that the immune effect of having the virus would have lasted, with me at least, for less than 5 months.

But in doing my research, I’d read (several times) that COVID-19 antibody tests have a fairly high percentage of false negative results. So I took another test last week, and this morning I got the results. I am positive!

I asked Amaru to scare up the latest on the reliability of these antibody tests. This is what he found:

“According to the CDC, there’s still a lot of uncertainty regarding these tests. They point out that ‘every test returns some false positive and false negative results.’ And while getting a positive result indicates that you’ve been exposed to the virus in the past, it’s unknown whether it also means a lack of contagiousness or lasting immunity. In addition, they say, a single antibody test is ‘not likely to be sufficiently accurate to make an informed decision regarding whether or not an individual has a prior infection or truly has presence of antibodies.’ They suggest that an additional test would increase overall accuracy.”

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Fun and/or Interesting

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I am infatuated with this new dance craze. It’s sort of a marriage between break dancing and the Charleston. A friend of mine – a dance teacher – says he could teach it to me, but it would probably take more time than I have left for dancing.

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