Massive Mouse

The tech world’s current trend of anti-planning blog posts is approaching cliche status. In a follow-up comment to his blog entry, Matt Linderman posted: “It’s not that all planning is always bad. It’s just we give it disproportionate value compared to what it’s actually worth. And often, we use it as an excuse because it’s [...]

I tend to obsess over things. Over the past two years, it’s been Warren Buffett and the stock market. I approach it like this: the most ideal situation would be to have lunch with Warren Buffett and get his take on things. I suspect that anyone who sat down with him and heard him say, [...]

You’re not supposed to publish on Mondays. The thinking is that you’re content will get lost in the shuffle. It’ll be ignored because of the sheer mass of other content and that extra little bit of stress that people feel starting a new work week. But saying no to a creative impulse is a bad [...]

In our house we eat a lot of fruit. We tear through cherries, raspberries, strawberries, apples and bananas faster than we can buy them. Grapes in particular rarely last the day. Unless they have seeds. Last week we tried a different kind of grape. They were tasty, fresh and crunchy; everything a good grape should [...]

For the last two months, I’ve been sleep-deprived and generally exhausted. (A newborn has arrived.) The best solution? Manage a business, launch a second business, and exercise a lot. My new son takes the same approach. If he sleeps a lot during the day, he’ll sleep a lot that night. (The opposite is also true.) [...]

I grew up watching my dad watch boxing, cheering for the underdog. I never understood it at the time. Why would you want to cheer for the guy who’s gonna lose? I had to grow up before I could understand: It’s exciting to cheer for the underdog, because he might win. And that slim possibility [...]

My Dad has been saying since I was a kid, “Hire great people and your job will be easy.” I intentionally rejected that idea. And all of my hires have been failures. I’m a “just get it done” kind of guy, so my skill set and aptitudes are not ideal for the slow and methodical [...]

“You can’t do just one thing,” Warren Buffett said. He was speaking in terms of the economy, how everything is interconnected, and how any decision you make affects hundreds of other things you probably haven’t thought of. The same can be said for personal decision-making. It’s well-known that every path we choose forsakes all other [...]

A discount rate is a negative percentage applied to a value on an annual basis. It is often used to determine the net present value of future cash flows. For example, the Consumer Price Index can be used as a discount rate to determine the future value of present dollars. Officially, the CPI measures the [...]