Anxiety and Depression
How is a cow an anti-depressant? Watch this excellent TED talk by Johann Hari. If you or anyone you know has trouble with anxiety or depression, watch this and share it. Even if you don’t – watch this. My favorite quote:
“We live in a machine that is designed to get us to neglect what is important in life.”
(H/T Collaborative Fund)
Signs of Progress
Signs of progress are all around us. We tend to focus our attention on big changes that happen all at once, meanwhile we ignore some of the most notable ones that take place slowly over time.
“Heart-disease deaths have declined from over 400 per 100,000 Americans in 1981 to 168 per 100,000 by 2015. That decline means 754,000 fewer Americans die each year than would have had there been no improvement since 1981. That’s equal to the number of Americans killed in World War II, saved every seven months.”
Morgan Housel via Collaborative Fund
Morgan Housel’s article is filled with stats that will leave any reader hopeful about the future.
Buying time
“The biggest unlock in shareholder value in the last five years is Walmart’s click & collect and delivery. Walmart gave us four days a year back — grocery shopping takes an average of 69 min a week; you grocery shop 1.6 times per week, and the average commute for grocery shopping is 12.5 min each way. That makes the largest dollar-volume category (grocery, 750 billion) less time expensive. Since the introduction of click & collect and grocery delivery, Walmart has added over $100 billion in shareholder value.”
Scott Galloway
Meaningful
“IF YOU WATCHED a movie about a guy who wanted a Volvo and worked for years to get it, you wouldn’t cry at the end when he drove off the lot, testing the windshield wipers. You wouldn’t tell your friends you saw a beautiful movie or go home and put a record on to think about the story you’d seen. The truth is, you wouldn’t remember that movie a week later, except you’d feel robbed and want your money back. Nobody cries at the end of a movie about a guy who wants a Volvo. But we spend years actually living those stories, and expect our lives to feel meaningful. The truth is, if what we choose to do with our lives won’t make a story meaningful, it won’t make a life meaningful either.”
A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life by Donald Miller
(H/T to The Waiters Pad that lead me to this book)
Telling Stories
I was reading Miller’s book and came across an allusion to Tolstoy’s “green stick”. Unfamiliar with the reference I looked it up and found the following:
“When Leo’s brother Nikolai was 12, he told his family that he possessed a wonderful secret that could make all men happy, a secret which would mean that no one would ever die, that there would be no war or suffering. Nikolai added that he had written the secret on a little green stick and buried it at the edge of the ravine in Yasnaya Polyana. As a boy Tolstoy truly believed in the power of the green stick, and tried many times to find it. The allure of the little green stick and its ability to make all people everywhere happy stayed with Leo and in his old age he asked his family to bury his body without ceremony in a simple wooden coffin at the site of the little green stick.”
Shakespeare.org
Apparently, storytelling runs in the family.
Forecasting
Indeed, robust academic research has shown that flipping a coin is a more accurate predictor of the future than the forecasts of leading economists. A CXO Advisory Group study collected 6,582 forecasts for the U.S. stock market from 68 market commentators and found similarly that a coin flip was more accurate than the forecasters.
Bob Seawright
Predictions
Not to be deterred, I decided to do a little forecasting of my own. Here are my 10 predictions for 2020…