John P. Faris III

Things I'm Working On

Morgan Housel

Unprecedented Events and Writing Great Poetry

Camp Croft

The more I learn about Croft State Park (located in Spartanburg, SC), the more I want to know about it…

Croft State Park, formerly named Camp Croft, served as a training camp for the U.S. Army during World War II. The camp, named after Major General Edward Croft, was established in 1940 and housed about 250,000 soldiers during the war.

Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger became a citizen at the camp. Richard D. “Dick” Winters, an officer featured on the HBO series “Band of Brothers,” underwent basic training at Croft.

via Upstate Business Journal

By the way, if you haven’t seen Band of Brothers, it’s an excellent series.

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This Has Never Happened Before

History is mostly the study of unprecedented events, ironically used as a map of the future. Stuff evolves, paradigms shift. So what worked in the past may not work today or tomorrow. The most valuable part of history is studying how people behave when the world changes, because it’s the most consistent thing over time.

Permanent Assumptions by Morgan Housel
(Emphasis Mine)

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“It’s not anyone else’s responsibility to show us the truth. It’s our responsibility to find it. We do that by asking good questions.” – Rob Fitzpatrick

H/T “The Mom Test (book review)” via The Waiters Pad

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Mindset

One of my favorite essayists, Bob Seawright, has  a good series on making behavioral finance practical. 

Here’s a sample from Part 4 – The Mindset.

As per the scientific method…, we should always hold our views of the truth lightly and tentatively, subject to more and better information and arguments. Changing our minds for those reasons (as opposed to mere expediency) is a good, useful, and desirable thing. As Jeff Bezos of Amazon insightfully expressed it, people who are right a lot of the time are people who change their minds a lot.

Bob Seawright

(Emphasis Mine)
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Here’s a Charlie Munger quote, also via The Better Letter:

“If you can get good at destroying your own wrong ideas, that is a great gift.”
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When Richard Feynman said that the imagination of nature was greater than the imagination of man, he meant that if you just keep following the truth you’ll discover cooler things than you could ever have made up.

Paul Graham’s essay Startup = Growth


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Here are a few more items that seemed to fit the theme:

Are trends and norms based on evidence?…

The goal of walking 10,000 steps per day may have originated when a Japanese pedometer manufacturer noticed that the 万 symbol (which means 10,000) looks a little like someone walking. The actual health merits of that number ‘have never been validated by research.’

Amanda Mull

On digging deeper…

People hate asking sensitive questions. However, it turns out that people don’t hate being asked sensitive questions. So talking around difficult questions in research interviews is a waste of time and money.

Hart, VanEpps, Schweitzer

Both via 52 Things I Learned in 2019

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From Howard Marks most recent Memo, I Beg To Differ:

“And that brings me to my favorite fortune cookie, which I received with desert 40-50 years ago. The message inside was simple: The cautious seldom err or write great poetry.“

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Humor

To end on a light note, an excerpt from a Tim Ferriss interview…

Tim Ferriss: I remember somebody asked me, “What are your blind spots?” And I was like, “I’m not sure I can answer that.” By definition —

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If you like this newsletter please share it with others that might enjoy it (that’s the ultimate compliment).  They can sign up here.

Here’s What To Choose Over Happiness

When stumped by a life choice, choose “enlargement” over happiness.

I’m indebted to the Jungian therapist James Hollis for the insight that major personal decisions should be made not by asking, “Will this make me happy?”, but “Will this choice enlarge me or diminish me?” We’re terrible at predicting what will make us happy: the question swiftly gets bogged down in our narrow preferences for security and control. But the enlargement question elicits a deeper, intuitive response. You tend to just know whether, say, leaving or remaining in a relationship or a job, though it might bring short-term comfort, would mean cheating yourself of growth. (Relatedly, don’t worry about burning bridges: irreversible decisions tend to be more satisfying, because now there’s only one direction to travel – forward into whatever choice you made.)

Oliver Burkeman’s last column: the eight secrets to a (fairly) fulfilled life via The Guardian

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Unintended Consequences

Because parking requirements make driving less expensive and development more so, cities get more driving, less housing, and less of everything that makes urbanity worthwhile. This process is subtle. Many mayors today declare their support for walkable downtowns and affordable units. But cities are built at the parcel, not from mayors’ podiums. And parcel by parcel, the zoning code quietly undermines the mayors’ grand vision. A commercial requirement of one parking space per 300 square feet means developers will put new retail in a car-friendly, pedestrian-hostile strip mall. And a requirement of one parking space per 100 square feet for restaurants means the typical eating establishment will devote three times as much space to parking as it will to dining. America did not become a country of strip malls and office parks because we collectively lost aesthetic ambition. These developments are ubiquitous because they are the cheapest way to comply with regulations.

How Parking Destroys Cities via The Atlantic

(Emphasis Mine)

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Showing Up

In Hollywood, his work ethic was undeviating: he showed up every day. He believed, and still believes, that any time spent thinking about writing is wasted except when one is in a room writing. He quotes Billy Wilder: “The muse has to know where to find you.” 

Referencing David Milch, the creator of the HBO Series “Deadwood”,  David Milch’s Third Act via the New Yorker

(Emphasis Mine)

H/T Shane Parrish Newsletter (FS | Brain Food)

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Art

I regret not taking any art history classes in school.  However, if I had I would have wanted it to be like these interactive pieces from the Times.  

The Impressionist Art of Seeing and Being Seen

A Messy Table, a Map of the World

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Don’t Just Stand There

Jason Zweig of the Wall Street Journal says there are three ways to earn money as a writer:

Lie to people who want to be lied to, and you’ll get rich.

Tell the truth to those who want the truth, and you’ll make a living.

Tell the truth to those who want to be lied to, and you’ll go broke.

Some variation of this applies to many fields, especially service industries where someone pays for an expert’s opinion. There can be a difference between knowing what’s right and making a living delivering what you know to be right.

This may be most common in investing, law, and medicine, when “do nothing” is the best answer, but “do something” is the career incentive.

Trying Too Hard via The Collaborative Fund (Morgan Housel)

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Unremarkable

“Nothing is so common-place as to wish to be remarkable.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., Autocrat of the Breakfast Table

H/T The Better Letter

Finding Your Way Home and Beauty in Motion

Your Time

One of the top things elderly Americans regret in life is being too busy to have had the time to do the things they actually enjoyed. Older Americans overwhelmingly wish they had worked and [sic] less and spent more time with family, going for a walk, sleeping in, and just enjoying life. Few people my age will take this advice seriously.

The field of positive psychology teaches us that having control over your time is one of the biggest keys to being happy. People adjust to material stuff quickly. But losing control of your time makes almost everyone miserable. No matter how much you love work, everyone should do everything they can to gain control over their time.

Having Control Over Your Time Is the Only Sensible Financial Goal by Morgan Housel

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Find Your Way Home

I once heard a speech by writer Elizabeth Gilbert about how the best way to respond to success or failure was the same, “You have got to find your way back home again,” she explained. “If you’re wondering what your home is, here’s a hint: Your home is whatever in this world you love more than you love yourself. Your home is that thing to which you can dedicate your energies with such singular devotion that the ultimate results become inconsequential.”

Trail Runner Magazine article about Tommy Rivers Puzey

This quote was from a Trail Runner Magazine article about Tommy Rivers Puzey, a long distance runner.  It’s an inspiring story about his battle with cancer. 

His return to the NY Marathon was written up in the NY Times.

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Tree Stand

Although it looks like a woodland of individual trees with striking white bark and small leaves that flutter in the slightest breeze, Pando (Latin for “I spread”) is actually 47,000 genetically identical stems that arise from an interconnected root network. This single genetic individual weighs around 6,000 metric tons. By mass, it is the largest single organism on Earth.

Aspen trees do tend to form clonal stands elsewhere, but what makes Pando interesting is its enormous size. Most clonal aspen stands in North America are much smaller, with those in the western U.S. averaging just 3 acres.

Pando has been around for thousands of years, potentially up to 14,000 years, despite most stems only living for about 130 years.

…It has dealt with disease, wildfire, and grazing before, and remains the world’s largest scientifically documented organism.

via Atlas Obscura

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Beauty in Motion

In his 2006 essay, ‘Roger Federer as Religious Experience’, the late, great American writer David Foster Wallace wrote that “beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty”.

“It might be called kinetic beauty,” he added. “Its power and appeal are universal.”

Watch Kipchoge run, and you’ll see his point. It’s difficult to find a sportsperson so impossibly suited to his craft, as if his entire reason for being is to coast over the ground at 4:40 per mile, a pace that for most would feel like a sprint.

But when Kipchoge does it, his head has virtually no vertical motion, his face so relaxed that he looks bored. His arms hang loose, swinging casually, his fingers in a gentle tuck, as if holding an invisible stick. His feet don’t so much hit the ground as stroke it, his toes pushing off the road with the elegant, balletic grace of a dancer.

via Irish Examiner , H/T The Collaborative Fund

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Links

If you’re interested in NFTs:

A model for trading and sharing art, built on the principles of financial transparency, royalties and easy access for all may sound egalitarian. The reality has been rather different. As soon as it became apparent that almost anything digital could be labelled as art and sold, the circus rolled into town. 

The Guardian

If you’re a baseball fan.

If you know (or don’t know) who Paul Finebaum is (RE: Knowledge Bubbles).

If you’re wondering why Amazon delivery vans make a funny noise when they back up.

If you’re thinking about working multiple jobs simultaneously.

If you like to snow ski (or you just want to be entertained)

Pace Yourself, Design as a Commodity, Career Advice

Pace Yourself

An interesting read by Dror Poleg…

“Even before people started working, the most gifted children were often forced to study at the same pace and in the same place as everyone else because it was not economically feasible to let each child study at their own pace and access the resources that are relevant to them at any given moment.

That meant that even people who had the skills to do more were forced to do less. Geography and scarcity handicapped above-average performers and protected the average ones. By “average,” I am not referring to people’s overall worth or potential. I am referring to their ability to perform a specific task for which they are paid.”

Does the traditional workplace throttle exceptional workers? If these constraints are removed, what happens to slower, less productive workers?

The internet continues to catalyze change.  The same thing that allows students to realize their full potential (by not being confined by the classroom) may very well be the thing that allows jobs to be moved around the globe (by not being confined to an office, country, or region). 

Two sides of the same coin. “One hand giveth, the other taketh away.”

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Investing 101

Morgan Housel wrote a good piece on how one can apply lessons from other fields to investing…

More important is this: If you find something that is true in more than one field, you’ve probably uncovered something particularly important. The more fields it shows up in, the more likely it is to be a fundamental and recurring driver of how the world works.

…five fields teach more about investing than most finance textbooks:

Health, and how people make short-term tradeoffs with long-term consequences.

Sociology, mostly people’s desire to belong to a tribe and signal their success.

Military history, and how people underestimate complex systems, become overconfident in their abilities, react in stressful situations in ways they hadn’t imagined, and underestimate risks that hadn’t been considered.

Evolution, which shows how competitive advantages are gained and squandered.

Nature (anything from geology to forestry) which has the best examples of compounding because incredible things happen over very (very) long periods of time.

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Design as a Commodity

David Perell wrote this article about the what he calls the “Microwave Economy”…

One of the weirdest things about modern urbanism, and the Microwave Economy in general, is that we build the opposite of what we like. We adore Europe’s narrow and car-less streets, but build skyscraper-lined cities with sterile shopping malls and six-lane roads, where pedestrians are always on edge. But the Microwave Economy is most visible in architecture, where the industry has overwhelmingly directed its innovative muscles towards making things scalable instead of more beautiful. It has prioritized machine-like reproducibility over workman-like craftsmanship.

And this from the same piece:

Simon Sarris calls this standardization the Aesthetic Deep State: “As the availability of stores like Home Depot (founded 1978) and Lowes (21 stores in the 60’s) spread — both have over 2,000 stores each today — the commodification of house hardware intensified. Today it is easier to find the things you are looking for quickly, for example if you need a replacement door knob. This also means that everyone’s door knobs look almost the same. As manufacturers and distributors consolidate, while carrying only a few brands, the details of houses converge… Before you can choose any options, you are limited by which choices are even available.”

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Career Advice

I’ve really enjoyed reading Tribe of Mentors. It’s a Q & A format and the chapters (of which there are many) are short, so it feels like progress even if you’re only able to read a few pages at a time. Here is a quote from Peter Guber…

“The seminal change in the business from then to now is that a young person should view the career pyramid differently rather than traditionally. Put the point at the bottom where you are now (at the start of your career) and conceive your future as an expanding opportunity horizon where you can move laterally across the spectrum in search of an ever-widening set of career opportunities. Reinvent yourself regularly. See your world as an ever-increasing set of realities and seize the day.”

— Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice from the Best in the World by Timothy Ferriss

I love the thought that as we get older more opportunities are before us. This is an unconventional, glass-half-full way of thinking.

Amelia Earhart, Tail Events and Forest Bathing

A Quick Announcement

Many of you are also subscribers to my email newsletter GSP Updates. You may have noticed you haven’t received an email since February 2020.  I’ve put that project on hold and I’m devoting more attention to the Monthly Memo.  In the meantime, I may try incorporating a bit of local content here.

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Amelia Earhart

Amelia Earhart, the first female pilot to fly trans-Atlantic, visited Spartanburg in 1931 and spoke at Converse College.  While that’s notable, I found her mode of transportation even more interesting. She flew into the downtown airport in a helicopter-airplane hybrid called an autogiro. Here are some pictures of this unusual aircraft.

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Tail Events

“The world is driven by tail events. A minority of things drive the majority of outcomes. It’s one of the most important concepts in investing, where a few positions may account for most of your lifetime returns.

History is no different. World War II, World War I, and the Great Depression influenced nearly every important event of the 20th century. Industrialization and the Civil War did the same in the 19th.

Demographics, inequality, and information access will have a huge impact on the coming decades. How those Big Things end is a story yet to be told. But when it’s told we’ll have a better idea of where it began.” (Morgan Housel via Collaborative Fund)

It’s worth mentioning that this prescient piece was written by Housel in Oct 2019.  I can’t help but wonder if we’re currently living a tail event.

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Doing the Hard Work

“…you can’t reason people out of positions they didn’t reason themselves into. No one responds well to having their identity attacked. No argument made in bad faith—that the person on the other side is a moron or a dupe or a racist or a snowflake—is ever going to be received in good faith.

Reason is easy. Being clever is easy. Humiliating someone in the wrong is easy too. But putting yourself in their shoes, kindly nudging them to where they need to be, understanding that they have emotional and irrational beliefs just like you have emotional and irrational beliefs—that’s all much harder. So is not writing off other people. So is spending time working on the plank in your own eye than the splinter in theirs. We know we wouldn’t respond to someone talking to us that way, but we seem to think it’s okay to do it to other people.” – Ryan Holiday from his post It’s Not Enough to Be Right—You Also Have to Be Kind

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Detachment

Several months ago I started reading Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout by Philip Connors.  The book is an account of a season spent in one of the last fire lookout towers in the West.  Here’s a passage from the beginning of the book…

“Not many people I know have to work this hard to get to work, yet I can honestly say I love the hike, every step of it. The pain is a toll I willingly pay on my way to the top, for here, amid these mountains, I restore myself and lose myself, knit together my ego and then surrender it, detach myself from the mass of humanity so I may learn to love them again, all while coexisting with creatures whose kind have lived here for millennia.”

The words “detach myself from the mass of humanity so I may learn to love them again” stuck with me.

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Forest Bathing

Many of us have spent more time outdoors this year.  I learned a new term – “Forest Bathing”…

“In Japan, we practice something called forest bathing, or shinrin-yoku. Shinrin in Japanese means “forest,” and yoku means “bath.” So shinrin-yoku means bathing in the forest atmosphere, or taking in the forest through our senses…This is not exercise, or hiking, or jogging. It is simply being in nature, connecting with it through our senses of sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch. Shinrin-yoku is like a bridge. By opening our senses, it bridges the gap between us and the natural world.”  (Time Magazine)

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Peace

Summer is ending and I find myself thinking about Paul Graham’s post on having children.  I especially like this passage:

“What I didn’t notice, because they tend to be much quieter, were all the great moments parents had with kids. People don’t talk about these much — the magic is hard to put into words, and all other parents know about them anyway — but one of the great things about having kids is that there are so many times when you feel there is nowhere else you’d rather be, and nothing else you’d rather be doing. You don’t have to be doing anything special. You could just be going somewhere together, or putting them to bed, or pushing them on the swings at the park. But you wouldn’t trade these moments for anything. One doesn’t tend to associate kids with peace, but that’s what you feel. You don’t need to look any further than where you are right now….Before I had kids, I had moments of this kind of peace, but they were rarer. With kids it can happen several times a day.”

Summer always presents a few more opportunities for these special moments. With all that is happening around us, I find these times even more meaningful.

Nevertheless, I always welcome the Fall and the cooler weather it brings.