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America First?
Markets have skyrocketed higher since late March, but the gains haven’t been shared equally around the globe. American outperformance has been an ongoing trend since the financial crisis, with recent history only further enhancing the dispersion. Markets tend to be “mean reverting”. This means cheaper markets tend to catch-up in valuation or, more painfully, expensive markets decline in value.
The genuine economic outperformance of the American tech giants has made this scenario a bit more nuanced than the chart suggests.
Try to wrap your head around these numbers. Don’t worry, the word quadrillion is thrown around only once.
This is a very helpful visualization of where the world’s wealth resides.
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The Road to Self-Renewal
A classic speech from John Gardner delivered in 1933 on how (and why) to maintain an attitude of lifelong learning. It is a highly quotable piece, but we will share some of our favourites:
Life isn’t a mountain that has a summit. Nor is it, as some suppose, a riddle that has an answer. Not a game that has a final score
But we have to bet on people, and I place my bets more often on high motivation than any other quality except judgement
I am not talking about anything as narrow as ambition. After all, ambition eventually wears out and probably should. But you can keep your zest until the day you die. If I may offer you a simple maxim – be interested
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Keeping the Flywheel in Motion: Jim Collins
A wide-ranging conversation with Jim Collins on the Farnam Street Podcast. We are regular listeners and found this conversation particularly insightful. Jim can distil complex topics more effectively than almost any other business writer.
Here is the interesting thing about luck – luck is asymmetric as a cause. Bad luck can kill you, but good luck cannot make you great
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Not Even Wrong: Ways to Predict Tech
An exploration of why some technologies succeed and why some flounder. There is a tendency to dismiss groundbreaking technology when it first arrives. Think about the iPhone as a technology that took people time to adjust to (everyone needs a keyboard!), or virtual reality where tech hasn’t quite found its legs yet. Being able to predict or at least understand these trends is crucial in trying to understand what the future will look like.
The Wright Flier could only go 200 meters, and the Rocket Belt could only fly for 21 seconds. But the Flier was a breakthrough of principle. There was no reason why it couldn't get much better, very quickly, and Blériot flew across the English Channel just six years later. There was a very clear and obvious path to make it better. Conversely, the Rocket Belt flew for 21 seconds because it used almost a litre of fuel per second - to fly like this for half a hour you’d need almost two tonnes of fuel, and you can’t carry that on your back.
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