My daughter is reading my favorite book. “I’m on page 112,” she says, “of The Choose Yourself Stories”. This is my collection of more personal stories about my life. I never marketed it. Just put it out there. But she found it. Now she has a lot of questions like, “Why did you always want… Continue Reading
90% of the feedback I got about “Choose Yourself” was about one thing: How to bridge harsh reality with the world of imagination: how to become an Idea Machine. For my whole life I felt like a stray dog, dashing around until I could survive in the jungle. But I was lost and it took… Continue Reading
On Quora someone asked, “should answers be categorized by expert / non-expert?” My response: There is no such thing as an expert. First, a couple of anecdotes. In 1799, George Washington caught a cold. He was coughing and he had a fever. This was considered an emergency. The greatest American alive was sick! Blood was… Continue Reading
I have an amazing tool/app that makes my work 100x more productive. It’s called a phone. That sounds sarcastic. I’m not being sarcastic. It’s the truth. A lot of times people send me emails and then I forget about them or I never respond to them or I respond to them weeks later. I now… Continue Reading
My first night in my first apartment I woke up with cockroaches everywhere. I went to the bathroom and the entire floor was swarming with them. I panicked and screamed because I was a little baby and never saw this before. I should’ve just called Terminix michigan to get rid of the pests, but I… Continue Reading
Time is not money. All the slick guys in their suits, peppering their lingo with “time is money!” Hurry! Money! It’s not true. I feel bad for them. Cheapening their time like that. I know this because I’m the master at losing money. I have very clever ways of making my money explode into dust.… Continue Reading
The Economist is out with a first class post on Barrick Gold founder Peter Munk. Munk’s tale How a former refugee from the Nazis made and lost several fortunes Apr 19th 2014 | From the print edition YOU can’t be right all the time. In a 1995 profile of Peter Munk, the founder of Barrick Gold,… Continue Reading
“Everyday we have an opportunity to create a living masterpiece.” – Michael Gervais “That’s what I’m f%&*ing talking about!” was not the typical conclusion of the presentations at San Francisco’s Wisdom 2.0 conference — where Zen teachers, such as Eckhart Tolle or Jon Kabat-Zinn, spoke on the role of mindfulness in the tech community —… Continue Reading
It’s really humiliating to ask for money from people. When I was a venture capitalist I hated everyone who asked me for money. And I hated my partners who pretended like they had the ability to make important life or death decisions over people. All we really wanted to do was make a lot of… Continue Reading
If you’re in the investment business in Canada, you may be just a little jealous of Deans Knight Capital: it’s a super successful small company with savvy entrepreneur clients and a fun, friendly corporate culture. And if you’re a Deans Knight client, you’re probably a happy camper — the company has produced better than 15%… Continue Reading
I came across a 2011 article about Canaccord Financial founder Peter Brown, and I particularly enjoyed the following excerpt: In 1968, Brown and partner Ted Turton bought 51 per cent of a struggling Vancouver brokerage for $23,000. They soon ran into problems with an “irresponsible” financial partner who bankrupted the company, he said. “We started… Continue Reading
I was a daytrader for many years and it almost killed me. I made money by making profits on my own money and also taking a percentage of the profits for the people I traded for. I traded up to $40 or $50 million a day at my peak. I did this from 2001 to… Continue Reading
When I was ten I loved to write down who liked who. “David liked Joanne”. “Lori liked Jimmy”. Then I would write down why. “David would laugh every time Joanne would make a joke in class.” I had a spiral notebook, about 8×11, and I pretty quickly would fill up all the pages and then… Continue Reading
Here are the rules: I’ve been at zero a few times, come back a few times, and done it over and over. I’ve started entire new careers. People who knew me then, don’t me now. And so on. I’ve had to change careers several times. Sometimes because my interests changed. Sometimes because all bridges have… Continue Reading
One time the Federal Government Shutdown came into an apartment I was sharing with a bunch of roommates. It tied us all up and blindfolded us and made us do things to each other. It made us call it “Ted” but I don’t really know if that was its name. Another time I was riding… Continue Reading
