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Rating threads Rob Lennon has been one of the best finds I made on Twitter in the past year. He has grown super fast, but what I like about him the most is that he's always trying new things with his content. The latest from him is Rating a thread:

For quality investors, the Return On Invested Capital (ROIC) is one of the most important financial metrics.A high ROIC is key for value creation and it’s a great way to look at a company’s competitive advantage.

When the Academy Award-winning director Guillermo del Toro was a boy growing up in Guadalajara, his mother bought him a Victorian-style writing desk. "I kept my comic books in the drawers, my books and horror action figures on the shelves, and my writing and drawing stuff on the desk," Del Toro recalled in a 2016

In... Out...

or, how to kick your addiction to the Internet’s biggest asshole.

Coming out of college or out of a traditional corporate job, most people think like turkeys. I thought like a turkey. Based on our understanding of the world having spent our entire lives in Mediocristan and the fact that up until relatively recent history, we have lived in Mediocristan, a turkey’s view of the world is highly rational. It’s also wrong. “A turkey is fed for a thousand days by a butcher; every day confirms to its staff of analysts that butchers love turkeys “with increased statistical confidence.” The butcher will keep feeding the turkey until a few days before Thanksgiving… [The] turkey will have a revision of belief— right when its confidence in the statement that the butcher loves turkeys is maximal and ‘it is very quiet’ and soothingly predictable in the life of the turkey.” -N.N. Taleb

Over time, all marketing strategies result in shitty clickthrough rates.

If you “have optionality,” you don’t have much need for what is commonly called intelligence, knowledge, insight, skills, and these complicated things that take place in our brain cells. For you don’t have to be right that often. All you need is the wisdom to not do unintelligent things to hurt yourself (some acts of omission) and recognize favorable outcomes when they occur.

Agency just accelerated and no one told you. The internet has accelerated disintermediation and increased agency more than any prior technology, but it’s only been commercially available for a couple of decades.

The Threshold Theory The Terman Study of the Gifted is one of the most legendary studies in psychology. In 1916, Lewis Terman developed America’s first IQ test. He used it and other evaluations to recruit 1,528 of the highest-IQ students he could find. The study began in 1921 and went on to become the longest-running

All shareholder letters of Francois Rochon (Giverny Capital)

All shareholder letters Jeff Bezos

All shareholder letters Terry Smith

All shareholder letters of Nick Sleep

All articles Peter Lynch

Why companies with skin in the game outperform

All class notes of Joel Greenblat

1. Finding your true self is an act of love. Expressing it is an act of rebellion. 2. A sign of growth is having more tolerance for discomfort. But it’s also having less tolerance for bullshi…

In my latest essay for The New Yorker, published earlier this week, I tackled the topic of "quiet quitting." This idea careened into mainstream discourse last summer, powered by a viral TikTok video posted by a twentysomething engineer named Zaid Khan. Here's the transcript: "I recently heard about this idea of quiet quitting where, you're

You said, “All the returns in life, whether in wealth, relationships, or knowledge, come from compound interest.” How does one know if they’re earning compound interest? Compound interest is a very powerful concept. Compound interest applies to more than just compounding capital. Compounding capit

Gareth Morgan’s Images of Organization is a must-read for those who want to develop a deeper understanding of a lot of the stuff I talk about here. Though I’ve cited the book lots of ti…

What exactly is Amazon? This is the question that has consumed me for the last ten years. I have sold to and bought from Amazon in about as many ways as one person can; I built an auto parts brand …

A distillation of the year's wisdom

The other day I sat down to write. But it didn’t happen. It just wasn’t there. The words. The momentum. One thought leading into the next. I knew I wanted to say something. I knew what I wanted it to be about. But I couldn’t get much further than that, beyond just a few sentences. A classic case of writer’s block, right? Maybe. Except I happen to think that writer’s block doesn’t exist. I’m with Jerry Seinfeld who said, “Writer’s block is a phony, made-up, BS excuse for not doing your work.” The words I chose above were illustrative: It just wasn’t there. What is it? It wasn’t the muses. Or inspiration. And I’ve never been a genius so that hadn’t abandoned me. What wasn’t there then? The work. I hadn’t done the work. Writing is a byproduct of hours and hours of reading, researching, thinking, making my notecards. When a day’s writing goes well, it’s got little to do with that day at all. It’s actually a lagging indicator of hours and hours spent researching and thinking. Every passage and page has a prologue titled preparation. The solution to my writer’s block that day was not to write at all. It was to stop for the day and go research the topic more. It was to go for a run and a walk. It was to do the prep work. Success as a lagging indicator is a phenomenon that holds true across most areas in life. When I look in the mirror and I’m a little flabby, that is a lagging indicator that, for weeks and months, I’ve slacked on eating healthy and exercising. When I’m grouchy and frustrated and anxious or short with my wife, that is usually a lagging indicator that I need to eat (in 2014,  Researchers from Ohio State University found  that most fights between couples are because someone is hungry). When I’m getting sick a lot, that is a lagging indicator that I have not been taking care of myself, working too hard,  not sleeping enough . Your retirement accounts are a lagging indicator of whether or not you have your financial act together—earning enough, saving enough. Pulling an all-nighter is not a sign of dedication but a lagging indicator of the exact opposite. It means you plan poorly, you procrastinate, you aren’t proactive enough, you don’t know how to effectively manage your work and your time. Not being able to  fully disconnect from your devices  on vacation is a lagging indicator that you don’t have good systems in place. Hitting a personal record on the bench press is a lagging indicator of a lot of discipline and hard work. Receiving a promotion is a lagging indicator of a lot of quality work. Delivering a keynote with confidence is a lagging indicator  of a lot of preparation . All my books are lagging indicators.  They are a culmination of years of work . That’s actually Robert Greene’s definition of creativity. He says, “creativity is a function of the previous work you put in.” Creativity is not mysterious or romantic. It’s tedious, Robert says. “If you put a lot of hours into thinking and researching and reading, hour after hour—a very tedious process—creativity will come to you.” But so are their sales.  The Obstacle is the Way  sold in its first year what  Discipline is Destiny  sold in a week. How? Because day after day after day, I worked to build a system, a platform, that has become a flywheel that day after day spins faster and faster. Combined, over a million readers have subscribed to  Daily Stoic ,  Daily Dad ,  The Reading List Email , and this RSS email lists. Of course, I have social media, too (you can follow me on  Instagram ,  Twitter ,  TikTok  and  YouTube ). In other words, I’ve filled a dozen football stadiums worth of “true fans” who I have built a relationship with. This is what keeps me moving—knowing that I have to keep filling and refilling the creative well. Knowing that creative output is a lagging indicator of a lot of hours of tedious work. Knowing that if I want to publish more books in the future, the only question is, am I doing the work now? It’s what keeps my priorities straight as a parent. I want to have a relationship with my kids as long as I am able to—which means investing in it now. In twenty years, attendance at Thanksgiving will be voluntary.  Attendance will be a lagging indicator of who I was as a parent today . It’s true as a spouse too. Fifty years of marriage is a lagging indicator of how quickly arguments are resolved today, how mistakes are handled today, the pressure of (or better yet, the lack thereof) today. And it’s true of fame and celebrity—at least the good kind, not the famous-from-a-sex tape kind. Bruce Dickinson from Iron Maiden  would say in an interview  that “fame is the excrement of creativity, it’s the shit that comes out the back end, it’s a by-product of it.” It’s a lagging indicator of years of making stuff that people like and get to know you through. Even this article is an example. It’s a lagging indicator, a byproduct of a process that started with an idea on a notecard, to an idea I kicked around with others in conversations and with myself on walks, which led to a first draft I spent time on across several days, which I returned to across several weeks whenever I had tweaks and improvements, which was edited by a team, and then finally published. Nothing comes from nowhere. Not success. Not inspiration. Not the muses. Not writer’s block. Everything is a lagging indicator. Of whether or not you did the work. Tweet Facebook Twitter Google+ Pinterest LinkedIn

Victory Through AttritionIn a book on the major wars that shaped the course of history, the strategist and historian B.H. Liddell Hart found that in only 2% of campaigns “did a decisive result follow a plan of direct strategic approach to the main army of the enemy.” The majority of campaigns are won through attrition.