What We’re Reading

Perspective:

If you had twenty five years left to live, how much time would you spend worrying about the daily ups and downs of the stock market?

If you had twenty years left to live, how much time would you spend trying to time the stock markets and the economy and other things that are both unpredictable and completely out of your control?

If you had fifteen years left to live, how much time would you spend trying to buy or sell a specific stock at the perfect price?

If you had ten years left to live, how much time would you devote to comparing your monthly investment returns against the returns of others?

If you had five years left to live, how much of it would you spend obsessing over financial news and its unforeseeable impact on your portfolio?

Steve Jobs on the day the iPad was released:

I got about eight hundred email messages in the last twenty-four hours. Most of them are complaining. There’s no USB cord! There’s no this, no that. Some of them are like, ‘F— you, how can you do that?’ I don’t usually write people back, but I replied, ‘Your parents would be so proud of how you turned out.’ And some don’t like the iPad name, and on and on. I kind of got depressed today. It knocks you back a bit.

College:

At the close of the 2020-21 academic year, women made up 59.5% of college students, an all-time high, and men 40.5%, according to enrollment data from the National Student Clearinghouse, a nonprofit research group. U.S. colleges and universities had 1.5 million fewer students compared with five years ago, and men accounted for 71% of the decline.

Walking:

Meditation is far from the only transcendent purpose that walking can serve. Many have written about the so-called savoring walk, the practice of focusing on the positive events in your life while walking, which helps you savor happiness. I practiced this all throughout the coronavirus shutdowns in my city, circling my neighborhood nightly after dinner. Those walks are some of the sweetest memories I have of that period, and I have continued them since, inadvertently preparing for my Camino. Almost at the moment I began the journey, my gratitude began to bubble up—for my family, faith, friends, and work, but also for a cool drink of water, taking off my shoes, and a soft pillow at night.

Depression-level declines:

Toyota Motor, the world’s largest automaker, plans to cut production worldwide 40 percent in September because of a shortage of computer chips that the company had avoided being hurt by until now.

Have a good weekend.