What We’re Reading
One of the greatest motivators is a sign of progress. Hardship is easier to tolerate when your work is being recognized (either through external validation or financial rewards), but long journeys don’t show progress in the traditional sense. When you have no customers, no audience, and nobody knows or cares to know about what you’re making, the greatest motivators have to be manufactured.
Great people don’t have to believe in themselves. They don’t have to fake anything. They have evidence.
A few years ago, an interviewer asked Jay Z about his incredible self-assuredness. It’s a good question. He does seem like a person with unending faith in himself. How else could he rap the things that he raps? How else could he have gone from the Marcy Projects to Madison Square? (Great book on this by the way, Empire State of Mind by Zack O’Malley Greenburg)
I’d argue it wasn’t belief. As Jay Z explained,
“People don’t realize I’ve put a lot of my life into what I’m doing right now. I didn’t just have a hit record and get lucky. I put a lot of my life into it so the things that come out of it is not due to bravado and arrogance. I have confidence because of the work that I’ve put in, and I’ve put in so much work.”
Let’s say you have two people, Person A and Person B. They are both value investors who follow the strategy laid out by Benjamin Graham in the 1930s.
Person A was born in 1930. Person B was born seventy years later, in 2000. They both start applying the Graham investing strategy at a very early age, let’s say when they were 15 years.
Person A becomes Warren Buffett, once the richest man on earth, who experienced one of the biggest booms in value stocks when he was young. Person B loses half of their money because value stocks are out of favor in the 2010s.
Same strategy, same actions, different times, different outcomes.
There are about 30,000 open positions for travel nurses nationwide, according to data from SimpliFi, a health-care staffing firm. That’s up some 30% from last winter’s peak, and still climbing. Salaries have jumped too, with rates as high as $8,000 a week advertised for a three-month assignment.
Nationwide, the number of high school seniors is expected to drop about 10% between 2025 and 2037, according to the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education. That means colleges will have to work harder to win students.
Have a good weekend.