Either invest full-time or put it on auto-pilot. It’s rare to have great success otherwise. The best auto-pilot approach is to decide how much you want to invest each month and then buy that same dollar value each month whether the market is up or down. The technique is called “dollar-cost averaging“. Over the long-term, [...] Read more – ‘Auto-pilot investing’.
Managing expenses is hard. Our natural instincts lead us to want more and expenses follow along on the same path. To keep expenses in check, I’ve been asking myself, “Is it free?” If it’s free, sure, let’s try it. If not, then… maybe. Of course, it’s more common to ask, “Is it expensive?” or “Is [...] Read more – ‘Is it free?’.
Geologic time, how we chronologically track the back story of earth’s history, is a real mind bender. Its vastness is unfathomable, really, unless broken down into human terms. My favourite analogy is squishing the planet’s 4.57 billion-year history into one calendar year. Unicellular life shows up in March, dinosaurs go extinct by Christmas Eve, and [...] Read more – ‘All that was now isn’t’.
The editor’s letter in the most recent issue of Alpinist Magazine (#35) raises some questions about anonymous ascents and the current age of self-promotion. The following post is from an email discussion that Katie and I had prior to her letter. People that mourn the (apparent) death of idealism naturally focus on the wrong explanation. [...] Read more – ‘The silent and the loud’.
It is much harder psychologically to be unsure than to be sure; certainty builds confidence, and confidence reinforces certainty. Yet being overly certain in an uncertain, protean, and ultimately unknowable world is hazardous for investors. To be sure, uncertainty breeds doubt, which can be paralyzing. But uncertainty also motivates diligence, as one pursues the unattainable [...] Read more – ‘Uncertainty motivates diligence’.
Trying to choose between web developers and not sure how? A quick and easy way to find out is to run the developer’s own website through Google Pagespeed. Google Pagespeed is a tool that evaluates the performance of web pages according to current best practices. Pagespeed will run tests on any web page and spit [...] Read more – ‘Your web developer’s report card’.
If someone gave you an Olympic gold medal (that you didn’t win), would it be worth more than its melt value? Getting something for free is a thrill, a gift. If you find $20 on the street, it’s a natural reaction to buy yourself lunch and be excited about it. But what if your parents [...] Read more – ‘The high cost of no price’.
Great websites combine content, speed and usability into powerful solutions to their visitors’ problems. The combination of all three leads to increased traffic and subsequent revenue for site owners. In addition, content and speed also optimize search engine results, making your site easier to find on the internet. Here are nine ways to improve your [...] Read more – ‘9 things your website needs’.
Criticism is necessary and useful; it is often indispensable; but it can never take the place of action, or be even a poor substitute for it. The function of the mere critic is of very subordinate usefulness. It is the doer of deeds who actually counts in the battle for life, and not the man [...] Read more – ‘The function of the mere critic’.
Does a $40,000 a year education that comes with an elite degree deliver ten times the education of a cheaper, but no less rigorous, self-generated approach assembled from less-famous institutions and free or inexpensive resources? - Seth Godin on “Buying an education or buying a brand?“ Read more – ‘An education or a brand?’.
“Rightsizing your business is one of the most important decisions you can make. Just because you’re thriving at one scale doesn’t mean that a little more effort or a little more investment magically take you to the next. They probably don’t.” ~ Seth Godin, “An atomic theory of business size“ Read more – ‘An atomic theory of business size’.
I have several well-meaning friends that think their dog is a surrogate child. “Gonna have kids?”“Nah, we have a dog.” Thinking your dog is the equivalent of your child is like thinking you’re a pro poker player, but you’ve only ever played with Monopoly money. It feels like the real thing right up until you [...] Read more – ‘Dogs are not children’.
In order to predict how well your investments are going to do over the long-term, you need to know your current compound average growth rate (CAGR) — how well your investments have done in the past up to today — and then use that rate to estimate a future value of your investments. But most [...] Read more – ‘How do I figure out my current CAGR?’.
It’s not uncommon for “one-man brands” — like me and massivemouse.com — to refer to themselves and their business with “we”. Some think that this is an unnecessary facade; a vain attempt to make a small company sound bigger than it is. I disagree. It does depend on the speaker’s motivation, and yes, if it’s [...] Read more – ‘Why there’s a “we”’.
This morning, several people woke up, scraped the barrel and wrote stories like this: “S&P takes worst slide in 2 months“. Worse, they got paid for it. Even worse yet, they probably have no idea why it’s horrible work. To put this nonsense into perspective, here’s a chart of the S&P 500′s progress over the [...] Read more – ‘Stock market reporting & other fairy tales’.
“Our companies don’t employ us because they love us. They never have and they never will. That’s not the job of a business. Businesses don’t exist so we can have a place to go every day. The purpose of a business is to make money. To excel at a company, you’re going to have to [...] Read more – ‘The business value you bring’.
“Climbing Everest is the ultimate in the opposite of [an adventure], because you get all these high-powered plastic surgeons and CEOs… They pay $80,000 and have Sherpas who put all the ladders in place and 8,000 feet of fixed rope. You get to a camp, and you don’t even have to lay out your sleeping [...] Read more – ‘Don’t compromise the process’.
The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea around them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of a doubt, what is laid before him. [...] Read more – ‘The most difficult subjects’.
It was no ordinary desire that survived disappointment, discouragement, temporary defeat, criticism and the constant reminding of a waste of time. It was a burning desire. It was an obsession. – Andrew Carnegie Read more – ‘No ordinary desire’.
In my last WordPress post, I talked about how to set up a secure installation of WordPress. In this post, I suggest eight things to change in the WordPress backend before you install your theme. These tweaks make for a better set up, and they make things easier down the road. 1: Change your permalinks [...] Read more – ‘8 tweaks for your WordPress installation’.
Moses was there with the Lord forty days and forty nights without eating bread or drinking water. And he wrote on the [stone] tablets the words of the covenant—the Ten Commandments. – Exodus 34:28 No wonder it took 40 days and 40 nights. God and Moses wrote the Commandments onto stone tablets that had to [...] Read more – ‘You ain’t Moses & those pixels ain’t tablets’.
I recently started offering WordPress setup services. Because WordPress is so easy to work with, it’s fairly straightforward to build a secure, standards-compliant site for $1,000. A potential client recently told me that he was referred to someone who could build a site for half that amount. Honestly, I don’t know how someone can build [...] Read more – ‘8 questions you should ask your discount web developer’.
For years, Ottawa has treated large airports as cash cows to be milked for revenue. But the surging number of Canadian travellers flying from U.S. airports suggests that the government’s desire for airport revenue is ultimately self-defeating and a hindrance to economic growth. — Globe & Mail, “An ominous flight pattern” Read more – ‘An ominous flight pattern’.
Men in general judge more by the sense of sight than by the sense of touch, because everyone can see but only a few can test by feeling. Everyone sees what you seem to be, few know what you really are; and those few do not dare take a stand against the general opinion. – [...] Read more – ‘Those few do not dare’.
Leaving aside tax factors, the formula we use for evaluating stocks and businesses is identical. Indeed, the formula for valuing all assets that are purchased for financial gain has been unchanged since it was first laid out by a very smart man in about 600 B.C. (though he wasn’t smart enough to know it was [...] Read more – ‘Aesop & investing’.
Because of WordPress’ popularity, the number of malware and other types of attacks are greater than on other platforms. There are five best practices that can reduce the risk, but site owners often don’t find out about them until well after they have an established website. Unfortunately, implementing some of these changes on a live [...] Read more – ‘The easiest way to secure WordPress’.
Do hammers fail? How about pens? No, of course not. People may fail to use a hammer or a pen properly or effectively, but the tool itself cannot fail. The same it is with email. The world is (unfortunately) still learning how to use email. Many people still don’t know how to use it and [...] Read more – ‘Does email fail?’.
If a company purchases goods and services for its operations, and if the company pays sales taxes on those goods and services, are the taxes an actual expense to the business? The answer: It depends. In Canada, once a business grosses its first $30,000 in total revenue, it is legally compelled to register for a [...] Read more – ‘Is sales tax an expense?’.
Time is not money, because it’s an auto-renewable resource. Money is scarce and hard to come by. Time is abundant and free. It’s not uncommon to hear, “I make $50 an hour, so it’s cheaper for me to hire someone for $10 an hour to do that data entry.” It’s not true. The logic is [...] Read more – ‘Time is not money’.
One notable distinction between wrong people and right people is that the former see themselves as having “jobs,” while the latter see themselves as having responsibilities. Every person in a key seat should be able to respond to the question, “What do you do?” not with a job title, but with a statement of personable [...] Read more – ‘Having the right people’.
Those who built the great companies in our research distinguished between share value and share price, between shareholders and shareflippers, and recognized that their responsibility lay in building shareholder value, not in maximizing shareflipper price. The greatest leaders do seek growth — growth in performance, growth in distinctive impact, growth in creativity, growth in people [...] Read more – ‘Shareholder value or shareflipper price?’.
Sometimes. But most often, no. The importance of custom web design comes down to how much value you personally place — not how much your clients or your customers place — on a custom design and how good the designer is. Most of your customers don’t care about either. Here’s why: Your customers don’t care [...] Read more – ‘Do we need custom web design?’.
We all have that one friend who says, “I had the idea for eBay. If only I had acted on it, I’d be a billionaire!” That logic is pathetic and delusional. Having the idea for eBay has nothing to do with actually creating eBay. What you do matters, not what you think or say or [...] Read more – ‘Start making something’.
I originally posted this on the Ambler blog a couple years ago. Now that the hours have crept back in, I need to remind myself of my bad habits. I’ve been sticking to a rigid work schedule. I decided to try it out because, for the previous six months, I had been working “until I [...] Read more – ‘A fine balance’.
Sowing Seeds is a 4-part series about investing. It’s based on having studied several successful value investors with a strong bias toward treating equities as partial business ownership and not as lottery tickets. First: Part 1, Market value is imaginary Then: Part 2, The economy is irrelevant Finally: Part 3, The second best buzz Bonus: [...] Read more – ‘Sowing Seeds: Water your own tree, slowly’.
Sowing Seeds is a 4-part series about investing. It’s based on having studied several successful value investors with a strong bias toward treating equities as partial business ownership and not as lottery tickets. First: Part 1, Market value is imaginary Then: Part 2, The economy is irrelevant Finally: Part 3, The second best buzz Bonus: [...] Read more – ‘Sowing Seeds: The second best buzz’.
Sowing Seeds is a 4-part series about investing. It’s based on having studied several successful value investors with a strong bias toward treating equities as partial business ownership and not as lottery tickets. First: Part 1, Market value is imaginary Then: Part 2, The economy is irrelevant Finally: Part 3, The second best buzz Bonus: [...] Read more – ‘Sowing Seeds: The economy is irrelevant’.
Wealth conquered Rome after Rome had conquered the world. ~ Italian proverb This morning Christian and I were talking about $2,000 watches. A colleague of ours has one. The difference between a $200 watch and a $2,000 watch is likely dependent upon the logo attached to the expensive one, not on any increase in quality. [...] Read more – ‘Has wealth conquered Rome?’.
Setting out on an ocean voyage, with water in gourds and pounded tubers tied up in leaves, he would point his canoe into the right slant of wind, and then along a path between a rising star and an opposite, setting one. With his departure star astern and his destination star ahead, he could keep [...] Read more – ‘The last palu’.
Sowing Seeds is a 4-part series about investing. It’s based on having studied several successful value investors with a strong bias toward treating equities as partial business ownership and not as lottery tickets. First: Part 1, Market value is imaginary Then: Part 2, The economy is irrelevant Finally: Part 3, The second best buzz Bonus: [...] Read more – ‘Sowing Seeds: Market value is imaginary’.
“A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still.” - Author unknown On Friday, Holly and I had dinner at my friend Will‘s house. After dinner, Will and I had a discussion about the future of the economy, real estate and investing. Will takes a more pessimistic, macroeconomic view, while I’m more [...] Read more – ‘But if…’.
“My own fear-of-failure buster is hot, humid climbing walls. I’ve found that my ability drops drastically compared to many others in this situation, and I’ll get brutally burned off by climbers that I could out-climb in almost any other situation. So I make myself have a session in a busy, warm bouldering wall with locals [...] Read more – ‘A fear of failure’.
“A common time waster is mal-organization. Its symptom is an excess of meetings. Meetings are by definition a concession to deficient organization. For one either meets or one works. One cannot do both at the same time. If executives in an organization spend more than a fairly small part of their time in meetings, it [...] Read more – ‘A symptom of mal-organization’.
Character is like water. It will flow over, into and around any obstacles that are present. If it’s poisonous, it’ll undermine the system and sabotage the machine. If it’s healthy and nourishing, everything around it will grow and benefit. Read more – ‘Strong like water’.
I really don’t like Drupal. I’ve been told that “it can do anything”. I think that’s its downfall. Most of the Drupal setups that I’ve used haven’t anticipated all of my use cases. In every case, I’ve had to go back to the developers and ask for additional functionality to be added. Of course, it [...] Read more – ‘Convention over configuration’.
“Once you realize that changing the mount of money you need to live on can dramatically increase your chances of success, you have an important choice to make: How much are you willing to sacrifice for the business?” “One surefire way to determine if a bootstrapper is going to succeed or not is to check [...] Read more – ‘Bootstrappin'’.
The really good manager does not wake up in the morning and say, ‘This is the day that I’m going to cut costs’, any more than he wakes up and decides to practice breathing. – Warren Buffett Read more – ‘Are you frugal?’.
Everything with money is either an investment or the sacrifice of one. This seems simple enough, but the more you think about it, the more shocking is it’s impact. What It Means For Business In short, all any business is about is creating positive returns on shareholder equity that are greater than the combined impact [...] Read more – ‘The opportunity cost of your coffee’.
“They say that bad things remain in your memory longer than good things, a thought originated by people who live monotonous, uniform lives. They do remember more of the bad because their ‘good’ is so uniform, so mundane, and so dull that they can’t remember it. Any unpleasantry, even the smallest, is a deviation from [...] Read more – ‘Happiness is difficult’.
“I never thought I would be way happier when I had 2X instead of X. You ought to have a good time all the time as you go along. If you say, ‘I don’t really like this job, but in three years it’ll lead to this,’ forget it. Find one you like right now.” — [...] Read more – ‘Find one you like right now’.
“It is extraordinary to me that the idea of buying dollar bills for 40 cents takes immediately with people or it doesn’t take at all. It’s like an inoculation. If it doesn’t grab a person right away, I find that you can talk to him for years and show him records, and it doesn’t make [...] Read more – ‘Instant recognition or nothing’.
In my last post, I talked about the significant advantages that come from leveraging SMS, email, blogs and Twitter for greater productivity ad effectiveness. No doubt some readers may be wondering, “if the most productive kinds of communication are asynchronous, won’t that erode corporate culture?” Corporate culture is important. It’s the foundation for any business; [...] Read more – ‘But what about corporate culture?’.
What most people think of as lonely people hiding behind computer screens will soon be a new world order. And it’ll soon be a powerful business advantage in all industries, not just among web professionals. Or it will be a huge disadvantage if you’re a late-adopter. The texting teens, tweeting twits and pimply-faced nerd stereotypes [...] Read more – ‘Revenge of the nerds’.
As the days count down to launching Sales on Rails, I’ve started doing some usability tests. In my first usability test, I learned a lot about my sales site for Sales on Rails in addition to a ton of useful information about some of my competitors. Best of all, it only took 25 minutes. A [...] Read more – ‘4 keys to sales site usability’.
In a recent post, I hinted at how much I’ve learned while building a web application over the past year. A huge lesson came when I decided to do the third version of the design myself, which is what I should have done from the very beginning. Over the last year, I’ve learned enough HTML [...] Read more – ‘The screens you need’.
People are often surprised that I never consume traditional media (newspapers, TV, etc). I call it “selective ignorance“. “Selective” because I pick and choose what my brain gets exposed to, and “ignorance” as a joke. Why be selectively ignorant? Because the mainstream media is worthless, sensationalist, ill-informed and devoid of any intrinsic obligation to deliver [...] Read more – ‘How much has CNN cost you?’.
I’m getting ready to launch Sales on Rails, a simple sales order management tool, after nearly ten months in development. If I had made better decisions, I would have been able to do it with half the money in half the time. If I had focused on the minimum required, launched the product and then [...] Read more – ‘Start with nothing’.
The fourth dimension of any stock investment involves the price-earnings ratio — that is, the current price divided by the earnings per share. In the attempt to appraise whether the price-earnings ratio is in line with a proper valuation for that specific stock, trouble begins to arise. Most investors, including many professionals, who should know [...] Read more – ‘The fourth dimension of investing’.
Sooner or later, something fundamental in your business world will change. We live in an age in which the pace of technological change is pulsating ever faster, causing waves that spread outward toward all industries. This increased rate of change will have an impact on you, no matter what you do for a living. It [...] Read more – ‘Pulsating ever faster’.
I went to a seminar on flow-through shares. Then I went home, did the math, and confirmed what I suspected: although pitched as investments, flow-through shares favor the sellers (resource companies and stock brokers), not the buyers. What are flow-through shares? At first glance, flow-through shares seem like a great way to keep more of [...] Read more – ‘The scam behind flow-through shares’.
“Time is a variable continuum,” Michael Burry wrote to one of his friends one Sunday morning in 1999: “An afternoon can fly by or it can take 5 hours. Like you probably do, I productively fill the gaps that most people leave as dead time. My drive to be productive probably cost me my first [...] Read more – ‘Find a drive that supersedes everything’.
I have a bad habit. I tweak. Constantly. I suspect that my type-A fascination with improvement is frustrating to my family and co-workers, perhaps nauseating, curious at best. I feel it too. Sometimes I feel like I can’t escape my OCD-esque brain. But I am intrigued by making straight lines straighter. Even a laser beam [...] Read more – ‘The cost of status quo’.
I’m in Hawaii right now. In contrast to Canada, Hawaii in the winter has a consistently warm-but-not-too-hot temperature. Kids can’t get frostbite or hypothermia, so they don’t have to be bundled up against the cold. And there are no bugs. You can eat meals outside, sleep with the window open, where shorts and flip flops [...] Read more – ‘Less friction, what action?’.
At suspiciously regular — i.e. automated — intervals, I’ve been interrupted by a “Senior Relationship Manager”. He knows I’ve refused him. He knows I’m ignoring him. He knows that I’ve chosen the competition. But he still contacts me. Perhaps “Senior Relationship Manager” is a euphemism for Expert Relationship Eliminator? He’s contacted me so many times [...] Read more – ‘Persistence does not insist’.
Collecting aging receivables is a stressful, tedious, sometimes-unpleasant process. Unfortunately, letting aging receivables slide is even worse, because the older they get, the harder they are to collect. Here are some tips and a how-to guide for business’s least pleasant necessity. Tips Don’t procrastinate. You need to react fast to aging receivables in order to [...] Read more – ‘Need grease? Better squeak.’.
“Build a better mouse trap, and the world will beat a path to your door.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, late 19th century You don’t think that’s still true do you? In 2010, the mouse traps have been perfected. Nobody cares about yours. But they do care about who you are, why you’re different and what [...] Read more – ‘Build a better mouth trap’.
Extending credit to new customers is hard to do without risk. Only banks and credit card companies have made it a core competency. Most of us that choose to extend credit to our customers are stepping outside of our area of expertise. Especially with credit, that can be dangerous. Because they’re tedious and labor-intensive, credit [...] Read more – ‘How to do fast, simple credit checks’.
Too often, we fumble at the doors of opportunity, cursing our key chain, wishing God, our parents or our country gave us the secret code. If only we had been better equipped, we could have enjoyed the treasure behind the door. But the fault does not lie with God, our parents or where we were [...] Read more – ‘You don’t have the key’.
You’re not supposed to publish on Mondays. The thinking is that you’re content will get lost in the shuffle. It’ll be ignored because of the sheer mass of other content and that extra little bit of stress that people feel starting a new work week. But saying no to a creative impulse is a bad [...] Read more – ‘Best before’.
It’s almost 4am and I’m crying in a rocking chair, trying to get my 2-month-old boy to go to sleep. Yesterday, Guy Lacelle died in an avalanche in Hyalite Canyon. For some reason it’s sadder when I hold a baby. Most people know that Guy was a great ice climber. That’s not news, although it [...] Read more – ‘Guy’s gone’.
In our house we eat a lot of fruit. We tear through cherries, raspberries, strawberries, apples and bananas faster than we can buy them. Grapes in particular rarely last the day. Unless they have seeds. Last week we tried a different kind of grape. They were tasty, fresh and crunchy; everything a good grape should [...] Read more – ‘Do your grapes have seeds?’.
For the last two months, I’ve been sleep-deprived and generally exhausted. (A newborn has arrived.) The best solution? Manage a business, launch a second business, and exercise a lot. My new son takes the same approach. If he sleeps a lot during the day, he’ll sleep a lot that night. (The opposite is also true.) [...] Read more – ‘Action makes action’.
I grew up watching my dad watch boxing, cheering for the underdog. I never understood it at the time. Why would you want to cheer for the guy who’s gonna lose? I had to grow up before I could understand: It’s exciting to cheer for the underdog, because he might win. And that slim possibility [...] Read more – ‘Underdogs’.
My Dad has been saying since I was a kid, “Hire great people and your job will be easy.” I intentionally rejected that idea. And all of my hires have been failures. I’m a “just get it done” kind of guy, so my skill set and aptitudes are not ideal for the slow and methodical [...] Read more – ‘Hire character’.
“You can’t do just one thing,” Warren Buffett said. He was speaking in terms of the economy, how everything is interconnected, and how any decision you make affects hundreds of other things you probably haven’t thought of. The same can be said for personal decision-making. It’s well-known that every path we choose forsakes all other [...] Read more – ‘Choice & commitment’.
A discount rate is a negative percentage applied to a value on an annual basis. It is often used to determine the net present value of future cash flows. For example, the Consumer Price Index can be used as a discount rate to determine the future value of present dollars. Officially, the CPI measures the [...] Read more – ‘"What is a discount rate?"’.
In my last post, I criticized the question, “Would you rather own 100% of a $2,000,000 company or 10% of a $100,000,000 company?” The speaker was trying to justify business partnerships by implying that they guarantee growth. Wouldn’t it be nice if growth were that worthwhile and that easy to come by? The original question [...] Read more – ‘$2,000,000 now or $10,000,000 later?’.
You need profit. Without it, your business will die. A corpse can be in perfect, mechanical condition, but without blood — without a regular heartbeat pumping blood throughout the organism — the body will die. For a business, profit is that blood. In the software industry, there’s a ridiculous trend to structure companies that live [...] Read more – ‘Blood money’.
With the arrival of a baby boy, my normally tightly-controlled schedule has been disrupted like New York in the movie King Kong. It’s been awesome. In addition to the joys of a new child, an additional, unpredicted benefit has surfaced: less sleep, early morning solitude and a one-thumb-friendly text editor has increased my available writing [...] Read more – ‘Pocket Blogging: How to turn 20 minutes into 200 words’.
A friend of mine is struggling right now. It’s not the kind of brilliant, joyful struggle of a master, but the nervous, disheartened struggle of a discontent beginner. He’s not where he wants to be, he’s not sure which direction to go, and he knows any direction is going to start off with an uphill [...] Read more – ‘Threshold guardians’.
ME: “Is there a mandatory waiting period between selling a stock (with the sole intention of locking in the loss) and then buying it back (if it’s a stock you have long-term faith in)? Is there a minimum waiting period as far as CRA is concerned?” ACCOUNTANT: “Yes, if a security is sold and then [...] Read more – ‘Locking in losses: You may not want to’.
If people are telling you something can’t be done, be sure that they have the experience to know so. (And even then, sharing your ideas is risky.) Most of the time, we look for support from friends and family, hoping that they will encourage us. A lot of the time their concern for us — [...] Read more – ‘Cupped & sunlit’.
It usually goes like this: A small company sponsors a small group of athletes committed to the core of their sport. The company and the athletes enrich each other through their authentic devotion to the sport they love. The company and the athletes grow together in stature and, for the company, in revenue. Then the [...] Read more – ‘Why pretenders hurt your brand’.
Last night, my newborn son kept me up all night, waking every hour and sabotaging my climbing plans for today. I don’t mind. He’s five weeks old; he needs my help. But it got me wondering if there are adults in my life that I help that I shouldn’t. Does my “see how much I [...] Read more – ‘Controlled by incompetence?’.
Last Friday, I presented a fun slideshow called “Is Sponsorship a Sin?” at Canmore’s annual Night of Lies. Although couched in humor, my main complaint was that not all athletes are worthy of official sponsorship. A common comment was, “Oh well, even if they’re not worthy, I guess it’s up to the companies which athletes [...] Read more – ‘"It’s up to the company to decide."’.
On October 30th, I presented “Is Sponsorship a Sin?” at the annual Night of Lies in Canmore. It’s a fun evening of heckling, mockery & ridicule. Given the nature of the event (& the typical amount of beer consumed), I thought examining professional climbing would be a good fit. I’ve included a video of my [...] Read more – ‘The Sinful Sponsorship Slideshow’.
“Self-promotion is bad.” No, bullshit is bad. Self-promotion happens everywhere and it’s smart. We just don’t like it mixed with our idealistic pursuits, of which climbing is one. “Sponsorship is selling out.” Only if the person has previously committed to not being sponsored. Otherwise, it’s just psychological projection on the part of the critic. “Sponsored [...] Read more – ‘Sponsorship Myths’.
It’s becoming increasingly common for brands in the outdoor industry to sponsor “athletes” based on their notoriety rather than by their accomplishments. It’s a sad state that puts brand integrity at risk. In many cases, lots of media play has become sufficient for supporting athletes, despite a glaring lack of legitimate achievement. This has had [...] Read more – ‘Who's on your team?’.
One of the big advantages of the GTD system is that very few things fall through the cracks, whether they’re actions I’m supposed to complete or actions I’m expecting completion for from others. Having two simple email categories — a “WaitingFor” label and a “Defer” label — goes a long way toward keeping track of [...] Read more – ‘Close the loop’.
“A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine [...] Read more – ‘The Art of Living’.
“Once you realize that changing the amount of money you need to live on can dramatically increase your chances of success, you have an important choice to make: How much are you willing to sacrifice for the business?” “One surefire way to determine if a bootstrapper is going to succeed or not is to check [...] Read more – ‘How much are you willing to sacrifice?’.
In a previous post, I outlined the advantages for small businesses using web-based software and cloud computing. In this post, I’ll describe Google Apps, a key web application in our business. But there’s a catch. In some ways, using Google Apps demands a paradigm shift. The advantages described to non-users usually don’t sound significant when [...] Read more – ‘Google Apps’.
I have a dream. I have a dream that someday I’ll own a restaurant. And some Saturday night, a couple will walk in to have dinner. One will be the CEO of a bank. And one will be the CEO of a cell phone company. They’ll have a great time. As like-minded individuals, they’ll enjoy [...] Read more – ‘Feedom’.
In 2006, I started overhauling my other business. I wanted to focus on my work, get better at what we were already good at, and outsource the rest. Previously, we were spending too much time on tasks that were not our core competencies. That meant outsourcing several things that we had always done in-house. Among [...] Read more – ‘Saving money with cloud computing’.
Are you running a business or a lemonade stand? The difference is in whether your first priority is the dollars you collect or the products and services you exchange for them. A subtle difference, but a revealing one, in terms of “give and ye shall receive.” Lemonade stand owners take first, give later (maybe). Signs [...] Read more – ‘Lemons, anyone?’.
“If you are an entrepreneur who is looking for capital and is sending letters or emails of introduction, leave out the bullshit. Say who you are, what you have, what makes it different than the competition, what you want to accomplish, how you plan on getting there, and how I can help. [Anything] else will [...] Read more – ‘What entrepreneurs should not do’.
Experience-Testing Question If you sold $1 million dollars worth of product, how much money would you make? Sometime last year, a contractor sat across from me, frustrated that I wasn’t budging on his rationale to increase his rates. “You guys have a big business,” he said. “You can afford it.” Despite our sales being less [...] Read more – ‘How much do you (really) make?’.
Is sponsorship a sin? NO. But bullshit is. After nearly 15 years of climbing, I rarely read climbing magazines. I have no subscriptions. If I do pick up a magazine, I usually only look at the pictures. The words usually make me nauseous. My experienced climber friends are the same way. Some of them haven’t [...] Read more – ‘Is sponsorship a sin?’.
The tech world is buzzing with “agile development” and “scratch your own itch.” The thinking goes that if you’re a web developer or web designer, you should build a product for yourself, because you know that customer intimately. In our flattened, long-tail world — so the thinking goes — you’ll be able to find enough customers [...] Read more – ‘Scratch my itch’.
You used to read the paper with breakfast at the kitchen table. You used to make to-do lists with Sticky Notes. You used to book appointments in your DayTimer. You used to write letters on paper, sitting at your desk. You used to send email from your computer. You used to watch movies in the [...] Read more – ‘Why She Hates Your Smartphone’.
I’ve always done my best work when I’ve had to come from behind. You need that sense of urgency. You need that heightened state of anxiety, that state of awareness and focus, to get your creative juices flowing. That’s when you dig deep and find solutions. It’s a condition that plays an important role in [...] Read more – ‘Stay the Course’.
Technology is changing our expectations of writing and it’s a change for the better. The immediate access that the Internet, cell phones and fast food have conditioned us to expect is lowering our tolerance for the historically slow, painfully dry, academic approach to writing. I’m glad for the change. When I was in school, every [...] Read more – ‘You need no introduction’.
The tech world’s current trend of anti-planning blog posts is approaching cliche status. It makes me throw up a little bit. In a comment follow-up to his blog entry, Matt Linderman posted: “It’s not that all planning is always bad. It’s just we give it disproportionate value compared to what it’s actually worth. And often, we use it [...] Read more – ‘The Planning Fallacy Fallacy’.
The evolutionary answer seems to be that there is a tradeoff between the ability to learn and imagine — which is our great evolutionary advantage as a species — and our ability to apply what we’ve learned and put it to use. So one of the ideas in the book is that children are like the R&D department of [...] Read more – ‘Useful Uselessness’.
I have a bad habit. I tweak. Constantly. I suspect that my type-A fascination with improvement is frustrating to my family and co-workers, perhaps nauseating, curious at best. I feel it too. Sometimes I feel like I can’t escape my OCD-esque brain. But I am intrigued by making straight lines straighter. Even a laser beam has a margin [...] Read more – ‘The Cost of Status Quo’.
For the past month or so, I’ve been investigating a potential new business, one that would be entirely web-based. (Years ago two paths diverged in a wood, and I chose to live in my car and climb full-time rather than learning HTML…) The details are irrelevant to Ambler, but what I’ve learned about the Internet in [...] Read more – ‘You Are What You Tweet’.
Statistics from a well-known company’s 2008 annual report: 2008 Company Highlights Earnings were $18.1 billion, the third highest in Company history Revenues grew 6% to a Company record of $183 billion Global revenues grew 13% Infrastructure and Media segments grew operating profit 10% Total equipment and services backlog grew to $172 billion, an increase of 9% [...] Read more – ‘Did You Buy, Sell, Short or Just Spectate?’.
For the past month, I have had the pleasure of working with Dave Bartholomew. Our work with Dave is still in its infancy, but it is already showing positive returns. Dave has a wealth of knowledge and experience, and it’s a fabulous opportunity for us here at Ambler. Having Dave onboard also gives me a great opportunity [...] Read more – ‘Reach Out & Ask Someone’.
Sooner or later, something fundamental in your business world will change. We live in an age in which the pace of technological change is pulsating ever faster, causing waves that spread outward toward all industries. This increased rate of change will have an impact on you, no matter what you do for a living. It will [...] Read more – ‘Pulsating Ever Faster’.
For the past week, I’ve been sticking to a rigid work schedule. I decided to try it out because, for the previous six months, I had been working “until I was finished”. Of course, “finished” never came, the quality of my work decreased as the hours increased, and I was starting to get burnt out. I [...] Read more – ‘A Fine Balance’.
…under many commonly encountered strategic situations, growth in sales and even growth in earnings add nothing to a firm’s intrinsic value. This statement seems to contradict an article of faith about a company’s sales and profits—[that] growth is good. However, as we explained earlier, growth on an even economic playing field creates no value. It [...] Read more – ‘The Value of Growth’.
Often, we have potential hat and apparel manufacturers contact us trying to solicit business. Here’s a sample: “We take this opportunity to introduce ourselves as one of the supplier of garments from [COUNTRY]. We have both knit and woven unites. Our production ranges are T-shirts, Polo shirt, Sportswear, Shirts, Jeans, Trousers for Men’s, Women’s and Kids.” As [...] Read more – ‘What You Don’t Know About Me Could Hurt You’.
This question has been burning up cycles in my head for more than a week. A post on one of my favorite blogs started the thought process. Initially, I thought the question was ludicrous. Especially when posed to another person. Can’t he answer that himself? My gut-level response last week was, “As many as it takes.” However, I’ve [...] Read more – ‘How Many Hours Should I Work?’.
“WASHINGTON — People are starting to make nervous jokes about pulling their money out of the shaky U.S. banks and stashing it under their mattresses instead. But the banking crisis is no joke. It is real — so real it risks turning the emerging recession into the biggest economic nightmare since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Not [...] Read more – ‘HEADLINE: "Experts: Recession Turning into Depression"’.
“Approval, though, is not the goal of investing. In fact, approval is often counter-productive because it sedates the brain and makes it less receptive to new facts or a re-examination of conclusions formed earlier. Beware the investment activity that produces applause; the great moves are usually greeted by yawns.” — Warren Buffett, in a letter [...] Read more – ‘Great Gains, Greeted by Yawns’.
Uh, folks… He does that every year in every annual report… I guess it’s true that those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it. And journalists that can’t read further back than 12 months are doomed to look foolish. Read more – ‘HEADLINE: “Buffett Admits Mistakes”’.
At our office we have successfully adopted a work environment free of a defined schedule and by being entirely results-focused. I call it “Working on the F.A.R.M.” “Why ‘working on the F.A.R.M.’?” Because a successful farm is practical. Because a successful farm focuses on the farm’s needs, and then indirectly, all the farmers benefit. If [...] Read more – ‘Working on the F.A.R.M.’.
The fourth dimension of any stock investment involves the price-earnings ratio — that is, the current price divided by the earnings per share. In the attempt to appraise whether the price-earnings ratio is in line with a proper valuation for that specific stock, trouble begins to arise. Most investors, including many professionals, who should know better, [...] Read more – ‘The Fourth Dimension’.
We’ve been sponsoring a whole lot of events this year. Here’s some feedback: “Thank you very much Scott for all those beautiful hats. Since I was also a volunteer I was permitted to pick one. My daughter and I had a fun time looking through all those hats. We wished we were still a little younger and could fit [...] Read more – ‘Tis the Season’.
Ted Rogers, the founder and CEO of Rogers Communications, died this morning. A photo caption read, “Ted Rogers, shown here in 2005, was surrounded by loved ones when he died at his home early Tuesday.” The caption should have read, “Ted Rogers, shown here in 2005, was surrounded by loved ones when he died at his home [...] Read more – ‘In Bad Taste’.
Somewhere along the line, we seem to have confused comfort with happiness… There is magic in misery. — Dean Karnazes in Wired Read more – ‘Happiness & Spindrift’.
People are often disturbed or shocked or both to find out that I very rarely read the paper, watch the news or listen to the radio. My assumption is that, since the media has no in-depth knowledge of anything, their watered down versions of information, fit for public consumption, have little value. If you really [...] Read more – ‘Selective Ignorance’.
UPDATE 081203: Despite Kirk Wright’s creative rebuttal in the Outlook, the best way to describe PAH housing is still as a “losing less” enterprise compared to renting in Canmore. Above all, PAH CANNOT be considered an investment of any other type than a losing one. Because appreciation is tied to the CPI, it is mathematically [...] Read more – ‘BUYER BEWARE: Palliser Village Numbers Way Off’.
The POINT of asynchronous communication (voicemail, email, text) is NOT to notify someone that you need something. The point is to inform someone WHAT you need, HOW they can help, WHEN you need the assistance by, and finally, HOW to get back to you with the solution. So here’s the test: Do you leave messages like the [...] Read more – ‘"Do I Suck Too?" : How to Tell in One Easy Question’.
“There are only two premises which are tenable as to the future. Either we are going to have chaos or else recovery. The former theory is foolish. If chaos ensues nothing will maintain value; neither bonds nor stocks nor bank deposits nor gold will remain valuable. Real estate will be a worthless asset because [...] Read more – ‘The Markets’.
After reading The Suck Factor, several friends asked me if I was depressed. No. Far from it. Getting discouraged, probably even depressed, comes from under-estimating the effort required to make something happen. When the reality is harder than the fantasy, people often get discouraged. If you think it’ll be damn hard, then when it is, [...] Read more – ‘Positive Pessimism’.
If there were only one thing that were crucial to success, I think it would be this: the devout acceptance that, to varying degrees, everything sucks. You cannot escape The Suck Factor. Whether you’re a professional athlete, actor, writer, banker, lawyer, teacher, photographer, guide, trucker, you can be guaranteed of two things: You will always [...] Read more – ‘The suck factor’.
“In the physical education department at the university some academics wanted to find out what was behind [Gullich's finger training]. They called in some rock athletes, had them hang on flat holds right on their fingertips and loaded them down with more and more weights. One after the other let go and fell off. Only [...] Read more – ‘How to Climb 5.14 With Your Socks On’.
“Wolfgang was a genius, able to realize all his potential at decisive moments, to summon up all his mental and physical energies when they were needed… His achievements cannot be attributed to a unique natural talent, something that most people assume about him. Rather, his abilities were the result of incredible exertion.” — Tillman Hepp, describing Wolfgang [...] Read more – ‘The Talent Myth, Part II’.
“Thinking is the very essence of, and the most difficult thing to do in, business and in life. Empire builders spend hour-after-hour on mental work… while others party. If you’re not consciously aware of putting forth the effort to exert self-guided integrated thinking… then you’re giving in to laziness and [you] no longer control your [...] Read more – ‘Integrated Thinking’.
In other words, have you ever choked on your own foot? Or visually inspected the inside of your own ass? This past week, I’ve been introduced to three such brilliant contributors to mankind, two in person, the third online. The first two were at Lake Louise on the weekend, fresh off their hard core, painfully [...] Read more – ‘Are You a Social Contortionist?’.
Few meals are as tasty as beef from a sacred cow. For a few years now, my friends have heard me enthusiasticlly admit that I do not recycle. My rationale up to this point has been that there are three R’s — Reduce, Reuse and Recycle — and the general public pretends they never heard the first [...] Read more – ‘The Eight Great Myths of Recycling’.
When I was young, riding a bike, a neighborhood girl said to me, “Scott, you don’t have to pedal all the time.” My response, thirty years and two lifetimes later, is, “Yes you do, Sally. Yes you do.” Read more – ‘Pedaling’.
…is matching my bites with what I can chew. My brain doubts my appetite. A huge number of factors are in play in order for me to become a half-decent sport climber. But the greatest factor — and most difficult — is correcting my pre-conceived notions. Thirteen years of thinking such-and-such a grade is hard — and the [...] Read more – ‘The Hardest Thing About Sport Climbing…’.
Email is either a colossal time waster or the key to productive correspondence. It used to waste my time and monopolize my day. Now my Inbox is empty 20 minutes after I get to work. Here’s what it looked like when I got to work today: Here’s what it looked like 4 minutes [...] Read more – ‘How to Empty Your Inbox in 20 Minutes’.
UPDATE 090228: An idea has been bouncing around in my head for months. I’ve finally committed it to words. It’s the opposite of the unacknowledged reality about the ROWE approach: ROWE won’t go anywhere, because their sales pitch focuses on what you can get from a ROWE environment, not what you can give to your [...] Read more – ‘Why ROWE sucks and what to do about it’.
If a consultant’s idea is SMALL, they’ll hide the detail behind case studies and vague “our productivity increased X%”-type testimonials. And they’ll turn a 10-page memo into 200 unhelpful 5″ x 7″ pages so it’s the “right size” according to their publisher. But if an idea is BIG, the author will lay it all out [...] Read more – ‘Why Consultants Suck’.
“I didn’t put any pressure on myself. I started with Replicant to warm up, then I felt good and climbed the most demanding route, Terminator, and finally felt like I had enough energy left to climb Sea of Vapors safely. It took me five hours, which is about the maximum amount of time for me [...] Read more – ‘MENTAL MUSCLE :: Soloing the Trophy Wall’.
“Then, in a moment of clarity, I realized why I like trying hard problems. It’s the intimacy. And the closer you get to the threshold of what you can do, the more intimate everything must be; it’s like you have to get inside the rock as well as yourself, and see how it thinks. [...] Read more – ‘To Learn to Look, and Look Ever Harder’.
“So somebody else built a successful business on that idea you had three years ago. What does that mean? That if you would just have pursued that idea, you would now automatically be enjoying their spoils? Sorry to burst your bubble, but I really don’t think so. Ideas on their own are just not that [...] Read more – ‘Ideas Are Nothing Without Execution’.
Once upon a time, we used pen and paper to record and calculate. If we made a mistake, we used an eraser. If a pencil lead broke, we sharpened it. If the pencil lead was low-quality and constantly breaking, we threw the pencil away and picked up a newer, better one. So answer this: If [...] Read more – ‘Nothing Local: Turning Computers Back Into Pencils’.
Blackberries are all the rage. “Push email”* has become the latest multi-tasking tool that keeps Pavlov and his dog in chapter one of Introduction to Psychology. Unfortunately, the interruptions caused by push email effectively reduce your IQ by 10 points – 2.5x greater than smoking marijuana.** If you’re trying to be productive — to GET [...] Read more – ‘Push-Back Email’.
Dear Fellow Airline Travelers, If you are passing through airport security and you have metallic objects in your pockets, take them the f&%€ out BEFORE you get to the body scan. Those handy gray bins are really handy for scanning your junk while you simultaneously walk through. Amazing, eh? Thank you. Sincerely, The Rest of [...] Read more – ‘Security & Speed’.
The following is my contribution to an email exchange on fueling for performance: Hello lads. I’ve been thinking about this for the past week or so, because I think that both food prescriptions and food “freescriptions” have their place. It depends on the sport-type and the goal. The number one performance contributor (WAY above fuel [...] Read more – ‘Food as Fuel’.
…and soon the wireless “service providers” will be scrambling — like that guy sitting on the toilet when the T-Rex shows up in Jurassic Park — to make up for their ignorance of the former and their faith in the latter. May there always be consequences: Hello, Ma Google MOOHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Read more – ‘Loyalty vs. Retention’.
I’m back. And I’m inspired, which, if you’ve read any of these posts before, you’ll know that that means I’m pissed off. This time, at an airline. Stragglers still exist. In an age where Apple, Google and Skype are give, give, giving to their customers and get, get, getting billions, you’d think that the airlines, [...] Read more – ‘Brutish Airways’.
Those who have read this blog before will no doubt start to see a pattern: I tend to connect points by their straightest lines, and traveling reveals that my method of analysis is not universal. And that I think it should be. I am in Malaga, Spain. where the weather is good, the limestone awesome, [...] Read more – ‘The Problem with Warm Climates’.
The problem is not solved if you send an email. The problem is not solved if you leave a voicemail. The problem is not solved if someone tells you they will handle it. The problem is not solved if you tick it off your list. The problem is not solved if you get it off [...] Read more – ‘On Problem-Solving’.
“My mother said to me, ‘If you are a soldier, you will become a general. If you are a monk, you will become the Pope.’ Instead, I was a painter, and became Picasso.” A friend and training mentor once told me, “The secret of the pros is that they train in secret.” For a while [...] Read more – ‘The talent myth’.
“No, no, no. It’s the German. It’s ‘DEE, Hippie, DEE.’” Greg Thaczuk taking a break from the sprints with Dumbbell Clean & Jerks. Read more – ‘Peace, Brother’.
God damn it, Torr thought. Hardy was trying to get himself killed again, and doing it, as usual, in the worst-run park in the world: Yosemite. Torr looked down at the letter in his hand, shaking his head. “Because you’re in the middle of nowhere again, and because I know how much you like general [...] Read more – ‘Uncaged’.
I’m sitting in a German Internet cafe. School just let out. Unfortunately I don’t have a digital camera. I swear that, every April 1st, fashion moguls must sit around and think, “What’s the stupidest-looking thing we could make popular this year?” Read more – ‘Teen Fashion’.
I was conditioned as a child to sit silently beside a moving window. I grew up 40km from the nearest town. For 18 years, I rode a school bus, a back seat or gripped a steering wheel for at least an hour, often two. Silent reverie became a pastime. Thinking has become an art. Right [...] Read more – ‘From 5.12 to 5.14’.
It is probably worth explaining what happens when you work for 90 consecutive days in an isolated environment. The first week is the hardest, especially because most of us are accustomed to a maximum of five work days followed by two days off. Whether we acknowledge it or not, this creates an unconscious expectation. Our [...] Read more – ‘The Beast Within’.
“I wish it could have been water. Oil makes men idle, whereas water makes them work.” - King Idris of Libya, commenting on Libya’s 1950s discovery of oil Heli-bags are dropped every 120m. We unload the bags and plant six geophone stations between them — two cables, twelve geophones per bag. With a crew of [...] Read more – ‘Oil & Water’.
In Oman, I have learned to relax. Today is day 81. The beast within that went without and wrote Philadelphia has calmed down marginally — probably due to the hour-and-a-half nap I had today at “work.” I am prone to action and a neurotic foot-tapping when it stops. I was once asked, “Can you relax?” [...] Read more – ‘Thick Black Coffee’.
If a man’s interest in women is suppressed for thousands of years, will he pursue men? In cultures where extra-marital male-female interaction is condemned or impossible, does homosexuality become increasingly acceptable? Here in Oman, the answer is yes. Calling someone a “lady boy” is a favorite insult. But rubbing noses while shaking hands, making kissing [...] Read more – ‘Philadelphia’.
I am working in Oman (just east of Saudi Arabia) and at the moment I am in the strangest place possible – a Radisson hotel. I am sequestered in this white cube of Western architecture because, as everyone knows, thinking critically is one thing, but vocalizing criticism is a sure sign that you’re over-worked. Therefore, [...] Read more – ‘Down Time’.
I think it was Jack Tackle – one of North America’s most prolific alpinists – that said, “90% of alpine climbing is buying the plane ticket.” Well, the same seems true of large-radius-social-circle acquaintenances that want to fill my Inbox with garbage. Why does travel draw people to a keyboard? Why does setting Birkenstock and [...] Read more – ‘Travel Spam Jihad’.
