Letters Remain

  • Warren Buffett’s 10 Ways to Get Rich

    Reprinted from Parade Magazine: Warren Buffett’s ’10 Ways to Get Rich’, written by Alice Schroeder; the author of Buffett’s authorised biography, The Snowball.

    1. Reinvest Your Profits
    2. Be Willing To Be Different
    3. Never ‘Suck Your Thumb’
    4. Spell Out The Deal Before You Start
    5. Watch Small Expenses
    6. Limit What You Borrow
    7. Be Persistent
    8. Know When To Quit
    9. Assess The Risk
    10. Know What Success Really Means

    This from No. 10:

    Despite his wealth, Warren Buffett does not measure success by dollars. In 2006, he pledged to give away almost his entire fortune to charities, primarily the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He’s adamant about not funding monuments to himself — no Warren Buffett buildings or halls. “I know people who have a lot of money,” he says, “and they get testimonial dinners and hospital wings named after them. But the truth is that nobody in the world loves them. When you get to my age, you’ll measure your success in life by how many of the people you want to have love you actually do love you. That’s the ultimate test of how you’ve lived your life.”

    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Lowball Strategy

    Ryan Holiday on the military strategist John Boyd’s lowball ‘technique’:

    John Boyd had a rule that whenever he was using data as support for an argument, he’d deflate the numbers to understate his case. The idea was use lower number while making a strong case; when he was challenged and fact checked, it’d always be worse when the new calculations came in. A lot of people confuse this with managing expectation, but it’s a philosophically different way to think about strategy. Generally, he figured, that when people have a big stick they use it. To not use it, to keep it hidden, the mark of a different breed of person.

    Lloyd Morgan

  • A Perfect Memory

    Hypermnesia is the condition—usually associated with a variety of mental illnesses—of having unusually exact, vivid memories. Spiegel interviews Jill Price, 42, a Californian woman with hypermnesic super-memory.

    In addition to good memories, every angry word, every mistake, every disappointment, every shock and every moment of pain goes unforgotten. Time heals no wounds for Price. “I don’t look back at the past with any distance. It’s more like experiencing everything over and over again, and those memories trigger exactly the same emotions in me. It’s like an endless, chaotic film that can completely overpower me. And there’s no stop button.”

    Aside from the ridiculous ‘infinite loop’ statement, the article is a fascinating look at what most people would assume is an asset: a perfect memory.

    via Mind Hacks

    Lloyd Morgan

  • A Thanksgiving/Christmas Prayer (for Atheists)

    A prayer for atheists before Thanksgiving/Christmas dinner:

    Dear Global Economy, we thank thee for thy economies of scale, thy professional specialization, and thy international networks of trade under Ricardo’s Law of Comparative Advantage, without which we would all starve to death while trying to assemble the ingredients for such a dinner as this.  Amen.

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Barack Obama’s Speechwriters

    A profile of Barack Obama’s speechwriter, Jon Favreau, 26, from a January ’08 edition of The New York Times:

    “The trick of speechwriting, if you will, is making the client say your brilliant words while somehow managing to make it sound as though they issued straight from their own soul,” said the writer Christopher Buckley, who was a speechwriter for the first President Bush. “Imagine putting the words ‘Ask not what your country can do for you’ into the mouth of Ron Paul, and you can see the problem.”

    Newsweek’s profile of Favreau (again from January ’08) is also worth a browse.

    “What is your theory of speechwriting?” Obama asked.

    “I have no theory,” admitted Favreau. “But when I saw you at the convention, you basically told a story about your life from beginning to end, and it was a story that fit with the larger American narrative. People applauded not because you wrote an applause line but because you touched something in the party and the country that people had not touched before. Democrats haven’t had that in a long time.”

    Now, with Obama announcing Favreau as the White House’s Director of Speechwriting, Esquire looks at his influences.

    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Best of Esquire’s 75 Years

    75 years since its initial publication, Esquire shares the 7 greatest stories and the 70 greatest sentences to have been published in the magazine.

    Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well.
    –Ernest Hemingway, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” 1936

    via Kottke

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Visual Guide to the Financial Crisis

    An excellent infographic on understanding the current financial crisis from one of my favourite data visualisation sites, FlowingData.

    Lloyd Morgan

  • What Should Any Educated Person Know?

    Tucker Max creates a list of what he believes is the information any educated person should know. By no means a definitive list (far from it), but some good information regardless.

    English lit: Read lots of novels, especially the classics. There are hundreds of sites out there that purport to list the Western Canon, browse a few and just start reading. It gives you a base from which to work and to understand the world. Almost all culture is based on previous culture–you cannot hope to understand modern media without experiencing the base it is built on. And don’t just focus on the obvious ones like Shakespeare and Chaucer; there are a lot of writers on the margins of the canon who are just as good. A few things to remember:
    1. If you don’t understand something, don’t just quit. Shakespeare is hard to get through without the guidance of someone who can place it in context for you and help you wade through the language. Some things you need to take in a classroom setting, but if thats impossible, don’t be afraid to use a study aid or read a critical essay. It does not make you stupid to ask for help; quite the contrary, knowing your limits is very wise. [But at the same time, just because something is in the canon, doesn’t automatically make it good. For instance, I think James Joyce is pretty shitty.]
    2. This is not easy. It’s not supposed to be.

    Update: Tucker Max has since taken down his message board and the original post was lost. I believe the copy linked-to above is the best currently available.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Scouting New York

    Even though I’ve never been to New York, I love the Scouting NY blog; a collection of often over–looked and unique locations discovered by a NYC film location scout.

    The ‘About’ section says all you need to know:

    I work as a film location scout in New York City. My day is basically spent combing the streets for interesting and unique locations for feature films. In my travels, I often stumble across some pretty incredible sights, most of which are ignored every day by thousands of New Yorkers in too much of a rush to pay attention. 

    As it happens, it’s my job to pay attention, and I’ve started this blog to keep a record of what I see.

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Food Production: Where ‘TV Dinners’ Come From

    The video of the production line at a Goodfella’s frozen pizza factory (originally via Richard Holden) has been widely shared and I’m sure you’ve already seen it (and been fascinated by the machine that puts the tomato base on).

    Some may also have seen a few of the slightly less appetising videos such as this one on hot dog production (via Kottke) and this, on bacon production.

    But, if you’re interested in food production—and specifically how technology is employed to increase its efficiency—I highly recommend watching Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s Our Daily Bread; a captivating documentary.

    Lloyd Morgan