Wealth – Page 28 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Your Money or Your Wife . . . Take the First Wife, Please . . .

“Of course there’s a catch! You have to spend the thirty million, but after thirty days you’re not allowed to own any assets. No houses, no cars, no jewelry. Nothing but the clothes on your back! Now, you can hire anybody you want, but you have to get value for their services. You can donate five percent to charity and you can gamble another five percent away, but you can’t give this money away, and that includes buying the Hope Diamond for some bimbo as a birthday present.” – Brewster’s Millions (1985)

Thankfully, they won’t let me down.

I’ve spent quite a few posts talking about money. Money is important, because they won’t give me beer and PEZ® without money, so that’s why I write about money and the jobs that will get you money. Money is also the underpinning of the financial system that runs the world that brings me that beer and PEZ™, so I get to write about that, too, and it’s fun since I’m an economics nerd.

But wealth is more than a 401K and a stock portfolio and stacks of gold coins hidden in a fake plastic pipe in a building somewhere downtown, though those are a good start. (And with a blowtorch and some pliers I managed to get the old man to tell me where that fake pipe was.) Wealth, true wealth, mainly involves you. And a blowtorch. But don’t forget the pliers because you never know where their weakness will be.

If you’re satisfied with what you have, you’re wealthy. It’s that simple. And it doesn’t need to be as much net worth as a typical Congressman has ($900,000 in the House, $3.2 million in the Senate) to be wealthy. Your wealth is determined by what you need. If I could tattoo that phrase on every kid in America on their forehead (backwards, so they can read it every time they look in the mirror), then my kids would not look so out of place with their forehead tattoos with that same phrase. I’m sure that interviewers for future jobs will be impressed by their dedication to personal financial management. Or, you know, the blowtorch and pliers will convince them that these kids are a great fit for the position.

But the biggest determinate for wealth for many people is simple. I’m surprised that I haven’t gotten to this topic in all that time, since it’s so very basic.

Your choice of spouse is the most important factor in being wealthy*.

*This doesn’t apply to Bill Gates or Elon Musk. Nor, really, does it apply the really, really wealthy people in the world. If you have so much money that your spouse can’t spend it all, you’re fine and you can skip the rest of this post, though there will be questions on the final about it.

Less than $15,000,000 or so net worth? Keep reading.

Why is a spouse so important? A spouse often determines the minimum lifestyle the family will accept.

Keeping up with the neighbors isn’t a factor with your spouse. Overheard story: “I’m so jealous of Sheila, she’s rich enough she doesn’t have to drive a brand new car.”
The spouse may make the majority of the spending decisions in the house. In my case, I bought our present house without The Mrs. ever having been to it. The Mrs. only saw a few dodgy photos from my cell phone, which was a really cool Blackberry® with a keyboard.
Open and honest communication about money is crucial. And I assure you that money conversations can be brutal when you don’t have a bunch of cash in the bank. The conversations can be brutal even when you have money. Conversations about money are conversations about values, about choices, and can be the most emotional conversations outside of who gets to pick the next movie on Netflix®, since we all agree that Netflix™ is serious.

Way back in the 80’s, there was a movie called “Brewster’s Millions.” A guy (Richard Pryor) had to spend $30,000,000 in thirty days and have nothing to show for it so he could get $300,000,000, which was exactly like my first marriage, except that it didn’t involve John Candy and we didn’t get $300,000,000 if we got ourselves into debt servitude forever.

My first marriage, in a movie involving John Candy.

I’ve been married once, even though the law says twice. I’d say that the first marriage was an assignment in creating as much debt as possible in the shortest amount of time while leaving nothing to show for it, but that minimizes the hate and discontent. Let’s put it this way – it was like a Mad Max® movie, but with less civility and shotguns, and more lawyers and spreadsheets.

As the marriage unwound, we both agreed it would be best if X moved while we had a nice meal at Taco Bell®.

X: “I think it would be good if I moved out.”

John Wilder: “Yes, I think it would be good if you moved out.” (Inside John Wilder’s head: OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD YES, SHE’S GONE! GONE GONE GONE!)

On her last day at the house, she put a plastic grocery bag filled with bills on the kitchen table. She then handed me a checkbook. “I have no idea how much money is in there,” and walked out.

Several hours later, after going through eight inches of bills (this is not an exaggeration) I realized that I was, outside of my mortgage, more than a year’s salary in debt. Adding my mortgage? The debt went up to everything I made for three years. And that didn’t included all the other bills like food, water, power, bubble bath, and PEZ®. And you, Internet, know my maxim is: “if you can’t solve it with a spreadsheet, you can solve it with a shotgun.” The spreadsheet was gloomy.

The spreadsheet may be gloomy, but wine never lies. Until the alarm goes off at 6AM. Then wine is a big cheating liar.

All in all, I guesstimate that the first marriage cost me $250,000 directly, and more than that indirectly when you count up the money I could have made if I could have saved that money. A lot more. Let’s just say that it’s not a lie to say that my first marriage probably cost me $1,000,000 in the long run.

But Henny Youngman answered the question of, “Why are divorces expensive?”

“They’re worth it.”

X did not see eye to eye with me on a lot of things, and money was one of them. Spending now for fun now that you had to pay for later, was okay with her. It wasn’t so much with me, and that was not good for either of us. We didn’t agree. Divorce eased a lot of stress.

When I met The (soon to be) Mrs., I was curious about her relationship with money. The fact that she managed to live in a tiny apartment with minimal needs, infrequent and small purchases of frivolous items like PEZ® dispensers, made me pretty sure that we were on the same page as far as money and PEZ™ went. If you don’t need it, don’t buy it.

And in our relationship, we eventually set up spending rules – if it wasn’t food for dinner or at a cost of $20 or less, we had to confer. Yes. $20. Amazingly small for 2018, so let’s call it $60 today. It’s not our current limit for buying stuff without conferring, it’s a bit higher, and, honestly I’m not sure it’s defined at this point. But that limit, back then, was important. We had mutual accountability, and we had to want something enough that we were willing to pitch it to the other.

“Really honey, I need a framed poster of Daffy Duck©, and look at the price!”

Yup. Miss that poster.

So, we drove used cars for years. Just kidding. We still drive used cars. They’re nicer used cars now, but still they’re used cars, even though we stopped being in debt outside of our mortgage after only three years after being married. We haven’t bought a new car . . . this century.

We go out to eat more than once a month now. A lot more than that – often between picking up kids from practice and the other million things we do in a week, well, we end up eating dinners of fast food that cost more than ribeyes for everyone grilled to perfection at home. These are tradeoffs.

But we don’t have as many “needs” as we did even a decade ago. The Mrs. gets a very nice bottle of scotch for Christmas and manages to snort it down during the year – The Mrs. even shares that scotch when The Mrs. is in a good mood. If I didn’t get any presents for Christmas? I’d be fine with that. If I had enough time to devote to the hobbies I already neglect, that might be the nicest present. One day I’ll build my own ICBM.

I’d call it Johnny Wilder Blue™ but they never asked me.

But if The Mrs. needed a new BMW each year? If we had to have the nicest house in town? If we had to have furniture that was new and coordinated? If The Mrs. needed the newest fashions from whatever place in New York? If the elastic waistbands in our underwear needed to work?

We’d be poor.

Because we don’t need those things, we’re wealthy. An example: I bought The Mrs. a new car. It was actually used with 28,000 miles on it, but it was new to us. The Mrs. hadn’t even seen it, outside of a crappy cell phone picture I sent to her. When it arrived at our house, The Mrs. liked it. Mostly. Then I told The Mrs. that it cost 25% less than she thought it cost. I’d put the car on my credit card, and got six hotel nights, too, as long as we were willing to spend the night in Albania.

“I love it.”

Tonight, I was driving one of our cars across the state to go watch The Boy wrestle tonight. I realized I had more cash in my wallet than the car was worth according to the Kelley Blue Book®. I’m thinking that if you can say that and you’re happy? You’re wealthy.

Oh, and The Boy won. He didn’t even have to use the blowtorch.

See how wealthy I am?

Recession? Depression? Oppression? At least there are Bikinis.

“In 1930, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, in an effort to alleviate the effects of the . . . anyone, anyone? The Great Depression, passed the . . . anyone, anyone? The tariff bill? The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act?” – Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

Did George R.R. Martin study economics? It certainly looks like he’s studied bratwurst.

Not that there’s anything to see here (yet) and I don’t want to go around spreading panic, but I just thought I’d dust off some information about recessions. And depressions. No particular reason. Nope. Just stretching my legs.

What is a recession?

A recession is a period of time when the economy gets a little smaller for at least six months or so. Generally, the recessions of the past have seen the economy drop by no more than 5% in any three month period. When you look at the numbers, even most years when there is a recession, the economy still grows overall.

Looks like this would be a good comb for Dwayne Johnson (The Rock®), or a really complicated game of Tetris®.

The blue areas are the economic growth. The red? Contraction. The average recession length since 1945 has been about 10 months, and the average economic expansion has lasted about five and a half years. The general idea is that the economy is based on constant growth.

How much of the economy is geared to growth?

I’m not sure, but I estimated it using publicly available figures. I guessed that 2/3 of construction work was geared towards growth, 20% of manufacturing, 10% of retail (Home Despot® and such), 20% of finance (can’t build if you don’t have cash), and 20% of hotel/restaurant jobs. I did the math, and that comes out to 12,000,000 jobs. How close was that? It’s roughly 10% of the workforce, and unemployment can hit 10% after a recession. So, as a first guess it’s probably not too bad. 12,000,000 jobs, at minimum are required for growth. And those same jobs disappear when growth disappears.

But even with the economic hardship and dislocation, recessions are good. Think of a small, quick fire in a forest. After the dead brush piles up, clearing out the underbrush makes the forest stronger. The strong trees survive, but the weak and rotten trees get burned down. In this part of the Midwest, a regular feature of forest management is a burn off – some places do it every three years or so. The fires are always small, and the danger of a larger fire goes away because all of the dead wood is consumed, but we do keep a supply of elephants on hand to stamp out the burning ducks. Just in case.

Bad businesses fail during a recession. Those on life support go away – they clear the way for growth and good, strong businesses to take their place – the end of a recession is a time of renewal, much like in Hollywood® when the Plastic Surgery Fairy drops by the homes of all good actors and actresses on George Clooney’s birthday.

A depression, however, is a wildfire in a forest that’s built up dead wood and standing dead trees for decades after a gasoline rainstorm. Wildfires burn out of control. Whatever is in the path gets burned. Healthy trees? Doesn’t matter – the inferno takes them along with the dead wood and no amount of well-trained ducks can stamp the flames out.

Healthy business? Doesn’t matter. Business failures start, and then cascade. People panic, and hold onto money. Companies panic and hold onto money. One sign of a depression (besides a sudden drop in male underwear sales – this really happens) is that debt levels actually go down. People don’t buy anything during a depression – they never know when they’ll be able to replace the money that they have. Debt levels also drop because the debts are written off – bankruptcy is another way to lower debt levels.

What causes a depression? A Soviet by the name of Nikolai Kondratiev had an economic theory – namely that the business cycle we stupid capitalists kept running into was based on debt and that the capitalists were stupid and over the course of decades would forget that debt was, you know, bad. Lenin loved him, but Stalin? Not so much, especially after a communist-sympathizing professor at the University of Minnesota ratted him out to Soviet authorities for a visit with an anti-communist when Kondratiev visited the University of Minnesota.

Minnesota has been a leftist state for a long time. Wondering if we could trade it to China for a box of magic beans? Or regular beans? Or an I.O.U.?

It’s debatable whether or not Kondratiev’s economic theory is correct, but it certainly fits the technologically-driven cycles of debt and discovery that lead to boom and bust that we’ve seen in the United States over the last three centuries.

I told The Mrs. I would use these graph-ruled index cards. See, I told you I would. Bonus: thinking about girls wearing bikinis.

Let’s talk about the economic cycle. (That was one of my best pick-up lines in college, but I would add “baby” at the end to make it totally sexy. Because, really, who isn’t put in the mood by discussion of aggregate economic activity?)

So, let’s talk about the economic cycle, baby.

In Spring, new businesses are formed. As economic activity expands, existing businesses expand. Optimism is the atmosphere. And, since debt is low (and people don’t want debt), there is money to buy stuff. And stuff is relatively cheaply as the currency gained a lot of power during the deflationary winter. Social cohesion and trust in newly-rebuilt institutions is high. And it’s nearly bikini weather! Think 1945 to 1965 in the United States.

I’m sorry.

Summer=bikinis! Who needs anything else? Oh, and also relaxation, and growth, and profits, and expansion. The greatest degree of questing for personal growth and whatever hippy course you want to take to validate yourself occurs in summer. The focus on strong institutions passes – but the quest for self-gratification takes over, and it really doesn’t matter because inertia in the economy keeps things going. 1965-1985 is representative of Summer.

I’m really sorry.

Harvest happens in Fall. You could call it Autumn if you have to be all East Coast, but if you do, I’ll call it Efterår, which is Danish for Fall and sounds like what a Viking could yell it at you before you got totally pillaged. But Fall is a great analogy since at this stage the economy is harvested. All the work that went on in Spring to prepare for economic success, all the growth that took place in the Summer, well, it’s time to harvest it in Fall. And greed is good, right? And debt hasn’t hurt us for the last fifty years, so, please, have as much debt as you can eat. Yup, you got it. 1985-2005.

Okay, does this make it better? And, Oktoberfest is in fall. Or efterår.

And now? If Kondratiev was right, Winter. The last Winter in the United States was the Great Depression, which lasted 253 years if you listened to my Grandma. But the Winter was difficult – debt collapse, financial panic, bank failures, tariffs, plant closings, unemployment, greater government control of the economy, breadlines, and no bikinis at all. Oh, and war brought about by the crisis. If Kondratiev is right, this would last from (roughly) 2005 to 2025.

Oh, sure, she has to top every story. But she also dated Andrew Jackson when he was just a kid.

This graph shows the velocity of money – how it moves in the economy. It’s clear that we’re in a place where money isn’t moving as fast as it used to throughout our economy – it’s at a record low since we’ve been measuring it. The low velocity is not because everyone is wealthy, it’s because tons of dead dollars sit on the books of various banking institutions. We’ve also pumped massive amounts of money into the system:

Now, if that money starts moving around like it used to, and there’s bunches of it . . . nah, that wouldn’t lead to inflation, would it?

Kondratiev’s cycle is roughly as long as a human life – which makes sense. Like a bad Arkansas carnival ride, you have to forget what you learned in the cycle in order to want to repeat it. Kondratiev’s work was also picked up by Strauss and Howe in their bestselling book The Fourth Turning. It’s a good book, and in some cases it almost reads like prophecy (it came out in 1997). I’d toss a link to the book up here, but you can figure this one out, or at least your Mom told me you could. She also said you could dress yourself, but she was pretty worried about your diet.

Depressions bring down banking systems, currencies, and governments – from Weimar Germany to the Russian Revolution. The chaos from just a financial mess can last for decades. But during the 17^th Century in Europe, things got even worse:

The massive quantity of silver and gold that the Spanish brought back from the New World distorted the economy of all of Europe, leading to inflation. But then, the Maunder Minimum (LINK) hit. The Maunder Minimum, a decrease in the overall output of the Sun, added poor harvests and exceptionally cold winters to inflation. The regular resources that Europe depended on became scarce. When accompanied by resource constraints like Europe during the Maunder Minimum in the 17^th Century, the chaos can last for a century. I wonder what it would look like if oil were much more expensive? (But that’s a future post.)

I think that we were pretty close to a financial system collapse back in 2008-2009. The solution was to pump astonishing amounts of money into the financial system leading to distortions that have caused commodity prices like oil and grain to lead to the Egyptian revolution and the Syrian revolution, all while we wage wars in two countries. I don’t think our financial system is remotely fixed at this point – debt continues to rise. It’s up to $70 trillion dollars – thankfully that’s only about a million dollars of debt for each family of four. We can work that down in a year or two, right, if we cut back on going out for dinner?

The kink in the curve? That was what caused a worldwide recession and panic in 2008 and 2009. Hope nothing changes. Debt’s good, right?

Is there a draft in here? Seems chilly. Winter’s coming, I think.

“Be so good they can’t ignore you.”-Steve Martin Plus? A sniper joke.

“Cash, every movie costs $2,184.” – Bowfinger

I made this one up for fun when working on this post. The Mrs. laughed so hard . . . I had to use it. A link here (LINK) for the age impaired. Link is probably PG-13.

“Be so good they can’t ignore you.”

That was what Steve Martin said when he was being interviewed by now unpersoned Charlie Rose and Rose asked what advice Martin would give to a young person.

Martin continued, “ . . . it’s not the answer they want to hear.”

It isn’t.

People want easy. People want lottery money. People want step-by-step guides, complete with phone numbers and instructions on how to become rich and famous. And they want Steve Martin to do it for them. Now please, we’re waiting.

Face it: people want free stuff, not hard work and risk.

I can’t imagine that Steve Martin wants anything for free – he wasn’t raised that way. He’s been a comedian, musician, screenwriter, playwright, and actor. He’s been more successful at each of these than almost any person on the planet. When you combine these successes, Martin starts to look less like an entertainer and more like a National Treasure©. Maybe a National Treasure® we should keep in Tupperware® and wrapped in the good paper towels so we don’t scratch him. We’ll get him out when company comes over.

But Steve’s success wasn’t free. In his book, Born Standing Up, Martin talks about his road to comedy, “I did standup comedy for eighteen years. Ten of those years were spent learning, four were spent refining, and four were spent in wild success.” This is what those of a certain political persuasion call unearned overnight success. It is obvious that this success was a result of Martin’s comedic privilege, because it takes a village to raise a comedian.

The concept of spending hours and hours, day after day, year after year seems a bit quaint now, when participation trophies assure every wonderful child that they’ll be successful no matter what. What seemed fresh and new in his comedy routine when his wild success began was in reality the result of work, study, and effort that took fourteen years. And he didn’t even have to “accidentally” release a sex tape to make it happen.

Did Martin know that his hard work would make him an icon known all the way around the world, worth millions of dollars? Probably not. Although it’s also certain that he didn’t wake up one morning and say, “Omigosh, there’s been some sort of error – where did all this money and stuff come from?” And that line is comedy gold if you read it in Steve Martin’s voice.

Certainly, Steve Martin didn’t and doesn’t appeal to everyone – his persona of an entertainer that’s “just really bad at it” falls flat with certain people. But Martin’s dedicated work created a skill set that appealed to enough people that Martin has true freedom – to do whatever he wants, whenever he wants. At one point in Born Standing Up, Martin talks about how stand up became difficult for him when doing huge stadium shows – but he didn’t stop. There were “too many zeros,” in his paychecks. So, he died an unremembered failure.

No, just kidding. His next project, a movie called The Jerk, made $180,000,000, despite costing only $2,184 to make. That was his next step.

I realize that there’s a difference between writing whatever comes to mind and working hard every day, every post, so that today’s writing is better than yesterday’s writing. And that next week I’ll be better yet. And that my writing strikes a resonance somewhere, with someone. It creates value.

This is true. I still swoon when I think of it.

And getting good at any craft is not entirely straightforward. Scott Adams (LINK) uses eighteen elements when writing humor, and edits himself ruthlessly. Scott wasn’t a humor writing machine when he started, but he built his greatness with time and effort. And it is effort – I watched a short video of Jerry Seinfeld talking about the effort that goes into making just one joke. It can take an afternoon or more to get it right – and even then he spends time tweaking it, and this is the level of effort that is required by an experienced comedian. Imagine how much more difficult it would be to be a rookie.

For me, I’m going to work harder, steal everything I can from Martin, Adams, Seinfeld, and study it.

And learn.

Imagine if I never told Jerry to change his hair?

I do want to say thanks to The Mrs., who has greatly encouraged me to get better. The nice thing is she’s my harshest critic but also the one I won’t slug. But I will, passive-aggressively, change all the radio presets in her car to Mexican flamenco music. She’ll never guess that I changed the autocorrect for “John” on her phone to “His High and Most Worthy Lordship.”

Just kidding, The Mrs. isn’t a trained assassin. But don’t tell The Boy and Pugsley – The Mrs. just assigned them a mission to stealthily clean their bathroom.

I’m working hard to make myself better, every post. So I can’t be ignored.

But failing that, couldn’t I just play the lottery?

I’ll just leave this here:

The Funniest and Most Meaningful Black Friday Post . . . Ever. Now 50% off, Today Only.

“It’s Black Friday, the day when ordinary house moms turn into vicious bargain hunting animals, blinded by low prices, and eager to get the Christmas shopping done early. If this was a zoo I’d say run for you lives, but this is Buy More!” – Chuck

Mabel’s family was upset with her on the drive home. They used Apple® products and didn’t have Windows™. (I’m sorry for that joke, but by way of explanation I’m a father.)

Like many people, I try to avoid the stores on Black Friday. If I were a mullet wearing geezer with my toga full of elf chum (please don’t ask me to draw a picture of that, I’m not even sure what elf chum is, and now that I’ve written it I feel vaguely dirty), I’d say Black Friday is maybe the one real American holiday that most people agree on. Christmas is great, but when was the last time a group of people attempted to choke each other to death to get a gift-wrapped package of underwear on Christmas? Never. But put a 50%-off tag on socks with a pattern of Iron Man® smoking a bong with Donald Duck™ on them? Heck, I’d drop kick a calico kitten through a box fan for a bargain like that! Sure, we have great holidays like Fourth of July, but nobody ever died in a riot for 2 for 1 fireworks.

Bargains! Free stuff! Perhaps that’s the new slogan of the United States – Free Stuff! And don’t forget that buying stuff is easier than actual salvation or real effort to be a better person. And even if you don’t like toast – that toaster is only $5. You can learn to love toast.

Perhaps Black Friday not only our true holiday, it is perhaps our true religious holiday.

You can tell that these zombies aren’t leftists – they don’t appear to be lecturing anyone.

I’m not going to make fun of people who are short of cash and frugal and truly need the items that they buy, but that only accounts for a small percentage of purchasers on Black Friday. As Americans, we have been conditioned to shop. Until we drop. And don’t let Debt stand in your way. And I use the word “we” for a reason – I’ve done it, too. No, I would sooner investigate my hotel room with a black light and then still stay there than go in a store the day after Thanksgiving. But I do have the Internet. And I’ve bought stupid stuff:

Dog Waxer – rechargeable! Never let your unwaxed dog embarrass you again.
Solar Powered Night Light – Works best on a sunny day.
Internet-Connected Underwear – With your app, you can check the temperature and humidity.
Night Vision Scope for Caulk Gun – Now you can apply your caulk, even in the dark.
Crossword Puzzle Book for Dogs – Just as it says.

So, yes, I’ve bought my share of stupid crap, which made me ask the question: why do we buy useless crap at all?

Impulse: I see shiny things. I must have them. The depths of the brain, that part that grunts instead of talking and that never uses underarm deodorant that drives this fascination. Just give it meat, scotch, and women and the impulses will go away.
Herd Mentality: I will fight you to the death for the toaster that puts the fuzzy face of Bob Ross on toast! They actually make a toaster that does this and I am hoping that the Discovery Channel® has a series coming where people fight to the death for consumer items. Makes me feel so, well, Roman. Humans want to have the things that other humans have, which is why so many ex-wives exist. I’ll just stop right there.

What a happy little toaster!

Makes You Feel Better: Shopping really works to make you feel better – it gives you a sense of accomplishment. No matter how hard your day was, and what tasks you face, there is a 100% chance that you can buy something and it will make you feel a little bit better. It gives you that sense of control, no matter how poor your decisions were today, you can find a breakfast cereal or, say, 436 pairs of shoes. You can make a choice and follow through. People even have a name for this type of shopping – “Retail Therapy.”

The nice thing about Retail Therapy? It costs about the same as real therapy, and you can still hate your mother when you’re done shopping for those 436 pairs of shoes. So you have hatred and shoes left. I call that a win-win.

Why not shop until you drop? You can. If it’s not a problem:

Well, if you’re going into debt for power tools just to chase the kids around with (a circular saw works well as long as you have enough extension cord) or sacrificing your ability to retire just so you can have a “Hello Kitty®” ashtray, it’s a problem.
If you have boxes of stuff you’ve never opened inside of other boxes of stuff you’ve never opened, it’s either a problem or a movie premise for Leonardo DiCaprio© for a movie called Inshopsion. There is a rule, however, that DVDs starring Burt Reynolds™ do NOT count in this category, so don’t even ask.

If you really need something to complete you, shopping isn’t it. It’s short term, and only lasts until you’ve bought the next thing. And the more crap you buy, the more confusion you bring into your life – sooner or later you have to spend more time managing the crap than it is worth. Again, I know this from experience – my own. And I still can’t find that spare kidney I bought on Kidney-Bay® on Black Friday back in 2012. Maybe it moved back to the original owner.

How do you cut back? Thankfully, the solutions are simple:

Replace shopping with something that’s a real achievement. Blogging for thousands of wonderful readers who have wonderful hygiene, immaculate mullets, and stunning good looks counts. You know, as an example.
Look for real competition in the world. I mean, soccer was invented by European beatnik nudist jugglers to provide something to do while their berets dried and they drank cappuccino. But, yes, even soccer will do. Find something.
Bored? Learn to not be bored. Take up chainsaw juggling. European beatniks do it all the time between cigarettes and poetry readings.
One of the things we don’t thing about too much when we think about shopping is time. And time, my friends, is all we have, each day that ticks away is lost forever. Plan your time to be and do something real.

We have to shop. We have to buy things. But as the Roman philosopher Seneca said, any over used virtue becomes a vice. Or was that Captain Kirk? I’ll go check my 12 disc collection of Star Trek: The Original Series Commemorative 32^nd Anniversary Edition Complete with Pink Tribble Box Set. I got it on Black Friday in 2009 on sale for $24.99. It might be here over behind the Original Smokey and the Bandit 2 jacket. Who knew that Burt Reynolds was exactly my height, but only weighed 155 pounds? Thing doesn’t even fit around the shoulders.

Eastbound and Down.

Bonus: Deliverance interview between Burt and Johnny.

Okay – I love comments, and would love to have more, so don’t be shy. Or I will dropkick another kitten through a box fan. And don’t forget – you can just subscribe to this in the box above, and I’ll show up at least three times a week in your inbox. Which won’t break it. And I won’t send or sell your address, ever.

Twitter, The 1%, and Thanksgiving (Not Available in Canada)

“If you could fight any celebrity, who would you fight?”
“I’d fight Gandhi.” – Fight Club

I’m not saying that an evil psychic entity made me send those tweets at 2am. But I’m sure the wine had nothing to do with it.

Twitter® is living proof that the IQ of any group can be measured by the taking the average group IQ (which should be close to 100, I would hope) and dividing it by the number of participants. Since there are over 6,000 tweets per second on the system, well, that means the IQ of Twitter® is 0.02, which is slightly above a rock, but still slightly below anyone dating a Kardashian or a common houseplant. But I repeat myself. Slap fights between dim kindergartners are often more founded in firm intellectual rigor than a Twitter© argument, and said arguments are generally about as productive as trying to teach a dog to say “milk.”

But I hadn’t figured that out a year ago. It was back then that I commented on a breathless news story about the evil top 1% in the world. I pointed out that almost everyone on Twitter® was in the top 1%.

The howls of outrage began.

I admit the whole Handmaid’s Tale obsession on the left cracks me up, you know, because we’re on a course to live in a theocracy. But if we have to live in a theocracy, can’t it be a sexy one? Sexy, sexy theocracy. Mmmm.

Okay, it was mainly just this one guy – I think he was from Great Britain. He was incensed that I would make such an outrageous statement. His idea was that the 1% was evil. It must be taxed, and taxed ferociously for the betterment of the entire planet. He was filled with a mixture of outrage and envy. Outrenvy? Anyway, I then cited statistics that stated that to be in the top 1% in income in the world you need to make only $32,400 per year, or whatever the equivalent was in the fancy wrapping paper that he used for currency instead of sweet, sweet American dollars.

Ahhh, England, using children to do the jobs Americans won’t.

There was a long pause. $32,000 per year is only $16 per hour. $16 per hour seemed like not a lot of money to him. Certainly he didn’t want to be taxed, he wasn’t an evil rich guy. Other people are evil rich guys. So, he switched the argument to wealth. To be in the top 1% in the world in wealth, yes, the bar is a little higher. Including all sources of wealth, homes, chickens, cars, that toenail clipping collection, and your mom’s secret spaghetti sauce recipe (tomato paste and a little garlic and oregano), to hit the top 1% requires $770,000. That’s a taller hill than the $16 per hour, but still one that’s achievable for many Americans in their lifetime. I don’t know about Great Britain, since my conception of their economy involves lots of singing chimney sweeps with bad teeth and I have no idea what chimney sweeping (singing or not) pays. But let’s be frank, $770,000 isn’t Bond villain-level money, unless James Bond’s villain is living in a partially paid off house in the suburbs and maybe has a decent 401k balance.

Times are tough, even the Bond Villains are on a budget. Hope they have enough credit limit left for date night and a space-based orbital laser system. You know how much date night can cost.

So, in the big scheme of things:

You’re doing okay.
You’re alive.
You’re likely in the top 1% in income . . . in the world.
Besides – you’re more than your money, more than your income, more than your net worth. You’re also your Rolex® collection.
You’re a handsome devil, and have an intellect way above average.
You’ve got a lot to be thankful for.

We’ll get back to the big picture soon enough in future posts, but in the time it took you to read this sentence, you have to admit – you were doing okay.

And me? I’m thankful that I figured out not to get involved in Twitter© slapfights.

So, Happy Thanksgiving, wherever you are. Except Canada. You can’t even get that right, Canada. Thanksgiving in October? Is that when the Moose and Beaver signed a treaty not to invade Nova Scotia or something???

18 Life Lessons I Learned Coaching Kids Football That Matter to You

“I look at you and I see two men: the man you are, and the man you ought to be. Someday those two will meet. Should make for a hell of a football player.” – The Replacements

I actually did buy a book on coaching which was pretty helpful – the first year it was helpful to the other team.

It was August. It’s hot here almost every August, but that’s to be expected since I haven’t been able to move into a mall so I could enjoy a constant 72°F temperature with ambient lighting and strangely inoffensive Muzak® versions of Ozzy Osborne’s Crazy Train.

No, no mall for me. As I stood there in the blistering August sunshine, I was surrounded by the cream of the crop of football athleticism in the county ready for their first practice.

I began my speech:

“You may think you have known tough in your life, but I assure you that within the next few practices you will endure pain and hardship like you’ve never known. You will become killing machines. You will learn to revel in the annihilation of your opponent. You will desire nothing more than to utterly devastate him just so you can go to sleep with the memory of the sounds of the lamentations of his mother bringing a smile to your face.”

One of the players raised a hand.

“Coach Wilder, Momma wants to know if she could bring cupcakes to the practices. For after.”

Okay, so they were third and fourth graders.

And I didn’t really say that. I did, however tell them this:

“Our first game is on the first Wednesday in September. We have exactly nine practices – that’s 18 total hours – before the first game. We can’t afford to miss a single minute. If you’re late to practice, take a lap. If you miss practice and it’s not excused by me, you may not be able to play.”

I know it was only PeeWee® football, but this wasn’t my first year coaching. I’d helped as an assistant coach for The Boy. Now he was playing school league football in junior high, and it was Pugsley’s turn to be on the recreation league team. And after my rookie head coaching effort the previous year, I was determined to do better. I was worried about the press from ESPN® – they can be brutal, especially after I’d signed that huge contract that stipulated I got a free cookie every game. If I bought them for the team.

Bill Parcells, former Super Bowl® winning football coach, said, “You are what your record says you are.” With the previous year’s team, we were 3-5. We were not great, even though I had the very best pair of running backs in the county. Our record was my responsibility. And that’s one of the reasons that people use sports metaphors – sports is clean. “We were a great team” doesn’t really cut it. We were a 3-5 team. That’s not great, unless you’re the Cleveland Browns©, in which case it’s purely amazing.

The other nice thing about sports is that it’s well defined and immediate in a way that’s different than a lot of things in life. There are the rules that determine the way the game is played. The field is the boundary on where it’s played. And both teams will show up Saturday morning at 10AM. You know when it’s going to be played.

There are no excuses. There is no gray area. And due to league rules, every team has exactly the same number of practice hours available to them. The difference? How you use them, and I felt I could do better than 3-5. I had to protect that contract.

Our first set of practices were intense, but mainly intense for the coaches – we were looking to see who had talent, who had speed, and who had heart. And, frankly, we were a bunch of dads, not an NFL® coaching combine. I knew about most of the kids, but one big surprise was a gangly young kid who could run. We put him in at tight end, even though he didn’t know much about football.

I had a plan for every practice until that first game day. I handed out rules to all of the parents. I handed out schedules of practices to my assistant coaches, with the practices broken down minute by minute and what we were going to cover each day along with the plays we were going to install, and when we were going to install them. What, do you think third grade football is a kids’ game???

I love clever plans. That’s why when I find one, I steal it.

It finally came down to game day. With third and fourth graders, a coach was allowed to be on the field, and I was with my offense. Our first game was away – at the biggest rival our town had. The game had gone back and forth, and we were up by 5 points.

The opposing coach took a time out. His last time out

I was puzzled . . . why? It was second and six. No real reason, right?

I couldn’t see the scoreboard – so I asked the official. “How much time is left?”

“One minute, fifty seconds.”

Holy cow! I had no idea that the game was that close to being over. I went back into the huddle with the team. “Guys, if we make this first down, we’ve won the game. Think we can do it?”

“Yeah!”

They did it, on a nice little off tackle run to the left side of the field, by my tight end. Three plays later . . .

We won!

And we kept winning until we were 5-0. Most teams we were beating by 30 points or more, and we were able to get every kid lots of time to play. The next game, we were up against that team we had played first. I walked out onto the field with the team. They seemed . . . flat. Really flat. Over confident.

Right before kickoff, I said: “Guys, if you don’t take this seriously, you’re gonna get beaten out there.”

Beaten wasn’t the word for it. They got destroyed. Which was just what they needed. Because of that loss they got hungry again, but lost a close game the following week.

I didn’t lie to the kids or try to make it sound good. We had one game left, and our record was 5-2. If we lost, the team that we were playing would go to the championship game. If we won? We would play for the championship. It was simple. Parcells would have been proud of my honesty.

Bill Parcells, robotic football mastermind.

The game was back and forth. As halftime approached, we were down by 14 points. We had thirty seconds left. Our team managed to get four plays off in that thirty seconds, and we came away with eight points.

But now momentum was on our side, and we got the ball back in the second half. We scored on the opening drive and never looked back. We were going to the championship, because the kids were what their record says they were. As coaches we just helped them find it.

I learned a lot coaching youth sports. Why is this post on Wealthy Wednesday? Because I think that what I learned pertains directly to productivity and focus, which should add to your bottom line in anything.

Lesson 1. If you’re the coach, know what the score is and how much time is left. It’s what your players expect. If you’re in charge of something, know how it’s doing.

Lesson 2. It’s easy to be a jerk parent if you don’t know what the coach is going through. I’ve been a jerk parent in the past. Heck, I’m still a jerk parent, but now I at least know when I’m being a jerk parent. Know when you’re being a jerk. It makes being a jerk that much more enjoyable.

Lesson 3. I am totally faster than almost every third grader in town. Over a short distance. If I have a head start.

Lesson 4. Keep kids busy and occupied during practice – no dead time. Why? Kids want to work. They want to be engaged. They want to contribute. They want to get better. When they’re just standing around, none of this is happening. As a coach, it’s your job to help them to understand how to get better and how they best fit on the team.

Lesson 5. Be honest with your team. They know when you’re not. Telling them a pretty lie ends up with them losing all respect for you. Even a third grader can look up at the scoreboard and see if they’re winning or losing. Honesty matters.

Lesson 6. Know that there is a deadline built into the game. There’s one in life, too, even when it’s not apparent.

Lesson 7. Skip stretching. Third graders don’t pull muscles. Me? I need to stretch – I could snap a kidney getting out of bed. Spend your time where it’s appropriate. Don’t spend time doing things only because everyone else does it.

Lesson 8. Don’t be overconfident. Paranoia is your friend. It helps you prepare. It drives you to see your weaknesses. It drives you to improve every little detail you can. And it explains why your neighbor watches you mow the lawn, taking notes the entire time.

Lesson 9. Be ruthless on small infractions like being late to practice. Then big infractions don’t happen. Getting the little things done, and done right, matters.

Lesson 10. It’s a game. It should be fun. Corollary: games are more fun when you win. Life should be fun, too. Second corollary: If you always win? Boring. There have to be stakes worth playing for.

Lesson 11. When you lose? Learn from it – very few people learn from winning. Thankfully, you will lose. Winning is more fun, but the right loss with the right lesson might be more important for your future.

Lesson 12. Laugh at your own mistakes when you make them. Unless you’re a surgeon. That’s kind of a bad time to do that. Laugh later if you’re a surgeon. Or a bodyguard. Or my lawyer.

Lesson 13. The number of hours and minutes before the season is over is set on day one. Make the most of them. Assume the number of full moons and sunsets that you get to see are limited, too. Make the most of them, but not in a middle-aged lady “YOLO” way. We don’t need another one of those movies – ever.

Lesson 14. Every drill, every practice, every game – start with the end in mind. Focus on the goal. Every day, every task, every job at work. Focus on the goal.

Lesson 15. The end result is up to you as a coach or as a player. Or as an owner. Sure there are bad breaks. Tons of reasons that you can explain away failure. “You are what your record says you are.”

Lesson 16. Third graders suck at throwing and catching. Keep it on the ground. Play to your strengths and against your weaknesses. Don’t expect your players to do things they can’t. Don’t expect the poo-flinging monkeys you work with to write Shakespearean sonnets while doing calculations involving quantum mechanics. Not going to happen. Work to the things they’re good at. Like poo-flinging.

Lesson 17. A PeeWee© season is short, less than 8 weeks long. You have to make every minute count. How is that different than life?

Our team made it to the Championship Game. Except they didn’t call it that. They called it the REGISTERED TRADEMARK OF THE NFL© game at the end of the year. Yup. Rhymes with “Uper Rowl.”

We were warming up, and our star tight end who had been a great player all season and often scored two or three touchdowns a game . . . was hurt. His ankle wouldn’t allow him to play. I talked to his grandpa. He said, “There was no way he wasn’t going to suit up for this game . . . .”

As we ended up the first half, we were up by a touchdown – a good, tightly played game. I hate those – I like blowouts.

We got the ball first in the second half. Our first play, like every single one of our offensive plays that game, was to the right side. The left side had fallen asleep. I ran a reverse to the left, the one where our tight end normally carried the ball. But this time, the backup tight carried the ball. When he got to the end, there was nothing but green, open field to the end zone. After that, we could score at will. They were broken. There is nothing better than outsmarting a defense consisting of third and fourth graders into utter confusion. Oh, wait . . . that sounds bad.

When we had a nice buffer, we substituted deeply – we put lots of kids in positions they’d never played, just for fun. When it was about 20 seconds left in the game, I called a timeout. We were up by 21 points.

In kid football, a referee will refuse to grant you a timeout if he thinks you’re being a jerk. I looked at him. “Trust me.”

The referee looked over to the sideline and saw my injured tight in hobbling onto the field. He understood. He wouldn’t allow the timeout, but he made sure that the clock allowed for one final play so the tight end could get in for the big win.

We had won the REGISTERED TRADEMARK OF THE NFL© game. I’m just glad I didn’t let them down.

Lesson 18. Be faithful to those that helped you along the way. It will make your utter betrayal of them later even more sweet.

The Ant, The Grasshopper, Tim Ferriss, and Ben Franklin.

“Do you want ants? Because that’s how you get ants.” – Archer

Thankfully I’m not alone. Stupid Grasshoppers.

There are occasions when a simple question can punch you in your gut like a rabid Mike Tyson reacting to a paper cut that you just poured lemon juice on. Here’s a question that hit me last week:

“What do you do with your money?”

“I keep it in the bank.”

“Then why do you do so many things you dislike to earn more of it?”

The above quote is from a conversation between Tim Ferriss (an author with an unusual fondness for the letter S) and Ryan Holiday (I’ve mentioned him before) –you can read the rest of the article here (LINK). Holiday puts this exchange first in his piece – it’s pretty powerful, so powerful that it might even relate to issues we face as a country – not that I’ll solve those. That sounds like it would be hard.

Working is good for you. Producing value is good for you. It says so right on the label. But I worry sometimes about money being my goal instead of a way to allow me to work toward my real goals. When I lived paycheck to paycheck, I was fixated on money – as a single dad with little savings, it was tough. Did I focus on fulfillment? No, I focused on keeping enough money in my bank account so I could pay the electrical bill, which is why it was 40°F in the house in the winter and 85°F in the house in the summer – air conditioning was for closers, and the kids were awful about closing. Mainly awful about closing the window, but I digress.

I had Alec Baldwin give the kids a speech about cleaning their room. He fired them, but only after they cried. But Pugsley got a set of steak knives.

When you’re in that condition, life is about that struggle for money. I remember we’d eat Kraft® Macaroni and Cheese™ on the nights we weren’t having Hamburger Helper©. On really good nights, we’d have actual hamburger in the Hamburger Helper©. If an expense wasn’t absolutely required? I’d avoid it. Oil changes? Why would you do that, there’s still some in the car? What do I look like, a Rockefeller? Stitches? That’s what Super Glue® is for.

At that point in my life I viewed money as the end. Everything was about making more of it or saving what I had.

When I really think about it, maybe the only common value we have left as a country is this secular religion of chasing money. It’s like the old fable of the Grasshopper and the Ants, where the Ants work all summer to store food for the winter, but the Grasshopper uses a leveraged buyout to get money to buy the mortgage to the Anthill from the bank and bulldozes the Anthill to put up a Starbucks®.

Okay, that’s not the way the fable ended. The first time I saw the Ant and the Grasshopper, it was the 1934 Disney® cartoon version. They showed it at school on a field trip because movies are easier than teaching. The end of the movie version of that fable had the Ants inviting the Grasshopper into the Anthill for the winter, provided that the Grasshopper played music for them and voted for FDR. I was a horrible child – six year-old me thought the Ants were just incentivizing negative Grasshopper behavior and I thought he should have been left out in the cold. Why? Because even at age six I was heartless.

I would have enjoyed the original fable more. In Aesop’s version, the Ants work all summer, and the Grasshopper plays all summer. When it comes time for winter, the Grasshopper comes begging from the Ant, and the Ant tells the Grasshopper to die in a fire. I find that a bit more satisfying than the Disney™ version, but I guess Disney© didn’t like the idea of having a cartoon turn into Silence of The Grasshopper where the Ants eat the Grasshopper with some fava beans and a nice chianti. It could be that hordes of traumatized and crying six year olds isn’t good for business, unless you’re a therapist.

Thankfully, if the story of the Grasshopper and the Ant were real and happening today, the Grasshoppers would form a Grasshopper PAC and would vote in a pro-Grasshopper Congressbug that would immediately introduce legislation to tax the unfair profits of Ants. Additionally, the Grasshoppers would also denounce the Ants for the culture they created that was the source of all that wealth. It’s only fair, right?

Me? All kidding aside, for most of my life I’ve been an Ant. Working huge numbers of hours to try to provide for the family, build up some financial resources for the future. Some years I worked in excess of 3,000 stressful hours to provide for the family – that’s an average work week of over sixty hours, every week for a year. Some people work even harder. The kicker? There’s an alternate view of the Ant: some felt that the Ant isn’t always the good guy, that his very industriousness was driven by the love of money. In the words of dead-guy-with-a-comic-book-worthy-name-from-1690, Roger L’Strange (I swear I didn’t make up that name) about the Ant (spelling and capitalization in the original):

“Vertue and Vice, in many Cases, are hardly Distinguishable but by the Name.”

In L’Strange’s oddly capitalized view, working too hard was itself a vice. The poor Ant can’t get a break – everybody wants his stuff, but now he can’t even work hard without people piling on.

But L’Strange was right. Maybe I worked too hard. And maybe I am too stunningly handsome.

Okay, he’s not L’Strange, but Dr. Strange is cool. And Benedict Cumbereberbatch Bandersnatch Cumberdoodle plays him well.

But the Ant and the Grasshopper might be the one fable that encapsulates the American dichotomy. Are you a spender, or are you a saver? Something tells me there might be another way.

There is a very important role of money in a free market economy. It gives incentives for behavior that fills the needs and desires for others. It’s a scorekeeper – resources flow to those who best used them to create economic prosperity. It’s a rationing system for goods and services that doesn’t require the hand of government to make it function. There are some pretty negative roles of money, too, but I’ll skip those for this post.

There is a way to be neither Ant nor Grasshopper. If you’re working hard and understand why you’re working, that’s a start. Paying bills is important, but trading your life away for dollars is really selling your soul.

As Ben Franklin said, “Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that’s the stuff life is made of.”

And I don’t think Ben was talking about the magazines Life and Time. If he was, I guess that makes the quote stupid instead of powerful, and it’s unlikely that Ben read either Life or Time, since he spent most of his time on his phone or watching Netflix®.

The powerful question remains and is really a restatement of old Ben’s comment: “Then why do you do so many things you dislike to earn more of it (money)?”

I’m blessed now to be able to view money is a means, not an end. The results of the Tyson punch? Spleen ruptured. Thankfully it’s not something serious, like having to examine my life choices . . .

The Six Steps to Excellence, One of Which Involves Me Being a Huge Jerk (for a small fee)

“I’m Bill S. Preston, Esquire.” “And I’m Ted ‘Theodore’ Logan.” – Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure

Be excellent to each other. Oh, and party on, dudes.

Why do you want to get better?

The better you are, the more you can do. The more you can do, the more lives you touch. This provides more life satisfaction – the idea that you’re good at something is one facet of meaning. And if you’re good at the right things, it also means more money.

Let’s look at Amazon©. Jeff Bezos was a huge help in writing this post tonight. I got the following from Amazon®:

Ink for pen that I took notes with.
Notecards that I put my notes on.
Laptop that I wrote the post on.
Extra charger for the laptop because the dog eated the first one.

Let’s look at Microsoft©: Bill Gates and Paul Allen were the founders and leaders of the company that made:

The operating system on my laptop.
Microsoft® Word™, which I wrote this post on.

Together these three men during their lives have touched massive numbers of people. Oh, wait, that was Harvey Weinstein. But when you create a business that legitimately touches people’s lives and fulfills their desires? Yeah. You’re going to get money in addition to the satisfaction of sending notecards to a guy who ordered them on his couch at midnight.

When Bezos goes grocery shopping, Bezos goes grocery shopping.

I know that there are reasons to be concerned about both companies, but that’s not this post. The principle remains that the economic way to make money is to make people happy. And the only way you can do that is if you’re excellent. The more excellent? The more money. And it’s Wilder Wealthy Wednesday . . . so . . .

So how do you get better?

Step 1 –Study. And Do. And Study.

I’m not sure which one comes first. And it doesn’t matter. Sometimes I read a book about a subject before trying it. I’m sure that The Boy would have preferred I just jumped into diaper changing, but reading the book only took two hours. Man he could yell.

Sometimes I try something without reading about it. Say, programming an infinite loop into the school’s mainframe that caused it to store zeros until its memory overflowed – this actually happened. You should have seen the printout. Good times.

Practice and study are critical. Practice without study is just action. Study without practice is just academic. You have do both together to make meaningful progress.

Is study limited to books? No. Studying the results of your actions is studying. I study the results of my blog:

Which posts are most popular? (Ones where I use the word “booger”.)
Which method of writing brought the best quality post? (English, rather than a language I made up myself, regardless of how musical it sounds when I throat sing a translation of Poker Face.)
Is blocking out the post on notecards better than writing it out on loose paper? (Yes. Better still? Bake it into a clay tablet.)
Is Ben Affleck better in The Accountant® than he is in Justice League™? (Yes.)
Am I getting tired of listening to Ben Affleck as I write these posts? (Yes.)

Step 2 –Get Feedback. Honest Feedback. (Or, better living through jerkishness)

Honesty is hard to find. Unless you know a horrible person like me. Let’s go into the wayback machine to when I was in college. I may have written this story before, but follow along anyway – this will be a better version.

I was a sophomore in the Humanities Honors program. It was like the regular classes, but you got a B instead of an A for the same quality work. Part of the rather chaotic curriculum was giving speeches. I can’t remember the topic, but the speeches were long. Really long. Twelve minutes to fifteen minutes long.

One student got up to give a speech. I’ll call her Sandra.

She was nervous. Horribly nervous. The speech was halting, and punctuated with “uh” throughout. At the seven minute mark of the speech I started counting the “uh” content of the speech while I timed it. Every time she said “uh”, I put a hash mark on a piece of paper. As she continued speaking, I kept putting hash marks on the paper in front of me.

At the end of the speech, I tallied up the number of times she said “uh”. It was in the hundreds. Really a huge number. I then divided by the number of minutes I’d been counting them.

I have no idea why the instructors went around the room to ask for critiques from the students, but they did. Most people said, “good speech” or some vaguely worded praise.

Not me.

“You said ‘uh’ 221 times in the last seven and a half minutes of your presentation. That’s 29 times a minute. That made it really hard to listen to.”

The room went silent. If a stare was dangerous, Sandra’s eyes would have been coveted as a weapon of mass destruction by nation states that use handfuls of brightly colored tissue paper instead of actual money. I think the United States developed a “hate stare” weapon during the 1960’s, only to shelve it due to the Geneva Convention banning its use as a war crime.

Anyway, it was that kind of stare. Ever make a woman really, really, really mad at you? That stare.

The next person then gave a vague “good speech” comment.

Fast forward a month. It was the next time for a presentation. Sandra got up to speak.

And it was amazing. Eloquent. Perfectly pronounced, not a single “uh” to be found. Not one. It was certainly the best speech that day. During the speech, when her eyes looked up from the podium, they looked directly at me. They were not happy eyes.

Once again, the professors turned to the students for critique. My turn. “That may have been the best speech I’ve heard this year. Great job, Sandra.”

Not a bit of emotion crossed her face. But her eyes said, “I hope you are nibbled to death by flaming diseased miniature poodles in hell again and again and I want you to have to watch Ben Affleck movies while they eat you.” That was oddly specific. But, hey, she was on a roll.

I’m sure she hates me to this day. But she’s better because of me – I changed her life.

Real friends give real feedback. And at least at my house, we’re pretty honest. Do a good job? Praise is coming in. Whine and make a sound like a coyote in a blender? It’s gonna be a long day for you as we mock you. But it’s universal. It’s meant in love, and a requirement of feedback is trust. My kids know I’m on their side even when I’m being critical.

Did I have that bond of trust with Sandra? Not so much. But don’t let anyone tell you that hate isn’t a performance enhancing drug.

The poet Robert Burns said it best: “O wad some Power the giftie gie us, to see oursels as ithers see us!” But based on the typing? He was drunk.

Seek honest feedback. And treat it earnestly – it’s a gift, or a “giftie.” Or I can provide the feedback for a small fee. For a larger fee, you can hate me. For an even larger fee I’ll watch a Ben Affleck movie with you while you hate me.

Step 3 –Get Better Each Time. A Lot at First, A Little Later On. (As proven by a graph on a sketchy blog.)

The Mrs. mocked me when I bought little notecards that were graph ruled.

“When would you ever need to use those?”

Well, tonight:

See the pretty graph? I did it myself, bet you can’t tell! And, see, I DID SO have a use for those notecards!

This is an S-Curve. An S-Curve is a particular curve that describes several natural phenomena. It’s also known as the “Logistics Curve.” Here I’ve applied it to learning.

Several studies have suggested (not that I necessarily take them as gospel) that it takes ten years or 10,000 hours of constant study, practice and effort to become world class at something. That’s reasonable. I mean, not reasonable, that seems like an unreasonable amount of work. Maybe realistic is a better word.

But Pareto taught us the 80/20 rule: 80% of the work is normally done by 20% of the workers. 80% of a need words in a foreign language is learned in 20% of time required to master the language.

And that’s the good news: in two years (or less) you can get to an 80% competence level. And that’s good enough for most people. “Meh” is most of what we really need in our daily lives.

But the last 20% is where greatness is. Yes, you’re not going to get world class recognition if you don’t have at least some talent. Unless you’re Ben Affleck.

Now the fine print: this world class thing does not apply to the talentless or stupid or physically unable. You’ll just never get there unless you have some basic ability in what you’re doing.

But beware: talent can be your enemy. I’ve seen some talented kid wrestlers start out winning early on, say “state champ” at age six. But they’ve got a great move, say a headlock. Headlocks are like Sesame Street®. They work great on kids, but are ineffective, no matter how well they are done when you hit high school. So the “state champ” who had a talent for headlocks . . . now can’t win a match. They never had to work to learn to be fully competent in wrestling. And Marcus Aurelius used wrestling as a metaphor, so that makes me smart.

Remember, the core tenant of Buddhism is “babes are excellent.”

Step 4 –Experiment. Each Moment Is A New One.

I was listening to the radio one night and an odd guest said one of the most profound things I’ve ever heard. “An infinite possibility lies between one word and the next. That space, that pause gives you the ability to change the future with your words. The space between the words is infinite. Own it.”

Okay, he didn’t really say that. But he did say something that made me think that. Each time I write is an experiment. An opportunity with infinite possibility. So I try new things. I even try things that didn’t work in the past. Maybe I just sucked. Maybe the audience was distracted by shiny things that day.

Every experiment is like that space between the words – filled with infinite possibility.

And don’t be focused on victory today. Like that six year old state wrestling champ, victory now is probably not as important as victory later. Sometimes focusing on victory now robs your ability to be daring and experiment, and because World Emperor or something later.

I’ve learned more from times I’ve lost than times I’ve won. Seek to push yourself to failure.

Experiment.

Step 5 –Experts. Find Them. There are Smarter and More Experienced People Than You.

We’re spoiled by YouTube. If I want to learn to lay tile, I can find video after video teaching me how. This dispersed knowledge and these teachers can help you get to 80% competence more quickly than ever. You can learn everything from floor tiling to making cookies to forging a sword to rifle shooting to melting aluminum cans into aluminum ingots in your back yard, although that’s probably not legal in California.

Lincoln was also a wrestler. I’m sensing a theme here . . .

But learning from these experts requires humility. And humility requires courage. The best advice I ever gave a new employee is in this story:

John Wilder: “So, did you get [that thing] done?”

New Graduate Employee: “Well, you see that I was working on trying to . . .”

I held up my hand. “Stop right there. What rank did you graduate in high school, top of your class?”

NGE: “Yes.”

John Wilder: “And in college, you were near the top, right?”

NGE: “Yes.”

I gestured up and down the hallway. “Every one of your coworkers was best in their high school class. Every one of them was near the top of their college class. Each of them is smart. Some of them are smarter than you. When you were in elementary school, they always asked you the questions, because you knew the answers, right?”

He nodded.

“You’re not expected to know the answers here, you’re expected to be honest, work hard, and learn. You’re smart, so you can do those things quickly. My boss? He’s smarter than me. And I graduated at the top of my class. The crazy thing is, when he doesn’t know something, he asks people to explain it. No hesitation. So when I ask you a yes or no question . . . answer yes or no. Don’t tell me a story. Answer the question. And for heaven’s sake, if you don’t know something? Ask.”

Best advice I ever gave, outside of never engaging in a land war in Asia. Why do they never listen?

Step 6 –Never Give In, Never Give In, Never, Never, Never . . . (Unless You Should)

Giving up on the excellence graph is easy. Working for years is hard. Even worse? Working for years at something you don’t like that you’ll never be good at. I’d love to give you some sort of meter that told you which was which, but that’s life – you have to figure it out. But see Step 5 – you can ask.

Again: for most things in life, a “Meh” competence level of 80% mastery is awesome.

Morpheus would have been awesome in Bill and Ted! Oh, wait . . . maybe Bill and Ted is the prequel to The Matrix?

So, that’s it. Follow these six steps and you can be excellent.

Parting thought: Ryan Holiday (link) wrote that passion is about you. Purpose is about a mission that’s bigger than you – and that’s a reason to drive and strive for excellence. So, have purpose, not passion.

But passion is forged in competence. If you get better, it breeds passion. And if you can have your passion and purpose? Why not both?

The 13 Keys to College Success. Beer Bongs Suspiciously Absent.

“Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son. Mr. Hoover, president of Delta house? 1.6; four C’s and an F. A fine example you set! Daniel Simpson Day . . . has no grade point average. All courses incomplete. Mr. Blutarsky. Zero. Point. Zero.” – Animal House

Meet my freshman adviser, Mr. Morpheus.

Here is my advice to a new college student, or even one currently in college if they’re slow. Hey, roomies, if they’re currently passed out on the floor of their bedroom after one too many $1 Zombies® at Applebees™, you can write the following post on their face in Sharpie® for them. Don’t worry, they’ll thank you later.

Sage Wilder Advice Number One: College is an investment.

And not like a lame “investment as a metaphor” – college is an actual, real investment of your time and somebody’s money.

College costs a lot, tens of thousands of dollars a year, plus the cost is going up every year. The primary reason costs go up is that colleges are a great machine that turns the maximum amount that you can borrow for college into debt, a hangover, and twenty extra pounds of weight where you used to have a waist, all while giving you fancy coffee and climbing walls. Why those things? It’s well known that Socrates did no teaching until after he’d had his caffeine and a good climb.

The other cost of college is your time. During the four or five years you spend chasing sorority girls studying hard for a degree, you could be out working, making money. The time spent at college has this second cost – the income you give up – embedded in it.

So how do you make money?

Well, depends on your degree. If you’re getting a degree that’s not directly tied to a career, often you emerge from college well suited to be a retail clerk. Oops! You were qualified for that before you went to school. Hmm.

Degrees matter. Science. Engineering. Accounting. Finance. Economics. Computers. Construction Management.

Those are good. They pay well, and there are often more jobs than graduates.

Sociology. Anything with “Studies” in the target. Exercise Science. Music. Art History. Anthropology (over 12,000 grads, 700 jobs). Art.

These are a waste of your time and effort, if you expect to work in those fields and/or be able to afford to eat anything more than ramen.

Average return also depends on what school you go to. Not as much, but there really is a difference in the job offer you’ll get if you go to Northern Southwestern State Community College versus, say, Harvard. Ahhh, good old NSWSCC, no one can hold a candle to you! The school does matter, both to employers and to the quality of connections you make, but more on that below. If you’re more likely to impress an employer with your school? Yeah, you’re more likely to get a job offer.

What’s the net cost? This varies greatly by school. Every school has a list price – what they’re saying they’re going to charge you. But after scholarships and other discounts, what will you really pay? This hits to the cost side of the equation. Combined with the lower income during the college years, this is the cost your degree must pay back.

And it has to pay this back not with your total income, but the difference in what you would have made if you never graduated college. And we all know that no one could ever make fortunes like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg if you don’t finish college. What? Gates and Zuckerberg were dropouts? Hmm. Well, could it be that college graduates would be more successful . . . even if they didn’t graduate?

That’s the difficulty – you can’t live your life 15 times and measure which way you would be more successful. But college has free beer and climbing walls, so, it’s got that going for it.

Sage Wilder Advice Number Two: GPA is probably important.

When I was doing college recruiting, we specifically recruited for graduates from a window – too high a GPA? We were pretty concerned that they might be, umm, not real humans, but that was a very long time ago. Grade inflation has taken the average grade at Harvard to an “A”. Yes. The average grade is an “A”. So if you don’t have a great GPA? You’re below average.

But the second part is we can use GPA as a real estimate of what you’ve learned. So, study! Spend the hours, learn the material. Get together with friends to study. Have smart friends. Get examples of old tests, and study those. By my junior year at school, I was studying an average of eighty hours for a test in my harder subjects. For one, I spent over 120 hours studying for the final. I was thrilled when I got a ‘B’. There were about two A’s given for about 150 students. So, I was thrilled with my ‘B.’ Especially since I dropped that class the first time I took it.

Yes. Drop classes if your grade is like one of those “fail” videos on YouTube. Oh, wait. Those fail videos took the name from the grade. Yes. Drop the class. Go again next time. Avoid YouTube. Seriously.

And the best way to a good GPA? Go to class. I had one class that was just . . . so very early. On the occasions I went, I actually learned lots of stuff that was helpful and showed up on the test. But going to class was . . . so early. So I didn’t.

I passed. Barely. And I was thrilled about it. Easier method? Actually go to class.

Sage Wilder Advice Number Three: It really is who you know.

Successful people hang out with successful people. Make connections at college. When you graduate, you should know 100% of the top 10% smartest people in your major. Also? Know the rich people. They might not be the best students, but I have never gotten a job from a poor person. Meet them. Don’t be fake or lie, but don’t miss the chance to hang with the son or daughter of a billionaire. One major mechanism of moving social classes is, well, being useful to a billionaire’s kid. His dad will set you up. Or, better yet? Marry one.

I had one friend who went to college and married an heiress who was worth over a billion dollars. Nah, just kidding. It didn’t work out, so he dumped her. And, yes, that’s a true story.

But almost every job I ever got was from someone I knew who liked me. So know those people.

Sage Wilder Advice Number Four: Avoid debt. Avoid debt. Avoid debt.

Debt is horrible. Student loan debt is the worst. With a car loan, a home loan? Declare bankruptcy and you can walk away. How do you get rid of student loan debt? Die. Bankruptcy won’t do it. I wrote about it here (College Funding, Value and Grade Inflation: Should Your Kid Go? Should You Pay?).

Even with an awesome job, college debt is a killer, and you don’t even have a crappy used car to show for it.

The best strategy? Have someone else pay. Get a scholarship. Have your parents pay or help. The Reserve Officer Training Corps? Yeah, you can get the Army, Navy, or Air Force to pay for your college. And all you owe them is one weekend a month, and two weeks a year. Not a bad deal for tens of thousands of dollars in tuition.

Sage Wilder Advice Number Five: Nobody cares.

Instructors and professors don’t care about you. The school doesn’t care about you. Your friends? They might care about you, but as soon as you’re off campus if you flunk out? Yeah, that door is closed.

It’s not meant to be a demotivator. You were raised and told you were a super special precious snowflake of a human. But the reality is that if you’re “one in a million” that there are 7,200 people just like you on Earth. And if you flunk out? The college doesn’t care. The world doesn’t care. Your mom and dad will care. But don’t get mad at the situation – the situation doesn’t care.

Your roommate might care. But he or she might be happy you’ve headed to other locations. Privacy so they can play their progressive jazz harmonica at 2:24am!

Sage Wilder Advice Number Six: Activities are a yes.

Join clubs. Join sororities. Join professional organizations. Do all of those things.

I was in a car reviewing résumés from my alma mater while on a recruiting trip. The leader of the recruiting team, a graduate of the same school as me, asked about a particular candidate.

“What clubs was he in?”

I listed them.

“What offices did he hold?”

“Um, none.”

“So, a member, member, member. Pass. We’re looking for leaders.”

This was the guy who hired me. So, if you’re in a club? Do more than be a member. Lead. Bring cookies or beer. Do something.

Heck, that might be great advice for life: don’t be a non-player character.

Sage Wilder Advice Number Seven: Manners.

You’ll be surprised how often you’ll be expected to have a tie. So, have one. Or whatever fancy things girls wear. Dresses? Pantsuits? Whatever. Have at least one of those with you on day one at school.

Also: drink slowly. You’re not used to alcohol.

Don’t eat like a pig. Your mom taught you better than that. Use your knife and fork properly and KEEP YOUR ELBOWS OFF THE TABLE.

And don’t try to eat a hot dog in one bite. It might nearly cause you to choke to death. Not that I’d know.

Sage Wilder Advice Number Eight: Relationships.

Get married later. Like after you have a job and some money. But have lots of relationships. Go to parties. After you’re done studying and your homework is done, unless you’re going with your billionaire girlfriend. Also? Don’t leave any evidence on YouTube.

Sage Wilder Advice Number Nine: Have a “Plan B.”

Your high school boy/girlfriend will dump you. Your plans for Friday will change. Life in college is the most tumultuous period of your life. Ride the wave. You will not have the same major on day one as on day 300. Your ideas will evolve. Wonderful!

Sage Wilder Advice Number Ten: Discipline.

Be disciplined in sleep, study, exercise. College will try to pull all of your routines away. Maintain them even though you’ll see a lot more nudity than ever before in your life. Odd nudity. Weird nudity. Party nudity. Covered in 7-11 nacho cheese nudity. But keep your discipline.

Sage Wilder Advice Number Eleven: Go all in.

When Cortez or Obama or whoever it was that conquered the Aztecs landed on the beach, he burned the boats. That way his sailors had no way out. They had to be committed to the conquest. Thus, they peacefully slaughtered thousands of Aztecs until they converted them all to Scientology. I think.

But the point remains: If you’re in college, you’re in. All in. Go for it.

Sage Wilder Advice Number Twelve: Is it for you?

The narrative is simple: do well in high school, go to college, get a good job, work 40 years, retire and die.

Okay, we’re all going to die. But what if . . . you could get a good job after high school without college?

You can.

My neighbor is a lineman. That means he knowingly works with high voltage lines to fix them when they’re broken. This is a big deal after hurricanes – these are the guys that bring Netflix® back. And they make good cash.

So do plumbers. And guys that fix air conditioning. And guys that suck septic systems. All of those people make pretty decent money, at least around here. And they don’t have to worry about office politics, or showering.

I had one youth I worked with in Scouting. He wanted one of the careers above. My basic reaction was to tell him – “Go to college.” I would have been wrong. He has three job offers. He’ll be making $80k a year before an engineer his age will.

Good for him.

Sage Wilder Advice Number Thirteen: Enjoy.

Life is like a bodybuilding elf. It’s short and hard. So? Enjoy yourself. But understand that your choices at 18 might impact your ability to be a billionaire when you’re 30. Or 50.

Unless you married the billionaire heiress. You did do that, didn’t you?

“If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” – Herbert Stein

“Something’s the matter. Something sinister and something grotesque. And what’s worse is that it’s going on right here under my very nose.” – Blackadder Goes Forth

It’s amazing that one very short role was so iconic it cemented Ben Stein’s Hollywood career – he’s now known as Economics Lecturer to the Stars. He taught Miley Cyrus everything she knows about pole-dancing while nearly nude and its impacts on global trade due to dynamic trade imbalances in an information-driven economy.

Ben Stein is an odd person. Lawyer. Economic commentator. Writer. Actor. Inventor of the phonograph. But his father Herbert Stein was pretty spiffy, too. Herbert was an economist who headed up the Council of Economic Advisors for President Nixon and President Ford.

But that isn’t interesting. Or at least interesting to anyone not named “Stein.”

However, in 1976 he said something very interesting:

“If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.”

So silly, so obvious. So profound.

But what can’t go on forever?

Well, in the big scheme, almost everything. The Universe even has an expiration date. Unless there is are some pretty significant physical laws to the contrary that we have yet to find, all indications are that the Universe will keep expanding for a very long time. Like, for all of time. Forever. The Universe has moved on from the hot, incandescent birth where even light couldn’t exist to the relatively short period of now where we have stars and planets and Amazon® Echoes™ and such.

Eventually, because the Universe is continuing to expand, the galaxies will move so far apart that we won’t be able to see other galaxies at all. At somewhere around 100,000,000,000,000 years from now on February 13, late in the afternoon, the last star visible from the Milky Way® will burn out. That’s okay. The Sun will only last another 7,500,000,000 years or so. And the Earth will be gone billions of years before that. And that sucks, because I keep all my stuff here.

Eventually, even black holes evaporate. And under some theories even protons, the building blocks of everything we think of as matter, might decay. This proton decay would render normal matter obsolete. The implications of this are stunning. Making even a rudimentary PEZ™ dispensers would be impossible unless you made it out of pure ultra-dense neutronium, and even Amazon can’t ship a PEZ© dispenser that weighs 100 billion tons for free, even if you do have Prime®.

And at that point? It’s all gone. Nothing left but a very thin, diffuse mist of subatomic particles existing at a very cold temperature, where no more thermodynamic reactions are possible – known romantically as the Heat Death of the Universe. It’s like the Universe was the shower, and all the hot water was gone because your kids are incapable of taking a shower of less than an hour’s duration.

Ginsburg is never gonna carpool with anybody but Sotomayor again.

So everything has an end, with the possible exception of Hillary Clinton’s twin needs for political power and chardonnay. Oh, and maybe Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who has been rumored to have uploaded her consciousness to a small robot that she fashioned out of an old Sony® laptop and a Roomba© vacuum cleaner. Okay, to be honest, I started the Ginsburg rumor, because it would be really amazing if all of the members of the SCOTUS did that. I therefore declare personal ownership of the concept of RoboJudge©, including animation rights, but I would be willing to trade the Mongolian comic book rights for a beer right about now . . . .

Speaking of Heat Death, I found the following graph at RStreet.org (LINK):

Ohhhh, pretty bumps! If this was a roller coaster, what would happen next?

I actually drew this graph out on paper (back to the 2006 Dow levels) on a really slow work day one winter when I worked in Fairbanks, calculating what the Dow-Jones Industrial Average would be if it were in constant dollars. I even used data on the Consumer Price Index, and did all the math, and sacrificed a chicken, which is required in economics to make sure the results are right. Anyway, what’s interesting to me is that this graph shows the result of asset prices in a “forever low” interest rate environment.

I never, ever, would have guessed that this would have been the outcome of the Fed’s policy of printing money like a toddler drools to cover the massive spending and deficits of everyone who’s been president this century. I would have guessed that we would have had massive inflation, and an economy that would make the socialist paradise of Venezuela feel happy that they could stand in line for two days to get the free half cup of sawdust to eat.

Instead, we have Netflix®, a soaring asset base, and tacos on Tuesday.

I think I missed two things:

In a unipolar world, where we have the biggest and most intimidating armed forces the world has ever seen, everybody feels safe to use a dollar. It doesn’t make sense, but neither does the popularity of Twilight®. How intimidating are our armed forces? So intimidating that literally no power on Earth would ever consider taking us on in a conventional war. We’ve spent so much money on awesome military stuff that we’ve made World War II tactics impossible to use on us. So people around the world use dollars. It’s the next iteration of the Golden Rule: He who has the gold, makes the rules. And he who has the gun, has the gold. Just ask governments that tried to sell oil in their own currencies – I won’t use real names, let’s just call them Kuamar Mhadafy and Haddam Sussein.

This soaks up a lot of cash. Piles of it. And, better yet? Everyone in the world is willing to sell us actual physical stuff in exchange for electronic transfer of codes that say they have dollars. We don’t even have to print new dollars anymore!

Oh, and I’m sorry to have mentioned Twilight. If it helps, at least it’s not 50 Shades of Grey.

The other thing I missed is that banks just sat on huge deposits of cash to make their depleted balance sheets look better. They could just deposit the money at the Fed. I think we all agree that this was a better idea than just lending $2.7 million to absolutely anyone who wanted a house, even if “anyone” was a 12 year old buzzed on Pixie Sticks™ and the house was a cardboard box in the alley behind an all-night waffle and pizza restaurant.

But keeping that sort of balance is hard. Eventually the money starts to leak back into the economy – Chinese folks purchase Vancouver from the Canadians. Then the Canadians get excited because they can take their maple-syrup covered hands and spend the recycled American dollars on comic books and pantyhose from the United States. End result? Those dollars leak back.

And into stocks. And other assets. Some observers have said that, in addition to the high prices on the stock market, we also have a bubble in absolutely everything. But back to the stock market:

So, given that we’re at historically high valuations for a stock market . . . is it real? Can it sustain this high level?

Bueller, Bueller, anyone?