Don’t Stop
One of these whatever-they-are that resonated was the one about objective truth (I like to keep the topics light-hearted around here). For example, Brian wrote back to agree that Ed Cooley absolutely should have been canned for beaning a kid with a water bottle (and if you haven’t watched the apology video, you need to…though perhaps he redeemed himself by signing a new highly-regarded point guard).
Then Brendan wrote to tell me that this topic was one they were recently discussing in his Plato study group.
“Wait, what?” I said. “You have a Plato study group?”
He said yes – because it was a topic worth studying.
I agreed and was jealous. In fact, I took an entire semester-long class in college on The Republic and loved it. (I did the same on Doctor Zhivago…a college hack is that if you take a class that deep-dives on one book, the reading load is much more manageable!)
And Steven made the point that time is the most important part of any of this. Because the longer the timeline, the more likely it becomes that merit will carry the day. So “the most important thing,” he concluded, “is not to stop.”
That hit home with me because I had recently been invited to speak at one of our portcos’ quarterly all-hands and was asked how we were thinking about and preparing for all of the economic disruption that might arise from higher oil prices, blockaded straits, and the potential annihilation of entire civilizations.
Not to be glib, but I pointed to that paper that measured the last 500-plus years of returns and noted that if your time horizon is long enough, returns tend to take care of themselves even if outcomes are never guaranteed. So when faced with the prospect of economic dislocation, the key is not to try to predict what will happen next, but to make sure you are positioned to withstand the consequences of whatever it is that happens.
I wrote a while back that you can only lose a game that ends, and I continue to think that’s the right way to think about things.
– Tim
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