You learn a lot about someone's way of thinking by how they predict the future. Many, if not most, people make all sorts of strong conclusions and predictions with little-to-no evidence and never realize how big of a deal that is when their predictions inevitably don't happen.
Nearly everybody claims, "I knew it!" about major social events that they absolutely, without question, did not know. Nearly every middle-aged dad in the world claims they "knew" they should have invested in Google, Bitcoin, and all sorts of other things they absolutely never saw coming. To see examples of delusional people who don't realize how comically ignorant their predictions are, just find anybody - usually a man - who is "thinking about day trading" for a living. Foolishness.
Below, I'll lay out the 7 fundamental principles for predicting the future, touching on similar concepts as I've written about in my article about how to predict the future. I'll then lay out the predictions at the bottom of the article, along with the dates of the predictions and the dates of any modifications.
2010 - SEO:
Early in my career, I built websites that generated revenue by having traffic from Google searches. This is called "SEO" or "Search Engine Optimization." I was involved in several internet marketing forums and became an outspoken advocate for the idea that Google would soon be cracking down on nearly every "tactic" that worked. I was banned from two forums because I was scaring people. I decided to sell my biggest website before the big algorithm changed. Google eventually did change everything in 2011 - wiping out countless thousands of people, as I predicted.
I was still impacted, but much less than most people were because of my interest in forecasting major trends. To me, the lesson was to double down on accurate forecasts so that I could completely avoid at least some massive surprises.
2011 - Social Media News:
I invested very early into Bitcoin but ended up liquidating my position because I believed that political news on social media was a massive opportunity. I threw my entire net worth into building what I believe was the first political news company that was 100% focused on social media traffic. I began in 2011, and in 2013 threw every penny I had into it and launched a website that became one of the most popular websites in the world with millions of visitors per day.
I then surprised nearly everyone who knew me in the industry by selling and completely getting out of the social-media news market. I decided to sell in 2014 and finalized the sale in 2015. It seemed stupid at the time, but I'll explain why below.
2013 - Bitcoin:
I've always found it exciting to try to be early to markets and predictions while still being cautious and nuanced. For example, in 2013, I wrote that:
"[Bitcoin is a] massive possible opportunity [and] the possible payoff for the cryptocurrencies is simply staggering. If anything, the off-chance that the currencies become even medium-sized alternatives to fiat currencies is reason enough to put some money in the coins as a speculation."
2014 - Big Tech Censorship.
Before "fake news" was being used to describe any media report that someone disagreed with, I was extremely aware of the future of censorship by major tech companies. It's weird to talk about now, but nobody was discussing censorship by big tech as a real thing in 2014 or 2015. It was an afterthought. To me, however, it was the biggest risk that existed. So I sold the business.
The website I sold? It doesn't exist anymore. It effectively shut down and was merged with another website because censorship wiped it out, just as I was concerned.
In 2019, a Pulitzer-prize-winning NY Times journalist reached out to interview me about why I was able to see that coming years before it was in any news cycle.
2020 - Covid.
When Covid first began spreading, I was the first person I knew who went into quarantine. I also shifted my entire retirement accounts into Treasury bonds because I believed that the dollar and related assets would skyrocket as people fled to financial safety. I was right. Then a few months later, stocks had imploded and I rolled my money back into stocks because it was clear that the money printing was going to create a massive stock-market boom. That also worked out.
I dabbled in options for the first time and made several hundred thousand from a tiny starting amount.
2021 - Interest Rates.
In late 2021, as in December, I scrambled to do a cash-out refinance of all of my real estate holdings, both personal and investment, in order to lock in long-term interest rates and pull cash out before interest rates went up. This ended up being perfect timing. Within a couple of months, rates had skyrocketed. This move allowed me access to nearly a million dollars more than I would have had and saved millions and millions of dollars over the next ten years.
Monetary economics is an incredibly useful discipline to understand if you want to monetize any prediction. It allows you to understand the news financially better, even when the news isn't directly financial. It does, however, require leaving political ideology and populism at the door. But it's ok, you'll get paid handsomely if you have the guts to do it.
Predictions aren't just fun, they're also lucrative. The universe rewards people who can accurately forecast the future. If you can see a market early, move fast, and sell before troubles hit, you'll have an extremely financially rewarding life. All of the above predictions (other than 2020 and 2021) were made before I was 26, and they allowed me to retire at 26. Pretty crazy.
Anyway, enough talking about previous predictions. Let's look at the principles for developing a good prediction:
I've written a little bit about predicting the future before. It's endlessly fascinating.
Fundamentally, some of the predictions will be annoyingly vague, because they should be comprehended, and internalized, but are impossible to comprehend with perfect specificity.
NOTE: These aren't created for anyone other than myself. Most of them will be hard to prove. This is a personal project, so that's fine.
FIRST UPDATED: 5/6/2023. Any additions or edits will have the later date next to them below.
AI Predictions:
Political Populism
Inequality
Social Unrest
Mental Health
Material Prosperity
Prosperity Denial
Return to Tradition
As time goes on, I'll add to the above predictions.
Have you heard the story of Jim Thorpe?
Not only was he the first Native American to win gold at the Olympics, but he's easily one of the most athletic human beings in history. He didn't just dominate at the 1912 Olympics with minimal training, but he obliterated nearly every sport he tried. During his unbelievable career, he played professional football... and professional baseball... and professional basketball.
Jim Thorpe's story is the story of a man overcoming utterly impossible obstacles in such a way that it seemed almost easy. He had to overcome personal tragedy, unbelievable racism, sabotaging teammates, and the death of multiple family members - including his mother - when he was a child. But he still overcame.
In his legendary 1912 Olympic events, someone stole his shoes - so he simply found two mismatched shoes in the garbage. One was too big and one was too small. Oh, and he still won gold. And then set several records, which you'll learn about later in this essay. The man was essentially unstoppable.
Jim Thorpe is a personal hero of mine and, I believe, the greatest athlete to have ever lived.
Jim Thorpe was a legendary Native American athlete who dominated the 1912 Olympics, winning gold. He also played professional football, professional baseball, and professional basketball.
When you think of the greatest athletes of all time a few names likely come to mind. Michael Jordan, Muhammad Ali, Wayne Gretzky, and Babe Ruth are some of the world's most famous and skilled athletes and consistently land in the top five when listing out the greatest athletes ever.
Another name that frequents these lists is Jim Thorpe. While his name might not be recognizable to the average American anymore, he was once a household name across the country. I think it's time Thorpe made a comeback. If you want to remember people for their athletic accomplishments, then everyone should know his name and story.
Unlike the other legends listed above, Thorpe didn't just excel in one particular sport. When you're talking about who the greatest multi-sport, all-around athlete is, most people would tell you that the answer is undoubtedly Jim Thorpe.
Sure, there are some other incredibly talented multi-sport athletes out there and men with remarkably versatile skills. Deoin Sanders, Carl Lewis, Wilt Chamberlain, and Jim Brown come to mind.
But Thorpe was in a league of his own.
He won the gold in the 1912 Olympic Games in both the pentathlon and the decathlon-- both of which are multi-event games that show his ridiculous versatility.
He didn't stop there, though. He played major league baseball for seven years, professional football for 13 years, and professional basketball for at least two years.
It's really difficult to say which sport Thorpe is best known for.
He was an All-Pro back as a professional football player. He kept the Olympic record for his points total for two decades after winning eight of the fifteen individual events of the decathlon and pentathlon.
As a basketball player, Thorpe displayed his abilities barnstorming all over the country. While his baseball numbers weren't statistically outrageous, the fact that he was able to compete at the highest level of the game certainly says something.
Basically, Thorpe could play any sport he tried with ease. He is a true sports legend and an American icon.
If you've ever come across a social media post about Jim Thorpe, there's a good chance it was accompanied by this picture of the legend during the 1912 Olympic Games:
Why, you ask?
Look at his feet-- he's wearing two different shoes.
When this photo was taken, Thorpe had already crushed the field in the pentathlon, placing first in four of the five events. During the 1,500-meter run, he left his opponents in the dust, beating the man in second place by nearly five seconds.
The next week, it was time for him to compete in the decathlon which occurred over the course of three days.
In the pouring rain, Thorpe ran an 11.2-second 100-meter dash. No one was able to match that time at the Olympics until 1948.
Sometime after this event, just about the worst thing that can happen to a track and field athlete during the Olympics happened-- his shoes went missing.
Some accounts say that his shoes were missing on the second day of the decathlon. Others say that they disappeared a few minutes before the 1500-meter race portion of the decathlon was about to begin.
There are a lot of different theories about what exactly happened here-- who took Thorpe's shoes? Why were they missing? Had they been stolen?
Bob Wheeler, the author of the biography Jim Thorpe: The World's Greatest Athlete and the founder of the Jim Thorpe Foundation, believes that it was right before the 1500-meter race that his shoes went missing. He is a fairly credible source, considering that he conducted more than 200 interviews with teammates, friends, and family members of Jim Thorpe while writing his 1979 biography.
According to Wheeler, the story goes like this:
A few minutes between the decathlon's 1500-meter race, Thorpe's shoes were nowhere to be found. One of his teammates gave him one shoe to borrow. The second shoe? He found it in the garbage.
Not only was he wearing two mismatched shoes, but one of them was way too big for his foot and one of them was way too small.
The solution?
Thorpe squeezed his foot into the small shoe and wore extra socks on one of his feet to make the shoe fit better.
Most of us would whine and complain if we had to walk around in a too-big shoe and a too-small shoe for ten minutes at the grocery store.
Thorpe didn't just go out and compete against the world's greatest decathletes in the 1500 meters with mismatched shoes that didn't fit. He went out and won.
This is a timeless story that has a powerful message more than one hundred years later. It says never give up. Never quit. Never let obstacles stop you from attaining greatness.
Thorpe was the winner of the final event of the Olympic Games-- the 1500 meter (it's worth noting that Thorpe ran the 1500 meter twice during the Games, once for the pentathlon and once for the decathlon. He smoked the competition both times.)
Each gold medalist was crowned with a laurel wreath as they came up to receive their medals by King Gustav of Sweden.
According to the New York Times, the crowd gave a "great burst of cheers led by the King" when Thorpe received his pentathlon gold.
For his decathlon performance, Thorpe wasn't just given his medal. He also received a bust of the king and a Viking ship-shaped jewel-encrusted chalice.
King Gustav of Sweden grabbed Thorpe's hand firmly and said, his voice shaking with emotion:
"Sir, you are the greatest athlete in the world."
What did Thorpe say in response?
"Thanks, King."
There is a lot we don’t know for certain about the beginning of Jim Thorpe’s life.
While it’s known that he was born in Indian Territory that would later be known as the state of Oklahoma, and he was baptized as “Jacobus Franciscus Thorpe” in the Catholic Church, no birth certificate was ever found for the American hero.
Most biographers believe that Thorpe was born near the town of Prague on May 22, 1887, which is the date that is listed on his baptismal certificate. However, Thorpe himself once said his birthday was May 28, 1888, in a note to The Shawnee News-Star in 1943. He also said that he was born:
“...Near and south of Bellemont– Pottawatomie County– along the banks of the North Fork River… hope this will clear up inquiries to my birthplace.”
Jim Thorpe grew up fishing, hunting, and learning from elders in what is now central Oklahoma, but what was, at the time, Sac and Fox land. He also played sports growing up, with baseball being an early favorite.
Both the parents of Jim Thorpe were of mixed-race ancestry. Hiram Thorpe, his father, was born to a Sac and Fox Indian mother and an Irish father. Charlotte Vieux, his mother, was born to a Potawatomi mother (descended from Chief Louis Vieux) and a French father.
According to popular legend, Jim Thorpe is a descendant of the infamous warrior Chief Black Hawk.
The autobiography of Black Hawk, entitled Autobiography of Ma-Ka-Tai-Me-She-Kia-Kiak, or Black Hawk, Embracing the Traditions of his Nation, was the first Native American autobiography that was published in the United States.
“I am no more proud of my career as an athlete than I am of the fact that I am a direct descendant of that noble warrior [Chief Black Hawk].” – Jim Thorpe
The native name of Jim Thorpe was Wa-Tho-Huk, which can be translated to mean “path lit by great flash of lightning,” or, more succinctly, “Bright Path.”
Raised as a Sac and Fox Indian, Thorpe’s native name comes from the fact that the path that led to the cabin where he was born was brightened by lightening around the time of his birth. This was custom for the Sac and Fox, who named their people something that happened near birth time.
Thorpe had a twin brother named Charlie, and the two of them attended the Sac and Fox Indian Agency school in Stroud. Sadly, Charlie died of pneumonia when the boys were nine.
It is known that Thorpe ran away from the school he attended a number of times. Eventually, he was sent to an Indian boarding school (the Haskell Institute in Lawrence, Kansas) by his father. The reason he was sent away? So he would stop running away.
His life was struck by tragedy again when his mother died of complications during childbirth just two years after Thorpe was sent to the Haskell Institute. Understandably, he was left deeply depressed by the death of his mother. After getting into fight after fight with his father, Thorpe decided to leave home in order to work on a horse ranch.
When Thorpe was about sixteen in 1904, he went back to see his father again. He decided to go to the flagship Indian boarding school in the U.S. during the time– Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. This school was founded in 1879 with the purpose of training Indians for hands-on trades and assimilating them into mainstream culture.
It was during this time that Thorpe’s incredible athletic ability was first recognized.
He was coached by one of the most influential coaches of early American football– Glenn Scobey “Pop” Warner.
Soon thereafter, Thorpe’s father died from gangrene poisoning after a hunting accident. This left the young man an orphan, and he dropped out of school once again. Before later returning to the Carlisle School, Thorpe spent another few years working on farms.
In 1907, In his third year at the school, Thorpe wandered by track and field practice and easily cleared a 5’9” high jump bar wearing his heavy overalls. In his plain street clothes, he beat all of the school’s high jumpers.
He didn’t just impress people with his athletic abilities in track and field, though. During this time, he also competed in:
That's right– ballroom dancing. In fact, he won the 1912 intercollegiate ballroom dancing championship.
Though Pop Warner was reluctant to let his best track and field athlete play the intensely physical sport of football, Thorpe convinced him to let him attend practice and try some rushing plays against the school’s defensive team.
Warner permitted this, figuring that Thorpe would quickly give up the idea after being tackled easily.
Of course, that never happened. Instead, Thorpe “ran around past and through them not once, but twice.” After his impressive display, Thorpe flipped Warner the football while saying that “Nobody is going to tackle Jim.”
It was in 1911 that the American people started to notice Thorpe’s tremendous athletic ability. In a game against Harvard, a top-ranked team at the time, Thorpe scored all four of the field goals in the 18-15 upset. Amazingly, his team completed this season with a record of 11-1.
Thanks to Thorpe, Carlisle won the national collegiate championship in 1912. During the season, he scored a whopping 198 points and scored 25 touchdowns. By some accounts, he was responsible for 224 points and 27 touchdowns during this time.
Jim Thorpe even played against future President Dwight D. Eisenhower during a 1912 game against the West Point Army team. While the 92-yard touchdown Thorpe made during the game was nullified due to a penalty against a teammate, Thorpe rushed for a 97-yard touchdown in the next play. During the game, Eisenhower injured his knee when attempting to tackle Thorpe.
Eisenhower spoke of Thorpe’s performance during this game in a 1961 speech, stating that:
“Here and there, there are some people who are supremely endowed. My memory goes back to Jim Thorpe. He never practiced in his life, and he could do anything better than any other football player I ever saw.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower
In 1908, Thorpe received third-team All-American football honors. After heading to North Carolina for a time to pitch for the Rocky Mount Railroaders, Thorpe was lured back to Carlisle by Pop Warner. In 1911 and 1912, he was named a first-team All-American.
Even though Thorpe would gain his greatest fame from track and field, he didn’t compete in the sport in 1910 or 1911. Despite his incredible skills in a number of athletic endeavors, football was Thorpe’s favorite sport to play.
Jim Thorpe started training for the Olympics in the spring of 1912. Initially, he focused on hurdles, shot-puts, and jumps. However, being so incredibly versatile and skilled as an athlete, he added in the javelin, pole vaulting, discus, 56 lb weight, and hammer.
He earned himself a spot on the Olympic team thanks to his all-around ability during the Olympic trials held at Celtic Park in New York.
There were two new multi-event sports included in the 1912 Summer Olympics– the pentathlon and the decathlon.
The pentathlon was based on the event that had been a part of the Ancient Olympic Games, and consisted of:
The decathlon was also inspired by the pentathlon, but instead of consisting of five events, this one had ten. All the way back in 1884, there had been a ten-event competition known as the “all-around” or “all-round” championship which was quite similar to the modern decathlon.
The first appearance of the modern decathlon as a part of the Olympic Athletics program was at the Stockholm 1912 games– the games where Jim Thorpe displayed his superior athletic abilities.
The decathlon is split into two different days of events:
Since Thorpe was so versatile as an athlete (for example, he had gone to a number of track meets with Carlisle and served as a one-man team,), both of these new Olympic sports seemed the perfect fit for Thorpe.
After entering the trials for both events, Thorpe earned a place on the pentathlon team and was chosen to represent the U.S. in the decathlon.
You would think that competing in these two multi-sport events would be enough for most athletes. Thorpe, though, also competed in the high jump and the long jump at the 1912 games.
The first competition Thorpe competed in during the games was the pentathlon on July 7. Out of the five events, he won four. The fifth event– javelin– he had never competed in before that year and still placed third.
Thorpe won the gold medal and went on to qualify for the high jump final the same day. A few days later, he participated in the long jump and placed seventh.
The last event Thorpe participated in during those summer games was the decathlon. This was his first and only decathlon in his entire life.
He went into the competition with some serious competition lined up. Everyone was expecting a strong performance by Hugo Wieslander, a Swedish athlete that had set the inaugural world record for the pentathlon the previous year.
He was no match for Thorpe in these games, though. Jim Thorpe defeated Wieslander in the decathlon by 688 points. Out of the ten events, Thorpe placed in the top four in every single one.
For nearly two decades, his Olympic record of 8,413 points stood strong.
Out of the fifteen individual events that made up the decathlon and the pentathlon, Thorpe won eight.
All of this is remarkable on its own. To understand just how incredible his feats were during those games, you have to realize that someone had stolen his shoes just before he was due to compete.
While many athletes might be completely shot down by this occurrence, which their shoes being the most essential gear they have, Thorpe quickly found two replacement shoes. Not only were the shoes mismatched, but he fished one of them out of a trash can.
A true king, he put these ill-matched shoes on and won the gold medal.
The 1912 Summer Olympics also saw the sport of baseball for the first time in the history of the games. Included as a demonstration sport (meaning it was played to promote it rather than as a regular medal competition,) a game was played between the United States and Sweden.
The U.S. team was made up of various members of the track and field athletics delegation. One of the participating athletes was Jim Thorpe himself, who played in one of the two exhibition baseball games.
At the closing ceremonies of the games, Thorpe won two gold medals as well as two challenge prizes. These were donated by Czar Nicholas II of Russia for the pentathlon and King Gustav V of Sweden for the decathlon.
It is said that King Gustav commented to Thorpe when he was giving him his prize:
"You, sir, are the greatest athlete in the world"
Thorpe is believed to have simply said in return:
“Thanks, King.”
When Thorpe came home, he was given a hero’s welcome. At a ticker-tape parade on Broadway shortly thereafter, he was the star attraction.
After his domination at the Olympics, Thorpe went back to Celtic Park where he had qualified for the games several months earlier. There, he competed in the Amateur Athletic Union’s All-Around Championship.
Out of the ten events held, Thorpe won seven.
What happened in the other three? He came in second, of course.
During his performance, Thorpe broke the previously standing record of 7,385 points that had been set several years earlier in 1909 by achieving a total point score of 7,476.
The broken record had been held by Martin Sheridan, who was the Irish American Athletic Club’s champion athlete. Sheridan himself was no lightweight when it came to athletics, having won five Olympic gold medals.
When Thorpe broke his record, he was there to watch it happen.
A good sport, he went up to Jim Thorpe after the event. As he reached out to shake his hand, he said:
"Jim, my boy, you're a great man. I never expect to look upon a finer athlete."
Sheridan went on to sing Thorpe’s praises to a New York World reporter, saying:
"Thorpe is the greatest athlete that ever lived. He has me beaten fifty ways. Even when I was in my prime, I could not do what he did today."
In 1912, athletes participating in the Olympics were held to strict rules about amateurism. At the time, athletes weren’t considered amateurs if they:
In order to compete in the Olympics, athletes had to be amateurs and not professionals by this definition.
Months after Thorpe’s domination of the games, in January 1913, it was reported that he had previously played professional baseball by the Worcester Telegram. The story was further circulated by newspapers around the country.
In 1909 and 1910, Thorpe received meager pay as a professional baseball player in the Eastern Carolina League. It is reported that he received somewhere between $2 and $35 per week, which, in today’s money, amounts to a range of $58 and $1,018.
The kicker was that college athletes regularly played professionally during the summers to help them earn some money. To sidestep rules against amateurism, most of these players used aliases. Thorpe, however, did not.
The American public didn’t care that Thorpe had briefly played professional baseball. He was an American hero. However, the case was taken very seriously by the Amateur Athletic Union. One of the founders and the secretary of the AAU, James E. Sullivan, was particularly concerned with Thorpe’s previous stint playing professional baseball.
Thorpe wrote a letter to Sullivan to help explain that, while he had played pro baseball, he didn’t know he was doing anything wrong. In fact, he was just following the example of other college athletes.
“I hope I will be partly excused by the fact that I was simply an Indian schoolboy and did not know all about such things. In fact, I did not know that I was doing wrong, because I was doing what I knew several other college men had done, except that they did not use their own names …”
This honest admission, unfortunately, didn’t help his case. Thorpe’s amateur status was retroactively withdrawn, and the International Olympic Committee stripped him of the titles, medals, and awards he had won in the Olympics.
To further complicate the controversy, both the AAU and IOC had broken their own rules in disqualifying Thorpe. Protests had to be made “within 30 days from the closing ceremonies of the games” according to the 1912 Olympics rule book, but the first reports of the issues didn’t pop up until six months after the conclusion of the games.
Beyond that, there’s even some evidence that Thorpe’s time playing pro baseball was known to the AAU before he competed in the Olympics. Only when confronted with this fact did they decide it was a meaningful issue.
It wasn’t until three decades after his death that his status as an amateur was restored in 1982 and his family was presented with two medals in a ceremony.
However, the battle to correct the record wasn’t over.
Even though the IOC had restored his status as an amateur and returned the medals to his family, they didn’t declassify the other medalists from the 1912 games. This means that he was still essentially considered a co-winner, rather than rightfully restored as the sole winner.
Believe it or not, it wasn’t until July 2022, 110 years after the Olympic Games in Sweden, that the IOC announced that Thorpe would be reinstated as the sole Olympic champion in both the pentathlon and the decathlon.
Being stripped of his medals was devastating to Jim Thorpe. The only positive outcome of the whole ridiculous endeavor was that he started receiving offers from professional sports clubs as soon as it was reported that he had been declared a professional.
Thorpe was a free agent at the major league level after the Olympics because his contract had disbanded in 1910 with the minor league team that he had last played for. This was highly unusual for the time because this was during the era of the reserve clause in North American professional sports. This meant that pro athletes rarely had the opportunity to change teams unless they were given an unconditional release.
This meant that Jim Thorpe had his pick of the litter when it came to which team to play for.
Turning down an offer with the St. Louis Browns, he decided to join the New York Giants. The Giants had been the National League champions the previous year.
With the help of Thorpe’s superior athletic abilities, the Giants once again became the National League champions in 1913.
Shortly after the Giants lost the World Series, they embarked on a world tour with the Chicago White Sox. Unquestionably, the celebrity on the tour was Jim Thorpe.
On this incredible journey around the country and the world, Thorpe was able to meet major world figures including Pope Pius X and Abbas II Hilmi Bey. He even played to a huge crowd in London that included King George V.
Thorpe continued to play sporadically for the Giants. He had a short stint with the Milwaukee Brewers (a minor league team) before returning to the Giants and then being sold to the Cincinnati Reds.
His team-hopping didn’t end there– he went back to the Giants before being traded to the Boston Braves in 1919.
Until 1922, Thorpe continued to play minor league baseball.
While it sounds like Thorpe was pretty busy playing baseball after the Olympics, he hadn’t abandoned his love of football. He played with the Pine Village Pros in 1913 and then with the Canton Bulldogs in 1915.
The Bulldogs certainly recognized the worth of this incredible athlete. Reportedly, Thorpe was paid $250 per game, which amounts to nearly $6,700 in today’s dollars. At the time, this was a truly incredible wage.
The team got their money's worth, too. Before Thorpe joined the team, about 1,200 would attend their games. For Thorpe’s debut game, 8,000 fans showed up– more than six times more than the average attendance.
Thorpe played for the Bulldogs for a number of years. In one particularly legendary championship game in 1919, Thorpe put the game out of reach to the competition by kicking a (wind assisted) 95-yard punt from the 5-yard line of his own team.
The Bulldogs were one of fourteen teams to form the American Professional Football Association in 1920– the organization that would become the NFL in just two years.
Who did they select as the inaugural president of the APFA? Why, Jim Thorpe, of course.
True to his nature, though, Thorpe just spent most of the year playing football for Canton. His tenure as the president of APFA only lasted until 1921.
Between 1921 and 1923, Thorpe helped to organize and played for an all-Native American team, the Oorang Indians.
Even though the team didn’t do that well, Thorpe’s incredible skills during the seasons were recognized. He was selected for the first All-NFL team in 1923, which later was recognized formally to be the league’s official All-NFL team.
After having played football for six different teams between 1920 and 1928 and playing in 52 games, Jim Thorpe retired from professional football at the age of 41.
Believe it or not, Jim Thorpe also had a basketball career that was unknown even to his biographers until 2005. How did they find out about his stint as a pro basketball player? From a ticket was found in an old book.
Thorpe played on a traveling basketball team as the primary feature of the “World Famous Indians” of LaRue. For at least two years, he barnstormed with the team in a number of states.
At this point, you must be thinking that we’ve reached the end of Thorpe’s athletic versatility. After all, he dominated in track and field while also playing professional baseball and football all while he was still a young man.
Believe it or not, though, Thorpe also considered going into professional hockey for the Tecumseh Hockey Club in Canada for a brief time in 1913. Imagine being so athletically talented that you could choose to play just about any sport at the pro level!
Over the course of his life, Thorpe married three times and was the father of eight children.
His first marriage was to Iva M. Miller in 1913, who he met at Carlisle Indian Industrial School. Between 1917 and 1923, the couple lived in a home in Yale, Oklahoma that is now known as the Jim Thorpe House.
Together, they had four children:
In 1925, Iva filed for divorce on the grounds of desertion.
A year later, Thorpe married for the second time to Freeda Verona Kirkpatrick, who was working for the manager of the baseball team Thorpe was playing on. Together, they had four children:
After fifteen years of marriage, in 1941, Freeda filed for divorce.
Four years later, Thorpe would marry the woman that he spent the rest of his life with. On June 2, 1945, he married Patricia Gladys Askew.
It is unclear how many descendants there are living of Jim Thorpe's. One grandson, Michael D. Koehler of Chicago, was a football star himself in his youth. He went on to be an educator and coach before passing away in 2015. Several of his grandsons were present to receive the AAU Gussie Crawford Lifetime Achievement Award for their grandfather, and a number of grandchildren have been outspoken about their opinions regarding the campaign to reinstate Jim Thorpe’s place as the sole winner of the decathlon and the pentathlon during the 1912 Olympic games.
Once his athletic career had come to a close, Thorpe struggled working jobs that weren’t related to sports. He found it difficult to provide for his family and never stayed with the same job for very long.
He had worked a ton of different jobs during the Great Depression, including as an extra in a number of movies. In most cases, he was cast in Westerns as an American Indian chief.
Thorpe was cast as himself in a 1932 comedy Always Kickin’, where he played a coach that was instructing young players how to drop-kick.
While the Great Depression was still going strong, Thorpe sold the film rights to his life story for $1,500, which is about $27,000 in today’s money.
In 1940 and 1950, Thorpe was in the films Knute Rockne, All American, and Wagon Master, respectively.
In 1951, the truly legendary athletic career of Jim Thorpe was memorialized in the film Jim Thorpe- All American. There had been a number of rumors that Thorpe didn’t get any money for the film, but Warner Brothers did pay him $15,000 in addition to $2,500 that went towards an annuity for him.
In addition to working in films after his athletic career, Thorpe worked a bunch of different jobs, including:
During WWII, Thorpe even briefly joined the Merchant Marines.
In his later life, Thorpe sadly struggled with chronic alcoholism until his death in 1953.
The later years of Jim Thorpe were plagued with problems, including chronic alcoholism and money troubles. In 1950, he was admitted to a Philadelphia hospital as a “charity case” to treat lip cancer.
While dining with his wife in their Lomita, California home, Patricia, in early 1953, Thorpe went into heart failure for the third time. For a brief period of time, he was able to speak to the people around him after being revived by artificial respiration. Shortly thereafter, though, he lost consciousness and passed away. The world’s greatest athlete died at the age of 65.
Supporters of Thorpe fought for decades for his Olympic titles to be reinstated. Over the years, several attempts were rebuffed by US Olympic officials.
Those that stood between Thorpe and his rightful honors included Avery Brundage, who wasn’t just the president of the IOC but also Thorpe’s former teammate. He was quoted as having said, “ignorance is no excuse.”
The author Robert Wheeler and his wife, Florence Ridlon, were among Thorpe’s most persistent advocates. They established the Jim Thorpe Foundation in 1982 and were able to prove that Thorpe’s disqualification occurred after the time period allowed by the Olympics rules. Thanks to their hard work and the support they gained from the U.S. Congress, the IOC Executive Committee agreed to reinstate Thorpe’s medals.
However, the saga didn’t end there.
Instead of declaring him the sole winner of the events he won, the pentathlon and the decathlon, they announced him to be co-champion with Wieslander and Ferdinand Bie. This is particularly ridiculous considering that both of these athletes had always held that Thorpe was the only champion in their eyes.
Two of Thorpe’s children, Bill and Gale, were presented with commemorative medals in 1983 by the IOC. The original medals had sadly been stolen from museums and never recovered.
Recently, in July 2020, a petition started going around asking that the IOC declare Thorpe to be the sole winner.
Circulated by Bright Path Strong and backed by Pictureworks Entertainment, the IOC finally voted to make Thorpe the only winner of both the pentathlon and the decathlon on July 14, 2022.
Jim Thorpe is considered to be one of the best athletes of all time. During his life and posthumously, he has been the recipient of countless awards and honors.
Here’s just a small sampling:
According to Red Smith, a renowned sports writer:
"Thorpe was the greatest athlete of his time, maybe of any time in any land."
Let’s take a look at some of the organizations, events, and in one case, a town, that was named after the greatest athlete of all time.
Beginning in 2019, Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, started holding the Jim Thorpe Area Running Festival. A series of races are held during the event, including a 26.2-mile marathon.
Based in Oklahoma City, the Jim Thorpe Association is a charity and civic organization that is named in memory of the legendary Jim Thorpe. Since 1986, they have been awarding the Jim Thorpe Award to the top college football defensive back.
The Oklahoma Sports Hall of Fame is also a part of the Jim Thorpe Association. Every year, they induct at least two athletes based on their accomplishments.
When Jim Thorpe passed away, residents of his hometown had paid to have his body returned from California by train. His funeral was held in Shawnee, Oklahoma at St. Benedict’s Catholic Church. After the ceremony, his body lay in state at Fairview Cemetery.
The original plan was to build a memorial for the legend at the athletic park in Shawnee, and the residents started raising funds for this effort. State legislators were asked for funding by local officials, but the governor vetoed it.
All the while, Thorpe’s wife had his body shipped to Pennsylvania. The rest of his family had no idea this was happening.
She had heard that there were towns in Pennsylvania that were looking for ways to attract tourism and business. According to Jack, Thorpe’s son, she had made a deal with local officials for monetary benefit.
Essentially, the towns of Mauch Chunk and East Mauch Chunk bought the remains of Jim Thorpe.
At his grave, they built a monument to Jim Thorpe, merged the towns, and renamed the new town Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania.
Jim Thorpe was buried in a town he had never once set foot in.
As you might imagine, this didn’t sit well with the rest of Thorpe’s family.
His son filed a lawsuit against the town in an effort to have his father’s remains re-interred near his family members in Oklahoma. After several years of complex legal happenings, the case was effectively brought to a close when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear it. Thorpe’s remains are therefore still in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania.
Though baseball wasn't Thorpe's best sport, the fact that he could compete at the professional level in so many different sports is truly remarkable. Over his major league baseball career, Thorpe amassed:
In his minor league baseball career, he had 7 home runs, a batting average of .252, and 176 hits.
Jim Thorpe played 52 professional football games and started 37 games. He played for 12 seasons professionally.
When he played for the Carlisle Indian School, he had 53 touchdowns in 44 games, scoring 421 points. He led the nation in 1912 with 29 touchdowns and 224 points.
Thorpe won gold in both the pentathlon and decathlon in the 1912 Olympic Games held in Stockholm, Sweden.
In his obituary in the New York Times, it was written that:
“He could run the 100-yard dash in 10 seconds flat, the 220 in 21.8, the 440 in 50.8, the 880 in 1:57, the mile in 4:35, the 120-yard high hurdles in 15 seconds and the 220-yard low hurdles in 24 seconds. He broad-jumped 23 feet 6 inches and high-jumped 6 feet 5 inches. He pole-vaulted 11 feet, threw a shot put 47 feet 9 inches, threw the javelin 163 feet, the hammer 140 feet and the discus 136 feet.”
Located in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, there is a monument erected in the honor of Jim Thorpe at his gravesite. About 100 miles southwest of where he had attended Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the site of the monument contains his tomb, historical markers outlining his life story, and two statues of him posed in athletic positions.
His grave rests on soil that had been brought from Thorpe’s native Oklahoma as well as from the stadium in Sweden where he won his Olympic medals.
Considering that Jim Thorpe was so incredibly talented and versatile as an athlete, and he is considered one of the greatest of all time if not the greatest of all time, it’s not a surprise that there is a memorial built around his grave.
What is surprising, though, is that it’s located in a place that he never once visited.
The short story is that Thorpe’s third wife was left in poverty after he passed, and she was frustrated by how long it was taking his hometown to raise the necessary funds to build a memorial.
So she took matters into her own hands and essentially sold his remains to two small towns in Pennsylvania that were looking for something to draw tourists.
The two towns united and were renamed Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, and his body still rests there under his monument, despite the efforts of his other family members to have his remains exhumed and relocated to his home state of Oklahoma.
The son of Jim Thorpe sued the town of Jim Thorpe in 2010 in an effort to have his father’s remains moved to Oklahoma. The suit was based on a 1990 law known as the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). The law was designed to help rectify the historical plundering of Native American burial grounds.
While a federal district court agreed with him, the decision was reversed by the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2014.
When they tried to bring the case in front of the U.S. Supreme Court, they refused to hear it. For now, that’s where the story ends, and his body remains in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania.
Titled Man of Bronze in the UK, this film was produced by Warner Bros. in 1951 and was directed by Michael Curtiz. Thorpe was played by Burt Lancaster and the story was a biographical look at the life of the incredible athlete.
The film Bright Path: The Jim Thorpe Story, will be produced by Angelina Jolie and star Martin Sensmeier as the incredibly talented Thorpe. Jolie has stated that she has already spent time with Bill Thorpe and that she will be working with the Thope family and the Tribes will creating the film.
Partnering with Indian Country to create the film, the filmmakers say they are dedicated to telling the authentic story.
There’s a lot of excitement and hype around this film, but there’s no known release date as of yet.
If you're looking for a solid summary of the life and achievements of Jim Thorpe, this is a great source. Interviewing people knowledgeable about Thorpe and using old letters to substantiate the book's claims, this is a well-researched text about his life.
Some people consider this to be the definitive biography of Jim Thorpe. Highly detailed, this is a good book for individuals that are looking for a thoroughly-researched look at the entire life of the American icon.
This is another well-researched biography about the legend Jim Thorpe. Wheeler was a driving force behind Thorpe's medals being reinstated-- Sports Illustrated credits him with primary responsibility for his Olympic god medals being restored in 1982.
This narrative nonfiction book by Lars Anderson takes a look at one of the greatest contests in the history of college football. In a classic David vs. Goliath matchup that pits Jim Thorpe against future president Dwight D. Eisenhower, this is a tremendous story that will delight Jim Thorpe fans, football lovers, and American history buffs alike.
Over the years, a lot of books have been written about Jim Thorpe. Here are some other titles you might want to check out:
The story of Jim Thorpe is a wonderful way for children to learn about overcoming obstacles, the history of sports, and the difficulties faced by Native Americans in the early twentieth century.
Here are some of the books about Jim Thorpe written for children:
In short, Jim Thorpe was famous for being a truly incredible and versatile athlete. He is thought to have been one of the best athletes of all time, if not the best athlete of all time.
As the first Native American that won gold for the U.S. at the Olympics, he quickly became a national icon and hero. On top of dominating in track and field, Thorpe played baseball, football, and basketball.
Jim Thorpe competed on the American track and field team at the 1912 Olympics. He also played baseball, football, and basketball professionally. As an indication of his all-around athletic talent, he even briefly considered playing professional hockey.
Jim Thorpe didn’t just play for one team, he played for a huge handful of teams in several professional sports.
He played on:
Jim Thorpe was born in what is now Oklahoma near Prague, Indian Territory. At the time, the land was that of the Sac and Fox Nation.
Some accounts say Jim Thorpe was 5'11" while others call him 6'1". As you might imagine, his weight varied over the years, but it is said that he was 185 pounds when he competed in the Olympic games.
To help you get a picture of the man himself, during the Stockholm games he had a 42-inch chest, a 32-inch waist, and 24-inch thighs.
Jim Thorpe was a tribal member of the Sac and Fox Nation. Forcibly relocated to Oklahoma in the 1870s, this tribe was originally from the Lake Michigan and Lake Huron area.
There are two other Sac and Fox tribes, which are the Sac and Fox Nation of Missouri in Kansas and Nebraska and the Sac and Fox Tribe of the Mississippi in Iowa.
At the 1912 Olympic Games in Stockholm, Sweden, Jim Thorpe won the gold medal in both the pentathlon and the decathlon.
Jim Thorpe was stripped of his medals because the IOC and AAU were confronted with the fact that he had briefly been paid to play baseball. Based on the strict rules about amateurism at the time that barred professionals from competing in the Olympics, they took his medals away and removed his title as the winner of both the pentathlon and the decathlon.
Yes– but not until thirty years after his death. His medals were reinstated in the early 1980s. However, it wasn’t until 2022 that he was named the sole winner of the pentathlon and the decathlon rather than a co-winner.
The total points Thorpe won at the 1912 Olympics amounted to 8,412.95 out of a possible 10,000. This was 688 more points than the second-place finisher, Swede Hugo Wieslander. It would take four more Olympics for anyone to beat this score.
Of course, it's also notable that he was the first Native American to win an Olympic gold medal for the U.S.
When he played on Carlisle's football team, he ran 1,869 yards on 191 attempts, helping to lead the team to a 12-1-1 record.
Jim Thorpe didn't retire from professional sports until he was 41. In his later life, he appeared in a number of films, usually in Westerns as an American Indian.
He also worked a number of different jobs, including a security guard, doorman and bouncer, construction worker, and ditch digger.
Thorpe even had a brief stint in the Merchant Marines during WWII.
Unfortunately, he struggled with poverty and chronic alcoholism in his later life until his death in 1953.
In 1950, Thorpe was hospitalized for lip cancer. He also suffered from chronic alcoholism. Thorpe had three heart attacks in his life, the third of which was fatal. He passed away at his trailer home in Lomita, California on March 29, 1953.
While there are different stories about Jim Thorpe's mismatched shoes at the Olympics, the consensus is that he won a gold medal wearing two different shoes-- one too big and one too small.
According to Bob Wheeler, author of Jim Thorpe: The World's Greatest Athlete, Thorpe's shoes went missing just a couple of minutes before the decathlon's 1500-meter race.
Remarkably, this didn't shut Thorpe down.
He borrowed one shoe from a teammate and found the other in the garbage.
It's incredible in its own right that he forged forward with totally inadequate gear. He had to squeeze his foot into his teammate's shoe, and wear extra socks to make the shoe fit that he found in the trash.
To make the story even more insane, though, he still won the race.
Thorpe was an incredible being-- he was said to have "moved like a breeze" and with "a kind of ease in his gait that is hard to describe. Equilibrium with no strictures."
To me, Jim Thorpe was way bigger than sports. His is a story of facing tremendous obstacles and overcoming them. In American society, he became a symbol of the injustice that Native Americans faced.
He is the epitome of the notion that no matter what troubles you face in life, you can overcome them. Born without U.S. citizenship because he was raised as a Native American, Thorpe climbed his way up the ladder to become a tremendously famous American icon.
Though more than a century has passed since his Olympic victories, the story of Jim Thorpe is truly timeless.
This story is incredibly powerful to me, so I wanted to share it with you. Feel free to learn more about me and my projects here.
If you crack open the dictionary to the word wealth, you’ll find definitions along the lines of “an abundance of valuable possessions or money.” Most of us strive to build material wealth, but, in reality, you need more than money to be fulfilled in life. There are a lot of different types of wealth, and only focusing on financial success can leave you lopsided, unhappy, and unhealthy.
Just to make myself clear: I believe that everyone would benefit from systematic wealth building. At the same time, I absolutely despise the culture of debt-fueled consumerism.
If you’re able to break free from the societally-sanctioned expectations of mindless purchasing and lifestyle creep, building wealth can be an incredible tool that allows you to live a productive and meaningful life.
So, what does it really mean to be wealthy? What does it look like to live an abundant life without getting caught in the endless cycle of consumerism? What types of wealth exist beyond monetary and material accumulation?
In this article, I’m going to break down my view of the necessary ingredients to live a comfortable, healthy, sustainable, and fulfilling life. If you find that you might be lacking in some of these areas, don’t despair. Every single one of these types of wealth is completely attainable if you are willing to commit some time every day to personal growth and development.
In this article, we're going to review the different types of wealth:
When you think about being wealthy, there’s a good chance the first thing that comes to mind is material wealth. This might conjure images of Lambos, elaborate mansions, and luxury vacations, but being materially wealthy does not necessarily need to mean that you are making extravagant purchases or even living a particularly glamorous lifestyle.
It can be tempting to try and “get rich quick,” and there are plenty of people out there that will gladly sell you their info products with the promise that they will tell you how to do so. While some people might get lucky, your best bet is to become increasingly financially literate and have the right mental framework. Money management is an essential tool in being financially wealthy, but an equally important part of building wealth is recognizing that consumerism is the ultimate scam.
Being rich does not have to be about indulging in every last tech gadget or spending your evenings dining at overpriced trendy restaurants. Consumerism is arguably the number one most societally acceptable addiction, and buying stuff will simply never fill the empty space in your soul.
What will fill your soul, you ask? Being productive. Engaging in meaningful activities. Identifying your purpose in life and pursuing it. Spending time with the people you love.
So why bother building material wealth if you aren’t going to spend it on all that fun new stuff? What’s the point of being rich if you can’t use it to show everyone how successful you are?
Because money is a tool that gives you access to one of the most valuable assets you have: time. What if you created stable passive income streams for yourself that allowed you to go to your kid’s soccer games, spend time with your spouse, and take the weekend to go camping and immerse yourself in nature?
What if you were financially wealthy enough to write a book that you think will help other people improve their lives? What if, instead of being caught in an endless wheel of money-in, money-out, you were able to give back to society in a productive way that really did make a difference in the world?
Sure, there are many well-known figures through history that rejected wealth and possessions and gave their lives to a cause greater than themselves. However, for most of us, being poor is the ultimate thief of time.
If you’ve ever lived paycheck to paycheck, you know that when you aren’t working, your time isn’t really even yours to enjoy. If you aren’t busy trying to figure out how to scrape together some extra dollars for that surprisingly high utility bill, you’re frequently burning your time and energy being worried about money in general.
In my view, material wealth is not in itself a goal. Instead, it is a powerful tool that can allow you to pursue a meaningful and productive life.
One of the most precious types of wealth we can possess as humans is health wealth. Even if you were naturally physically fit and healthy as a teenager despite being inactive and eating poorly, you’ll soon learn (if you haven’t already) that this is typically not a gift that keeps on giving.
Anyone who knows me knows that I try to lift weights and spend some time doing boxing and MMA training every morning. I work closely with a personal trainer and we lift together for 1.5 hours in my home gym. It completely sets the tone for the rest of the day, helps me emotionally, and gives me clarity of thought and focus for my time working on my businesses.
Later on, we’ll talk about emotional health, which is equally important as physical health. In this section, though, we’ll discuss how important it is to keep your body in good shape in order to live a wealthy life. Just like Emerson said, “the first wealth is health.”
If you aren’t taking care of yourself physically, though, you are going to struggle to build any of the other types of wealth on our list.
This is a foundational type of wealth, and we all know that you should build your house on stone, not sand.
So what does it mean to have health wealth rather than health poverty?
Health wealth means that you treat your physical body with compassion and respect. You get regular exercise, you eat nourishing food, you drink plenty of water, and you don’t deprive yourself of sleep. You get outside in nature and let the sunlight hit your skin rather than spending all of your time in some dark nook staring at a computer screen. You understand how important it is to maintain a healthy posture, particularly if you spend a lot of time sitting at a desk. Ultimately, creating a fortune in regards to your health means that you understand that your physical body is the vessel that will help you fulfill your purposes in life, and the better shape you’re in, the better able you’ll be to reach your goals.
Of course, it’s worth noting that sometimes our health is out of our hands. You can certainly do everything you’re supposed to do and still end up stunned in a doctor’s office after receiving news of cancer or some other terrible disease.
In general, though, treating your body well can help to reduce the risk of disease, improve your cognitive health and mood, reduce your stress levels, keep you feeling fit, and ultimately make life feel a whole lot easier.
Taking care of your health and building health wealth isn’t something that you can create overnight, much like the other types of wealth on our list. You create health wealth little by little, every day. It doesn’t come with becoming addicted to exercise or obsessing over never eating an ounce of fat, nor does it come from complete gluttony and over-indulgence. Becoming rich in health is a balance you work to obtain every day that stems from self-respect and the desire to lead your best life.
If you’re like a lot of Americans, you probably think that spiritual wealth is an oxymoron. For fairly understandable reasons, we seem to have a cultural conception that you can be spiritual and poor or materialistic and rich, but you definitely can’t be a spiritual and rich person.
Luckily, this simply isn’t true. You can be both spiritually wealthy and financially wealthy. In fact, the two different forms of wealth can have an intricately intertwined relationship where they support one another.
According to one study from Baylor University, entrepreneurs are more likely to believe that God is personally responsive to them. They also pray more frequently than non-entrepreneurs.
This is a classic example of people having spiritual wealth that directly impacts their financial wealth. After all, when you believe in something larger than you, it’s a lot easier to connect with the notion of having a purpose in life and working towards it.
Having a spiritual fortune inside you doesn’t mean you have to live in a cave carved into the side of a mountain with only a lantern, a knife, and a small clay pot to your name. In fact, if you can manage to build financial wealth without falling prey to the temptation of consumerism, being rich can help give you the headspace and time to really focus on your spiritual growth.
Spirituality is one of those words that’s gotten a little slippery over the years, and it’s definitely going to mean different things to different people. If you’re a materialist, (in the philosophical sense,) perhaps this all sounds like a bunch of hogwash to you. It seems clear to me, though, that there is something deeper going on in life than just “wake up, eat, work, sleep, repeat” that is worth connecting with.
Whether or not you believe in God or deities of any kind, there is a lot to be gained from building your spiritual wealth. This might include:
There are countless potential benefits to incorporating a spiritual perspective into your daily life. Studies have found that people who are spiritual or religious tend to live longer, have stronger immune systems, experience better emotional states, and have a reduced risk of disease. It also often comes along with a strong social support system as well as improved fitness and self-confidence.
In short, spiritual wealth can contribute to your health wealth, emotional wealth, and friendship wealth. When you’re spiritually impoverished, it can mean that you’re making nihilistic life choices, not treating yourself and others with the compassion you deserve, and ultimately not viewing life from a perspective of abundance.
Time is money. Time wealth is one of the original reasons I became an entrepreneur in my teenage years. I wanted the freedom to travel, to explore new hobbies, to learn every day at my own pace - I wanted freedom. And time is freedom.
One of the most often overlooked types of wealth is time wealth. Remember, you can always make more money, but you can’t ever make more time.
When you are time rich, you have the freedom to choose how you spend your time and where you spend your time. There are a lot of people that focus primarily on material wealth and fail to recognize just how valuable it is to have ownership over your time. After all, is it really that great to be making $500k a year if it means you’re regularly working 80+ hours a week and otherwise always thinking about your work when you’re not there? Is it really worth it to build up a fatty investment account if it comes at the cost of being able to do what you want when you want?
You need more than money. You need time, too. In fact, you should look for ways to trade any extra money you have for more time.
Of course, I’m not saying that you should never do anything productive and spend all of your time at the beach working on your tan. The point is that one of the greatest potentials of material wealth is that you can afford to choose which tasks you take on yourself and which tasks you delegate to others. Additionally, when you avoid the trap of consumerism and lifestyle creep, you have a lot more power over what you do with your finite time. After all, owning tons of material possessions or living in an extravagant home aren’t just things that cost you money, but they also secretly cost you a lot of time.
It is all too common for people to sacrifice their time in the present in order to build wealth that they expect to spend decades down the road in retirement. However, if you only focus on building material wealth and don’t allow yourself to engage in meaningful activities in the present, a horrible thing can happen.
It can destroy your soul.
The problem with the strategy of sacrificing all of your time in order to make money for the future is that what you do with your life makes you who you are. If you are putting your dreams and purposes on hold until some future date, you might find that you don’t have access to the wealth of potential you believed so strongly in when you started your wealth-building journey.
Time wealth is also something you want to consider when making purchases. There’s nothing wrong with spending money, but you’ll always want to think about whether a purchase frees up your time or takes your time. Consider whether what you’re buying requires a time sacrifice that you think is worth it, and whether the purchase enhances the time that you get to spend with those you love or on projects that are meaningful to you.
Do you know anyone that seems to have it all, but is ultimately missing one of the most important aspects of life? Bouncing around the globe and posting pictures of your excursions on Instagram might seem like an incredible life experience, but what if that means you end up being 40 and fundamentally alone, without a spouse and estranged from the family you were born into?
When you’re younger, you might think that you’re happy to be a bachelor (or ette) forever. It’s important to understand, though, that it’s possible (and likely) that your priorities will change as time passes. Old friends fade into the ether and you realize you don’t have anyone to call when you’ve got exciting news to share or when you’re lonely. Maybe you’re healthy, happy, and rich, but there will likely come a point when you wish you had found someone to share your experiences and life with.
On the other hand, maybe you have been putting your nose to the grindstone for years now to make a living for your family. Your kids have everything they need, your wife gets to be a stay-at-home mom, and you’ve been building up your retirement account so you can escape to Tulum someday once your hair is gray.
At the same time, you hardly get to spend time with your family. You leave on business trips and come back to find that your kids seem a bit older in a way you can’t put your finger on. Your wife resents you for not being around but also seems inconvenienced when you’re home. You are putting everything into financially supporting the family, but you ultimately don’t have a rich relationship with the people closest to you.
Are you sacrificing camping trips with your kids or evening walks with your spouse because you haven’t left any time for this essential aspect of life? Are you missing out on father-daughter dances, baseball games, piano recitals, and s’mores out at the fire pit?
Having a healthy and happy family is a very important part of living a rich life. Maybe it’s just you and your partner and a few dogs or maybe you have ten kids, but either way, it’s important to recognize that it’s very common for people at the end of their life to regret not spending enough time with their family. On the flip side, people rarely regret having spent too much time with those they love.
As one final note, I do want to mention that sometimes the family you’re born into can be abusive, neglectful, and all-around unsupportive of the pursuit of your greatest potential. While this warrants an article all on its own, it’s worth mentioning that family wealth isn’t a one-way street. Even though it’s ultimately ideal to have healthy and rich relationships with your immediate family, in some instances, it’s likely better to separate yourself from abusive and controlling family members.
Just like health wealth, emotional wealth is foundational to achieving any of the other types of wealth in a sustainable way. When you lack emotional wealth (or, as one could say, are emotionally impoverished,) it might manifest itself in the form of:
On the other hand, a person who is filled to the brim with emotional health will have healthy relationships, work-life satisfaction, a sense of purpose in their lives, emotional intelligence, and, often, financial wealth. Emotionally healthy people show themselves love and compassion and have a maturity that emotionally impoverished people simply do not.
When you’re wealthy emotionally, you don’t have to put on a persona to convince other people that you’re worthy of their love or to receive their affirmation.
Rather than running around trying to please everyone, you have a sense of an internal compass that you trust to guide you through life. You believe in yourself, you resist distraction, and you believe in the abundance of your own future.
Sadly, many Americans would fall into the category of emotionally poor. There are likely a lot of reasons that this is the case, and lots of people don’t even realize that they are lacking this type of wealth. In our materialistic, consumeristic society, it’s all too easy to get wrapped up in the cycle of thinking that you need more, more, and more, only to be left financially worse off and riddled with uncomfortable feelings of guilt, anxiety, and emptiness.
Additionally, many careerist paths basically demand that you turn yourself into some kind of robot. When you’re climbing the corporate ladder, you’re simply not supposed to have feelings. You’re not supposed to have bad days, you’re not supposed to let your personal life affect your work, and you’re certainly never supposed to express yourself in a way that could make others uncomfortable or, God forbid, make you seem weird.
There’s a common misconception that being emotionally healthy means that you never feel anger, sadness, or any of those other bummer feelings. In reality, though, the healthiest way to deal with emotions is to acknowledge that they are there and let yourself feel them. If you’re new to the world of not suppressing your emotions, this can feel clunky at first, but, over time, you will find that you reach a level of emotional stability and wellness that you never imagined was possible.
You shouldn’t let your emotions control you, but you also shouldn’t pretend you’re made out of stone.
Deceiving yourself to think that you are free from human emotions will not be a costless endeavor. If your father dies, let yourself cry, for Pete’s sake. If you feel anger, find a quiet place where you can hoot and holler and punch a pillow.
Being emotionally healthy (and wealthy) is about having so much compassion for yourself that you’re able to accept the fact that you have emotions. When you reach that point of self-awareness, your emotions no longer have to control you. Emotions are a part of the human experience, and with a healthy outlook on life and often a lot of self-work, it’s possible to get to a point where your cup is running over with emotional well-being.
Without emotional wealth, you will struggle to succeed in building any of the other types of wealth. Even if you do have an incredible morning day-trading on the stock market, you’ll likely let greed or fear get a hold of you soon enough. Even if you’re in decent physical shape currently, emotional poverty can lead to deteriorating health when you don’t have a supportive, loving view of yourself.
If you can identify yourself as being emotionally poor, all is not lost. Not in the slightest! Though overcoming negative and destructive habits and mindsets can take a lot of hard work and time, it is entirely possible to transform your life by changing your attitude. When you cultivate a deep sense of love for yourself, purpose in the world, and an optimistic forward-looking outlook, you’ll be on the path to building all of the essential types of wealth.
According to a study published by “The Survey Center on American Life,” Americans are lonelier now than they were just thirty years ago. About half of all Americans said that they have less than three close friends, and 12% of people say that they don’t have one single friend.
There are probably a lot of reasons why this is the case– people increasingly socializing on the internet instead of IRL, careerist types bouncing from city to city in order to climb the ladder, etc.
If you want to be wealthy, truly wealthy, though, it’s important to understand just how vital social relationships are to our health. If you need scientific proof of this notion, this study examines how the quantity and quality of a person’s social relationships impact their mental health, physical health, health behavior, and even their mortality risk.
When you have friends, it can help you increase your sense of both purpose and belonging, reduce your stress, make you happier, and encourage you to pick up healthy lifestyle habits. If you experience a rough spot in your life, whether it’s an illness, the loss of a job, a divorce, or the death of someone you love, friends are an essential tool in your arsenal.
That being said, it’s arguably better to have no friends at all than it is to have friends that don’t support your best interests. There are, sadly, plenty of people out there that ultimately don’t want the best for you, and it can be easy to get wrapped up in “friendships” with people that take way more than they give, lie, steal, play manipulative games, or want to keep you engaged in a behavior that is unhealthy for you because it benefits them.
If you’ve made it to adulthood with some quality friends still by your side, that’s great news. Be sure to not let those friendships peter out over time, though, because making friends typically gets more difficult as you get older.
That being said, don’t fret if most of your old friends have fallen by the wayside. While the study I referenced above talks about the importance of quantity and quality, I’d definitely suggest focusing more on the latter. Even having a small handful of people that you feel comfortable being yourself around can be life-changing, and, over time, you’ll find that the relationships get deeper and richer.
In our culture, it seems like there is an all-or-nothing attitude when it comes to wealth. On the one hand, you have people that pursue material wealth in order to support their consumeristic lifestyle and to impress others with their success. On the other hand, there is definitely a faction of people that see the destructive nature of consumerism but are unable to separate that from financial success. They believe that rich people are inherently greedy and evil, and they tend to see the world from the perspective of being the victim in their life story rather than the hero.
I started this blog because I know that it’s possible to build wealth without becoming a mindless consumer. Being rich doesn’t have to mean that you’re materialistic or selfish. On the contrary, it can allow you to have the headspace and time to pursue your purposes.
If you feel like there are problems in society that you can help solve, wealth and maintaining a healthy mindset are key weapons you’ll want to have in your arsenal. If you feel like you have something meaningful to contribute to the world, systematic wealth-building can help you coax your ideas and dreams over the threshold into physical reality.
So, why am I telling you all this? I’ve learned a lot of lessons the hard way in my journey to wealth and I want to help others recognize the different types of wealth that they should cultivate and nurture in their own lives. If you’re curious, you can learn more about me and my projects here.
If you’re able to build a foundation of emotional, spiritual, social, and health wealth, you are on the right track to living a purpose-driven life. Over time, it becomes easier and easier to see that material wealth is not an end in itself, but rather an incredibly powerful tool that you can use to live a productive, meaningful, and fulfilling life.
A bill banning catalog and internet sales of tobacco - including premium cigars - just passed subcommittee in the House of Representatives. The bill also raises the smoking age to 21 for everyone, including military members.
That this even passed the subcommittee shows just how deranged and pathetic the do-gooder, nanny-state weaklings in congress really are.
We've become a nation of whining children, incapable of dealing with the fact that liberty means having the option to splurge on ourselves when we decide.
Sometimes that means fried foods, sometimes that means desserts, sometimes that means a large sugary drink at the theater, and sometimes that means some premium tobacco.
That premium cigars are included in this anti-smoking garbage means it's NOT about health.
Premium cigars are created from 100% tobacco leaves, hand-crafted following centuries of tradition, and are generally used to mark moments of celebration, to bond with friends, or just to live the good life.
Unlike cigarettes, premium cigars aren't inhaled, aren't chain smoked, and in moderation have little-to-no negative impact on one's health.
In fact, most life insurance companies explicitly protect the right of the insured to smoke an occasional cigar - some even allow multiple smokes per month.
Again, it's not about health. But even if it was, we still shouldn't care because we're adults and should have the right to make adult decisions - like how much we eat, how much we drink, and how we live our lives in general.
That this bill also raises the smoking age for MILITARY MEMBERS to the age of 21 is beyond asinine. If you're old enough to die in Afghanistan, then you're old enough to smoke a Davidoff with me before you're shipped out.
This is just another step in the never-ending march of a decaying society towards permanent adolescence. I don't want any part.
I’m a buyer of gold and silver, but I take a different approach than most metals investors.
I don’t predict soaring gold prices - even while I buy more gold and silver every single week.
In fact, while I was acquiring large quantities of precious metals, I wrote a much-ridiculed article expressing caution over gold prices - at the peak of the gold bull market.
While everyone else was drunk on perpetually increasing gold prices, I wrote that gold was ‘expensive’ and would ‘likely’ drop ‘dramatically’ in price. Even more provocatively, I published the article on a popular Austrian economics website, which was rabidly pro-gold.
But I got the last laugh, not because I’m some kind of Nostradamus, but because following cautious, conservative principles works, over time.
Whenever you see someone who makes radical predictions be on the lookout.
Radical predictions are a byproduct of radicalism, and radicalism does not work. Just ask the people who lost their savings with bitcoin, the tech bubble of the late 1990s, real estate in 2007, and pretty much every other bubble in history.
The universe rewards conservatives, both politically and economically.
Conservatism is more than just a partisan buzzword. It’s a strategic philosophy that emphasizes caution, skepticism, realism, and historical patterns. Conservative investors are nearly always going to outperform penny stock investors, bitcoin speculators, and pretty much anyone else who is trying to get rich by gambling on a dramatic prediction.
In 2011, when gold prices peaked, I wrote an article for the Mises Institute of Canada, explaining that gold was expensive and that it was likely that the market would “dramatically overcorrect, meaning gold will essentially become cheap again.”
The price of gold peaked… that week. And it’s been dropping pretty much ever since.
If you look at the comments on the article, you’ll see a collection of people who were confused. They let their oversimplified libertarian radicalism cloud their ability to understand gold - and they believed that the only possible direction for gold prices was up.
That said, I did NOT predict the crash with any kind of time frame. I also didn’t say it was inevitable - just that it was “more likely” that it would “probably dramatically overcorrect.”
The reason I emphasize this is that while I’ve made a lot of money in my life being right about niches and markets, I never assume that something must happen. Predictions are for suckers.
The future is largely unpredictable, at least at any level beyond vague trends. This means that finding opportunity means more than looking for the most obvious play.
Just because we can identify major trends doesn’t mean we can translate that knowledge into actionable specifics. Life isn’t that simple.
As John Maynard Keynes once wrote, “The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.”
Conservatism isn’t about fearing radicalism. It’s simply recognizing that the universe is a fuzzy, difficult-to-understand place. Good strategy requires a healthy dose of humility and realism.
When it comes to building wealth and taking part in long-term trends, here’s how to do it:
How does gold fit in to this? Gold shouldn’t really be seen as an investment. It should be seen as an insurance policy that, if everything goes well, will lose money over time. It’s like buying a life insurance policy on a family member - you don’t win if you make money. It means something horrific occured. If gold becomes the best asset I own, it means that hell has been unleashed.
Bonus: Follow the clipper-ship strategy. I’ll be writing more about this in the future. It’s one of the most powerful ways to make money in nearly any market. Rather than trying to strike gold during a gold rush, you sell shovels to the miners.
Conservative strategy is good strategy.
When you make the right decisions, you don’t have to look for radical predictions to gamble on - you don't need the gamble at all. Cautious, skeptical, humble strategies always win out over time.
Because I use dollar-cost averaging and have a diversified portfolio and a high rate of savings, I’m unlikely to find myself in the desperate position of being close to retirement age and gambling on penny stocks because I didn’t save enough and am looking for a big payout to make up for lost time.
Legendary corporate strategist Michael Porter wrote: “The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.”
But how do you make the right choices? Ultimately, it’s all about your mental framework. Making caution an important part of your investing strategy focuses your attention on what not to do.
That makes all the difference.
Consumerism is the ultimate scam: it never delivers on the implied promise of emotional fulfillment. It's an extremely contagious, nearly incurable cultural disease - the more you expect, the more you try to achieve that expectation, then the higher your consumption standards become. Achieving your consumption goals feel like a failure.
It's the philosophy of moving targets, trading real life for a never-ending, moving target that cannot be achieved, quenched, or fulfilled - by nature.
Consumerism isn't wanting a new phone - it's always wanting a newer phone.
Falling for consumerism begins innocently: wanting to keep up with one's social peers. Eventually, you'll find yourself risking the lives of real families so you can text-and-drive to save 5 seconds, pissed off at the high-school kid because you have mustard instead of ketchup on your sandwich, giving up spending time loving your wife because you feel she wants a bigger house more than your precious time.
This is one reason, among many, that I choose to be part of the stealthy wealthy, which is a movement of people who don't just blow their money on consumerism once they earn it.
Almost everyone rejects consumerism in theory, but in application, it's killing us socially, financially, culturally, and emotionally.
Consumerism is the orphan maker, leading to generations of children growing up with new toys but absent, distracted parents.
Consumerism is the financial annihilator, leading to financial decisions being based on spending money rather than achieving personal, family, and social goals.
Consumerism is the great culture killer, obliterating authentic cultural identity with a mindless, vague existence based on what one consumes rather than who one is.
Consumerism is the emotional executioner, directly and completely robbing people of any sense of being able to enjoy "now." We trade fulfillment for the gnawing desire for more petty consumption as a lifestyle.
Being emotionally tied to unachievable goals leads to perpetual feelings of anxiety, gnawing-but-vague regret, and an uncanny feeling that one is wasting one's life. Consumerism isn't just unhealthy - it's evil.
I've never seen a consumption-obsessed person finally hit the lifestyle that allows them to relax. Because it's not about any material, set goal. It's about the cultural obsession with more, the perpetually moving target itself.
If anything, the more one 'wins' at consumerism, the more devastating the consequences. There aren't enough fancy new coffee shops in the world to make up for a thirsty soul that can't be quenched. And no, this isn't a swipe against fancy coffee shops.
Don't confuse consumerism with markets or capitalism. Capital is important, and markets are vital, but consumerism is a different animal. Consumerism is the idea that you behave only for a transactional gain - that life is a series of accounting decisions.
If you focus on consumption, then business success won't help you - it'll destroy you. It'll lock you into a new lifestyle like a slave shackled to a luxury galley ship. That lifestyle isn't success - it's your comfy hell on earth.
I think people know something is wrong. The Internet is speeding up our strengths and weaknesses - which includes consumerism going off the rails in new life-ruining speed.
There are plenty of competing potential alternatives to consumption as a religion. I won't go into much detail here, but the simplest I've found could be seen as character-based producerism: I only consume what I need and what I symbolically appreciate because of its reflection of my values.
If I have a nice cigar in my smoking room, it's not because I always need a new, better cigar. It's because I am rewarding myself to make a symbolic statement about my own production in other areas. It's about who I am as a person. That means even if the cigar ends up being too dry or poorly constructed, it won't be upsetting - the symbolism will work.
When I bought my Cadillac CTS-V, it wasn't because I always need the latest and greatest new car. It was because I knew what it stood for: hard work, innovation, and finally achieving a set financial goal. A few months ago, it was accidentally scratched - it didn't bother me because the car wasn't the goal. Being a good man was. The distinction is one most will always miss.
Perspective - focusing on who one is and what things mean - is the simplest antidote for consumerism of which I'm aware.
You don't have to be just like everyone else. You can be more productive, more stealthy about your income, and more balanced. To learn more, check out my about page and my essays page.
It's tempting to see a major drop in the stock market and believe that you have enough information to make a fast profit.
Right before I started writing this article, the stock market dropped well over 4%, leading to social media exploding with small-time investors saying things like, "Buy the dip!"
It sounds like sound advice. If anything, it almost sounds obvious.
After all, if you buy when stocks dip, that should, if you're guesstimating things correctly, mean that you're getting stocks just like normal over time - but at a slightly better deal.
This makes you more money, right? If stocks were a good investment yesterday, and today they're 4% cheaper, then you're just grabbing a 4% better deal, right?
Not quite.
In fact, this tempting approach is statistically more likely to cost you than earn extra. In fact, since investors started saying "buy the dip", stocks are down another 4% - and we could be on the verge of a substantial correction.
Fundamentally, "buy the dip" is a bad strategy based on an economic illusion.
As they say, "If it's too good to be true..."
"Buy the dip" has a lot of built-in assumptions that you can't statistically assume over time without getting seriously burned.
Let's break them down:
The ideas discussed immediately above are the basic assumptions of the "buy the dip" strategy. They might seem innocent but they can literally wipe out decades of savings because of several extremely important economic principles.
Let's look at the main principle that shatters these bad assumptions: the efficient market hypothesis.
Even if you find this to be mind-numbingly boring (most people would agree that it is), if you have any desire to save for retirement or find almost any level of financial independence, it's an idea you need to understand as much as possible.
This is the kind of financial and economic concept that every high-school student and college student should be deeply familiar with before they graduate. As I've written before, teaching financial concepts like this would change society completely. Unfortunately, the ideas are largely ignored.
Think of articles like this as the broccoli of self-help content. They're not fun to consume but you'll be better off if you do.
So grab a cup of coffee or tea, read the article, and feel free to contact me to discuss it further - or browse around the Internet to read some more. It's important and about way more than just "buy the dip" analysis.
Let's back up a bit.
To understand why you can't beat the market with tactics like the ones discussed above, we need to understand a concept called the "efficient market hypothesis (EMH)."
Effectively, the efficient market hypothesis (EMH) is the idea that asset prices fully "account" for all "known" information.
Without getting lost in the weeds, the hypothesis claims that, roughly, the market is already accounting for everything we know about the market.
In other words, if you think a downturn is coming, the market is already priced for what it believes is the likelihood of one - so gambling on a future bear market will probably not make money, because the market has already accounted for that prediction as well.
There's a reason Google is priced higher than a failing grocery store chain. The market is already pricing in the gamble that Google has better long-term growth likelihood than the failing grocery chain, to put it simply.
This notion of the market already pricing predictions is confusing to people.
Most tend to think that investing is about picking winners more often than picking losers. This isn't remotely true.
In fact, this isn't true any more than the idea that sports gambling is about just picking winners - if you pick winners of football matches 75% of the time, you will probably still lose money because a bunch of other gamblers made those same predictions - meaning the odds aren't always going to be 50-50. If anything, after fees, you're effectively going to almost always lose money gambling over time.
The same thing goes for stocks. You think Coca-Cola is a good bet? So do billions and billions of investor dollars. You think Google is a good bet? So do billions and billions of investor dollars.
Market prices reflect market predictions, effectively. So whenever you are gambling on the basis of a prediction you are making, so are all of the other people buying, selling, holding - or considering those things - that asset.
It's not enough to get a prediction right. There's a lot more going on. That simplistic "good prediction" understanding of investing is tempting and destructive.
No one person or organization decides what something is priced in the market. The stock market, in particular, is just a large collection of people buying and selling identical assets to other investors via bidding.
This means that prices simply reflect whatever supply and demand for the priced asset reflect at the time - if people suddenly stop selling, prices might go up - assuming there's the same number of people trying to buy with the same intensity as before.
This means that prices go up and down for individual assets on the basis of the investors trying to buy, hold, or sell the assets. So the prices reflect the desires being acted upon by the investors - market prices respond to what all of the investors think they are worth.
This understanding that markets reflect the beliefs of huge number of investors is important. Markets don't reflect random people or the average investor - they reflect the applied beliefs of investors with the most money being gambled on the asset, as well. The more exposure to the asset one has, the more one's acted-upon beliefs impact its price.
Market prices reflect what investors know about the market. Information being released impacts prices. Prices reflect known information - not just information, but known information. Or, more technically (and philosophically accurate, for lack of better word), prices reflect believed information.
This makes markets brutal, powerful, and very fast responders to events, analysis, and the learned experience of the most powerful investors. In other words, markets are elaborate social pricing machines based on known information about the assets in question.
Put simply, prices are the market's reflection of the known information about the asset at that particular time. This is important. If anything, understanding this is key to understanding everything else discussed on this page.
As information continues to spread faster and faster with innovations like the Internet, being able to have an "information edge" becomes increasingly difficult to the point of being impossible.
It would have been easier to outperform the stock market in 1940 than it is in 2018. Information simply spreads too fast and is too widely available to beat everyone else. Having an information advantage is difficult when insider trading is illegal and Indonesian street vendors have more information than the Library of Alexandria in their pocket computers.
Even Benjamin Graham, the father of value investing, (which Warren Buffet based his life work on), eventually came to concede to the efficiency of public markets. He wrote in 1976, literally 42 years ago and well before the Internet made things worse:
“I am no longer an advocate of elaborate techniques of security analysis in order to find superior value opportunities. This was a rewarding activity, say, 40 years ago, when our textbook "Graham and Dodd" was first published; but the situation has changed a great deal since then. In the old days any well-trained security analyst could do a good professional job of selecting undervalued issues through detailed studies; but in the light of the enormous amount of research now being carried on, I doubt whether in most cases such extensive efforts will generate sufficiently superior selections to justify their cost. To that very limited extent I'm on the side of the "efficient market" school of thought now generally accepted by the professors.”
If Graham thought it was tough then, he would have been a vigorous supporter of the efficient market hypothesis now. As everyone should be.
Understanding markets as nothing more than an incredibly massive, incredibly comprehensive series of pricing mechanisms is the first step towards financial humility.
People who misunderstand the EMH almost always misunderstand the first step: the market is just a big pricing machine accounting for nearly all known information. So unless you have some massive, massive information advantage (like insider trading, or some kind of elaborate expertise in a particular industry mixed with the ability to understand utterly in-depth financial valuations), you won't outperform the market. Period.
So you won't do better if you buy the dip than if you don't. You won't do better if you refuse to invest during a dip. You won't do better no matter what you do - not risk-adjusted.
This doesn't mean you're helpless. Make sure to read the end of this article if you'd like to skip to the more optimistic interpretation of these concepts.
You and I aren't nearly as smart as we'd like to be. Our comically tiny ability to comprehend the Universe pales in comparison to countless investors using countless unique angles coming together in the total capital markets - with almost everyone looking for the slightest advantage.
You can't beat the stock market, risk-adjusted.
Even if you predict all kinds of things correctly, that's not the point - you'll eventually get a couple wrong and those will ruin your numbers - putting you back where you started, or worse. If you do get lucky, you didn't get lucky on a risk-adjusted level - meaning, well, you were lucky, not better informed than the market at large.
And getting lucky isn't the same thing as having a superior strategy.
Studies repeatedly confirm this EMH framework. So do surveys. So does, well, almost all known evidence. And, it's even getting worse.
This bleak conclusion makes sense - after all, the market is nothing more than a pricing machine, so the more efficient (ie, the more informed the market is - which during the Information Age is going to be pretty damned informed) the market, the less likely you are to beat it.
For anyone keeping score on how well information spreads these days, you have effectively no chance of beating the market, risk-adjusted. Period. Sorry. End of story.
'Buy the dip' sounds good, but like I wrote earlier, it's based on some assumptions that don't make risk-adjusted sense. The biggest one is that you're assuming the dip isn't the beginning of a crash. Imagine if instead of "buy the dip" we said, "buy the stocks right before the bear market wipes you out for about 10 years." Doesn't sounds as clever, does it?
Of course, almost never will the dip end up a bear market. Nine times out of ten, you'll avoid that. But it's that one out of ten that wipes out your statistical advantage. That's the part that confuses people. You're not trying to usually beat the market - you're trying to beat the market on a risk-adjusted level - which is economically impossible.
The same concept applies to the other assumption: the notion that if you can "buy the dip" then you're buying it with resources that supposedly you had access to beforehand, otherwise you would just say "buy" and not "buy the dip." The reference to taking advantage of a specific opportunity in the market and not just buying consistently suggests you've been sitting on the money.
If you sit on money you want to invest in public markets at some point because you want to outperform it, you're missing the economic point - you're never going to perform better sitting on the sides. Think about how many people thought the market was "too" expensive a couple of years ago - they've lost an incredible amount of wealth because of that view.
I spent a lot of time writing about these concepts, but i want to make sure what I'm saying isn't misunderstood as another set of arguments. Here's a quick clarification. I'm not saying anything bolded in the section below:
Avoiding mistakes is 99% of investing. But enough about the bad news. Let's look at some interesting applications of these ideas that will make you money.
Now here's the cool part. You can invest better than almost every financial genius on earth in a couple of surprisingly simple steps.
You can invest better than the billionaires, the stock-market gurus, the bankers, the college endowment investment managers, the financial planners - you can outperform almost all of them over time.
The way is simple. They're all trying to outperform the market. This, on average, causes nearly every last blasted one of them to dramatically underperform the market for the reasons explained above.
So if you just hook up your portfolio to track the market as cheaply and as consistently as possible, you'll outperform the experts - by default.
All you have to do:
Do this and you'll outperform almost every mutual fund on earth over time. You'll outperform almost every equity hedge fund. You'll outperform almost every individual investor.
And you'll do it because of your humility.
Vanguard is an organization that exists so that any 'profits' get passed back to the funds themselves, meaning they are as low fee as is legally and economically possible - in general. Their index funds just try to not beat the market - they're based on the assumption that the market is essentially always priced the best possible way based on all known info.
And it works. Vanguard slaughters the competition easily. It's almost embarrassing for the experts. I'll be writing about this more down the road. Make sure to sign up for my newsletter if you'd like to read more. It's boring, but it's powerful because it's true.
Don't try to buy the dip. Don't try to make financial gambles on the basis of your market predictions. Build a simple portfolio like the one described above. Don't fight the market - let it carry you itself.
Buy the market regularly regardless of the news. Sometimes, you'll buy while the market is rising. Sometimes, you'll buy while the market is falling. Sometimes, you'll buy while the market is flat. Regardless, over time, your portfolio will get better, and your returns stronger.
Most importantly, perhaps: use economic literacy to avoid big mistakes that you'll regret for the rest of your life.
If you're looking for a legitimate excuse on which to blame everything going wrong in your life, I've got some great news: there's definitely a legitimate excuse for your situation.
In fact, I've never met a person yet who didn't have at least a few major external reasons they weren't wherever they wanted to be with their finances, health, fitness, and/or relationships.
I'm serious. Almost everyone I know has perpetual, legitimate excuses on hand useful for rationalizing every missed goal, every dropped ball, and every small flaw in their life. Excuses on tap.
Almost everyone has major areas outside of their control which consumes their time, energy, and mental bandwidth on such a level that using those areas as excuses would be honest, understandable, and even respectable. Let's review a few common ones.
Here are some extremely common excuses that you might have access to right now:
These are just the major excuses. Smaller ones are even more plentiful and just as legitimate.
Late for something? There was someone in front of you going too slowly. Miss a morning deadline? Your computer was giving you problems for a full 20 minutes. Ignoring the emotional needs of your significant other? They were rude earlier, and it's drastically easier to just give them the silent treatment like you were raised. Going into debt every month? Eating out a few times a week is not unreasonable.
If you have a somewhat normal life, then you're probably going to have a couple of mental health issues, a couple of kids, an emotionally needy spouse, and a lack of money. These are major excuses that, if you use them, nobody will blame you for the problems they will cause. If anything, your friends will bring them up to help you rationalize things whenever life goes south.
Heck, if you called me right now and told me your situation, I'd probably even go along with the excuses. They're legit. You have tons of them. Everyone will agree.
This is why the whole social justice movement is growing so quickly with young people. Because they're right about the oppression, kind of. This is true even on the smaller level we're talking about. In almost every negative situation, something else - outside of your direct control - is causing the problem on a major, fundamental level.
In fact, the general narrative behind excuses is all wrong. Most people believe that the default is things going correctly and that when something bad happens, that's the unknown variable that caused things to go south - that's why it's the excuse. Excuses are seen as exceptional events outside of one's control.
The truth is the opposite. In the same way, some people see "privilege" everywhere, the other side of that coin is to see legitimate excuses everywhere. Bad things happen to you constantly for legitimate reasons outside of your control.
That said, the purpose of this article isn't what it might look like right now. In fact, the real lesson is the opposite of how most people take these lessons.
Obstacles are inevitable, but excuses aren't.
When something goes poorly and you have the choice to blame the external cause or find some flaw or area of potential improvement with yourself, err on the side of choosing yourself - while also learning about the external source as well.
This puts you in a perpetual position of learning from failure rather than a cycle of repeating failure.
There is no strategic value in excuses - even legitimate excuses. There is a strategic value in understanding your disadvantages. Understanding your disadvantages is good, but an excuse is when you reject understanding the disadvantage in favor of surrendering your personal narrative to the disadvantage.
That distinction is the difference between an obstacle being a problem you overcome or the defining characteristic of your ruined, wasted life.
Think of your daily life like a general who surveys a potential battlefield: only a fool would ignore the terrain, but only a bad general would see the terrain as either good or bad without considering his options for navigating said terrain. You're the general of your life. So act like it.
An excuse is when someone surrenders their entire identity of being a strong, independent, strategic human being in exchange for telling their boss someone was driving slightly slower than normal in front of them. Excuses are pathetic, strategically useless, and are, ironically, a major personal flaw that causes major life harm.
This bears emphasis: excuses - surrendering to legitimate obstacles - is a reflection of your flaw. That means that the wrong mentality takes the understandable blame and shifts it from that external cause and points it right back at you: the foolish general.
It's important to understand the obstacles you face, yes. But that's not the same as surrendering to them and believing that those obstacles are the unmovable, unchangeable catalysts of the inevitable undesired outcome.
Scroll up and look at that list of excuses. Now, look at it as a list of possible disadvantages that one can overcome. Now one's entire outlook on life shifts drastically. You become more powerful when you realize you have the power in the first place.
The point of this article isn't to somehow suggest that you should ignore when you are, in fact, being oppressed. The concepts described don't mean you shouldn't care about things like unequal pay, abusive parents, or any other situations where you truly are being victimized. That's not the point at all.
It's also not the point of this article to shame you for not "overcoming" every situation. I wouldn't have been as successful if I'd grown up as a black female in 1930s Alabama. Some things are beyond our control. That's just a fact.
It's not a mental "trick" to suggest people should blame themselves over situations for which they aren't responsible. Sometimes structural, and macro changes are necessary.
"Victim blaming" and "blame yourself first" aren't remotely connected.
In "victim-blaming", you blame the innocent person for the actions of the guilty - and entrench the problem.
In "blame yourself first", you seek to understand the catalysts of the unwanted final result, and then act to minimize the unwanted final result as much as possible - and prevent it from happening again.
That's why it's "blame yourself first" and not "blame yourself only."
If you're only partly to blame, focus on what can be done on your end to change the outcome. But don't ignore the problems caused by external sources - and don't accept blame for what is not within your control.
Of course, if you aren't to blame at all, then don't blame yourself at all. Sometimes, there's nothing we can do and we can't fix a broken situation. These ideas are about empowering you, not enslaving you to unjust blame.
Let's look at a real-world example.
If you're the CEO of a company and someone running a department makes a series of horrible decisions that severely damages their department, then you should immediately figure out what you could have done to prevent the problem, what you did to cause the problem - if anything - and what you can do to minimize the current damage.
You begin by asking yourself the following questions:
That might mean realizing that you made a mistake in hiring for the position. It might mean you didn't put the right processes in place. It might mean you should have communicated better with the department head. It might mean many things.
What it shouldn't mean is that you should just blame the department head and ignore all culpability - direct or indirect. Blame yourself first weaponizes the fact that you can only, in the end, control your own decisions - and that's where the brunt of your analysis should be for fixing problems.
Even when someone else is to blame, "blame yourself first" results in a more comprehensive, total awareness of what occurred and how to minimize the damage.
In business, this really is an effective "hack" for almost every situation.
An excuse is when someone driving slow made you late for work. An obstacle is when someone drove slow in front of you - but your day was so organized that you still made the deadline because you (almost) always have the ability to arrive a little early through good planning.
In plain English: just because there's an external cause for something negative in your life, that doesn't mean that you don't have options for getting around that cause - even if the solution might seem "extreme" to others.
Just because you're poor doesn't mean you have to stay poor. Just because you're poor doesn't mean you can't compete against wealthier people. Just because you're poor doesn't mean you can't use that experience as a leverage point when dealing with others.
Just because you didn't have a father doesn't mean you have to have the "daddy issues" of someone who didn't have a father - sometimes, those who were fatherless become the best fathers because they trained themselves to use that pain and emotional vacuum as an energy source.
Sometimes, your biggest disadvantages and obstacles can become your biggest advantages and strengths. But you have to blame yourself first in order to rule over your life well. This is the beginning of a good personal strategy.
With a good personal strategy, even our weaknesses become untraditional advantages.
A fundamental part of a high-school education in America should involve understanding personal finance, the true cost of credit, and how delaying consumption for a few years can be the difference between financial hardship and an early retirement.
I don't mean a class or two of textbook information about how credit works. I mean actually teaching the principles of financial discipline.
We need a producer society focused on creating value - not a consumer society focused on taking as much as possible. Think: thrift and productivity as a culture.
Consumerism has become one of the most destructive quasi-religious elements of modern culture. People identify themselves on the basis of what they consume - not what they do or who they are.
That's why the following should be taught as a comprehensive part of high-school - and heck, college - education. Not just a single class, but as a fundamental approach to finance whenever it comes up, referenced throughout curriculum, branding, and materials.
For example, here are some thoughts that could be developed either through in-depth explanations or specific tutorials and hands-on guidance:
Building a culture of thrift is possible, but it requires focusing on just that - culture. Finance isn't just about math. People have to begin, as early as possible, to understand that not all consumption is "reasonable." We should view consumption with suspicion.
I say this as someone who was a millionaire for years before I bought a new vehicle. I live in a small house that I renovated. My biggest luxury is an occasional $15 cigar. This doesn't mean I don't live well - I live like a king. I just don't mindlessly consume.
The crazy thing is that basic personal finance teaches us to reject consumerism and ironically helps us achieve a much better lifestyle. Rather than spending money on things we don't need, we find freedom - and more money down the road to spend on experiences and a good life.
Good personal finance turns money around so that rather than us being enslaved by the economic system, we're using the economic system to maximize our own options, happiness, and legacy. It's incredibly powerful.
Consumerism is one of the most destructive forces in modern society. It takes potentially free people and enslaves them to empty consumption, constantly increasing their standards for what they believe "normal" people should be able to consume. The end result is an impoverished society... surrounded by material wealth.
Good finance is critical to a good life. That's why so many philosophies - from the book of Proverbs to Stoic thought - emphasize contentment, self-control as something to practice like any other skill, and a lifestyle of discipline.
What better place to develop a strong culture than educational institutions? What use is an educational institution that doesn't educate on the fundamental ideas, concepts, and identities that are key to every other part of society's prosperity?
Imagine every high school student becoming intimately familiar with these concepts. It would transform the world.
Mark Zuckerberg has announced that he wants to shift Facebook away from "passive" content to more active, "engaging" content. In other words, your Facebook newsfeed will soon replace the content that you might merely click on with content that you and your friends are more likely to engage with.
In other words, the pages that post 30 times per day hoping they can monopolize the newsfeeds of their "readers" will be penalized. Facebook traffic is going to shift heavily to brands that are dramatically more engaging.
Of course, this transformation has led to instant backlash from a wide variety of internet publishers -- probably because they don't really understand what Mark was saying, why he said it, or what the consequences of Facebook's easy-to-manipulate passive content ecosystem have been so far.
I founded one of the most popular political websites in the world. It began with an important mission: speaking truth to power by giving a voice to the forgotten middle class.
In the past, I wrote headlines for articles that reached over 15,000,000 users on Facebook. From a single posting. On a single page.
I've written articles that have been read by millions and millions of people from Facebook. No, I don't mean "seen" by millions of people. I mean millions of people clicked on the actual link and read the message crafted to influence their political interpretation of the world.
My site's style focused on the sizzling elements of stories that the Wall Street Journal and even Fox News didn’t want to cover. It was a perfect marriage with Facebook's algorithm because it ignored branding and focused on whether users would click on stories.
It was good storytelling. It was fun. And it worked frighteningly well.
Realistically, my personal headlines and articles had drastically more reach than the entire "Russian interference" scandal covered by mainstream outlets like the New York Times. So when it comes to the algorithm change and the implications, I'm speaking from the position of someone who has utilized this algorithm more than almost anyone on earth.
Still, the ecosystem that allowed what I was able to do is now mostly gone - and that's a good thing.
Visionless people look for consistency regardless of context. Some want the ecosystem that existed 4-5 years ago to be all that exists going forward. That's disturbingly short-sighted.
In the past, alternative media needed a huge boost to shake up the narrative. Now we're in a weird place where those same alternative media brands acquired too much power, and we need to change things again.
I now run the Conservative Institute, a very different project. It seeks to provide reliable, trustworthy news for conservatives in an era where dishonesty has become a fundamental pillar of the right-wing media ecosystem. The goal of CI content is not to "go viral" - it's to simply tell the truth. Accuracy is the primary goal, come what may.
We don't defend Trump when he's wrong. We don't attack liberals when they're right. We only report what we believe to be important stories that should circulate on the right wing - and everywhere. A typical article will link to sources like the New York Times, federal agencies, and PDFs of actual studies.
Now, Facebook seems to be responding to the same basic issues that CI was built to combat: a social media ecosystem that replaced high-quality, investigative journalism with shallow "passive" content mostly ripped quickly from other - often just as shallow - sources.
To better understand what's happening, let's look at the following basic concepts that provide context for the Facebook change.
Never in the history of the world was it so easy to reach so many people with a message.
I know people who had no experience in marketing, journalism, research, or much of anything else, reach thousands of people with low-quality stories mostly lifted from other sources.
In fact, ripping off my projects was a pretty easy way for someone with no talent or instincts to make a healthy six-figure income. It happened frequently.
That entire system was incredibly powerful for shaking things up. Now, we're in a different situation - the balance has shifted from the Associated Press, NBC, and local newspapers to an army of smaller sites that often spread misinformation, nasty accusations, or outright lies. Another way to describe it? Fake news.
The algorithms that decided how many people would see content didn't account for "accuracy" at all. Who cares if a fake story goes viral? It was getting the clicks and shares it needed to get more and more traffic on Facebook. That's a massive design flaw, especially when alternative media became so powerful.
This was a temporary hiccup in world history. "Alternative" and "mainstream" media aren't the future - quality media is, regardless of where on the political spectrum it may fall.
Everyone has an ignorant family member known for accidentally sharing fake news stories they didn't verify. The idea that a global media distribution system should give that person just as much power as someone who isn't as gullible is absurd.
I don't mean this in a condescending manner at all. I'm ignorant of many things just like you are. But many people simply don't have the time or expertise in media and geopolitics to know what source should be considered "trustworthy" and what source is taking them for a ride.
If anything, this system isn’t even fair to the person falling for the fake news - the distribution system should minimize the lies that show up in that person's newsfeed as well.
Some will huff and puff over what I just said, pretending they deeply care about ignorant people having the right to easy access to fake and misleading news. The problem is that this is mostly bad-faith virtue signaling.
Let me be blunt: passive-content farms/publishers don't respect their audiences. They often laugh at them. It’s easy to get rich off of people who don’t know any better.
Those market incentives are largely gone, and that's a wonderful thing.
"Passive" content is content that requires no investment from the reader. You don't have to have any kind of relationship with the brand or the content. It's content that happens to be in your feed, and you just may find it interesting enough to click on and read without comment - or not. Most of the content in your newsfeed is like this.
You probably have no emotional connection to the brand and if you click on the story, you may skim it or watch some video, and then exit out and never think about it again. No comments, no shares, no personal connection - nothing. It's passive content.
"Passive content" is where fake news comes from. It's the ecosystem that allows fake news to flourish. It's the system built on a series of economic incentives that allow bad faith publishers to make money manipulating you for fun and profit.
There are a few brands that manage to engage me with almost all of their content; Tim Ferris, Ryan Holiday, Bloomberg, The Art of Manliness, etc. I engage with their community, share their links to my personal page, and have a connection to the brands themselves. They don't just happen to show up on my feed and trick me into clicking.
I have a deep appreciation of the personalities behind the content. That's vital. That's good. And that's the future.
If your business model is based on easy traffic from one website, that's your problem, not Facebook's problem.
As the founder of Axios said to the Wall Street Journal:
"Facebook is a public company that controls its own decisions... Publishers should do the same damn thing."
This isn't new. Copyblogger, (a resource any content marketer should see as kind of like a regularly updated Bible), wrote years ago:
"If you're relying on Facebook or Google to bring in all of your new customers, you're sharecropping. You’re hoping the landlord will continue to like you and support your business, but the fact is, the landlord has no idea who you are and doesn’t actually care."
The future will still have plenty of content. The future will still have plenty of news. But it won't be low-quality content lifted from other sources without any attempt at providing extra value like additional context, additional sources, or additional facts.
The future belongs to quality publishers with strong brands and vibrant communities. This is the way it's been for centuries - and this is the way it will continue to be for centuries more.
If Facebook's change is going to harm your business, then discover higher-quality, more long-term oriented workarounds. Build an online "TV" show. Launch a podcast. Write a book. Go to other platforms. But don't blame Facebook for not allowing you cheap access to a gravy train.
The Clipper Ship Strategy: to make money during a gold rush, focus on supplying a secondary demand created by a primary boom. Chances are, it'll have drastically less competition while being just as lucrative.
Cryptocurrencies have a similar situation unfolding. Everyone is trying to get rich buying the 'coins' in order to sell them to someone else later. This is extremely risky, and just as many people will get wiped out as will make money. It's one thing to buy bitcoins if you're worried about a paradigm shift (like I described in my 2013 article on Seeking Alpha). But it's another thing to buy Bitcoins hoping it's your personal gold rush.
Trying to strike gold - or its digital equivalence - is for suckers or extremely skilled speculators. Chances are, you're not one of the latter.
Here's the real way people are making money with cryptos:
Either way, whenever you see a gold rush, don't fall for the trap. Don't go for the bait. Don't become a miner. Find a way to build wealth by looking for the second opportunity - it's probably being overlooked by others and there's more room to grow and profit.
When Caesar ordered that statues in honor of Pompey be restored after they'd been torn down, Cicero wisely informed him, "You have restored Pompey's statues, but you have made your own secure."
In other words, because Caesar acknowledged that his enemy still deserved his statues to be established, he wasn't weakening his position or legacy at all. If anything, it was a step towards ensuring that even his enemies would acknowledge him for well-earned accolades.
In the same way, if a certain president made a comment about a controversial topic that I agreed with, I would intentionally make it clear that I understood his point and agreed with it. Not because I am now in agreement with everything he says, but because such an approach pays dividends in the opposite direction should the shoe be on the other foot, in other words.
A collapse in good faith when it comes to appreciating goodness even in our enemies will lead to extreme political division and eventual massive fallout. For example, just take a look around the world now. Radicalism and pettiness go together.
Facebook's "trending" news section currently includes a statement by Alibaba founder and CEO Jack Ma. The soundbite is going viral.
Ma suggested, much to the dismay of business leaders around the planet, that fake goods from China are actually better than the real products.
Most are laughing at Ma, but I think he's making a great point and it's part of a multi-trillion dollar disruption going on in manufacturing and physical product marketing.
What Jack Ma Actually Said
Jack Ma was being questioned about all of the endless fake and counterfeit and "knock off" products that are for sale in bulk on Alibaba.com, a website that is essentially an Amazon.com for people looking to buy products to sell through repackaging.
Here's what Ma actually said:
"The problem is that the fake products today, they make better quality, better prices than the real products, the real names. It's not the fake products that destroy them, it's the new business models."
This isn't nearly as bad as it's being made out to be. It's also not wrong, in many cases. Let's do a quick review of some facts most people don't understand.
2 Facts to Keep in Mind
Jack Ma has a front-seat view of some massive economic shifts going on right now. He understands two very important facts:
If you buy a knock off watch, there's a fairly good chance it's made at the same factory as the big name brands - it just doesn't have the same brand.
This is especially true for easy to make products. Private labeling as an industry is changing how people view products.
That's why some companies, like the app Wish, are based on getting cheap private labeled products into the hands of consumers - they can be just a fraction of the cost, but have the same qualities as the name brand.
The above point touches on something that is difficult to wrap one's mind around at first: branding is largely an illusion.
If a small firm makes a product with identical quality as Apple, most people will think the apple product is higher quality because they believe in the illusion of the brand.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing. It can make decision making simpler and more efficient. But if you're spending more for a same-quality brand, then you might be missing the point.
This illusion is starting to crumble. It probably won't fully go away, but people are deconstructing what "name brand" means in the first place. This is incredibly interesting, and a sign of things to come, especially in ecommerce.
The Future of Manufacturing and Branding
As things progress, we're going to see more and more "same quality" products that will rival top brands.
Amazon recently started launching more of their own "branded" products that just slap on the Amazon label to a high-quality no-brand (previously, at least) product. This is making huge changes for all sorts of industries, especially in fitness and tech.
This trend is only going to get stronger. If you sell a fairly benign product and make money from your brand value, you'll still have many options for huge profits - but you'll want to make sure you pick the right product.
Generic products like "lase mouse" or "keyboard" are going to run into problems. Specific products like "gaming mouse" and "programmer keyboard" will likely be more promising, but we'll see how it plays out.
This article is going to be a little weird because it will reflect a very, very different mindset than one which is extremely common. Writing this article was weird for me as well, because it's difficult for me to sometimes understand other paradigms - and financial decisions is an area where I generally operate in my own little world.
For example, I delayed marriage and children for financial reasons. I didn't buy a new car until I had enough to literally retire. Right now, I'm reading the same books that I hope my financial planners had to read to become financial planners, because I want to know about every aspect of my financial situation and future.
To read more about my thoughts on careers and developing strategically sound income streams, keep researching this website.
No, I've Never Had a Job
I've never had a full-time job. I've had some freelance relationships as a writer, copywriter, and funnel builder for some financial companies. But I've never actually had a salary or anything along those lines.
It just never materialized. I started learning marketable skills while in high school. In fact, I started my business while in high school. I was doing consulting during my very brief moment at college before I dropped out to work on growing my business.
Yes, I'm a Millionaire
I mention this a lot for a few reasons. First, I don't care to be polite. It's not polite to bring it up a lot. But it's relevant, so I'll do it anyway. Second, as I just said, it's relevant. I'll talk more about this below, but suffice it to say