Why your personal brand is your most valuable asset
Darius Foroux makes a case I have watched play out in my own career: as the economy shifts from need to want, who you are becomes more valuable than what you do.
How To Plan Your Day Like Marcus Aurelius
Two thousand years ago the most powerful man in the world kept a private journal of reminders to himself on how to live. What strikes me about Marcus Aurelius is not the philosophy in the abstract but how operational it was. He used the morning to prepare for difficulty and the evening to review where he fell short.
The Society of Thought Hiding Inside Every Reasoning Model
This is one of the more fascinating findings I have come across this year. When you ask a frontier reasoning model a hard question, it does not simply think longer. It spontaneously generates an internal debate among distinct perspectives that argue, question, and reconcile, what the researchers call a society of thought. Nobody trained the models to do this. It emerged on its own when they were rewarded purely for getting the right answer.
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Mitochondria Are More Than Powerhouses — They're the Motherboard of the Cell
Every cell biology class you ever took told you that mitochondria are the powerhouses of the cell. Martin Picard at Columbia argues that framing undersells them by about an order of magnitude. His research shows mitochondria function more like a central nervous system for cellular health: they sense stress, send signals to the nucleus, influence gene expression, and coordinate the body's response to everything from exercise to emotional trauma. The practical implication is that how you treat your body at the level of sleep, stress, and physical activity isn't just affecting your energy levels. It's shaping the intelligence of your cells.
Is the Secret to Men's Longevity a Great Butt?
The Wall Street Journal ran with a headline that sounds like a joke but the underlying research is serious. Glute strength turns out to be one of the strongest predictors of longevity in men, better than most biomarkers most people track obsessively. The mechanism makes sense: the glutes are the largest muscle group in the body, and their strength is a proxy for overall lower body power, metabolic health, and the kind of functional capacity that determines whether you can stay active and independent well into old age. Worth rethinking your training priorities if your current routine doesn't include anything that seriously loads the posterior chain.
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What I Am Reading:
The Art of the Good Life: 52 Surprising Shortcuts to Happiness, Wealth, and Success
The Art of the Good Life is a toolkit designed for practical living. Here you'll find fifty-two happiness hacks -- from guilt-free shunning of technology to gleefully paying your parking tickets -- that are certain to optimize your happiness. These tips may not guarantee you a good life, but they'll give you a better chance (and that's all any of us can ask for).
Crazy Train
Semper Augustus Client Letter 2022
PROFITLESS PROSPERITY; INVESTING IN FLATION; AND – BERKSHIRE: GETTING BETTER ALL THE TIME
The Munger Operating System: How to Live a Life That Really Works
It’s such a simple idea. It’s the golden rule so to speak: You want to deliver to the world what you would buy if you were on the other end. There is no ethos, in my opinion, that is better for any lawyer or any other person to have. By and large the people who have this ethos win in life and they don’t win just money, not just honors. They win the respect, the deserved trust of the people they deal with, and there is huge pleasure in life to be obtained from getting deserved trust.
