The 🔟 Most Important Money Lessons

I Wish I Could Teach My Younger Self 🧵

I have an MBA in finance

But I’ve learned 10x more about investing from listening to podcasts than I did in school

Here are 24 podcasts that I regularly listen to that will make you a better investor⬇️

1/ Acquired -- @AcquiredFM

This podcast "tells the stories of great companies"

Ben Gilbert & David Rosenthal do a great job of talking through acquisitions & have a stellar list of guests

2/ Animal Spirits

@awealthofcs & @michaelbatnick break down financial news, share insights that they are thinking about, and recommend TV shows & movies

3/ The Business Brew

@BillBrewsterSCG does long-form, in-depth, discussions about capital allocation and the psychology of investing/business

4/ Capital Allocators

@tseides has an amazing series of guests that discuss all facets of investing

His recent book -- Capital Allocators -- takes all of the top learners from his interviews and condenses them into a book

How to analyze a:

▪️Balance Sheet
▪️Income Statement
▪️Cash Flow Statement

In less than 5 minutes:

Every company has 3 financial statements.

Each answers a unique question:

1. Balance Sheet: What’s your net worth?

2. Income Statement: Are you profitable?

3. Cash Flow Statement: Are you generating cash?

The financial statements are interrelated.

Each views a company’s financials from a different angle.

When combined, they provide a more complete view of a company’s true financial position.

1A: Balance Sheet

This tells you a company’s net worth at a specific point in time.

Layout:

1B: What I focus on first:

1⃣ Cash & Equivalents: How much?
2⃣ Debt: How much vs. cash?
3⃣ Goodwill: How much?
4⃣ Retained Earnings (+ T.S.): Positive?
5⃣ Receivables & Inventory: How much?

My inflation strategy:

Own businesses with recession-proof demand and pricing power

❤✈️🌎 2 years ago today @JamesIvings and I sold all our belongings and left the UK to travel for a year. We've never been happier and we have no plans to ever return there 🙂

Thread 👇

Since then we've started a remote web dev company @SquarecatWebDev and been lucky enough to have completed several freelance projects 💻 that have kept us on the road.

In the last few months we've become a huge part of this amazing new Maker community and have found so many new friends from @makerskitchen, @women_make_ and several others! 🥰

We love travelling together (even if I'm only a glorified laptop watcher 😒) but we're both much happier being able to share our ideas outside of our own little bubble and our products have benefitted too!

Here's to another year of nomading with my favourite person and to the Maker community continuing to grow with our help! Maybe one day we'll all get to meet each other ✌️ 💛

https://t.co/Uejb3Ng30u

Social Intelligence 101:

If your friend is telling you about an accomplishment, do not try to one-up them by sharing an accomplishment of your own.

Tame your ego.

Sit back and actively listen.

I want to tell you a story. It illustrates the low level, but unpleasant hassle faced by academics holding views deemed unacceptable by self-appointed defenders of public safety. I'm not going to name names. I'm not interested in facilitating a pile on. The abused is>>

robust and capable of looking after themself. I was sent a screenshot of the abuser's protected twitter narration of the incident. I've also seen it tweeted on here. I've no idea how it was leaked. I've not seen its authenticity challenged. >>

So to the tale. Dr X organizes a seminar with a symposium panel under the auspices of a Faculty in a large well known UK university. Dr Y who is a member of the university with a legitimate interest in the subject matter of the panel registers to >

attend. Y is known to hold what for sake of succinctness I'll call Gender Critical views. X notices shortly before the seminar is to begin that Y will be in attendance and goes into meltdown. Y is deemed an "anti-trans campaigner" which in the commonly accepted >>

rather than Pickwickian sense of these words is false. X contemplates a last minute cancellation of the event. Hurried discussions are held with senior faculty and eventually with the VC who insists the event must take place and Y must be allowed to attend. The event takes place>

A frequent question I get when talking with senior designers: Will my growth as a designer stall if I start managing?

There is often a second question underneath that, which is:
Will I no longer be respected as a design leader if I can't keep up as a designer?

Thread below👇

My short answer to "Will my growth as a designer stall if I manage?" is yes, absolutely, if "designer" is someone who produces design work.

Managing a 5-8 ppl team does not leave you time to design. When you don't practice a craft, you should not expect to get better at it.

However... (and this is a BIG however)...

What you *can* continue to grow (as both a design manager and a designer) is the following:

1) Your design eye
2) Your design voice

A strong design eye means that others trust you to know what is good.

It means your taste is well-honed through extensive study of an area.

It means your sense for usability, simplicity and aesthetics is well-developed even at subtle or fine granularities.

Very early in my design career, my manager asked me to review some design portfolios. I sat there, petrified, clicking through dozens of links. I could tell which ones were really bad, but many of the portfolios seemed good! I could not really distinguish between them on quality!