Alright I'll say it.
I am an addict to hard work.
I have enslaved myself to my business more times than I want to admit.
So I say this from experience not from theory.
You DO NOT have to sacrifice your life and the people who love you to build something extraordinary.
That is a LIE hustle culture has been selling for years and too many of us have paid for it with things we CANNOT GET BACK.
Charlie Munger reveals the mental trick he used as a WWII meteorologist to keep pilots from dying
"One of my favorite tricks is the inversion process. When I was a meteorologist in World War Two, they told me how to draw weather maps and predict the weather, but what I was actually doing is clearing pilots to take flights. So I just reversed the problem. I inverted"
"I said, suppose I wanted to kill a lot of pilots, what would be the easy way to do it? And I soon concluded the only easy way would be to get the planes into icing they couldn't handle, or to get the pilot into a place where he'd run out of fuel before he could safely land. So I made up my mind I was going to stay miles away from killing pilots by either of those"
"If somebody asked me to fix India, I would immediately say, what could I do if I really wanted to hurt India? I'd figure out all the things that could most easily hurt India, and then I'd figure out how to avoid them. You'd say it's the same thing, just in reverse, but it works better to frequently invert the problem"
"Every great algebraist inverts all the time, because the problems are solved easier. Human beings should do the same thing in the ordinary walks of life"
Insurance is the oldest of the four ways. It is a nine-trillion-dollar global industry. The equation underneath it was invented in 1560 by a broke Italian gambler.
His name was Girolamo Cardano. He wrote a book called Liber de Ludo Aleae. A short manual on how to win at dice. Nobody in finance read it for four hundred years.
Then in 1996 a ninety-year-old man in New York wrote a book that traced every modern risk model back to that manual. He called it Against the Gods. One thesis. Every dollar of premium ever collected on Earth is a footnote to a gambler scribbling in Milan.
His name was Peter Bernstein. He founded the Journal of Portfolio Management in 1974 and ran money at Bernstein-Macaulay before that. Wall Street called him the historian of risk.
In 2008 a small production company filmed him for thirteen minutes. He walked through the entire five-hundred-year arc. Cardano to Pascal to Fermat to Black-Scholes. Then he stopped and said the industry had built glass towers on the back of an idea a broke Italian scribbled to settle a card debt.
He died the following summer. Age ninety.
Reinsurance premiums crossed six hundred billion dollars last year. Every actuary on Earth prices catastrophe risk with the same expected-value framework Cardano invented to shave the house edge in Milan.
The video is thirteen minutes and twenty-two seconds long. Free. Eleven years on YouTube. Twenty-nine thousand people have watched it.
Almost none of them work in insurance.
No matter who you marry, at some point you will question your decision.
You will have a terrible argument and think, โWhy did I marry this person?โ
You will get annoyed by things you once found cute. You will go through seasons where the love feels quiet.
Thatโs marriage.
The mistake is thinking every difficult season means you chose the wrong person.
You need to learn how to get through a difficult season with the one you already chose.
This is how marriage works.
Pusillanimity is the sin of the man who never becomes what he could have been, and Aquinas classes it as a species of false humility. Which is why it hides so well in Christian men.โจโจRead the parable again and notice what the third servant actually says. Before he admits he was afraid, he slanders the master. He calls him a hard man who reaps where he did not sow. That is the tell. Fear always builds a theology to justify itself. The man who buries his gifts ends up with a God who is stingy, a Church that is dying, a country that is finished, an economy that is rigged. He needs the world to be hopeless so his own inaction looks like wisdom.โจโจThe sum matters too. A single talent was around twenty years of wages for a labourer. He was not handed pocket change and told to be careful with it. He was trusted with a fortune and he put it in a hole. Whatever God has given you feels ordinary to you because you have carried it your whole life, so you never price it correctly and never risk it.โจโจThen comes the line most men skip. To everyone who has, more will be given. Capacity is not static. The two servants who traded were handed more than they started with, because use is what grows a gift. Bury yours and it atrophies. The talent you refuse to stretch is smaller in ten years than it is right now.โจโจAquinas says the magnanimous man deems himself worthy of great things, and worthy is the word that scandalises modern Christians. Greatness of soul aims at honour, at difficulty, at what most men will not attempt, and it does all of it for God's glory rather than its own. You were made to be trusted with something and to come back with more than you were given. Go and invest.