Go from burnt out to FIREd up.
H explains why he always bets against his favorite baseball team: If they win, I am happy because my team was victorious. If they lose, I find solace in having won the bet. A dear friend relayed this true story about a shared acquaintance from our high school days. It is an adolescent’s attempt to reconcile the tension between the …
The hazards of normalcy bias were recently put on my radar by my invisible friend and unconventional thinker Dr. S, to whom I am grateful for the continuing mind expansion that has defined our virtual friendship. Having a friend who is unafraid to test and confront your definition of reality only strengthens your long-term resilience and the soundness of your …
A visit home for Father’s Day is the perfect opportunity to pay attention to details and tie up loose ends. We spent several hours completing the In Case Of Emergency binder, something dad had been working on in his spare time for the past year at my urging. Dad’s health is not what it once was. I gifted him this …
My latest journey down the rabbit hole of creating a “good-enough to get ‘er done” retirement portfolio reads like a biblical recounting of who begat whom. I started with William Bernstein’s Ages of the Investor, which inspired me to read one the books he referenced: Michael Zwecher’s Retirement Portfolios: Theory, Construction and Management. Zwecher strongly argues for the use of …
He was about my age, coming in to the ER with a fever. He had lymphoma, and was a week out from chemotherapy with the expected drop in white cells that rendered him immunocompromised as a result. I was a second year resident in emergency medicine at the university hospital where he received care. Despite difficult IV access and discussing …
I recently finished reading Bernstein’s slim book, The Ages Of The Investor, where he thoughtfully explores the accumulation stage, decumulation stage, and (trickiest of all) the stage during which one transitions from the former to the latter. It is in the transitional stage during which sequence of returns risk can appear and undermine what would otherwise appear to be a …
Small wins add up. This is a lesson from several years of playing strategy board games. While flashy, decisive rounds tend to leave a lasting impression and elicit high fives, they usually represent a short-term gain at the expense of a long-term victory. The deliberate incrementalist who responds to round-by-round incentives for small bonus point awards is easy to overlook, …
I relish the intersection of public health policy informed by behavioral economics. It’s a joy akin to matchmaking your two best friends and then witnessing as their relationship proceeds to marriage. It leaves me giddy and breathless and proud of the clever public health strategist who is able to leverage human psychology to improve population-level health. My wife relayed a …
In a couple of weeks, 3 of the 4 occupants of our home will be fully vaccinated. This is cause for (not so much joy as) a modicum of relief. And while it’s great that California announced that it will hold a lottery where 10 vaccinated people will have a shot at winning $1.5 million each, we didn’t do it …
By serendipity, I had a batch of shifts early in the month that resulted in a solid week off. I awoke on the first morning of that free week with an almost giddy sense of anticipation. It felt like the first day of summer in elementary school. That joy, alas, was not sustained. I found that I did not immediately …