Swart Donkey

Numbers are blunt tools for communication. The message they convey is more important to us than the countable thing they are supposed to rep...

There is a conflict between the idea of “leave your ego at the door” and meritocracy. If we believe in a world where the quality of life you...

Price is not value. Salary is not worth. The best way to see this is to speak to someone who has moved from a big company to a small company...

Merit is only one factor in wealth creation. Like risk and return, it is also not something you can simply reduce to a number for comparison...

The two main ways of measuring investment returns are called “Time-Weighted” and “Money-Weighted”. Time-Weighted could be called the play-pl...

The challenge we face with politics is that we want it. The most political people I know use phrases like “leave your ego at the door”, and ...

When the default is to work full-time for one company, that becomes the container into which we direct most of our energy. I think you get a...

One of the challenges with investing is when to admit you were wrong. If your goal as a stock picker is to do better than just investing bli...

“Win-Win” was the biggest insight Adam Smith offered the world. With central decision makers trapped in Nation State gun boat diplomacy, and...

Once you let go of the illusion that price is value, anxiety disappears from selling the pie. If people want pie, and you can get it made at...

I stepped away from the Corporate world in August 2014. I liked the idea of living off an Engine of Capital where my decisions of how to spe...

I hate feeling incompetent. Almost as much as I hate the feeling of having gotten it wrong by someone. In a way that I can’t correct. Inte...

Tacit Knowledge is understanding we have that we are unable to write down or verbalise. Embodied knowledge. Relational knowledge. It is in...

I have always envied Hole Diggers. Someone whose job it is to dig 6 holes. They dig 8, drop the mic, and leave work early. The ask and off...

I am a big believer in Institution Building. One of the reasons for the stretching of the pay scale from those on the bottom to the top is...

The deal most of us have is that we work to survive. Some of us get to do work that fulfils a deeper purpose than that, and some of us enj...

One objection to Capital is that the owners aren’t doing the work. There is a moral feeling that the people involved should be the people ...