There are two ways to measure how you’re doing: Against yourself and against others. Internal vs. external benchmarks.

A big part of almost every story in history is that expectations move slower than facts. People become vested in their views of how the world works. But the world can work one way for a long time and then … boom … abruptly lurch in a new direction. Opinions crawl while events leap. It’s a tricky little thing.

According to the most recent Census data, the white population in America decreased for the first time in history.

Two little stories from nature that teach us a few things about investing:

There are so many factors that can hold a person back in this life.

I recently experienced two very different Sundays. The first was a modern-day version of Planes, Trains, and Automobiles as I attempted to navigate my way home from a trip to the Midwest. The second consisted of a 5am wakeup thanks to my younger son, a lunch that was disliked by both boys, and an afternoon driving my older son field-to-field as he officially entered youth sports mania. Yet as different as these days were, they paled in comparison to the things I read/watched.

Success has a nasty tendency to increase confidence more than ability. The longer it lasts, and the more it was tied to some degree of serendipity, the truer that becomes.

We have harnessed technology to enable an incredible amount of information sharing around business and finance over the last two decades.

Last month the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published its latest report which made clear that temperatures today are higher than any time in the last 125,000 years, and methane emissions are a primary culprit.

The biggest takeaway from history is that the characters change but their behaviors don’t. The technologies, trends, tragedies and winners – the events that take place – are always in flux and can be nearly impossible to predict. But the behaviors that drive people into action, influence their thoughts and guide their beliefs, are stable. They’re the same today as they were 100 years ago and will be 100 years from now.