Blog - Page 34 of 43 - Kind of Lost

“Die with Zero” by Bill Perkins: Book Report (haha)

The premise of “Die with Zero” sounds provocative: Bill Perkins argues you should plan to spend all your money before you die, optimizing for maximum life experiences rather than maximum wealth at death. Not “die debt-free” — that’s a different book. Perkins is talking about people who will almost certainly die with millions in unspent savings because they never gave themselves permission to spend it on things that actually mattered while they were healthy enough to enjoy them. The title is deliberately extreme. The actual argument is more nuanced than it sounds.

I picked it up because I’m interested in the other end of the FIRE question — not just how to achieve financial independence, but what to actually do with it.

Shadow price in linear programming

Linear programming is a mathematical method for optimizing the allocation of resources — maximizing profit, minimizing cost, that kind of thing. I’ve built dozens of these models over 20+ years in operations research, and one concept I lean on constantly, and that clients almost never intuit on their own, is the shadow price: what a change in one constraint does to your optimal solution.

Two lessons from Diego Maradona’s life

Maradona died a few days ago and I was surprised by how sad the news made me. He was the best soccer player of his generation, and then some. One of the best ever, if not the best.

He had a long career on and off the field and many ups and downs in both. He ran into trouble several times because he was a rebel and disliked authority very much (hmm I just discovered one thing we had in common). I am not a soccer expert (heck, I am not an expert at anything, I am kind of lost after all) but I drew two lessons from all the memories I just reminisced about in the last couple of days and all the comments I heard and read.

Cashvertising (book review)

Are you tired of your marketing efforts falling flat? Do you want to know the secrets to create compelling ads that actually convert? Look no further than “Cashvertising” by Drew Eric Whitman.

As a seasoned copywriter with over a decade of experience, Whitman knows a thing or two about crafting messages that resonate with consumers. And lucky for us, he’s shared his expertise in “Cashvertising”, a must-read for anyone looking to up their advertising game.

The 6 W’s Explained: Who, What, When, Where, Why, How

The six W’s are six questions — who, what, when, where, why and how — that you ask about a problem before you try to solve it. They come out of journalism, where a reporter has to establish the facts of a story, and they got adopted into continuous improvement work for exactly the same reason: you cannot fix something you haven’t described properly.

I spent most of my working life as an operations research analyst, building models for manufacturing and supply chain problems. And the honest lesson from all of it is that the modeling was rarely the hard part. Getting a straight answer to these six questions was the hard part.

Continue reading “The 6 W’s Explained: Who, What, When, Where, Why, How”