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“Do one thing every day that scares you.”
Mary Schmich
I know that each time I go running I’ll get a little fitter and a little calmer.
That’s what a farming habit does: you repeat the same action for a return you can count on.
Deep work is my hunting habit. Each morning I give 2.5 hours to whatever matters most that day.
The hours stay fixed. What fills them changes.
Jesse Livermore focused on hunting. He made his living betting on where stock prices would go.
Edwin Lefèvre tells the story of his early years in Reminiscences of a Stock Operator.
When the stock market crashed in 1929, Livermore bet on the fall and made about $100 million.
A few years later he filed for bankruptcy. On Thanksgiving in 1940 he died by suicide in a Manhattan hotel. He left his wife a note that said he was tired of fighting.
Stu Ungar played poker for a living. He won the main event at the World Series of Poker 3 times.
Nolan Dalla and Peter Alson tell his story in One of a Kind.
Over his career he won an estimated $30 million.
He died in a cheap Las Vegas motel room with $800 in his pocket.
Hunting can make you rich and leave you broke a few years later.
Carl Fisher chased one big project after another. He paved a racetrack in Indianapolis with brick and pumped sand out of Biscayne Bay to build Miami Beach.
By the mid-1920s he was worth an estimated $50 million. Then he borrowed against Miami Beach to build a summer resort at Montauk.
It opened just in time for the 1929 crash.
A few years later Fisher was broke, drawing a salary from his old partners to promote the city he built. Mark Foster tells the story in Castles in the Sand.
When your week holds only hunting, a bad stretch can take everything.
Ronald Wayne chose farming over hunting. He worked as a draftsman at Atari.
When Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak started Apple in 1976, Wayne typed up the agreement himself. It gave him 10% of the company.
Since a partner could be on the hook for the company’s debts, Wayne wanted his savings out of reach.
Days later he took his name off the agreement and stayed at Atari.
He tells the story in Adventures of an Apple Founder. His 10% of Apple went for $800.
You can keep your savings safe and still trade away the upside.
Kenny Chow drove a yellow cab in New York for years. He borrowed about $700,000 to buy a taxi medallion.
Then Uber and Lyft filled the streets with cars.
By the spring of 2018 a medallion sold for about $200,000. That May his body was found in the East River.
Chow kept showing up for each shift. Uber and Lyft still cut his medallion’s value by more than two-thirds.
Alvah Roebuck repaired watches for a living. He went into business with Richard Sears.
The catalog company carried both their names.
Since Sears kept taking big risks with the company’s money, Roebuck asked to be bought out.
He sold his share for about $20,000 and stayed on to run the watch and jewelry department.
By 1916 Sears was the largest retailer in the country.
Roebuck lost much of his money in the 1929 crash. At about 70 he went back to work for Sears as a spokesman, touring stores that still carried his name. Boris Emmet and John Jeuck tell the company’s early years in Catalogues and Counters.
When your week holds only farming, you can miss the upside and still lose what you saved.
Andre Geim farmed and hunted. He spent his weeks on his main physics research and gave Friday nights to experiments that might lead nowhere.
One Friday he poured water into a powerful lab magnet and watched the water float in the air.
Friday nights cost Geim one evening a week.
Over about 15 years most of those Friday experiments failed. One used Scotch tape to peel graphite into sheets one atom thick.
It won Geim and Konstantin Novoselov a Nobel Prize. He tells the story in his Nobel lecture, Random Walk to Graphene.
Steve Wozniak designed calculators at Hewlett-Packard.
Outside work he built a computer to show off at a hobby club in Palo Alto.
He offered the computer to HP 5 times.
HP turned it down each time, so he kept his job and started Apple with Steve Jobs.
Wozniak left HP once an investor put money into Apple. Wayne sold his share that same year. Wozniak kept his.
He tells the story in iWoz.
Your day job can pay for the hunt.
Sara Blakely sold fax machines door to door. Most doors closed in her face.
She kept the job and put $5,000 of savings into a pair of pantyhose with the feet cut off.
In Dallas she got a meeting with a Neiman Marcus buyer, changed into her prototype in the restroom and walked out with an order.
She quit selling fax machines after Oprah named Spanx one of her favorite things.
In 2012 Forbes named her the youngest self-made female billionaire.
Hunting alone brings booms and busts. Farming alone works until something outside your control hits.
Farm to stay steady. Set aside time each week to hunt.
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How could you free one hour each week for new opportunities?
