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“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
Carl Sagan
The weather was great and my runs felt easy. After a week of hour-long runs, I was ready to make an hour my new floor.
Then I remembered my rule: before I raise a habit’s floor, I first do one session far beyond it, like a single run of about two and a half hours.
I pictured that run and kept my floor where it was, at half an hour.
Buyers in a bubble reason the way I did that week: prices rose last month, so they’ll rise next month. I use the rule so I don’t set a floor in good conditions that I can’t hold once they change.
After 35 years of wins, Seán Quinn kept adding to his stake in one Irish bank. In 1973 he borrowed £100 to dig gravel out of his family’s 23-acre farm in Ireland. By 2008 Forbes put him at $6 billion, the richest person in Ireland.
From 2005 he bought into Anglo Irish Bank, mostly through bets on its share price, until he controlled more than a quarter of it.
In a 2022 documentary he explained why he kept adding: “Anything I had done for the previous 35, 40 years I suppose turned out to be successful and any wee hiccups were always ironed out over a six-, 12-month period.”
The bank’s shares collapsed in the 2008 crash. The stake cost him about €3 billion. An Irish court declared him bankrupt in 2012.
“It was stupid to increase it at all,” he said of his stake in the bank.
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What rule would you set so ambition can’t crush your consistency?
