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“Diverse is not only possible, diverse is necessary, because in real farming you can’t depend on any given crop to be good every year.”
Wendell Berry
I paid three years of savings for one skill. Jiu Jitsu, seven days a week, with no money coming in. I called it a mini retirement.
Training hard was good for my body.
It made no money, built nothing and left my circle where it was.
Each day I run, do mobility work and meditate. I fast until noon and skip sugar, bread and fried food.
Five good habits that look separate. All five cover the same part of my life: my health.
Ten airlines may look like ten separate bets right up until fuel spikes and they all drop at once.
In investing, two stocks are correlated when they move together. Ray Dalio found that a thousand stocks that move together protect you no better than five.
On 19 July 1989 a DC-10 left Denver for Chicago with 296 people aboard.
Over Iowa the rear engine’s fan disk blew apart and metal tore through the tail in dozens of places.
That plane carried three hydraulic systems. Losing one or even two still left you flying. McDonnell Douglas showed the FAA a design where:
“no single failure or malfunction or probable combination of failures will jeopardize the safe operation of the airplane.”
Debris cut hydraulic lines 1 and 3 where they ran through the tail. The departing disk tore out number 2.
Captain Al Haynes and his crew steered with engine thrust alone and put the plane down at Sioux City. 184 people walked away from that landing. 112 didn’t.
The design assumed those three systems would fail independently.
On 4 June 1996 an Ariane 5 lifted off from Kourou carrying two inertial reference computers, one live and one on standby.
37 seconds in, the standby computer shut itself down. The live one followed 0.05 seconds later.
Neither machine was broken. They ran identical code, so a single arithmetic overflow stopped both and the rocket tore itself apart.
A French mathematician named Jacques-Louis Lions chaired the inquiry board. His report reached Paris that July and named the cause: one piece of software, running in both places.
From the 1870s to the 1950s the banana you could buy was the Gros Michel, planted across two continents.
The Gros Michel looked like millions of separate plants. Each was a cutting from the same original, so the whole crop was one plant repeated. A soil fungus called Panama disease drove it out of the export trade by the early 1960s.
The industry replaced it with the Cavendish, immune to that strain. A head gardener named Joseph Paxton raised that variety at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire from a single plant shipped out of Mauritius in 1830. He named it after his employer, the Duke of Devonshire.
The Cavendish is also a clone.
A newer strain called Tropical Race 4 beats the Cavendish too and has reached more than 20 countries.
A single fungus could take millions of plants at once.
I could add a sixth health habit tomorrow. That’s a sixth cover on the one part of my life that already has five.
Ed Thorp made sure his investments could not all lose at once. He set his fund up so a loss on one side was matched by a gain on the other. Thorp made money whether the market rose or fell. His fund, Princeton/Newport, returned 19.1% a year for 19 years.
The first cover in an area with none beats the tenth in an area that’s already covered.
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What could you start in an area you don’t cover yet?
