Impact Investments Quotes

After all, your chances of winning a lottery and of affecting an election are pretty similar. From a financial perspective, playing the lottery is a bad investment. But it's fun and relatively cheap: for the price of a ticket, you buy the right to fantasize how you'd spend the winnings - much as you get to fantasize that your vote will have some impact on policy.

When money is pooled together, it has a greater impact. A million dollars has more impact than one hundred thousand dollars. One hundred ETH has more impact than ten ETH. The more money, the greater the impact.

Ultimately, Investing is about holistic ROI. It’s not about just owning stocks or crypto or flipping for quick income. When we talk about holistic ROI, we are looking at our long term profit, short term profit, income security, cash flow, social impact, environmental impact, spiritual impact, stability of the permaculture economy, and more. That’s how we see it at Mayflower-Plymouth.

Money has a spiritual correlation. What we do with money and how we impact the world through our spending, saving and investing…. It has spiritual consequences.

With money comes responsibility. How we spend and invest our money has an impact on ourselves and on so many other people.

When we act upon capital as stewards, we not only retain it - we multiply it. We grow it. We expand it. And we perpetuate it to impact more and more lives in meaningful ways.

Investing isn’t a game - It has a substantive impact on the living of life and the development of civilization. It’s not just about stock tickers and opening bells and timing buys and sells to get a quick profit in the gap…. It effects when and where houses are built, the quality of schools, the accessibility of organic food, the price of solar relative to gasoline…. Investments direct the development of civilization.

It takes a huge investment in introspection to learn that the thirty or more hours spent “studying” the news last month neither had any predictive ability during your activities of that month nor did it impact your current knowledge of the world.

Investing at large scales is where the greatest impact happens. When we’re investing with billions of dollars or trillions of dollars, it’s easier to effect whole systems and implement society-scale results more rapidly and with more efficiency. When you have big objectives, you need big money. We have big objectives at Mayflower-Plymouth and we have a lot of good things to do in the world that’s going to help a lot of people, so we need to be working with big numbers.

At Mayflower-Plymouth, our investment approach is based on Permaculture Economics. We invest based on what we learn from nature and universal principles. We also emphasize the spiritual, ecological and physical impact of our investments. It’s a holistic approach. When you put your money with us, you can rest assured knowing your money is growing, but not at the expense of your values. In fact, you know with us your money is actually making the world a better place because we invest in alignment with natural, spiritual and cosmic law.

The modern world needs more and more capital for development. The capital makers are doing their best to achieve this. They are using various ad-hocs to maintain the aura of this modernity along with the continue paddling to strive the better future for the existing as well as coming generations. Investors like Aman Mehndiratta have come forward, took the reins in their hands and have started investing in Impact Investments.

Changes in interest rates can have significant impacts on debt securities risk.

The “occasionally remarkable” moments shouldn’t be left to chance! They should be planned for, invested in.

Your happiness is affected by 1) your outlook, that is, how you choose to view the events and circumstances of your everyday life; 2) specific actions with positive impact—things like writing down three things your grateful for, or sending appreciative emails, doing random acts of kindness, practicing forgiveness, meditating, and exercising; and 3) where you put your time and energy, and especially investing more time into important relationships and personally meaningful pursuits.

We need to start to talk about money in ways that dethrone it and make it subject to human ethics and standards of love and decency.

Investing the time up front to clarify what will move the needles dramatically increases the odds that simple rules will be applied where they can have the greatest impact.

Mother Nature does not develop Alzheimer’s—actually there is evidence that even humans would not easily lose brain function with age if they followed a regimen of stochastic exercise and stochastic fasting, took long walks, avoided sugar, bread, white rice, and stock market investments, and refrained from taking economics classes or reading such things as The New York Times.

Goldman Sachs preaching about diversity so it can be at the front of the line for the next government bailout. It’s AstraZeneca waxing eloquent about climate change so it can secure multibillion-dollar government contracts for vaccine production. It’s State Street building feminist statues to detract attention from wage discrimination lawsuits from female employees, all the while marketing its exchange-traded fund with the ticker “SHE.” It’s Chamath Palihapitiya founding a social impact investment fund and criticizing Silicon Valley, even though he and his wealth are products of Silicon Valley, all to cover up for his prior tenure as an executive at Facebook who dreamed out loud about a private corporate military. Those companies and people use their market power to prop up woke causes as a way to accumulate greater political capital—only to later come back and cash in that political capital for more dollars.

All investing is impact investing. The key is to ensure that the impacts brought about by our investments are the kind that make the world a better place.

In our work in whole-system change, my colleagues and I have shown time and again that if you give people skills (invest in capacity building), most of them will become more accountable.

My father who got cages instead of compassion. My father whose whole story no one of us will ever know. What did it do to him, all those years locked away, all that time in chains, all those days upon days without human touch except touch meant to harm - hand behind your back, N****r. Get on the fucking wall, N****r! Lift your sac, N****r. Don't look at me like that or I will f*****g kill your Black ass. It would be easy to speculate about the impact of years of cocaine use on my father's heart, but I suspect that it will tell us less than if we could measure the cumulative effects of hatred, racism and indignity. What is the impact of years of strip searches, of being bent over, the years before that when you were a child and knew that no dream you had for yourself was taken seriously by anyone, that you were not someone who would be fully invested in by a nation that treated you as expendable?

Here are a few key guidelines to consider: Spend less than you earn—invest the surplus—avoid debt. Do simply this and you’ll wind up rich. Not just in money. Carrying debt is as appealing as being covered with leeches and has much the same effect. Take out your sharpest knife and start scraping the little bloodsuckers off. If your lifestyle matches—or god forbid exceeds—your income, you are no more than a gilded slave. Avoid fiscally irresponsible people. Never marry one or otherwise give him or her access to your money. Avoid investment advisors. Too many have only their own interests at heart. By the time you know enough to pick a good one, you know enough to handle your finances yourself. It’s your money and no one will care for it better than you. You own the things you own and they in turn own you. Money can buy many things, but nothing more valuable than your freedom. Life choices are not always about the money, but you should always be clear about the financial impact of the choices you make.

If…an infant, especially one born with a genetically-encoded altered neurophysiologic reactivity, does not have adequate experiences of being part of an open dynamic system with an emotionally responsive adult human, its corticolimbic organization will be poorly capable of coping with the stressful chaotic dynamics that are inherent in all human relationships. Such a system tends to become static and closed, and invested in defensive structures to guard against anticipated interactive assaults that potentially trigger disorganizing and emotionally painful psychobiological states. Due to its avoidance of novel situations and diminished capacity to cope with challenging situations, it does not expose itself to new socioemotional learning experiences that are required for the continuing experience-dependent growth of the right brain. This structural limitation, in turn, negatively impacts the future trajectory of self-organization.

Our culture places a premium on work, not on relationships. Think about it. When we meet someone, our first question is not so what kind of positive impact are you having on the people around you?" No, it 's " what do you do for a living"? It's not "how are you investing in others?" Instead even if unspoken, it's "how much money do you make?" Our identity lies in jobs, titles, incomes,not in our connections to people.

Thus, increases in interest rates matter greatly for the economy as a whole. They not only cause direct reductions in investment spending and interest-sensitive consumption spending (the main intent of restrictive monetary policy), but they also may reduce aggregate demand indirectly through their impact on asset prices.

I first met Winston Churchill in the early summer of 1906 at a dinner party to which I went as a very young girl. Our hostess was Lady Wemyss and I remember that Arthur Balfour, George Wyndman, Hilaire Belloc and Charles Whibley were among the guests… I found myself sitting next to this young man who seemed to me quite different from any other young man I had ever met. For a long time he seemed sunk in abstraction. Then he appeared to become suddenly aware of my existence. He turned on me a lowering gaze and asked me abruptly how old I was. I replied that I was nineteen. “And I,” he said despairingly, “am thirty-two already. Younger than anyone else who counts, though, “he added, as if to comfort himself. Then savagely: “Curse ruthless time! Curse our mortality. How cruelly short is this allotted span for all we must cram into it!” And he burst forth into an eloquent diatribe on the shortness of human life, the immensity of possible human accomplishment—a theme so well exploited by the poets, prophets, and philosophers of all ages that it might seem difficult to invest it with new and startling significance. Yet for me he did so, in a torrent of magnificent language which appeared to be both effortless and inexhaustible and ended up with the words I shall always remember: “We are all worms. But I do believe that I am a glow worm.” By this time I was convinced of it—and my conviction remained unshaken throughout the years that followed. Later he asked me whether I thought that words had a magic and music quite independent of their meaning. I said I certainly thought so, and I quoted as a classic though familiar instance the first lines that came into my head. Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn. His eyes blazed with excitement. “Say that again,” he said, “say it again—it is marvelous!” “But I objected, “You know these lines. You know the ‘Ode to a Nightengale.’ ” He had apparently never read or heard of it before (I must, however, add that next time I met him he had not learned not merely this but all of the odes to Keats by heart—and he recited them quite mercilessly from start to finish, not sparing me a syllable). Finding that he liked poetry, I quoted to him from one of my own favorite poets, Blake. He listened avidly, repeating some lines to himself with varying emphases and stresses, then added meditatively: “I never knew that old Admiral had found so much time to write such good poetry.” I was astounded that he, with his acute susceptibility to words and power of using them, should have left such tracts of English literature entirely unexplored. But however it happened he had lost nothing by it, when he approached books it was “with a hungry, empty mind and with fairly srong jaws, and what I got I *bit*.” And his ear for the beauty of language needed no tuning fork. Until the end of dinner I listened to him spellbound. I can remember thinking: This is what people mean when they talk of seeing stars. That is what I am doing now. I do not to this day know who was on my other side. Good manners, social obligation, duty—all had gone with the wind. I was transfixed, transported into a new element. I knew only that I had seen a great light. I recognized it as the light of genius… I cannot attempt to analyze, still less transmit, the light of genius. But I will try to set down, as I remember them, some of the differences which struck me between him and all the others, young and old, whom I have known. First and foremost he was incalculable. He ran true to no form. There lurked in his every thought and world the ambush of the unexpected. I felt also that the impact of life, ideas and even words upon his mind, was not only vivid and immediate, but direct. Between him and them there was no shock absorber of vicarious thought or precedent gleaned either from books or other minds. His relationship wit

Here is a remarkable truth: God is able to bring eternal results from our time-bound efforts. This is what Jesus intimates when he tells us to store up treasure in heaven rather than on earth. When we invest our time in what has eternal significance, we store up treasure in heaven. This side of heaven, the only investments with eternal significance are people. “Living this day well” means prioritizing relationships over material gain. We cannot take our stuff with us when we die, but, Lord willing, we may feed the hungry and clothe the needy in such a way that an eternal result is rendered. We may speak words that, by the favor of the Lord, transform into the very words of life. This is the calling of the missionary, the magnate, and the mother of small children: spend your time to impact people for eternity.

I was convinced that I was totally incompetent in predicting market prices - but that others were generally incompetent also but did not know it, or did not know they were taking massive risks. Most traders were just "picking pennies in front of a steamroller," exposing themselves to the high-impact rare event yet sleeping like babies, unaware of it.

The ExxonMobil forecast numbers suggested that to make an impact on oil demand, the world’s governments would have to reach a unified conclusion that climate change presented an emergency on the scale of the Second World War—a threat so profound and disruptive as to require massive national investments and taxes designed to change the global energy mix.

Just as in other aspects of your life, setting financial goals is a tried-and-true way to reach those goals.

Save to invest, don’t save to save.

To be effective engineers, we need to be able to identify which activities produce more impact with smaller time investments.

You were born to convert the evaporating life into some impact on humanity.

It is a pity that dead men are still impacting the world while men who are still alive are wasting away, roaming the world without an understanding of what to do with their time.

Investors have a role in shaping the world, because everything is influenced by the allocation of capital. At scale and collectively, investors are most responsible for the allocation of capital. While responsibility is to be shared among all economic participants - As investors, we should have a sense of responsibility, and pride, about the societal impacts of our investment choices.

We are taught to believe that having deep passions is foolish at best and dangerous at worst. We live in a cultural moment that is suspicious of ardent desires and strong commitments, propagating the idea that few things in life matter, that we have outlived ideals and ethical principles, and that comprehensive cultural change is impossible. Many of us have adopted the view that because we cannot remedy the enormous inequalities of the social world, we should not even bother to try. We have resigned ourselves to the idea that in the long haul nothing we do has any real impact and that caring too much is consequently a waste of our energies. By the same token, our (postmodern and sophisticated) recognition that meaning is inherently relative at times causes us to stop looking for meaning altogether. Though we are surrounded by a multitude of objects, artifacts, cultural icons, and shimmering images, few of these items manage to affect us on a deep level. In some ways, we are increasingly reconciled to the idea that the best we can do is to avoid the more crushing disillusionments of life–that the less we invest ourselves, the more inoculated we are against the misfortunes of the world.

Even for taxable clients, mutual fund managers supervised the assets in very much the same way, simply ignoring the tax impact and passing the tax liability through to largely unsuspecting fund shareholders.

One concept lately gaining momentum is “impact investing” or “triple-bottom-line investing,” whereby investors back businesses that generate financial returns and meet measurable social or environmental goals.

Read with a vengeance, as if the author’s life is on trial, because nothing will have such an impact and be a better investment than owning, reading, and re-reading books that will change the way you think, write, and speak.

We can apply these five questions to our own attempts at building buffers. Think of the most important project you are trying to get done at work or at home. Then ask the following five questions: (1) What risks do you face on this project? (2) What is the worst-case scenario? (3) What would the social effects of this be? (4) What would the financial impact of this be? and (5) How can you invest to reduce risks or strengthen financial or social resilience? Your

Life choices are not always about the money, but you should always be clear about the financial impact of the choices you make. Sound investing is not complicated. Save a portion of every dollar you earn or that otherwise comes your way.

It would be easy to speculate about the impact of years of cocaine use on my father's heart, but I suspect that it will tell us less than if we could measure the cumulative effects of hatred, racism and indignity. What is the impact of years of strip searches, of being bent over, the years before that when you were a child and knew that no dream you had for yourself was taken seriously by anyone, that you were not someone who would be fully invested in by a nation that treated you as expendable?

Truth telling is an investment we must make in relationships—whether personal or professional. It takes a lot of time and thought, and sometimes, courage. However, there is probably not another investment of time that pays a greater dividend when done well.

Your relationships are the only “trophies” that you can take to heaven, so spend your life investing in them. Trust God, treasure your wife, spend time with your kids and build a legacy of love, laughter and faith in your family that will impact the world for generations to come!

The PRC’s “deterritorialized nationalism” is compatible with the commoditization of national sovereignty practice of many Mekong countries in which large-scale, long-term land concessions are granted to Chinese companies for lucrative investment in megaprojects (Dwyer 2007). Deterritorialized nationalism mobilized through xin yimin is at

As far as agricultural GDP is concerned, in today’s China additional investment in high-quality roads no longer has a statistically significant impact while low-quality roads are not only significant but also generate 1.57 yuan of agricultural GDP for every yuan invested. Investment in low-quality roads also generates high returns in rural nonfarm GDP. Every yuan invested in low-quality roads yields more than 5 yuan of rural nonfarm GDP. Low-quality roads also raise more poor people out of poverty per yuan invested than high-quality roads, making them a win–win strategy for growth in agriculture and poverty alleviation. In Africa, governments can learn from the Chinese experience and make sure their road programs give adequate priority to lower-quality and rural feeder roads.

Moments of pride commemorate people’s achievements. We feel our chest puff out and our chin lift. 2. There are three practical principles we can use to create more moments of pride: (1) Recognize others; (2) Multiply meaningful milestones; (3) Practice courage. The first principle creates defining moments for others; the latter two allow us to create defining moments for ourselves. 3. We dramatically underinvest in recognition. • Researcher Wiley: 80% of supervisors say they frequently express appreciation, while less than 20% of employees agree. 4. Effective recognition is personal, not programmatic. (“ Employee of the Month” doesn’t cut it.) • Risinger at Eli Lilly used “tailored rewards” (e.g., Bose headphones) to show his team: I saw what you did and I appreciate it. 5. Recognition is characterized by a disjunction: A small investment of effort yields a huge reward for the recipient. • Kira Sloop, the middle school student, had her life changed by a music teacher who told her that her voice was beautiful. 6. To create moments of pride for ourselves, we should multiply meaningful milestones—reframing a long journey so that it features many “finish lines.” • The author Kamb planned ways to “level up”—for instance “Learn how to play ‘Concerning Hobbits’ from The Fellowship of the Ring”—toward his long-term goal of mastering the fiddle.

Design for 80 percent and build separate paths for exceptions. Eliminate or reduce the impact of low-value steps. Simplify complex steps. Combine simple steps. Work to design quality into the work, rather than inspect step outputs after the fact. Use parallel paths wherever possible. Broaden job content and empower employees. Don’t design things to the task level unless the risk of variation is unacceptable and you’re willing to invest in testing prior to implementation.

How the sadness is handled by the physician has a powerful impact on the medical care received by the patients. If the grief is relentlessly suppressed--as in Eva's experience during residency--the result can be a numb physician who is unable to invest in a new patient. This lack of investment can lead to rote medical care--impersonal at best, shoddy at worst. At the other end of the spectrum is the doctor who is inundated with grief and can't function because of the overwhelming sorrow. Burnout is significant in both these cases, and that erodes the quality of medical care.

One way to get a life and keep it is to put energy into being an S&M (success and money) queen. I first heard this term in Karen Salmansohn’s fabulous book The 30-Day Plan to Whip Your Career Into Submission. Here’s how to do it: be a star at work. I don’t care if you flip burgers at McDonald’s or run a Fortune 500 company. Do everything with totality and excellence. Show up on time, all the time. Do what you say you will do. Contribute ideas. Take care of the people around you. Solve problems. Be an agent for change. Invest in being the best in your industry or the best in the world! If you’ve been thinking about changing professions, that’s even more reason to be a star at your current job. Operating with excellence now will get you back up to speed mentally and energetically so you can hit the ground running in your new position. It will also create good karma. When and if you finally do leave, your current employers will be happy to support you with a great reference and often leave an open door for additional work in the future. If you’re an entrepreneur, look at ways to enhance your business. Is there a new product or service you’ve wanted to offer? How can you create raving fans by making your customer service sparkle? How can you reach more people with your product or service? Can you impact thousands or even millions more? Let’s not forget the M in S&M. Getting a life and keeping it includes having strong financial health as well. This area is crucial because many women delay taking charge of their financial lives as they believe (or have been culturally conditioned to believe) that a man will come along and take care of it for them. This is a setup for disaster. You are an intelligent and capable woman. If you want to fully unleash your irresistibility, invest in your financial health now and don’t stop once you get involved in a relationship. If money management is a challenge for you, I highly recommend my favorite financial coach: David Bach. He is the bestselling author of many books, including The Automatic Millionaire, Smart Women Finish Rich, and Smart Couples Finish Rich. His advice is clear-cut and straightforward, and, most important, it works.

Or take school attendance. Everybody seems to have different ideas on how to raise it. We should pay for uniforms. Advance school fees on credit. Offer free meals. Install toilets. Raise public awareness of the value of education. Hire more teachers. And on and on. All of these suggestions sound perfectly logical. Thanks to RCTs, however, we know that $100 worth of free meals translates into an additional 2.8 years of educational attainment – three times as much as free uniforms. Speaking of proven impact, deworming children with intestinal complaints has been shown to yield 2.9 years of additional schooling for the absurdly small investment of $10 worth of treatment. No armchair philosopher could have predicted that, but since this finding was revealed, tens of millions of children have been dewormed.

A large brand will typically spend between 10 and 20 percent of their media buy on creative,” DeJulio explains. “So if they have a $500 million media budget, there’s somewhere between $50 to $100 million going toward creating content. For that money they’ll get seven to ten pieces of content, but not right away. If you’re going to spend $1 million on one piece of content, it’s going to take a long time—six months, nine months, a year—to fully develop. With this budget and timeline, brands have no margin to take chances creatively.” By contrast, the Tongal process: If a brand wants to crowdsource a commercial, the first step is to put up a purse—anywhere from $50,000 to $200,000. Then, Tongal breaks the project into three phases: ideation, production, and distribution, allowing creatives with different specialties (writing, directing, animating, acting, social media promotion, and so on) to focus on what they do best. In the first competition—the ideation phase—a client creates a brief describing its objective. Tongal members read the brief and submit their best ideas in 500 characters (about three tweets). Customers then pick a small number of ideas they like and pay a small portion of the purse to these winners. Next up is production, where directors select one of the winning concepts and submit their take. Another round of winners are selected and these folks are given the time and money to crank out their vision. But this phase is not just limited to these few winning directors. Tongal also allows anyone to submit a wild card video. Finally, sponsors select their favorite video (or videos), the winning directors get paid, and the winning videos get released to the world. Compared to the seven to ten pieces of content the traditional process produces, Tongal competitions generate an average of 422 concepts in the idea phase, followed by an average of 20 to 100 finished video pieces in the video production phase. That is a huge return for the invested dollars and time.

We grossly overestimate the length of the effect of misfortune on our lives. You think that the loss of your fortune or current position will be devastating, but you are probably wrong. More likely, you will adapt to anything, as you probably did after past misfortunes. You may feel a sting, but it will not be as bad as you expect. This kind of misprediction may have a purpose: to motivate us to perform important acts (like buying new cars or getting rich) and to prevent us from taking certain unnecessary risks. And it is part of a more general problem: we humans are supposed to fool ourselves a little bit here and there. According to Trivers’s theory of self-deception, this is supposed to orient us favorably toward the future. But self-deception is not a desirable feature outside of its natural domain. It prevents us from taking some unnecessary risks—but we saw in Chapter 6 how it does not as readily cover a spate of modern risks that we do not fear because they are not vivid, such as investment risks, environmental dangers, or long-term security.

In the immediate postbubble period, the wealth effect of asset price movements has a bigger impact on economic growth rates than monetary policy does. People tend to underestimate the size of this effect. In the early stages of a bubble bursting, when stock prices fall and earnings have not yet declined, people mistakenly judge the decline to be a buying opportunity and find stocks cheap in relation to both past earnings and expected earnings, failing to account for the amount of decline in earnings that is likely to result from what’s to come. But the reversal is self-reinforcing. As wealth falls first and incomes fall later, creditworthiness worsens, which constricts lending activity, which hurts spending and lowers investment rates while also making it less appealing to borrow to buy financial assets. This in turn worsens the fundamentals of the asset (e.g., the weaker economic activity leads corporate earnings to chronically disappoint), leading people to sell and driving down prices further. This has an accelerating downward impact on asset prices, income, and wealth.

What if, rather than asking women to bear the burden of responsibility for our nation’s health and intelligence, governments invested money in research for better formulas that can improve health? If what we feed our babies in the first year really has that much of an impact on lifelong health, this should be a priority. Because in reality, not all babies are going to be able to be breastfed, as long as we want to live in a world where women have the freedom to decide how to use their bodies; whether to work or stay home; whether to be a primary caregiver or not. In reality, there are going to be children raised by single dads; there are going to be children raised by grandparents; there are going to be children who are adopted by parents who aren’t able to induce lactation; there are going to be children whose mothers don’t produce enough milk, or who are on drugs not compatible with breastfeeding. Rather than demanding that every mother should be able to—should want to—breastfeed, we should be demanding better research, better resources, better options. We should be demanding better.

The various seafood guides usually rank farmed fish based on safety for consumers as well as on environmental impacts. Currently, it’s really hard to find out where or how animals were raised, what they have consumed that you don’t want to have as a part of you, or how long they have been sitting in storage, accumulating things you also do not want to have as a part of you. What most guides do not tell you is whether the fish are plant-eaters or carnivores, nor do you learn their likely age, and these things matter a lot for two reasons. The higher up the food chain, and the older the animal, the greater the concentration of contaminants: tuna, shark, swordfish, halibut, and in fact, most of the fish in the counter fit into this category. It takes a much greater investment from the ecosystem, pound for pound, to make a ten-year-old fish-eating tuna than a one-year-old plant-eating catfish. For those who want to eat low on the food chain with lowest risk of contaminants, farmed catfish, tilapia, carp, and certain mollusks are the best choices, but even so, it makes a difference where and how they were raised.

The rise of loneliness as a health hazard tracks with the entrenchment of values and practices that supersede any notion of "individual choices." The dynamics include reduced social programs, less available "common" spaces such as public libraries, cuts in services for the vulnerable and the elderly, stress, poverty, and the inexorable monopolization of economic life that shreds local communities. By way of illustration, let's take a familiar scenario: Walmart or some other megastore decides to open one of its facilities in a municipality. Developers are happy, politicians welcome the new investment, and consumers are pleased at finding a wide variety of goods at lower prices. But what are the social impacts? Locally owned and operated small businesses cannot compete with the marketing behemoth and must close. People lose their jobs or must find new work for lower pay. Neighborhoods are stripped of the familiar hardware store, pharmacy, butcher, baker, candlestick maker. People no longer walk to their local establishment, where they meet and greet one another and familiar merchants they have known, but drive, each isolated in their car, to a windowless, aesthetically bereft warehouse, miles away from home. They might not even leave home at all — why bother, when you can order online? No wonder international surveys show a rise in loneliness. The percentage of Americans identifying themselves as lonely has doubled from 20 to 40 percent since the 1980s, the New York Times reported in 2016. Alarmed by the health ravages, Britain has even found it necessary to appoint a minister of loneliness. Describing the systemic founts of loneliness, the U.S. surgeon general Vivek Murthy wrote: "Our twenty-first-century world demands that we focus on pursuits that seem to be in constant competition for our time, attention, energy, and commitment. Many of these pursuits are themselves competitions. We compete for jobs and status. We compete over possessions, money, and reputations. We strive to stay afloat and to get ahead. Meanwhile, the relationships we prize often get neglected in the chase." It is easy to miss the point that what Dr. Murthy calls "our twenty-first-century world" is no abstract entity, but the concrete manifestation of a particular socioeconomic system, a distinct worldview, and a way of life.

Indeed, for those in the West inclined to be critical of China, here are few cautionary facts. With its absolutely massive population (1.33 billion or one-fifth of the world's population) it's obvious that China should have a massive impact on the world. Yet, it's one-child policy, for all the uncomfortable ethical questions it raises and the painful sacrifice made by millions of Chinese families, means that China's annual percentage growth rate is low relative to the global average (0.49 per cent versus 1.13 per cent). Even with a population more than four times that of the United States (1.3 billion versus 0.3 billion), China's ecological footprint is still less than that of the US (2456 million global hectares versus 2730 million global hectares). In 2009, China invested far more than any other country in the clean energy industry – $34.6 billion or 0.39 per cent of its gross domestic product compared to United States' $18.6 billion or 0.13 per cent of GDP. When it comes to reforestation, China punches way above its numerical and geographical weight, with massive initiatives like the NFPP and SLCP helping seed some 4 million hectares of forest every year, which is probably more tree planting than the rest of the world put together.

Rejecting failure and avoiding mistakes seem like high-minded goals, but they are fundamentally misguided. Take something like the Golden Fleece Awards, which were established in 1975 to call attention to government-funded projects that were particularly egregious wastes of money. (Among the winners were things like an $84,000 study on love commissioned by the National Science Foundation, and a $3,000 Department of Defense study that examined whether people in the military should carry umbrellas.) While such scrutiny may have seemed like a good idea at the time, it had a chilling effect on research. No one wanted to “win” a Golden Fleece Award because, under the guise of avoiding waste, its organizers had inadvertently made it dangerous and embarrassing for everyone to make mistakes. The truth is, if you fund thousands of research projects every year, some will have obvious, measurable, positive impacts, and others will go nowhere. We aren’t very good at predicting the future—that’s a given—and yet the Golden Fleece Awards tacitly implied that researchers should know before they do their research whether or not the results of that research would have value. Failure was being used as a weapon, rather than as an agent of learning. And that had fallout: The fact that failing could earn you a very public flogging distorted the way researchers chose projects. The politics of failure, then, impeded our progress. There’s a quick way to determine if your company has embraced the negative definition of failure. Ask yourself what happens when an error is discovered. Do people shut down and turn inward, instead of coming together to untangle the causes of problems that might be avoided going forward? Is the question being asked: Whose fault was this? If so, your culture is one that vilifies failure. Failure is difficult enough without it being compounded by the search for a scapegoat. In a fear-based, failure-averse culture, people will consciously or unconsciously avoid risk. They will seek instead to repeat something safe that’s been good enough in the past. Their work will be derivative, not innovative. But if you can foster a positive understanding of failure, the opposite will happen. How, then, do you make failure into something people can face without fear? Part of the answer is simple: If we as leaders can talk about our mistakes and our part in them, then we make it safe for others. You don’t run from it or pretend it doesn’t exist. That is why I make a point of being open about our meltdowns inside Pixar, because I believe they teach us something important: Being open about problems is the first step toward learning from them. My goal is not to drive fear out completely, because fear is inevitable in high-stakes situations. What I want to do is loosen its grip on us. While we don’t want too many failures, we must think of the cost of failure as an investment in the future.

The aim is to get the students actively involved in seeking this evidence: their role is not simply to do tasks as decided by teachers, but to actively manage and understand their learning gains. This includes evaluating their own progress, being more responsible for their learning, and being involved with peers in learning together about gains in learning. If students are to become active evaluators of their own progress, teachers must provide the students with appropriate feedback so that they can engage in this task. Van den Bergh, Ros, and Beijaard (2010: 3) describe the task thus: Fostering active learning seems a very challenging and demanding task for teachers, requiring knowledge of students’ learning processes, skills in providing guidance and feedback and classroom management. The need is to engage students in this same challenging and demanding task. The suggestion in this chapter is to start lessons with helping students to understand the intention of the lesson and showing them what success might look like at the end. Many times, teachers look for the interesting beginning to a lesson – for the hook, and the motivating question. Dan Willingham (2009) has provided an excellent argument for not thinking in this way. He advocates starting with what the student is likely to think about. Interesting hooks, demonstrations, fascinating facts, and likewise may seem to be captivating (and often are), but he suggests that there are likely to be other parts of the lesson that are more suitable for the attention-grabber. The place for the attention-grabber is more likely to be at the end of the lesson, because this will help to consolidate what has been learnt. Most importantly,Willingham asks teachers to think long and hard about how to make the connection between the attention-grabber and the point that it is designed to make; preferably, that point will be the main idea from the lesson. Having too many open-ended activities (discovery learning, searching the Internet, preparing PowerPoint presentations) can make it difficult to direct students’ attention to that which matters – because they often love to explore the details, the irrelevancies, and the unimportant while doing these activities. One of Willingham's principles is that any teaching method is most useful when there is plenty of prompt feedback about whether the student is thinking about a problem in the right way. Similarly, he promotes the notion that assignments should be primarily about what the teacher wants the students to think about (not about demonstrating ‘what they know’). Students are very good at ignoring what you say (‘I value connections, deep ideas, your thoughts’) and seeing what you value (corrections to the grammar, comments on referencing, correctness or absence of facts). Thus teachers must develop a scoring rubric for any assignment before they complete the question or prompts, and show the rubric to the students so that they know what the teacher values. Such formative feedback can reinforce the ‘big ideas’ and the important understandings, and help to make the investment of

HOW TO CREATE A GOOD HABIT The 1st Law: Make It Obvious 1.1: Fill out the Habits Scorecard. Write down your current habits to become aware of them. 1.2: Use implementation intentions: “I will [BEHAVIOR] at [TIME] in [LOCATION].” 1.3: Use habit stacking: “After I [CURRENT HABIT], I will [NEW HABIT].” 1.4: Design your environment. Make the cues of good habits obvious and visible. The 2nd Law:Make It Attractive 2.1: Use temptation bundling. Pair an action you want to do with an action you need to do. 2.2: Join a culture where your desired behavior is the normal behavior. 2.3: Create a motivation ritual. Do something you enjoy immediately before a difficult habit. The 3rd Law: Make It Easy 3.1: Reduce friction. Decrease the number of steps between you and your good habits. 3.2: Prime the environment. Prepare your environment to make future actions easier. 3.3: Master the decisive moment. Optimize the small choices that deliver outsized impact. 3.4: Use the Two-Minute Rule. Downscale your habits until they can be done in two minutes or less. 3.5: Automate your habits. Invest in technology and onetime purchases that lock in future behavior. The 4th Law: Make It Satisfying 4.1: Use reinforcement. Give yourself an immediate reward when you complete your habit. 4.2: Make “doing nothing” enjoyable. When avoiding a bad habit, design a way to see the benefits. 4.3: Use a habit tracker. Keep track of your habit streak and “don’t break the chain.” 4.4: Never miss twice. When you forget to do a habit, make sure you get back on track immediately. HOW TO BREAK A BAD HABIT Inversion of the 1st Law: Make It Invisible 1.5: Reduce exposure. Remove the cues of your bad habits from your environment. Inversion of the 2nd Law: Make It Unattractive 2.4: Reframe your mind-set. Highlight the benefits of avoiding your bad habits. Inversion of the 3rd Law: Make It Difficult 3.6: Increase friction. Increase the number of steps between you and your bad habits. 3.7: Use a commitment device. Restrict your future choices to the ones that benefit you. Inversion of the 4th Law: Make It Unsatisfying 4.5: Get an accountability partner. Ask someone to watch your behavior. 4.6: Create a habit contract. Make the costs of your bad habits public and painful.

Learning to meditate helped too. When the Beatles visited India in 1968 to study Transcendental Meditation at the ashram of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, I was curious to learn it, so I did. I loved it. Meditation has benefited me hugely throughout my life because it produces a calm open-mindedness that allows me to think more clearly and creatively. I majored in finance in college because of my love for the markets and because that major had no foreign language requirement—so it allowed me to learn what I was interested in, both inside and outside class. I learned a lot about commodity futures from a very interesting classmate, a Vietnam veteran quite a bit older than me. Commodities were attractive because they could be traded with very low margin requirements, meaning I could leverage the limited amount of money I had to invest. If I could make winning decisions, which I planned to do, I could borrow more to make more. Stock, bond, and currency futures didn’t exist back then. Commodity futures were strictly real commodities like corn, soybeans, cattle, and hogs. So those were the markets I started to trade and learn about. My college years coincided with the era of free love, mind-expanding drug experimentation, and rejection of traditional authority. Living through it had a lasting effect on me and many other members of my generation. For example, it deeply impacted Steve Jobs, whom I came to empathize with and admire. Like me, he took up meditation and wasn’t interested in being taught as much as he loved visualizing and building out amazing new things. The times we lived in taught us both to question established ways of doing things—an attitude he demonstrated superbly in Apple’s iconic “1984” and “Here’s to the Crazy Ones,” which were ad campaigns that spoke to me. For the country as a whole, those were difficult years. As the draft expanded and the numbers of young men coming home in body bags soared, the Vietnam War split the country. There was a lottery based on birthdates to determine the order of those who would be drafted. I remember listening to the lottery on the radio while playing pool with my friends. It was estimated that the first 160 or so birthdays called would be drafted, though they read off all 366 dates. My birthday was forty-eighth.

The homeowner’s greater willingness to place the large, obtrusive sign on their lawns after agreeing to the smaller ones demonstrates the impact of our predilection for consistency with our past behaviors. Little investments, such as placing a tiny sign in a window, can lead to big changes in future behaviors.

you had a deep understanding of the impact bias and you acted on it, which is not always that easy to do, you would tend to invest your resources in the things that would make you happy,'' he says. This might mean taking more time with friends instead of more time for making money. He also adds that a better understanding of the empathy gap -- those hot and cold states we all find ourselves in on frequent occasions -- could save people from making regrettable decisions in moments of courage or craving.

Here the goals of improving land and making a profit would not be mutually exclusive: Holistic Planned Grazing requires a lot of animals, and in turn bolsters the carrying capacity of the land, sometimes two to four times. The more animal impact, the better the land—higher soil carbon levels, greater biodiversity, better water infiltration—and the more animals it can feed. This means greater income and a boost to local economies. It’s “impact” investing on many levels.

When the mid-20th-century white homeowner claimed that the presence of a Bill and Daisy Myers decreased his property value, he was not merely engaging in racist dogma—he was accurately observing the impact of federal policy on market prices. Redlining destroyed the possibility of investment wherever black people lived.

As a result, proportional movements of high-priced stocks in the Dow averages have a much greater impact than movements of lower-priced stocks, regardless of the size of the company.

for several years starting in 2004, Bezos visited iRobot’s offices, participated in strategy sessions held at places like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , and became a mentor to iRobot chief executive Colin Angle, who cofounded the company in 1990. “He recognized early on that robots were a very disruptive game-changer,’’ Angle says of Bezos. “His curiosity about our space led to a very cool period of time where I could count upon him for a unique perspective.’’ Bezos is no longer actively advising the company, but his impact on the local tech scene has only grown larger. In 2008, Bezos’ investment firm provided initial funding for Rethink Robotics, a Boston company that makes simple-to-program manufacturing robots. Four years later, Amazon paid $775 million for North Reading-based Kiva, which makes robots that transport merchandise in warehouses. Also in 2012, Amazon opened a research and software development outpost in Cambridge that has done work on consumer electronics products like the Echo, a Wi-Fi-connected speaker that responds to voice commands. Rodney Brooks, an iRobot cofounder who is now chief technology officer of Rethink, says he met Bezos at the annual TED Conference. Bezos was aware of work that Brooks, a professor emeritus at MIT, had done on robot navigation and control strategies. Helen Greiner, the third cofounder of iRobot, says she met Bezos at a different technology conference, in 2004. Shortly after that, she recruited him as an adviser to iRobot. Bezos also made an investment in the company, which was privately held at the time. “He gave me a number of memorable insights,’’ Angle says. “He said, ‘Just because you won a bet doesn’t mean it was a good bet.’ Roomba might have been lucky. He was challenging us to think hard about where we were going and how to leverage our success.’’ On visits to iRobot, Greiner recalls, “he’d shake everyone’s hand and learn their names. He got them engaged.’’ She says one of the key pieces of advice Bezos supplied was about the value of open APIs — the application programming interfaces that allow other software developers to write software that talks to a product like the Roomba, expanding its functionality. The advice was followed. (Amazon also offers a range of APIs that help developers build things for its products.) By spending time with iRobot, Bezos gave employees a sense they were on the right track. “We were all believers that robotics would be huge,’’ says former iRobot exec Tom Ryden. “But when someone like that comes along and pays attention, it’s a big deal.’’ Angle says that Bezos was an adviser “in a very formative, important moment in our history,’’ and while they discussed “ideas about what practical robots could do, and what they could be,’’ Angle doesn’t want to speculate about what, exactly, Bezos gleaned from the affiliation. But Greiner says she believes “there was learning on both sides. We already had a successful consumer product with Roomba, and he had not yet launched the Kindle. He was learning from us about successful consumer products and robotics.’’ (Unfortunately, Bezos and Amazon’s public relations department would not comment.) The relationship trailed off around 2007 as Bezos got busier — right around when Amazon launched the Kindle, Greiner says. Since then, Bezos and Amazon have stayed mum about most of their activity in the state. His Bezos Expeditions investment team is still an investor in Rethink, which earlier this month announced its second product, a $29,000, one-armed robot called Sawyer that can do precise tasks, such as testing circuit boards. The warehouse-focused Kiva Systems group has been on a hiring tear, and now employs more than 500 people, according to LinkedIn. In December, Amazon said that it had 15,000 of the squat orange Kiva robots moving around racks of merchandise in 10 of its 50 distribution centers. Greiner left iRo

But there are many times when we are not simply watching thoughts come and go, either because we are lost in them or because we choose to think something through, perhaps as a precursor to action. In both these cases it is crucial for us to discern wholesome from unwholesome thoughts in order to know which to give our energy to, because these thoughts do have a karmic impact; they lead us. From thoughts come actions. From actions come all sorts of consequences. Which thoughts will we invest in? Our great task is to see them clearly, so that we can choose which to act on and which simply to let be.

if you want to have a significant impact on people, on organizations, and on communities, you’d be wise to invest in learning the behaviors that enable you to become the very best leader you can.

The first step to increasing your happiness is to understand what positive psychology research has been telling us for the past fifteen years: the most significant factors in your day-to-day, moment-to-moment level of happiness are not circumstantial. They’re not heredity. They’re not dictated by your genes or caused by outside events. The most significant factors in your happiness are your actions. What you do every day. You can break down the bulk of happiness research into three areas. Your happiness is affected by 1) your outlook, that is, how you choose to view the events and circumstances of your everyday life; 2) specific actions with positive impact—things like writing down three things your grateful for, or sending appreciative emails, doing random acts of kindness, practicing forgiveness, meditating, and exercising; and 3) where you put your time and energy, and especially investing more time into important relationships and personally meaningful pursuits.

Before examining the many powerful changes in the investment climate, let’s remind ourselves that active investing is, at the margin, always a negative-sum game. Trading investments among investors would by itself be a zero-sum game, except that the large costs of management fees and expenses plus commissions and market impact must be deducted. These costs total in the billions every year. Net result: Active investing is a seriously negative-sum game. To

Rather, the goal is that at the conclusion of our life, each of us can look back on the path we took and say not that we contributed to the creation of our small part but that we worked together, building on our relative strengths to create a greater, more sustainable whole.

As usual, the mass media’s thoughts on oil’s ‘demise’ have been facile and incomplete. It is never (or almost never) correct to see a big event through the lens of only one or even two changing conditions, and the 2014 oil crash had five huge distortions that I saw converge at once. We need to understand each of them before concluding how the ‘new oil market’ will impact shale production in the future and the viability of “Saudi America.” In no order of importance, I see the top five reasons for the collapse of oil prices in 2014 as: 1.   The rise of the U.S. dollar. 2.   The defensive market share posture of Saudi Arabia inside OPEC. 3.   The increasing production in U.S. shale and the resultant ‘oil glut.’ 4.   The continuing malaise of China and European economies. 5.   The demise of U.S. investment banks’ commitment to oil marketing—the hiatus of the “endless bid.

Around the world there are 31 million girls who don’t get a single day at school. More than 10 million girls are married off as child brides every year. Millions more are forced to lose their education and chance of better future employment as they are sent out to work as cheap child labour or kept at home to serve as carers. The evidence is clear that providing universal education in developing countries could have huge impact on economic growth … and the results are starkest of all when it comes to educating girls. As ever it makes both big and small sense to invest in girls, and it is time to close that gender

the days may pass slowly, but the years move quickly. Planning for the future—and a financially sound one—is a great thing. Consider yourself lucky: you are in the optimal time of your life to start having a massive impact on your future wealth. Forget waiting for Prince Charming. The fairytale is yours . . . if you start now.

His name is C. J. Skender, and he is a living legend. Skender teaches accounting, but to call him an accounting professor doesn’t do him justice. He’s a unique character, known for his trademark bow ties and his ability to recite the words to thousands of songs and movies on command. He may well be the only fifty-eight-year-old man with fair skin and white hair who displays a poster of the rapper 50 Cent in his office. And while he’s a genuine numbers whiz, his impact in the classroom is impossible to quantify. Skender is one of a few professors for whom Duke University and the University of North Carolina look past their rivalry to cooperate: he is in such high demand that he has permission to teach simultaneously at both schools. He has earned more than two dozen major teaching awards, including fourteen at UNC, six at Duke, and five at North Carolina State. Across his career, he has now taught close to six hundred classes and evaluated more than thirty-five thousand students. Because of the time that he invests in his students, he has developed what may be his single most impressive skill: a remarkable eye for talent. In 2004, Reggie Love enrolled in C. J. Skender’s accounting class at Duke. It was a summer course that Love needed to graduate, and while many professors would have written him off as a jock, Skender recognized Love’s potential beyond athletics. “For some reason, Duke football players have never flocked to my class,” Skender explains, “but I knew Reggie had what it took to succeed.” Skender went out of his way to engage Love in class, and his intuition was right that it would pay dividends. “I knew nothing about accounting before I took C. J.’s class,” Love says, “and the fundamental base of knowledge from that course helped guide me down the road to the White House.” In Obama’s mailroom, Love used the knowledge of inventory that he learned in Skender’s class to develop a more efficient process for organizing and digitizing a huge backlog of mail. “It was the number-one thing I implemented,” Love says, and it impressed Obama’s chief of staff, putting Love on the radar. In 2011, Love left the White House to study at Wharton. He sent a note to Skender: “I’m on the train to Philly to start the executive MBA program and one of the first classes is financial accounting—and I just wanted to say thanks for sticking with me when I was in your class.

Life expectancy rose only modestly between the Neolithic era of 8500 to 3500 BC and the Victorian era of 1850 to 1900.13 An American born in the late nineteenth century had an average life expectancy of around forty-five years, with a large share never making it past their first birthdays.14 Then something remarkable happened. In countries on the frontier of economic development, human health began to improve rapidly, education levels shot up, and standards of living began to grow and grow. Within a century, life expectancies had increased by two-thirds, average years of schooling had gone from single to double digits, and the productivity of workers and the pay they took home had doubled and doubled and then doubled again. With the United States leading the way, the rich world crossed a Great Divide—a divide separating centuries of slow growth, poor health, and anemic technical progress from one of hitherto undreamed-of material comfort and seemingly limitless economic potential. For the first time, rich countries experienced economic development that was both broad and deep, reaching all major segments of society and producing not just greater material comfort but also fundamental transformations in the health and life horizons of those it touched. As the French economist Thomas Piketty points out in his magisterial study of inequality, “It was not until the twentieth century that economic growth became a tangible, unmistakable reality for everyone.”15 The mixed economy was at the heart of this success—in the United States no less than in other Western nations. Capitalism played an essential role. But capitalism was not the new entrant on the economic stage. Effective governance was. Public health measures made cities engines of innovation rather than incubators of illness.16 The meteoric expansion of public education increased not only individual opportunity but also the economic potential of entire societies. Investments in science, higher education, and defense spearheaded breakthroughs in medicine, transportation, infrastructure, and technology. Overarching rules and institutions tamed and transformed unstable financial markets and turned boom-bust cycles into more manageable ups and downs. Protections against excessive insecurity and abject destitution encouraged the forward-looking investments and social integration that sustained growth required. At every level of society, the gains in health, education, income, and capacity were breathtaking. The mixed economy was a spectacularly positive-sum bargain: It redistributed power and resources, but as its impacts broadened and diffused, virtually everyone was made massively better off.

Over time, one of this engine's most potent impacts is in prioritizing investments for customer-driven growth by shifting the annual planning process. Instead of starting with the silos, leaders start with the customers' lives, identify priorities, and then determine collectively the investments to improve them to earn the right to growth. Without alignment among your executive team to regularly review the customer journey that this engine affords, investments are not fully optimized. Tactical actions are budgeted and implemented by silo, but complete customer experiences that drive growth are not improved. Rinse and repeat.

I see professional advisors cold-call perfect strangers rather than do a call rotation for existing clients. I see advisors do prospecting seminars rather than a client advisory council or client appreciation event, and I see advisors run advertising campaigns rather than network with existing strategic allies and other professional influencers. “Spray and pray” marketing strategies are flawed on so many levels. Why, then, do so many advisors still attempt them? The reason for this is simple; nurturing existing relationships and other tried and true strategies can be boring and rarely results in instant gratification. Too many advisors want to find the next “new idea”, something with some “sizzle”, and, as a result, are continually searching for and dabbling with concepts that ultimately have minimal impact. It’s not unlike investing. How many times have you seen someone try to hit a home-run with a high-risk investment opportunity rather than stick with a methodical long-term approach? It’s not just money that compounds. As I’ve said before, discipline compounds, too. You have to be patient and let your efforts gather momentum. Too many advisors get themselves into the proverbial “Red Zone” and, rather than stick to the plan and see it through, they self-sabotage by abandoning the fundamentals and trying something new. Neglect also compounds. If we neglect our existing relationships it’s only a matter of time before they’ll be lured away and we’ll have to throw our own Hail Mary. Don’t deviate from your process. Identify the most fundamentally sound and proven trust-building activities, stick with them and tune out all the other noise. It’s much more effective to strengthen and nurture existing relationships over the long haul, rather than perpetually trying to start new ones. The prospecting treadmill is draining and you are building a business that is chaotic and unfocused. Relationships are proprietary and are a big part of the equity that you are building in your business.

Tesla applied for a patent on an electrical coil that is the most likely candidate for a non mechanical successor of his energy extractor. This is his “Coil for Electro magnets,” patent #512,340. It is a curious design, unlike an ordinary coil made by turning wire on a tube form, this one uses two wires laid next to each other on a form but with the end of the first one connected to the beginning of the second one. In the patent Tesla explains that this double coil will store many times the energy of a conventional coil.   The patent, however, gives no hint of what might have been its more unusual capability. In an article for Century Magazine, Tesla compares extracting energy from the environment to the work of other scientists who were, at that time, learning to condense atmospheric gases into liquids. In particular, he cited the work of a Dr. Karl Linde who had discovered what Tesla described as a self-cooling method for liquefying air. As Tesla said, “This was the only experimental proof which I was still wanting that energy was obtainable from the medium in the manner contemplated by me.” What ties the Linde work with Tesla's electromagnet coil is that both of them used a double path for the material they were working with. Linde had a compressor to pump the air to a high pressure, let the pressure fall as it traveled through a tube, and then used that cooled air to reduce the temperature of the incoming air by having it travel back up the first tube through a second tube enclosing the first. The already cooled air added to the cooling process of the machine and quickly condensed the gases to a liquid. Tesla's intent was to condense the energy trapped between the earth and its upper atmosphere and to turn it into an electric current. He pictured the sun as an immense ball of electricity, positively charged with a potential of some 200 billion volts. The Earth, on the other hand, is charged with negative electricity. The tremendous electrical force between these two bodies constituted, at least in part, what he called cosmic-energy. It varied from night to day and from season to season but it is always present. Tesla's patents for electrical generators and motors were granted in the late 1880's. During the 1890's the large electric power industry, in the form of Westinghouse and General Electric, came into being. With tens of millions of dollars invested in plants and equipment, the industry was not about to abandon a very profitable ten-year-old technology for yet another new one. Tesla saw that profits could be made from the self-acting generator, but somewhere along the line, it was pointed out to him, the negative impact the device would have on the newly emerging technological revolution of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. At the end of his article in Century he wrote: “I worked for a long time fully convinced that the practical realization of the method of obtaining energy from the sun would be of incalculable industrial value, but the continued study of the subject revealed the fact that while it will be commercially profitable if my expectations are well founded, it will not be so to an extraordinary degree.

In the past year, a new divestment campaign has caught on, faster than any other such campaign in history, according to a recent Oxford university study. Investors representing more than $2.5tn in assets under management, including the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Norway’s giant oil fund and the Church of England (whose archbishop is a former oil executive) have all joined the chorus saying sayonara to their dirtiest fossil fuel investments. They reason this is not about biting the hand that fed them; rather, it is about morality and economics. It is about the morality of not standing on the sidelines of climate change, “the most pressing moral issue in our world” in the words of the lead bishop on the environment for the Church of England. It is also about the economics of not getting stuck holding a bag of stranded fossil fuel assets that cannot be burnt if the world is to adhere to a given carbon budget, a topic on which Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of England, has expressed concerns. And it is about not missing out on the transition from a high-carbon to a low-carbon economy. The president of Harvard University, whose endowment is estimated to have a carbon footprint as big as that of Jamaica, is not convinced. As Drew Faust argues, constraining investment options risks significantly constraining investment returns, while divestment is unlikely to have a financial impact on the affected companies. It also raises the troubling problem of boycotting a whole class of companies whose products and services we rely on.

Hydraulic fracturing has been used safely in over a million wells, resulting in America’s rise as a global energy superpower, growth in energy investments, wages, and new jobs," added Mr. Milito in the statement. Environmental groups have countered that the isolated incidents of contamination confirm their fears about the environmental impacts of hydraulic fracturing. John Noël, of the group Clean Water Action, said in a statement that the report "smashes the myth that there can be oil and gas development without impacts to drinking water." Amy Mall, a senior policy analyst for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said that the EPA study, "while limited, shows fracking can and has impacted drinking water sources in many different ways," according to the Beacon Journal. The EPA report acknowledges that the findings may be due to a lack of data collected, inaccessible information, a scarcity of long-term systematic and base-line studies, and other factors. Bloomberg reported that EPA couldn't come to terms with energy companies including Range Resources Corp. and Chesapeake Energy to conduct water tests near their wells before and after they were fracked, meaning if the agency did find instances of contamination, it was harder to prove that fracking was the cause. "These elements significantly limit EPA’s ability to determine the actual frequency of impacts," the agency said in a fact sheet released with the report.

Aside from the movies, examples of positive-Black Swan businesses are: some segments of publishing, scientific research, and venture capital. In these businesses, you lose small to make big. You have little to lose per book and, for completely unexpected reasons, any given book might take off. The downside is small and easily controlled. The problem with publishers, of course, is that they regularly pay up for books, thus making their upside rather limited and their downside monstrous. (If you pay $10 million for a book, your Black Swan is it not being a bestseller.) Likewise, while technology can carry a great payoff, paying for the hyped-up story, as people did with the dot-com bubble, can make any upside limited and any downside huge. It is the venture capitalist who invested in a speculative company and sold his stake to unimaginative investors who is the beneficiary of the Black Swan, not the "me, too" investors.

Corporations have a unique role to play in creating a cleaner environment, and they also have economic incentives to use energy more efficiently as demand and costs rise globally. If every company in the S&P 500 voluntarily reported and disclosed its energy costs, clearly and explicitly as a line item on the balance sheet, there would be pressure to reduce that cost, just as there is for every other expense item. This would result in analyst and investor pressure on corporate executives to be more efficient with their energy output and to source cheaper and alternative sources, which would have a far greater impact on carbon emissions and pollution than any political treaty in history. As an added advantage, reducing costs increases profitability, which provides the appropriate incentives for corporate executives to act in their shareholders’ best interests and effect positive social change. According to PwC, 98 percent of the S&P 500 companies surveyed can link investments in emissions reduction to value creation.55 As a result, these corporations are discovering new ways to enhance efficiencies, create new markets, and build a competitive advantage.

Absent a Circle of Safety, paranoia, cynicism and self-interest prevail. The whole purpose of maintaining the Circle of Safety is so that we can invest all our time and energy to guard against the dangers outside. It’s the same reason we lock our doors at night. Not only does feeling safe inside give us peace of mind, but the positive impact on the organization itself is remarkable. When the Circle is strong and that feeling of belonging is ubiquitous, collaboration, trust and innovation result.

Unhappily, the basic assumption that most institutional investors can outperform the market is false. Today, the institutions are the market. Institutions do over 95 percent of all exchange trades and an even higher percentage of off-board and derivatives trades. It is precisely because investing institutions are so numerous and capable and determined to do well for their clients that investment has become a loser’s game. Talented and hardworking as they are, professional investors cannot, as a group, outperform themselves. In fact, given the cost of active management—fees, commissions, market impact of big transactions, and so forth—investment managers have and will continue to underperform the overall market. Individual

No liquid investment alternatives with stable guaranteed principal values exist that can provide real returns by consistently beating the combined impact of inflation and income taxes.

The Twelve Behaviors 1.​Focus on customers and growth (serve customers well and aggressively pursue growth). 2.​Lead impactfully (think like a leader and serve as a role model). 3.​Get results (consistently meet any commitments that you make). 4.​Make people better (encourage excellence in peers, subordinates, and/or managers). 5.​Champion change (drive continuous improvement in our operations). 6.​Foster teamwork and diversity (define success in terms of the entire team). 7.​Adopt a global mind-set (view the business from all relevant perspectives, and see the world in terms of integrated value chains). 8.​Take risks intelligently (recognize that we must take greater but smarter risks to generate better returns). 9.​Be self-aware (recognize your behavior and how it affects those around you). 10.​Communicate effectively (provide information to others in a timely, concise, and thoughtful way). 11.​Think in an integrative fashion (make more holistic decisions beyond your own bailiwick by applying intuition, experience, and judgment to the available data). 12.​Develop technical or functional excellence (be capable and effective in your particular area of expertise).

In addition to improving R&D and engineering processes, we pushed hard for our business leaders to treat R&D more strategically. Our individual business units used to decide how much to spend on R&D based on previous budgets and what they thought their proper “share” of available money was, regardless of the impact on current and future projects. We centralized R&D budgeting at the business level, analyzing potential projects and channeling more funds to those we thought would yield the biggest business impact. In our Aerospace business, we also began choosing new projects in ways that would balance long- and short-term growth. Most new product development had entailed what we called “long-cycle” projects. We’d invest in designing a revolutionary new cockpit design, but it might be six to eight years before the project was finished and sales started coming in. Beginning around 2005, we balanced these kinds of projects with new, “short-cycle” ones—products that customers might purchase within months, not years (incremental enhancements to existing aircraft, for instance, rather than entirely new platforms for new aircrafts). Then we started adding the salespeople to support it, giving it an even bigger boost in 2010. Together, the combination of short- and long-cycle projects would allow us to realize steadier, more predictable growth. Over the years, our shorter-cycle products have grown, and today they are a highly profitable, $1 billion business.

He has now completed two books, the first on how investment dealers “fee-farm” over half of the life savings of many clients, and this second book about conditions which allow quiet professional corruption to remain hidden from the public, and ignored by authorities. What drives me? (in the authors words) I hope to have an impact upon the #1 cause of disability, disease, and stress in society today. I believe I have some unique perspectives on this from my experience. For example, the #1 cause of disability, disease, and stress is fear of economic uncertainty. In my experience, the #1 cause of fear of economic uncertainty, is unfairness between those who are protected and enriched within the “lifeboats” of certain professions, corporations or institutions, and those who are not so protected. There are different levels of protection by the law, and immunity from having to adhere to the law, depending upon the wealth, power or status of those involved. Justice systems simply do not often “look upwards” to investigate and prosecute those of great wealth, power and status. These rigged systems of governance, finance, justice etc, cause unfairness, injustice, and repeal the laws of poverty for a few very lucky people, and repeals the chances of prosperity for billions of others. A small few win by corruption, while the rest of society must lose by default. This is a broken system. The unfairness of rigged and/or broken systems, causes imbalances sufficient to destroy entire societies. Societies can literally shake themselves apart with the human vibration of living in an unjust, unfair world. At time of writing this, I am the chairperson of the volunteer Canadian Justice Review Board of Canada, working to better understand one of societies most valuable social systems,

Applying this approach to measuring the value of impact investments generates thorny methodological problems. The first is that blended value often comes with public and collective good characteristics. Like the meadow that creates a feeding ground for migratory birds, they often create value that is enjoyed by those who do not pay for it. They also often require coordination between both customers and others, such as a drinking water business that relies on many noncustomers to keep the aquifer where it sources the water clean.

If impact investing is what we do, blended value is what we produce.

The current of impact investing is washing along the shores of a bifurcated world still organized to separate profit making from social and environmental problem solving. For now, this bifurcated world channels the energy of impact investors into the hidden pools and underground rivers on the margins of mainstream investment and philanthropic activity. But water has a powerful ability to reshape the world it flows through. The gathering weight of impact investment activity is wearing away the bedrock of seemingly immovable institutions and investment practices.

BARGAIN-ISSUE PATTERN IN SECONDARY COMPANIES. We have defined a secondary company as one that is not a leader in a fairly important industry. Thus it is usually one of the smaller concerns in its field, but it may equally well be the chief unit in an unimportant line. By way of exception, any company that has established itself as a growth stock is not ordinarily considered “secondary.” In the great bull market of the 1920s relatively little distinction was drawn between industry leaders and other listed issues, provided the latter were of respectable size. The public felt that a middle-sized company was strong enough to weather storms and that it had a better chance for really spectacular expansion than one that was already of major dimensions. The depression years 1931–32, however, had a particularly devastating impact on the companies below the first rank either in size or in inherent stability. As a result of that experience investors have since developed a pronounced preference for industry leaders and a corresponding lack of interest most of the time in the ordinary company of secondary importance. This has meant that the latter group have usually sold at much lower prices in relation to earnings and assets than have the former. It has meant further that in many instances the price has fallen so low as to establish the issue in the bargain class. When investors rejected the stocks of secondary companies, even though these sold at relatively low prices, they were expressing a belief or fear that such companies faced a dismal future. In fact, at least subconsciously, they calculated that any price was too high for them because they were heading for extinction—just as in 1929 the companion theory for the “blue chips” was that no price was too high for them because their future possibilities were limitless. Both of these views were exaggerations and were productive of serious investment errors. Actually, the typical middle-sized listed company is a large one when compared with the average privately owned business. There is no sound reason why such companies should not continue indefinitely in operation, undergoing the vicissitudes characteristic of our economy but earning on the whole a fair return on their invested capital.

The longer I’m involved in investing, the more impressed I am by the power of the credit cycle. It takes only a small fluctuation in the economy to produce a large fluctuation in the availability of credit, with great impact on asset prices and back on the economy itself.

Your personal time defaults should have a deliberate role in your life: they should boost your positivity, advance your health and relationships, and promote growth and development. When you go to bed each night, you should feel satisfied that you’ve invested in areas you care about.

Finally, financial markets move for infinite reasons: economic developments, political decisions, unexpected shocks, technological innovations, etc. All of them have different impacts and we cannot and should not seek to analyse them in depth, due to the difficulty of establishing appropriate relations between cause and effect. We

Research and development conducted by private companies in the United States has grown enormously over the past four decades. We have substantially replaced the publicly funded science that drove our growth after World War II with private research efforts. Such private R&D has shown some impressive results, including high average returns for the corporate sector. However, despite their enormous impact, these private R&D investments are much too small from a broader perspective. This is not a criticism of any individuals; rather, it is simply a feature of the system. Private companies do not capture the spillovers that their R&D efforts create for other corporations, so private sector executives in established firms underinvest in invention. The venture capital industry, which provides admirable support to some start-ups, is focused on fast-impact industries, such as information technology, and not generally on longer-run and capital-intensive investments like clean energy or new cell and gene therapies. Leading entrepreneur-philanthropists get this. In recent years, there have been impressive investments in science funded by publicly minded individuals, including Eric Schmidt, Elon Musk, Paul Allen, Bill and Melinda Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Bloomberg, Jon Meade Huntsman Sr., Eli and Edythe Broad, David H. Koch, Laurene Powell Jobs, and others (including numerous private foundations). The good news is that these people, with a wide variety of political views on other matters, share the assessment that science—including basic research—is of fundamental importance for the future of the United States. The less good news is that even the wealthiest people on the planet can barely move the needle relative to what the United States previously invested in science. America is, roughly speaking, a $20 trillion economy; 2 percent of our GDP is nearly $400 billion per year. Even the richest person in the world has a total stock of wealth of only around $100 billion—a mark broken in early 2018 by Jeff Bezos of Amazon, with Bill Gates and Warren Buffett in close pursuit. If the richest Americans put much of their wealth immediately into science, it would have some impact for a few years, but over the longer run, this would hardly move the needle. Publicly funded investment in research and development is the only “approach that could potentially return us to the days when technology-led growth lifted all boats. However, we should be careful. Private failure is not enough to justify government intervention. Just because the private sector is underinvesting does not necessarily imply that the government will make the right investments.

Quantifying the impact of these discoveries, and separating the contribution of private vs. public investment, is difficult. But as one measure, economists have attributed roughly half of the trillions of dollars in US GDP growth since the end of World War II to technology improvements.