New Year Resolutions, Anyone?, - How About a Premortem?

[John Hjorth]

Wall Street Journal - (Ben Cohen) [January 3^rd 2025] : It’s Called a Premortem—and It’s the Most Productive Thing You’ll Do All Year.

 

Forget about making a New Year’s resolution. Have you tried imagining your deathbed?

 

Morbid excercise, for sure; but does it makes sense to you? And does it have some kind of appeal to you? And if so, how, and in what way?

 

From the article :

 

Quote

... “What can I do in the next three to five years,” he asks himself, “that I will respect looking back from my deathbed?”

 

Most people give up on their New Year’s resolutions after a few weeks.

 

Shaich, 71, has been looking back from his deathbed for a few decades.  And he doesn’t call it a New Year’s resolution. He calls it writing a “premortem.” ...

 

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Amazon : Ron Shaich : Know What Matters: Lessons from a Lifetime of Transformations.

[Kazid]

Memento mori.

 

I reflect on this at the end of every month, have done this for several years. It is a great way to calibrate your actions, interpretations, and expectations about life. It's very easy for me to lose sight of the big picture, and this is a powerful way to counter that.

 

Highly recommend giving it a shot. Don't half-ass it, really go deep.

 

 

[Spekulatius]

Got to do this too:

https://archive.ph/MT875

Edited January 5 by Spekulatius

[John Hjorth]

10 hours ago, Kazid said:

Memento mori.

 

I reflect on this at the end of every month, have done this for several years. It is a great way to calibrate your actions, interpretations, and expectations about life. It's very easy for me to lose sight of the big picture, and this is a powerful way to counter that.

 

Highly recommend giving it a shot. Don't half-ass it, really go deep.

 

Thank you for a great post, @Kizion,

 

I especially like the way you apply the word 'recalibrate' here in this context.

 

Life is precious, life is limited, life is changeable and fickle. Time is a resource, of which it is not possible to buy more with money.

 

Each of us are produced and delivered without any 'best before' or 'expiry' date attached to us by a label, and without a corresponding users manual, and no recommendations or regulations about how to charge and power us up are given. [Qualification : I'm not aware of EU having any work in progress regulation related to that, I may be wrong about that].

 

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Every year in January, I visit a certain stat at Statistics Denmark [The Statistiscal Department of the Danish State, fully populated with well paid and happy nerds, who do nothing else but full time collecting, hoarding and crushing all kinds of data, about the Danish economy, population and society in every imaginary aspect] :

 

Statistics Denmark : Life table (2 years tables) by sex, age and life table.

 

Mind the great service here from Statistics Denmark : Even a newborn is able access the table and get some kind of perception what is in the bag of life.

 

Today, I also noticed another change, compared to prior years : At age 99, you can now also now get an estimate of your life expectancy. Years earlier, one would get a reply being at age 'in  the early '90's' as 'Sorry not enough data available to compile a reply', indicating one is already standing with one foot on a banana shell and the other in the grave.

 

Also mind the Danish hospitality towards people who don't master Danish language : The tables name in Danish language is 'Dødelighedstavle' [, translates to English by 'mortality table'], while in English language it is called 'Life table'. 

 

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In a way, I think of a 'premortem' as a certain kind of assessment, with a longer horizon than a New Year resolution, and likely  also more ad hoc, and / or frequent regular.

[John Hjorth]

1 hour ago, Spekulatius said:

Got to do this too:

https://archive.ph/MT875

 

I still remember CofB&F member - by now, not active for a long time -, Kravens board signature : 'Buy cheap, and something good may happen'.

[Spekulatius]

4 hours ago, John Hjorth said:

 

I still remember CofB&F member - by now, not active for a long time -, Kravens board signature : 'Buy cheap, and something good may happen'.

I got already in an open air concern in CLT with Bob Dylan playing amongst others. The ticket was $25 but later the same day dropped to $20. Bob Dylan wasn’t really good live, the other acts were better even the unknown ones.

 

I just went to a free gig at brewpub around my apartment last night. was themed “Phish” tribute. I don’t know that Phish band, but those tribute guys were awesome. I have rarely seen a Guitarplayer as good as this grandpa. I listen to some Phish tracks later  (a band from Vermont- country rock classified) and I think the tribute band is better than the original.

 

There are two learnings from this:

1) cheap can always get cheaper ( I would almost says “will”

2) be careful about wanting to meet your hero’s. Most won’t live up to your expectations . Heroes are just average people that do or did something exceptional in one discipline. Other than that they are probably just average.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited January 5 by Spekulatius

[Charlie]

On 1/5/2025 at 2:15 AM, John Hjorth said:

Forget about making a New Year’s resolution. Have you tried imagining your deathbed?

@John Hjorth Buffett in one of his last interviews said you should think about if you had to live only one more day/month/year (I think he said day), what would you do? And now do this every day. Live every day as it would be your last day. This exercise focuses you on the most important things and let you forget about irrelevant things. Meet family and do things you really want to do before you die. 

 

Edited January 6 by Charlie

[Charlie]

On 1/5/2025 at 2:15 AM, John Hjorth said:

Amazon : Ron Shaich : Know What Matters: Lessons from a Lifetime of Transformations.

@John Hjorth Thanks for recommending the book.

I am reading the book and it is very good.

 

Some chapters:

- Competitive Advantage is everything.

- Make Smart Bets

- Be Contrarian: Conserve in a Boom, Build in a Bust:

"This future-back perspective, as I've already shared, is fundamental to my approach to both life and business. 

But its importance is heightened during more extreme circumstances, positive or negative. From a future-back

perspective, it´s wise to be cautious when everyone else is investing like crazy, and to make smart investments

when everyone else is pulling cash out of the market. This is an underlying principle of value investing, espoused

by leaders like Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger. But it´s wisdom that rarely seems to make it into business 

operations. I believe it works there as well. Conserve in a boom; build in a bust. And nowhere was that advice

more dramatically relevant than in the boom years of early 2000s and the bust of the Great Recession."

 

Highly recommended!

 

[james22]

Regret Minimization Framework:

 

Imagine yourself at 80, looking back at life: "Would you regret this decision?"