Together with Affinity:
Learn how leading investment banking firms are using a relationship intelligence platform—a 21st century CRM—to put their focus back where it belongs: on their relationships. Check out our full guide to the modern investment banking CRM.
Download the guide and start closing more deals faster.
Lessons Learned:
We’ve all heard some form of the quote above. From Mark Twain to Winston Churchill, many of the smartest minds of the past have drawn inferences to learning from our past—specifically from mistakes or errors in judgment. That’s exactly why many aspects of society advance in a non-linear fashion. We eliminate the mistakes from ever occurring—avoiding the one step back and two steps forward. We just keep marching forward with a compounding effect until we hit bottlenecks or the peak of human innovation.
At some point in our lives though, we are faced with a scenario that doesn’t have a clear outcome and arrives with a new set of challenges. And we must be willing to make difficult and calculated decisions during that moment.
The current COVID-19 pandemic is one such scenario. Many, if not all of us, have never directly had to deal with a pandemic. From wearing masks to shutting down businesses and schools, we’ve been put through the wringer many times over by our government leaders across the world.
While we are all still learning how to cope and adapt to this new normal, enough time has passed for us to draw unpolished conclusions from some of the lessons that we’ve learned during this pandemic. Ones that we can apply for ourselves and for future generations.
I crowdsourced some of these evergreen lessons for you in the tweet below.
Once you gloss over the snarky comments there are actually some really insightful responses that may make you reflect on the past 18 months.
For the past week, I’ve been stewing over this question and have asked many close friends and family to see if there was any continuity across responses. It turns out that there were similar responses so I decided to use this newsletter as a way to express my own thoughts on the matter.
Without further ado, here are the top lessons I’ve learned from the pandemic.
1) Normative conformity and groupthink rule during a crisis.
Emotions and groupthink trump statistics, especially in the face of fear or existential crises.
People will deny what they see and believe and submit to groupthink.
Leaders fail to emerge as everyone falls in line.
A perfect example of this is the Asch Conformity Experiment. Watch the video below if you’ve never seen or heard of this experiment before.
Apparently, people conform for two main reasons: because they want to fit in with the group (normative influence) and because they believe the group is better informed than they are (informational influence).
We’ve seen both of these conformities across the board from local health officials to state governors.
In times of crisis, we need more leaders to step up, even if it means risking their careers as public servants.
2) Everything that can be politicized will be politicized.
Maybe I was naive in thinking that an existential crisis would rally the bases in a unified effort. To be honest, it did feel that way at the beginning of the pandemic in March and April of 2020, but it has since then become another politicized topic of discussion—specifically around the vaccine and its uptake.
I’m not here to pick sides or point fingers but one of the worst things that could have happened was the pandemic starting during an election year. It was used as a campaign tool on both sides of the aisle and continues to be used today.
3) Always question the “experts”.
When you consider someone an expert on something, the default setting in your brain is to trust that person blindly—especially when their knowledge base has a high barrier to entry.
During the pandemic, many of our so-called “experts” in high government positions looked downright incompetent. The constant flip-flopping across policies have essentially caused most Americans to lose complete faith in their institutions—or whatever little faith was left.
The most prominent matter of incompetence had to be centered around the mask debates (which shockingly still continues on to this day).
Take for instance this article that was published by Time Magazine on March 4, 2020, titled: “Health Experts Are Telling Healthy People Not to Wear Face Masks for Coronavirus. So Why Are So Many Doing It?”
Flash forward a month later (April 3, 2020) after CDC updated its guidance. The article title was updated to: “Public Health Experts Keep Changing Their Guidance on Whether or Not to Wear Face Masks for Coronavirus.”
The Surgeon General even tweeted out in late February that masks didn’t work yet they were trying to save them for healthcare workers. That tweet has now since been deleted.
While I would like to give them the benefit of the doubt of when the facts (science) change so should you, but I just can’t get myself to; especially after reading Michael Lewis’s new book The Premonition: A Pandemic Story where he exposes the bureaucratic failures of multiple administrations and the CDC.
The point is we need to ask more (difficult) questions to those we deem as experts so we can be more informed.
One example of this could be the relationship you have with your health practitioners. No one knows your own body better than you do, so sometimes it’s necessary to advocate for your own (or your child’s) health if you feel like you are getting generic responses. You have to remember, they aren’t always looking out for your individual needs, they are serving the general population and sometimes the greater good.
4) Bonus: Wake up call to take control of your own health.
If we’ve seen one consistent theme across this pandemic it’s that this virus has been more severely attacking people with compromised immune systems (generally older adults) or pre-existing conditions for the most part.
It goes without saying that some of these pre-existing conditions and autoimmune diseases may not have been self-inflicted. Regardless, we can still use this moment to try and take control of our own health.
Simple things such as getting daily exercise, going on nature walks, eating fresh produce, getting adequate sleep, and soaking in copious amounts of Vitamin D could drastically change your experience with dealing with Covid if you are unfortunate enough to contract the disease.
This was a wake-up call for all of us. How many times did you hit the snooze button?
Performance Update:
Now let’s see how the People’s Portfolio did this week…
We caught a nice rally this week after 2 of our holdings (PENN and SQ) made some very large acquisitions.
Square stock rallied this week after it announced an all-stock deal last Sunday to buy Australian fintech Afterpay for $29B. Jack Dorsey’s payments company now looks to expand into the booming installment loan market.
On Thursday morning, Penn National Gaming announced plans to buy theScore for $2B. The purchase of Toronto-based media company Score Media and Gaming allows the company to obtain in-house technology and grow its presence across North America. Shares of Score Media and Gaming rallied nearly 80% on the news while Penn rallied 9%.
On Friday we voted Shopify to remain in the portfolio for another 10 weeks. Shopify continues to be one of our three biggest winners of the year, currently sitting on a 22.72% gain.
Square (SQ) is on the chopping block next week for the 2nd time. We’re currently holding onto a 20.69% gain over the past 19 weeks.
Our portfolio is so close to getting back into the black on the year, currently -0.47%. Just a few more weeks like this and I won’t feel so bad about my life choices.
Keep an eye out for the new Twitter poll every Friday. Follow along in real-time with nearly 300,000 others on Public.
Portfolio News Highlights:
The biggest stories affecting our portfolio this week:
Square agreed to buy ‘buy now, pay later’ (BNPL) platform Afterpay in a ~$29B deal (BW)
Shares of theScore close up 79% after Penn National announces plans to buy the company for $2 billion (CNBC)
Strong Financial Prospects Keep NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) Up and Ahead of Regulatory Pressures (Yahoo)
‘Crypto is not a shadowy corner of finance’: Coinshares Chief Strategy Officer (Yahoo)
Exxon suspended from climate advocacy group it helped form (Reuters)
AWS Eased Investor's Disappointment In Amazon's Slowing Growth (Benzinga)
What Else We’re Reading:
Blogs/Articles:
Why So Many Millennials Fall Prey to Impostor Syndrome - Julia Carpenter (WSJ)
No, Really, TikToks and Tweets Could Make You a Smarter Investor - Katherine Greifeld (Bloomberg)
Behavioral Finance Warning: Humans Love Complexity - Wes Gray (Alpha Architect)
My Investing Nightmare - Nick Maggiulli (Of Dollars and Data)
Books:
The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion - Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell
Need new reading material? Visit my Amazon page for my most purchased book recommendations.