Ben Hunt: “The business of Wall Street consists of two and only two things: thinking up news ways to create a transferable share of some future economic activity, and thinking up new ways to borrow money today for a promise to repay that money and more in the future. We call the former activity “securitization”. For example, equity promises are securitized into “stocks” and debt promises are securitized into “bonds”, which makes the sale and resale of these promises sooooo much easier. We call the latter activity “leverage”, which is just a ten-dollar word for borrowed money. Every bit of financial innovation over the past ten thousand years or so – all of it! – has been in service to one or both of those two activities: securitization and leverage.”
Shane Parish: “The key to doing anything well is commitment. Not only does commitment help you become better at what you do, but it also makes other people want to help you. If you see your job as punching the clock, not only will you never be great at it, but your employer won’t invest in you. The best relationships are the ones where both partners go all in all the time to make the relationship amazing. If committing sounds like a lot of work, it is. That’s why so many people are half-in. The problem with half-in and half-committed is that it doesn’t get you the results you want. If you’re not committed, get out. The committed person gets both the opportunity and the results.”
Rafal Nadal: “One lesson I’ve learned is that if the job I do were easy, I wouldn’t derive so much satisfaction from it. The thrill of winning is in direct proportion to the effort I put in before. I also know, from long experience, that if you make an effort in training when you don’t especially feel like making it, the payoff is that you will win games when you are not feeling your best. That is how you win championships, that is what separates the great player from the merely good player. The difference lies in how well you’ve prepared.” [via Shane Parish]
WSJ: “What if scientists could engineer the sponge to serve a variety of therapeutic purposes, including storing drugs and enhancing cancer therapies? Such sponges exist, in a class of ultra-porous crystals known as metal-organic frameworks, or MOFs. Research into potential uses for MOFs has accelerated over the past five years, chemists said. They predict the crystalline compounds could transform healthcare, energy and other industries. Some said MOFs could become as widespread as polymers, compounds that form the basis of many man-made materials like plastics, in the next decade or two.”
