Yes

Let’s say we poll the American public on their investing savvy. They get to choose what best determines the overall success of an investment. Their choices are:

1. Timing (When to sell? When to buy?)
2. Selection of Stocks (Exxon or Chevron? Home Depot or Lowes?)
3. Asset Allocation (How investments are diversified)

Which would they choose?

What? No, I’m not going to tell you what they’d choose. This is a poll afterall.

However, I’ll tell you what Harry Markowitz thought.

9% of the success of your investments comes from Timing and Selection . . . combined.

91% of your investment success depends upon how you’ve allocated your investments. Are you diversified appropriately?

We are a visually oriented culture. Therefore, I have provided a highly advanced, cutting-edge graphic of this theory.

So the next time you hear some poor blighter rasping about whether to buy the latest hot stock or whether to sell his declining Yahoo.com shares, you can cackle wisely to yourself. Diversify, my pretties.

Any idea what this means?

To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it “the way it really was” (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger. The danger affects both the content of the tradition and its receivers. The same threat hangs over both: that of becoming a tool of the ruling classes. In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it. The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of Antichrist. Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.

[Walter Benjamin]

How often you got up in the middle of the night
when one of your children had a bad dream,

and sometimes you woke because you thought
you heard a cry but they were all sleeping,

so you stood in the moonlight just listening
to their breathing, and you didn’t mention

that you were an expert at putting toothpaste
on tiny toothbrushes and bending down to wiggle

the toothbrush ten times on each tooth while
you sang the words to songs from Annie, and

who would suspect that you know the fingerings
to the songs in the first four books of the Suzuki

Violin Method and that you can do the voices
of Pooh and Piglet especially well, though

your absolute favorite thing to read out loud is
Bedtime for Frances and that you picked

up your way of reading it from Glynnis Johns,
and it is, now that you think of it, rather impressive

that you read all of Narnia and all of the Ring Trilogy
(and others too many to mention here) to them

before they went to bed and on way out to
Yellowstone, which is another thing you don’t put

on the resumé: how you took them to the ocean
and the mountains and brought them safely home.

[Joyce Sutphen]

But then, since the essence of American Enterprise and Achievement says, “Be all you can be. Life is too short to worry about the blighter who unceremoniously cuts in front of you on the way home from work,” it makes sense that Achievement (as an action, not as a result), is one of the high virtues of our culture. “Life is short. Play hard.” is applied to all aspects of life. Cram in all you can. Live life to the fullest. Enjoy it while you are able. No wonder people haven’t the foggiest idea about how to reflect, to sit back, and to consider the meanings of their achievement. Life nowadays is about “doing,” despite popular belief that it involves “relaxation” and “enjoyment.”

Life is not too short. It’s the perfect amount of time. It’s only too short when one doesn’t know how to fill it properly — stuffing it to the gills with never-satisfied action.

Ambition is a great thing, especially in corporate America. Bosses always focus on goals, progress, and achievement. This is what makes successful companies or even successful people throughout history. Take Gaius Marius again, 7-time Roman consul with a brilliant career (except for the end). Plutarch has some wise words concerning Marius at the end of his biography:

Unmindful and thoughtless persons . . . let all that occurs to them slip away from them as time passes on. Retaining and preserving nothing, they lose the enjoyment of their present prosperity by fancying something better to come; whereas by fortune we may be prevented to this, but that cannot be taken from us. Yet they reject their present success, as though it did not concern them, and do nothing but dream of future uncertainties . . . in the seeking after and gathering them they can never satisfy the unlimited desires of their mind.

The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. [Theodore Roosevelt]