Sorry for your loss. I appreciate your storytelling. It's therapeutic to read about something that many of us are going through. I grew up on a farm in a rural area that is almost 100% Trump supporters - including my entire family. I've always been good at compartmentalizing and I think that has helped me deal with this issue. I am not going to let Trumpism ruin my otherwise amazing relationship with my family. I'm just not willing to give him that win.

I love your idea of eating more protein and healthy fats and substituting some cardio with weightlifting. But do you really think eating only one meal a day is sustainable for most people? Do you think you can achieve the same results by still eating three meals a day?

What is the #1 thing you need to see in a company before you’ll invest?

I’m not a venture capitalist but I have started and bought many companies. Some failed. Most succeeded. On a recent trip to my alma mater I stayed with friends and had the good fortune to meet their daughter who was the executive director of a VC firm in the Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, North Carolina area known as the Research Triangle.

I asked her the above question.

There has been a lot written on about this, but I wanted to hear it first hand from someone in the trenches so to speak.

Here were her simple answers: Besides the typical…

Thank you for your wonderful insights and suggestions. Many years ago, I personally met Susan Jeffers who wrote, Feel the Fear and Do it Anyway. She lived in the same building as a close friend. She invited me to her place and gave me a whole stack of her books. She sadly died of breast cancer not long after our meeting, but her wisdom lives on in all her books.

My mantra that everyone could use: Exercise and Portion Size. Period. It’s so simple.

I lost weight in the pandemic. My BMI is 19. Mostly that’s because I had the time to work out more. I also ate all my meals at home.

When you cook all your own food, it’s easier to make it healthy and in small portions. Don’t buy junk at the grocery store. Don’t buy junk for your kids either. You’ll be doing them a favor. …

I used an app called, apptracker, that easily allowed me to log the time I spent on everything. I did this for two months. The results were enlightening. I recommend everyone do this for at least a couple months. The truth is always in the numbers and if you don't know the numbers, you don't know the truth.

There's that old story about Joe Kennedy who said he knew it was time to get out of the market when his shoeshine boy started giving him stock market tips. That was in 1929 right before the stock market crash and the start of the Great Depression. I think that's where we are now. I've begun selling my stocks. Interest rates will increase. And bond prices will go down as a result. I don't think it's a good time to be heavily in the market, but if the millennials prop it up for awhile, that's fine by me. Gives me more time to cash out intelligently.

Great analysis. At the time it was published, Good to Great was amongst my favorite business books. A few years ago, I hired the former CMO of Circuit City after their bankruptcy. I guess they weren't great anymore. Point being, My stock portfolio includes Walgreens and CVS and CVS is a better performer. Which leads me to a hypothesis: success is more time relevant than we think. Consider this study by McKinsey: "A recent study by McKinsey found that the average life-span of companies listed in Standard & Poor's 500 was 61 years in 1958. Today, it is less than 18 years. McKinsey believes that, in 2027, 75% of the companies currently quoted on the S&P 500 will have disappeared." I would love to read a post-mortem study of the eleven companies, if it exists.