Having an abundance of free time sounds great, especially if you feel like you are constantly short on time. But it turns out that we dread idleness. Having too much discretionary time is associated with a lower sense of well-being. In fact, as I have previously...

A friend recently recommended a book by an author whose previous book I had read. She asked me, "What was that (prior) book about?" My response: "Uh. . . umm . . . I can't remember." I had drawn a total blank -- I couldn't recall the main characters or even the plot....

Once (almost) every four years, February has a 29th day. Today's IFOD is about why the calendar needs this extra day, as well as a few other little-known interesting facts about Leap Day. 1. Why Leap Days are Necessary To get the obvious fact out of the way, leap days...

We move through life in a fog of uncertainty. Most uncertainty is no big deal. Not knowing exactly how the weather will turn out today, whether your morning commute will go smoothly, or what you'll have for dinner are minor uncertainties that don't cause much angst....

Amazon released its Kindle ebook reader in 2007. Back then, pundits predicted that eBooks would kill off printed books because of eBooks' lower cost, greater portability, and instant delivery for ebooks. But that hasn't happened. Ebooks have remained at 10%-15% of all...

Warren Buffett's annual letters to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders are considered "must-reads" by the business and investment community. And for good reason -- they are chock full of wisdom and Buffett's worldview. But there is another set of must-read letters: Jeff...

Apple released the McIntosh computer 40 years ago this week. It cost $2,495 (about $7,500 in today's dollars), had 128k of memory (or 0.000131 Gigabytes), and no hard drive (you stored files on a floppy drive). Yet, even with these modest specs, the computer and the...

Happy birthday to the SPDR® S&P 500® ETF Trust (SPY), which started trading 31 years ago today (1/21/93). It's the original Exchange Traded Fund or "ETF" and is a single stock that tracks all 500 stocks in the S&P 500. What are ETFs? ETFs are baskets of stocks...

The book that probably has had the biggest impact on my thinking is The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb (I've read it 3x). The main theme of the book is that important events that have the biggest impact on our lives, so-called "black swans," are unpredictable—things like...

A man with a watch knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never sure. -Segal's Law I think Segal's Law is brilliant as it gets to the heart of the difficulty of having multiple sources of information. It's easy to believe a thing if you have just one...