How Geofencing, Journaling and a Cultural Calendar Changed My Life

I did not have another Pepsi or Coke until I moved to the US in 1991. Here I discovered that sodas were sold by the gallon, just like water. And I drank them like water. In the first year in the US my consumption of soda pop made up for all my non-consumption of the previous 18 years.

A few years later, when was 21, after asking for a third refill of Coke at a restaurant, I realized that I could no longer actually taste the tingling sweetness of the drink. Not anymore. I had drunk so many sodas that I had stopped enjoying them, and what used to be a special drink had turned into brown, high-calorie water.

At that point I decided that I’d only drink a soda on rare occasions (e.g. when I went to the movies). There was no point of drinking so much of it and not enjoying it. My consumption went from a soda (or two) every day to just a few times a year. And an interesting thing happened. I only had one soda last year, but I tell you, I enjoyed every sip of it. Abundance often devalues things we enjoy. There is such a thing as too much of a good thing.

I did the same thing with food.

When I am in Denver – 92% of the time – I look at food very functionally: It is just the fuel that powers me, and I want this fuel to be good for the engine. Just to be clear, I don’t eat salad and quinoa and more salad all day, but I do steer clear of food that isn’t good for me, often passing on things I like (red meat, ice cream, pasta); but overall, I eat what I like and like what I eat. When I travel – I eat guilt- and carefree, and enjoy every bite; I don’t care if the dish is loaded with carbs and dripping with fat. I enjoy that 8% of the time so much that it makes the 92% moderation worth it. So, in addition to inhaling Europe’s slow beat and convivial company, I am looking forward to Swiss sausage and Italian pasta.

And one more thing on this subject. When I stopped casually drinking soda a quarter century ago, I did not do it for health reasons – I was 21, and my health was not something I paid any particular attention to then. But in hindsight, just that one decision alone saved me 30 pounds of weight. When I had my soda of the year last year, and I found it to be too sweet. I have not had sugar in a meaningful quantity in over a year, and my taste buds have changed. I don’t enjoy soda as much as I used to, and that’s a good thing.

Daily journal

I have decided I am going to start keeping a journal. I listened to Tim Ferris’s interview with Penn Jillette, and I was really impressed with Penn’s journaling. He started keeping a journal when he was 30, and at the time he felt that it was already too late. He has kept the journal for 34 years without skipping a day. Every day he writes about important conversations he had and reviews books he’s read and movies he’s watched. He writes about things that happened that day. But most importantly, he looks at what he wrote a year, 10 years, and twenty years ago on that day. This allows him to time travel.

I love this idea; it allows you to travel back to your life in the past and retain memories and thoughts you’d otherwise lose as they were replaced by the daily noise. There is an interesting side effect, too: Writing book and movie reviews makes you want to want to watch movies and read books that are worthy to be written about.

I am curious how journaling will impact what I write about (and what I publish). I can only dedicate so much time to writing each day. This journal somehow seems more important than some of the usual things I do. My writing may switch from making stock market observations to become more personal in nature. This may also be a great way for me to retain knowledge (thoughts) that I gain throughout the day and then somehow lose by the end of the day.

Writing down important conversations I have on a daily basis is a great idea, too. Aside from helping me not to forget them, it may allow me to explore them further on my own. For instance, yesterday I spoke to a friend about the impact that WeWork had on unicorns (companies with very large valuations that recently went public). Before WeWork blew up, unicorns had access to endless amounts of capital, as private and then public investors were willing to finance their losses unquestioningly.

The WeWork blowup may have changed that, and it is great thing for companies that have sustainable business models and not so good news for the ones that don’t. Uber and Lyft come to mind here. Access to abundant capital forced these companies to fight a war of attrition.

I listened to Lyft’s earnings call, where management talked about how they started to raise prices and Uber followed. Then they stopped issuing discount coupons and Uber did not, and they resumed. Lyft’s CEO said that they’ll be “the follower,” not the leader in price setting from now on. I get a feeling that Uber management listened in on this call, too. There is no reason why Uber and Lyft cannot have a cozy, rational duopoly in the US (Lyft is a US-only company).

Cultural calendar

I also listened to Tim Ferris’s interview with Neil Degrasse Tyson. There are a few insights that I got from this interview. First, his parents made an effort to take him every week to interesting places – museums, planetarium, baseball games and concerts.

My kids are unlikely to have me take them to baseball games, but I need to make a more proactive effort to expose them to the world around them. I need to set a day each month where I look ahead a month or two and plan our “cultural” life. Neil’s parents did not tell him, you need to be an astrophysicist, they just exposed him and his siblings to the world.

Another thing I took out of this interview is that you really have to be careful what you emphasize. Neil did not have good grades in high school. The New Yorker did a profile of him in which they called him “a “mediocre student.” He said (I am recalling from memory here) that the New Yorker was factually correct but wrong in spirit, because though he didn’t have good grades statistically speaking, he had a lot of strong outside interests. He read books about science nonstop; he was president of the science club; he took photos and sold them to newspapers.

The punchline here is that if he had chosen to have perfect grades he’d have had to give up the other interests that were even more important to his education than good grades. Interestingly, despite his mediocre GPA, his achievements outside of the classroom got him into Ivy League schools.

As a parent, there is such a thing as grades that are good enough. If Hannah chooses to read books instead of getting an A in a class, that is probably better for her in the long run. (She read 55 books in 2019 and apologetically told me that due to the agreement about reading we have, she had “cost” me $500. I told her that was the best $500 I’d ever spent). If she takes to reading comic books instead of getting A’s, though, I may have to rethink this.

Vitaliy Katsenelson is chief investment officer at Investment Management Associates in Denver, Colo. He is the author of Active Value Investing (Wiley) and “The Little Book of Sideways Markets” (Wiley). Read more on Katsenelson’s Contrarian Edge blog.

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