Revisiting stories of Warren Buffett, Danny Meyer, and exceptional stock picks like Amazon and Nvidia, this episode delivers valuable, enduring truths for investors both new and seasoned.To catch full episodes of all The Motley Fool's free podcasts, check out our podcast center. To get started investing, check out our beginner's guide to investing in stocks. A full transcript follows the video.
This video was recorded on Jan. 01, 2025.
David Gardner: I try never to say never, but I'm nearly there with a few things. One is running for public office. I'm much more drawn to the private sector, where the vast majority of us work every day in the United States, by the way. I see immense value in what I call private service that would be serving others through the private sector, often finding it more enjoyable and rewarding than traditional public service. Another never for me is repeating a Rule Breaker Investing podcast. We've delivered a new podcast every week now since July of 2015 by my math, that makes it 496 weeks without a skip or a repeat. This approach suits me because I thrive on innovation rather than repetition, unlike the constant sound bites heard in 2024s numerous political campaigns. Yet continuously introducing new content can lead to neglecting essential timeless truth. That's why a couple of times a year, I revisit and highlight key lessons in our Blast from the Past series, ensuring both new and longtime listeners catch important takeaways, whether they're hearing them for the first time or as a reminder from years ago. Let's kick off 2025 with a Blast from the Past, Volume 10 only on this week's Rule Breaker Investing.
Mary Long: It's the Rule Breaker Investing podcast with Motley Fool co-founder David Gardner.
David Gardner: Welcome back to Rule Breaker Investing in Happy New Year. I know I'm not the first to say it, but since this year's show, based on how the week was set up, comes out on January 1st, just like last week's show came out on Christmas Day. It's one of the earlier times I get to say, Happy New Year to you. Thank you for joining me. This is a Blast from the Past. I'm really excited to share with you five points. Each was made at some point in the past, but I've assembled them, brought them together for you now this week, in order to kick off this year for you as a Rule Breaker investor. I've got three investing points, one business point, and one life point. All of them Blasts from the Past. Without further ado, let's get started. Blasts from the Past, number 1, first aired on June 8th of 2016. It was a great quotes podcast. It was great quotes Volume 3, the A Warren Buffett edition, June 8th, 2016 and I began to ask aloud, What if we'd never sold? What if you'd never sold? Dear listener, what if I'd never sold? There's an old saw about Warren Buffett again, possibly apocryphal that he would have more money today if he had never sold anything. You might have heard that one if you're a Buffett fan, I have, but I have to admit my lame Googling powers didn't immediately reveal for me when I looked this up some time ago that he had ever said this, but what a great idea or question it was. In fact, I once used that question to write a memorable introduction to Motley Fool Stock Advisor, back in the day where we had a page 1 essay each month written by me or my brother Tom. I basically started wondering on that page 1 essay, whether that is true of me, whether I would have more if I'd never sold. You might wonder of yourself. If that's true of you. Would you actually be better off today as an investor, had you never sold anything you'd initially bought? For a lot of us, that's a hard question to answer if you've not been actively keeping score or if you don't want to spend the time to go back and do what if scenarios with all the investing that you may have done over the years or decades, I can understand you not having time to do that, but for me, it was rather easy to do, thankfully, because I keep score for everything that I do, whether it's Motley Fool Stock Advisor or Motley Fool Rule Breakers or Motley Fool Supernova back when it existed or my CAPEs page today, I habitually keep score on as many things that I do as possible because when you're scoring, as I've often said in the past, and I will say this again in the future, I know, when you're scoring, you're creating a learning system. You know how you're doing. If you're doing well, you know to keep doing that.
If you're doing poorly, you know to start changing up the game, so it's really helpful if you can keep score. Just by the nature of what I did for 28 years, picking stocks month in and month out, I was being scored all the time. On this Blast from the Past point, taken, again, from June 2016, I had gone back to Motley Fool Stock Advisor and that June 2014 introduction two years earlier, and I'd asked myself at the time, could all 146 consecutive monthly stock selections that I personally had made since the dawn of Motley Fool Stock Advisor in March 2002, taken together, could they have possibly performed better for all of us, had we never sold even one? Now, again, that performance included every good and every bad sell decision that my team had made over those 12 years. Good, for example, was Strayer Education, which we sold in January 2009, and it had been down in the succeeding five years, 75% more from that point so that was a good sale. In fact, the market was up 125 percentage points over that time. That was a great sell, but bad was Biogen IDEC. We'd sold that in June of 2009. Right during the great financial recession. At the time that I wrote that introduction, again, back in 2014, Biogen IDEC had gone up 480% since. The good and the bad and also the tragic cells like Arm Holdings, which I had two positions that I sold in June of 2009. Both of those positions had risen 700% since the company, by the way, eventually went private, although it has since come back and gone public again.
Let's answer the question. Would we be better off today had we not sold any of our Motley Fool Stock Advisor picks? By the way, whether we would have been better off today or not, which I'll answer in a sec, let's reflect that we would have done so with a lot less work because it takes a lot less work to sit on what you've already done than to decide to sell and then constantly research something new to put that money in instead. Anyway, the final answer to the question, I regret to say it is instructive is you bet your britches. As revealed, 146 picks into the history of Motley Fool Stock Advisor, we would have done much better had we never sold any of those stocks, including our worst losers. While I haven't gone back and checked that recently, anybody at the Motley Fool could, if they want to, I suspect it's just as true today. Why is that? I think you probably can already into it or infer from what I just said why that is because it only takes a stock that you've sold going up 400% or 700% since to wipe out all kinds of bad decisions that you might have made instead. At least in my case, I think what's happening is that I look for really good companies, and the truth is most of these are really good companies, not all of them, but most of them are, and when one of them goes up 700% after a sell, you'd have to have seven companies lose 100% of their value in order to erase that out. Stocks go up more than they go down. That is the fundamental truism that underlies, I think, why it makes sense to hold not to sell most of the time. I do want to mention before going on to Blast from the Past point number 2, that in December, I got featured a few places, including the podcast Chit Chat Money for being a patient investor. In fact, one headline coming from finchat.io last month was entitled The World's Most Patient Investor Question mark, and it had a picture of me.
What I want to say about that is it's not just being patient because on its own, patience can be a huge mistake. If you're invested in bad things and show amazing patience over 15 or 20 years, that is a tragic error that you don't ever want to make. I think the key thing is the key behind having a 16 cent cost basis, as I do in Amazon, having a 16 cent cost basis for Motley Fool Stock Advisor members in Nvidia, the key is, it's Amazon and Nvidia. I don't think you can take patients away from what you're showing patients in and hold it up as a virtue on its own. I think it's that combination of great stocks over great time periods that really equals Rule Breaker Investing. I appreciate the call outs and the underlining of patience, but it's really important to note what stocks do you own in your portfolio that will help you decide how patient you should be. On to Blast from the Past point number 2. This one goes back to 2019, five years ago. It was a great quote. Another great quotes. Podcast, it was great quotes Volume 10 and I was talking about dips. There's a little sermonet that I'm about to rock again because I had a lot of fun doing this five years ago, and I'm going to do it again. I usually title this one dips wait for dips. As I said, five years ago, I say to you today, I'm not going to say that you are a dip if you bought on a dip, but I will say it's pretty dippy to base your investment process in strategy around waiting for stocks to drop and then deciding to buy them. I do think there's a psychological safety net to that. You think, well, it was at $60 a couple of weeks ago, and so now it's at 52. That feels better. The problem is, some of the great Rule Breakers don't really dip that often.
People who are waiting for dips end up looking pretty dippy when stocks don't dip. I once wrote an essay entitled Dips Buy On Dips. This Blast from the Past, as I mentioned, dips back to June 2019, great quotes Volume 10 podcast where I was shamelessly quoting myself. I know I don't do it too often, but I shared these words with you, and I quote "Dear fellow Fools, do you buy on dips? Many investors do, but let me explain why I don't. For starters, some of our stocks never really dip or at least not for long. If you follow the logic, you're going to see that these are often our best performers because after all, they never dipped. Which means that if you're sitting back waiting for the dip, you're going to miss the sizzle. I prefer sizzle to dip." That essay continued. "Look at our three best Rule Breaker picks so far this year. Of the three, two have dipped, but only briefly and only from well higher than where they were picked. One stock went from 90-80 in a two week period in July. Another fell from 60-52 for a few days in early November. If you're a dippy investor, I won't call you a dip. Looking to dip your way into the Rule Breakers scorecard, you may not have bought our three best picks this year unless you were particularly lucky or adept acting in a narrow window of a week or two." Let me say that again. If you insisted on buying on dips, you very likely didn't buy any of our three best stocks this year. Even if you did buy that first stock that was at 80 when it dipped from 90, guess what? Our cost basis was actually 60. Anyway, meaning it was already up 33% once you'd perfectly timed your dip from 90-80. In the meantime, that other stock the dipped from 60-52, if you'd snapped it up right there at 52, congratulations, but our cost basis was 31 for that stock.
Again, it was still up 67% from what we'd first paid for it when you perfectly timed your dip. You dip? I'm sorry. Did I just call you dip? I apologize. By contrast, our three worst selections that you offered investors, I'm sorry to say numerous dips on their way to 30-40% declines. Thus, the dippy investor who looks for dips as precursors to buying has now established positions, perhaps multiple positions in our three worst performing stocks. This, by the way, is how sometimes people who join a Motley Fool service like Rule Breakers with it's wonderful winning scorecard, wind up losing money and then canceling their memberships. It's not for me, they say, after missing all the winners and buying all the losers. Dips. Okay, I'll stop, but let me close with a solution. How do I suggest approaching Rule Breakers or even just investing in general? Make a commitment to the companies that you want to own, not the stocks that you're going to buy on dips. Be an investor, not a share price guesser. Once you've committed to plunking down an investment in any of our stocks, buy it all right then, which is what I usually do or if you like, buy in thirds, as I did classically back in the day with my big investment initially in America Online. I've written about this elsewhere, but I made a really important decision as a young investor. I didn't feel comfortable committing as much all at once as I wanted to to AOL stock, so I divided it in three and bought some one month, some a month later. The last third, a month after that, I bought in thirds and that ended up becoming a common practice among many Motley Fool members who may not have felt comfortable buying Amazon all at once, but in thirds, we can do it. It's a great way to trick yourself into getting a full position in a stock that you were waiting for a dip for and otherwise may never have bought. Anyway, it's often true of our best stocks. They rarely dip. Therefore, people who are waiting for the dip for a stock like Intuitive Surgical end up becoming Intuitive Surgical watchers instead of Intuitive Surgical investors.
Now, I realize it's an extreme position I'm taking, and I don't like to call my fellow fools out as dips, but I do think it's pretty dippy behavior. Part of why the Motley Fool exists, by the way, is to challenge the conventional wisdom. I think there's conventional wisdom out there that the proper way to time your way into a stock or the market is to wait for a dip, but in a world in which the market typically rises on average, around 10% a year, and doubles every seven years or so, and that's just the market averages. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me to be sitting there being the person waiting for the dip. That's the end of my mini sermonet. I apologize again for insulting anybody that I may have called a dip. I can even look at my own self and say, exhibited some dippy behavior in the past, which is why that essay means a lot to me because I think it's calling out very common behavior that corrected can make you and me such better investors. I do want to say before we move on to Blast from the Past, number 3, that originally, the phrase I rocked back there on that great quotes, Volume 10 was Dips Buy On Dips, but one of my fellow Fools, I think, in a subsequent mailbag, said, David, do you really mean that or do you mean something different? I thought about it, and I realized he was right it's not the dips buy on dips. If you buy on a dip and the stock goes back up, that's not dippy behavior. It's dips, wait for dips. That is the new patched up version of what I hope will be a classic line from me. It's dips, wait for dips. I'm going to be a dip if I keep using the word dip too much more. Let's move on to Blast from the Past number 3. On to Blast from the Past, number 3. This one comes from a June 2016 mailbag.
You know, part of the fun of doing a podcast for 496 weeks in a row, is you can really go way back and you can pull stuff that nobody remembers. Jake, who wrote me this note, may not even still be a Rule Breaker investor, for all I know, but Jake, if you remember our exchange on the June mailbag in 2016, good on you. I was answering a question from Jake and I was looking at the time at LinkedIn's list of the 40 most attractive employers in America. LinkedIn called that its top attractors list. What I saw there was pretty stark. The top 10 employers back in 2016, according to LinkedIn and its data, well, I'll just list them off real fast. See if any of these company names sound familiar. The top 5 in order number 1 Alphabet, number 2 Salesforce, number 3 Facebook, number 4 Apple, and number 5 Amazon. By the way, Uber was number 6, seven was Microsoft, eight was Tesla, nine Twitter, 10 was Airbnb. I'll mention, by the way, Netflix was number 11. There you go. The top employers of 2016. I couldn't have known this when we did the mailbag eight years ago, but what has happened since? Well, for Motley Fool members, most of those stocks are stocks we picked. I picked Google, Salesforce, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Tesla, and Netflix, and I won't go through all of them, but Google's up 17 times in value from our original pick. Salesforce is a 52 bagger. Facebook now Meta platforms is a 21 bagger. Apple, since I picked it in 2008, is a 51 bagger. Amazon is a 1,445 bagger. I won't bother with Tesla and Netflix. I don't want to throw too many numbers at you, but both are 100 plus baggers for me. There's something really important in this point. It's about who are the best employers?
David Gardner: The best employers, as it turns out, often become the best stocks. Who to thank it. Most people, when they think of the stock market, they disconnect it from the business realities, the companies themselves, people who just look at ticker symbols, people who are just looking at chart patterns on graphs, and looking for the dips, people who are disconnecting business from investing. But something the Motley Fool has always done from day one for us is we are business focused investors. We care much more about the company than in my case, the near term valuation of a stock or what's just happened yesterday on the stock market. We're looking at great companies, and great companies are great employers. Anybody who knows conscious capitalism, something I've chatted up quite over the years, having served on the National Board for many years, I'm a huge fan of conscious capitalism, and one of the four foundational points of conscious capitalism is that you are creating a win for everybody. Businesses that create a win, of course, for their customers, otherwise, they're not going to exist for long, but who win for their employees. Businesses that win for their partners and suppliers, that win for their local community in some cases, speaking of some businesses, for others that win for the environment. Yes, there are companies out there doing beautiful things for our environment. You and I can be part owners in these great companies. Why spend much time with non great companies? One of the quickest ways to find the great companies is to look at a list of the best employers. Now, Jake, back in 2016, our exchange, I didn't start buying those stocks then. Most of those stocks I'd already held for 7, 8, or more years first bought
Amazon in 1997. They were already long holds for us, but look at what has happened in the eight years since. Those stocks have skyrocketed, and often they're grouped together now, and they're called things like Magnificent Seven; causing Fools like me to say things like, what's your Magnificent Seven score, which I won't explain right now to new listeners, but older listeners know exactly what I mean when I ask, what is your Magnificent Seven score? The great employers of a decade ago have become the great stocks today, and they all get grouped under a silly label that disconnects what's really happening, which is they are delivering products and services that you and I love, in many cases, deeply esteem or need, whether we're trying to Google something, trying to buy a new computer for our mother, trying to figure out what we should watch next in streaming entertainment. These are the companies that have shaped our world, and they were the best employers in 2016. To close it out on this blast from the past, sometimes, you know, I think about the Motley Fool and what our company and our membership, what our community is actually doing in the world. I think we're causing people to allocate capital more intelligently. When we tell people to buy Amazon, not buy Dot com, or to buy Netflix, not Blockbuster, when people do, and then Netflix and Amazon succeed, what's really happening is money is flowing to the good things that are productive and innovating and growing, and money is not going to the things that are not as good. I think we're actually causing, if you think about it, if you're a fellow Fool with me for a long time listening to this podcast, a member of our services.
If you were there with us at a book signing, let's say, back in the 1990s, and you're still listening to me here in 2025, I think we're causing good capital to find its way to good companies. There's a really nice, almost global effect that's happening as an unintended consequence of the advice that we've been giving for more than 30 years now. When good money finds good companies, great things happen in the world at large. When good money finds bad companies, that's not good. When bad money finds good companies, that's also not so good. That's sometimes one of the things that I think about and reflect on when I think of the Motley Fool. Those are my first three blast from the past points, all of them investing points. The first, of course, if we'd never sold, dot dot dot, the second, dips, wait for dips and the third best employers; best stocks. Let's now move to my business Blast from the Past. Danny Meyer is a New York City restaurateur and the founder and executive chairman of the Union Square Hospitality Group. He's also the author of a wonderful book called Setting the Table, which many restaurants, many hotels, many in the hospitality industry often quote from or have been influenced for good. Bye and Danny Meyer was on this podcast on November 16th, 2016. I should have him back sometime this year. It's been a while, Danny, but I initially wanted to call out a key point that I remember him making in the blast from the past I'm about to share with you. But when I actually went back and listened to the podcast, again, I realized there was a second possibly even more important point that he made. Let me now share with you a few points we can learn from this blast from the past from one of the great entrepreneurs in the restaurant industry today. I first met Danny at the Conscious Capitalism Conference a few years before, and I remember the talk that he gave, and in particular, he talked about trying to scale because once you all of a sudden had more than one restaurant.
Just picture Danny Meyer having one really great restaurant and doing a wonderful job as an entrepreneur, and it's time for him to open up a second restaurant. He has this incredible attention to detail and intuition about how it can work well in the restaurant industry. But when he opens a second restaurant, he can't be both places anymore. His talk was, when he can no longer be there to oversee the staff, they are now in different places as he scales. The question is, how could he ensure that even when he was not there, people would get it? Danny said he began to realize he needed to turn his intuition about what works about being for people, about being hospitable, by his definition, being for your customers. You needed to turn that intuition into intentionality so that it actually became a thing. You give it a language. You make it something you can teach and coach. You figure out what are my principles? What's really going on underneath in my intuition and how can I turn that into something I can codify and share at scale, turning it from intuition to intentionality? I asked him at the time, did I get that right? Did I remember that talk he gave a few years before? This is what Danny Meyer said, and Blast from the Past number four is just going to quote him for the rest of this blast from the past because please enjoy this wisdom. Danny said, You got it very right, David, with that memory. When I gave that talk several years ago, I was deeply struggling with that very topic. The two questions I would most frequently get asked would be one, how do you guys always manage to hire so many awesome people? Danny went on, that's a reasonably easy question to answer, which is that we focus on the six emotional skills that always are present in a very high level, and somebody's got what we call a high hospitality quotient, a high HQ to use Danny's language.
Those are people who are happiest themselves when they're making someone else feel better. That has nothing to do with whether they're a good cook or not. That's just how they're wired and motivated. But the second question when I gave that talk was one that I was really still struggling with. Which I called the $20 million question because I couldn't answer it. Danny went on. The question was, how can you make sure to maintain your culture of hospitality even as you grow? Because the world is littered with businesses that lost the way they do business. They lost their culture, they lost their way. I still couldn't answer the question. We were growing Shake Shack at that point and building new restaurants in New York City, and the Shake Shacks were no longer exclusively in New York. I was very fortunate to work with a fantastic organizational development consultant named Erica Anderson, whose company is called Proteus. She writes a column about leadership for Forbes. Erica said to me one morning over breakfast, because I said, I can't answer this question. I'm worried to death that if we lose our culture, it's like trying to cook recipes with crappy ingredients. I just won't be the same. She said, sometimes if you can't answer a non mathematical question, maybe the question itself is flawed. She helped me to understand that it was a Fool's errand. Appreciate the Fool reference there, Danny. It was a Fool's errand to try to maintain culture. Culture does not want to be maintained anyway. You shouldn't be worried about maintaining a culture. You should be worried about how to advance your culture and grow it. She helped me define the question differently, which was, instead of helping you maintain your culture, even as you grow, the question is how you can use your growth to advance your culture. That was probably the most important moment I've had in the last small handful of years, Danny Meyer said, because what that showed me was that if you can name your culture and name the family values that you expect from the people on your team to support that culture, and if you are completely focused on promoting people who are the stars of that culture, then what happens is that every time you grow, you're actually sending a powerful message to everybody else on the team.
The people who get the professional and financial rewards, first and foremost, of the growth are the people who most carry the culture. He concluded, now that doesn't excuse you from being an awesome performer. We still want to get 100 on our test, but we're not interested in promoting people who get 49 out of 49 points for performance, and we make excuses for the fact that they are not culture carriers. Every organization seems to have people that are so good at what they do that everyone looks the other way in terms of how they carry the culture, and we just learned that that's the surest way to hurt your culture as you grow. I don't think I need to add a lot to Danny's point. I really appreciate that blast from the past. I highly recommend if you find yourself inspired by that message, that learning about corporate culture, that you go back and listen to my entire conversation with Danny Meyer. Eight years ago, November 16th, 2016, it was Entrepreneurship Month for the podcast that month, and I still think back on that conversation fondly and there are many lessons for business people contained therein. Before I move on to blast from the past number 5, let's briefly just think about what we just said with point number 3 and what we just learned from Danny Meyer, and that is point number 3, great employers become great stocks.
Then we heard from Danny Meyer, a great employer that it's about advancing the culture, not just maintaining it. There's a nice loop and connection there between seeing up close and personal, especially for those who might know Union Square hospitality or its restaurants. That is a great company with a great culture. While it's a private company, we haven't been able to be invested in it, nevertheless, you can see the benefit of how those great employers become great stocks over time. Blast from the past number 5 is a life point. I first came across the book, Do More Great Work more than a decade ago. It's by Michael Bungay Stanier who is somebody else, of course, that I've had on this podcast, which is why this blast from the past is celebrating. It was August 11th, 2021. Michael was one of my authors in August, and we talked about his book, Do More Great Work. That's the blast from the past that I'm pulling in to today because Do More Great Work puts forward this premise at the start of the book. Michael says there are three types of work. There's great work, there's good work, and there's bad work. The first exercise he has you do in this book, which I completely recommend to you, dear listener, if you've not come across Do More Great Work before, I highly recommend you start your 2025, maybe thinking about reading that book and going through the exercises as I did. I'll be sharing a little bit more about that in a minute. But he said there are three types of work, great, good, and bad.
Great work is what you feel called to do, it's what you could do forever, it's the infinite game that you play, it's the flow that you feel when you're in the midst of it, it's your great work. Good work is probably what you're doing for your job. It's stuff that you're good at, that's needed in the world, it's good work. You're probably earning a salary for it. If you're working, most of us are doing good work each day when we go to work. Bad work is work that you really don't need to do at all. If you could wish away, let's say, ever taking out the garbage, you would. If you could take bad work altogether out of your life, Michael Bungay Stanier who is an executive coach by profession, then you would lead a more interesting life, a better life. He has you at the start, draw a simple circle and make it a pie chart, where you have three slices of pie. What percentage of your work each day or the past month or in 2024 was great work for you. How big was the pie slice that was good work for you? How big is your bad work slice of pie? The rest of the book tries to help you get rid of the bad and as the title says, do more great work. That's exactly what I want for you, dear listener, my fellow Fools.
I want you to do more great work in 2025 with this blast from the past point number 5. One of the great exercises in that book I think it's Chapter 3. He asks you to map out what you're like at your best. I'm going to do that a little bit for you right now as we close. He asks the reader, I think I have this right. He asked the reader, think of a couple of recent memories moments where you were really in that great, great place. Where were you? What were you doing? He has you imagining again where you were, and then using verbs to describe what was happening. I was thinking of a book signing that I really loved in Seattle, Washington years ago, where my brother and I were there, we were presenting, we were helping, we were feeling needed, we were getting claps. We were making people laugh. I was thinking about that book signing and writing down the verbs and that's what you can do if you want to do this exercise right now with me. But don't just think of one, think of two different maybe contrasting situations, both of which are great work for you and be writing down the verbs. Then the next step after you've written, you should spend 3-5 minutes. You should probably write 10-20 verbs down for each. You can throw in some adjectives if you like, warm, surprising.
Go ahead and come up with 10-20 terms for each of your two different memories. Then the next step that we go through because Michael loves language, and he recognizes in marketing and in branding how important language is, is he has you look back over that list of terms you just came up with and try to amp up the language. For example, at one point, I'd written visualizing Great Impact, and I decided a better way to say that is dreaming big. Or I thought about how important beautiful settings are to me. It really matters to me the physical setting I find myself in. The best is always drawn out of me when I'm in beautiful places. I'd written down beautiful setting, but if you try to amp up that language, what can you come up with? I came up with, instead, stunning locales? That's what you're doing. You're taking the language that you initially wrote down, and then you're writing a second draft with more interesting galvanic jump off the page words. Then to close out this exercise, what you're doing is you're taking your 10 favorite words or phrases, and you're lining them up. Top to bottom. I'll give you my example in a sec. But each of those 10 lines starts with the word or phrase you came up with and then looks at what the opposite is. Because in good branding and marketing, often you're not just advocating what you stand for or what you're trying to sell, you're also trying to show how it contrasts with not having that product or not choosing to use that service and what the not feels like. To close out last in the past, number 5 and specifically Chapter number 3 from his book, which I totally recommend to you, what are you like at your best. Here's how it ends up sounding. I'm going to show you mine. You're welcome to show me yours if you go through this exercise, and you have a good story you want to tell. Our mailbag at the end of January, there are actually five Wednesdays in January this month.
On January 29th, I will be happy to present anybody who wants to share with me theirs. But I'll give you mine just to show you how this sounds and what it looks like. You should know that not only have these 10 phrases become part of my own lexicon, I first did this more than a decade ago, but I actually laminated them, and I put them up behind my computer monitor at home to keep these phrases top of mind to keep me always in the zone of reminding myself what I'm like at my best. A little sharing at the end. Here are my 10, showcasing, not burying my talents, laughing, not alienated, dreaming big, not focusing small, rewarding, not purposeless, hobnobbing with fascinating people, not boring yourself in public, games nearby, not funlessness, learning and thinking, not rode pablum, stunning locales, not the merely serviceable, social, interspersed with serious, not all fluff or all Dauer and finally, excelsior, not insufficiently joyful. Well, Michael Bungay Stanier announced late last year that his own podcast, two pages with MBS, his initials, two pages with MBS, would finish out, which he did to close out 2024. Michael's podcast invited on bright lights and friends of his to share two pages from a book that had meant something to them. You perform a dramatic reading for a few minutes. It's just two pages, and then you discuss that passage with him. I was privileged to be invited myself once and read two pages from the Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens. Anyway, that podcast, which he had done for years, closed out with grace and style as he made himself the final guest and read two pages from Ulysses by James Joyce. Like Danny Meyer, Michael is just one of those really good people in business, for whom, as George Bernard Shaw once wrote, life is no brief candle, but a splendid torch, which you've got hold of for the moment. You want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations. Cheers to you, Michael Bungay Stanier, and thank you, dear listener, for joining with me for these five blast from the past moments here to kick off 2025. Happy New Year and Fool on.
Mary Long: As always, people on this program may have interest in the stocks they talk about, and the Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against, so don't buy or sell stocks based solely on what you hear. Learn more about Rule Breaker Investing at rbi.fool.com.
