Articles, tips & resources from the team at BFA.
All toddlers are clumsy, but our son Max was at risk of a sidewalk face plant each time he toddled out the front door. Time and again, he’d run outside expecting the best, but it was a coin flip whether he’d make it to his destination or stumble and slap the concrete with outstretched arms once more.
The thief who stole my travel wallet at the Barcelona train station must have been a high jumper. Before sitting down on a bench to organize my papers, I’d been careful to make sure no one was around. After the theft, I found an escalator behind the bench, but it was still hard to believe: the thief must have run up the down escalator and leapt over the wall the moment I put my wallet on the bench to set down my backpack. A medal-worthy performance, except that it happened to me.
It was the early 1980’s, just after the debut of MTV and right before Apple launched the Macintosh personal computer. Future economics professor Campbell Harvey was considering what to study for his Ph.D. thesis at the University of Chicago. The world had just emerged from a traumatic recession, so he decided to see if there might be a way to anticipate the next slowdown. Intrigued by an academic paper written two decades earlier, he looked at whether the bond market held any helpful information, and panning through rivers of data, he found gold.
A couple of decades ago, I met a cab driver named Janice who drove me home from the airport. She was a woman in her early sixties who described how she lived in Panama for most of the year and came back to San Francisco to work each autumn. “I earn all the money I need for the rest of the year in just about three months here.”
It’s your last day at work. Your colleagues took you out to lunch last week, and you received a packet of papers from HR. Now you’re walking out of your office carrying a banker’s box full of personal effects. Congratulations, you’ve been disrupted. You weren’t fired. This was your idea: you just retired.
