More personal thoughts will be in bold below in the outline. For those that want to listen to The Brothers on Books Podcast discussion with Jacob Lund Fisker I’m attaching the link directly below:
BOBP 17: Early Retirement Extreme
Chapter 3: Economic Degrees of Freedom
- Discusses the ideas of coupling and organization in a systems framework. A system can be loosely or tightly coupled while an organization can be linear or nonlinear:

- I made a couple of earnings curves to demonstrate tightly coupled vs loosely coupled. You can see in a tightly coupled system the more work you put in translates into predictable earnings where as a loosely coupled example there wouldn’t be such an obvious relationship:


- I tend to think of soccer teams as more of a nonlinear system. A starting 11 in soccer could be much better together than the sum of the individual parts or, on the other hand, worse than its talent would predict. A baseball team however may be more of a linear system as their batting and base running are more segregated in nature, making the addition of players more predictable.
- Salary man and working man spend all their time working and little of their time solving complex problems using assets
- Business man still relies on other people to turn assets into profits
- Tight coupling in form of shareholders/bondholders and workers/consumers generates risk
- Renaissance man
- Specialist is not a well balanced man
- Reaches creative solutions for most needs
- Independent from marketplace
- Uses vast skills and thus spends less, and consequently less dependent on marketplace
- Salary man and working man spend all their time working and little of their time solving complex problems using assets
- Business man still relies on other people to turn assets into profits
- Tight coupling in form of shareholders/bondholders and workers/consumers generates risk
- Renaissance man
- Specialist is not a well balanced man
- Reaches creative solutions for most needs
- Independent from marketplace
- Uses vast skills and thus spends less, and consequently less dependent on marketplace
Ergodicity and Destiny
- Luck is only important in the short term
- Ergodicity
- Attitudes + actions lead to habits
- Habits over time tend to deliver deserved outcomes
- Pick right actions
- Vision must lead to mission
- By constantly thinking about something, you will influence your actions
- Doing something that is considered very difficult at least once in your life is highly recommended
- My actuarial exams I think were this for me. Those exams didn’t just give me certain math and insurance knowledge. They gave me a blueprint on how to tackle ungodly large obstacles by breaking up the larger goal into smaller mini goals.