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A week of easy runs had me ready to make an hour my new floor. Then I remembered the run my rule asks for first. Seán Quinn's 35 years of wins ended in a €3 billion loss on one Irish bank.
Show Notes
A week of easy runs had me ready to make an hour my new floor. Then I remembered the run my rule asks for first. Seán Quinn's 35 years of wins ended in a €3 billion loss on one Irish bank.
Featuring: Seán Quinn, Carl Sagan
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Chapters:
(00:00) A good week of easy runs
(00:12) The rule before raising a floor
(00:26) How buyers in a bubble reason
(00:37) Seán Quinn's 35 years of wins
(01:16) The 2008 crash and €3 billion
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"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
Carl Sagan
The weather was great and my runs felt easy. After a week of hour-long runs, I was ready to make an hour my new floor.
Then I remembered my rule: before I raise a habit's floor, I first do one session far beyond it, like a single run of about two and a half hours.
I pictured that run and kept my floor where it was, at half an hour.
Buyers in a bubble reason the way I did that week: prices rose last month, so they'll rise next month. I use the rule so I don't set a floor in good conditions that I can't hold once they change.
After 35 years of wins, Seán Quinn kept adding to his stake in one Irish bank. In 1973 he borrowed £100 to dig gravel out of his family's 23-acre farm in Ireland. By 2008 Forbes put him at $6 billion, the richest person in Ireland.
From 2005 he bought into Anglo Irish Bank, mostly through bets on its share price, until he controlled more than a quarter of it.
In a 2022 documentary he explained why he kept adding: "Anything I had done for the previous 35, 40 years I suppose turned out to be successful and any wee hiccups were always ironed out over a six-, 12-month period."
The bank's shares collapsed in the 2008 crash. The stake cost him about €3 billion. An Irish court declared him bankrupt in 2012.
"It was stupid to increase it at all," he said of his stake in the bank.
What rule would you set so ambition can't crush your consistency?