Daniel Weimar > Recent Status Updates

Reputation is invaluable. Freedom and independence are invaluable. Freedom and friends are invaluable. Being loved by those who want to love you is invaluable. Happiness is invaluable.

The hardest financial skill is getting the goalpost to stop moving

There is no reason to risk what you have and need for what you don’t have and don’t need.

To make money they didn’t have and didn’t need they risked what they did have and did need. That’s foolish. If you risk something that is important to you for some that that id unimportant to you it just does not make any sense

Be careful who you praise and admire. Be careful who you look down upon and wish to avoid becoming. Focus less on specific individuals and case studies and more on broad patterns.

We all do crazy stuff with money, because we’re all relatively new to this game and what looks crazy to you might make sense to me. But no one is crazy - we all make decisions based on our own unique experiences that seem to make sense to us in a given moment.

Few people make financial decisions purely with a spreadsheet. They make them at the dinner table, or in a company meeting. Places where personal history, your own unique view of the world, ego, pride, marketing, and odd incentives are scrambled together into a narrative that works for you.

Every decision people make with money is justified by taking the information they have at the moment and plugging it into their unique mental model of how the world works

Individual investors’ willingness to bear risk depends on personal history

No amount of studying or open mindedness can genuinely recreate the power of fear and uncertainty. Some lessons have to be experienced before they can be understood.

To grasp why people bury themselves in debt you don’t need to study interest rates; you need to study the history of greed, insecurity, and optimism. To get why investors sell out at the bottom of a bear market you don’t need to study the math of expected future returns; you need to think about the agony of looking at your family and wondering if your investments are imperiling their future.

Knowing what to do tells you nothing about what happens in your head when you try to do it

Financial outcomes are driven by luck, independent of intelligence and effort. Financial success is not a hard science. It’s a soft skill, where how you behave is more important than what you know

Doing well with money has a little to do with how smart you are and a lot to do with how you behave. And behavior is hard to teach, even to really smart people.

Run towards what you want, as opposed to away from what you don’t want

Manage 95 percent of your business down to the penny. Spend the last 5 percent “foolishly” - (ex. fancy spoons for the museum gelato cart).

If you take care of your managers and give them what they need to be successful, you put them in a better position to take care of their teams

Just because a few clients love an employee doesn’t mean they should be allowed to erode the foundation of everything you’re trying to build

Let your energy impact the people you’re talking to, not the other way around

It’s easier to learn the right way to do things at the high end than it is to break bad habits. You can always take it down a notch later, but it’s harder to go the other way

Hire great people, treat them well, invest deeply into their personal and professional development, and they will take great care of your clients

Map days with precision, organizing priorities, and setting nonnegotiables

Intentionalities isn’t a luxury or business philosophy, it’s a requirement

Whatever you do for a living, you can chose to be in the hospitality business

The welcome conference
Human desire to be taken care of never goes away