Matthew Comments

When the Vikings hired Mike Zimmer, I started following the team again. They improved quickly from pathetic to respectable. I searched for football news that wasn’t just gossip or marketing to help me understand what I was watching. I found Pro Football Focus (PFF). They didn’t just take available statistics and crunch the numbers. They built their own foundation by watching each player on each play, assigning a grade, and then applying analytics with that information. There are parallels between the lessons of football analysis and the lessons of analysis for our culture. They are outlined below. The lessons are in bold. The context here is the NFL--but can you see how they might be lessons for American culture as well? PFF tries to be objective, but that doesn’t mean they don’t make decisions. Any decision process can be criticized as biased. That does not mean every decision process is equal. PFF makes judgments about how good or bad a play is. They judge every player on eve

Early in my career, I started following a personal finance column written by a guy named Jonathon Clements. He was down-to-earth and seemed to be writing for the common man. It was ironic that I found him in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. WSJ features columns written by finance hot-shots predicting the future and lifestyle gurus describing cars and homes I could never afford. Clements was different. Clements now runs a not-for-profit website/blog where he shares financial advice: humbledollar.com. A year ago, he posted “21 signs you’re a HumbleDollar reader”. I read those signs and thought “Wow. He gets me. He really gets me.” Below, I highlight 3 of those 21 signs, and why they mean something to me. If you want to see the “21 signs” article, the link is at bottom. When friends boast that they save 10% of their income every year, you think, "Is that all?" When I was younger, I was recruited to help my good friend Jake. He wanted to visit his parents, but he wa

The passing of John Bogle recently breezed through the public’s scant attention span. Sad. Bogle was a national hero. He was a fiduciary. A fiduciary is someone who takes some control of resources on behalf of another person. In modern legal terms, the emphasis is that the fiduciary makes decisions that are best for the owner, rather than best for the fiduciary’s personal interests. Legislation is occasionally considered that would require financial advisors to “act as fiduciaries” for their clients. In practice, that means they should always act for the benefit of their clients, not their own interest. For example, when choosing between a low-cost mutual fund and a higher-cost fund that offers to send the advisor on a nice vacation, they should choose the lower cost fund. It’s a tough standard. It’s such a tough standard it can be hard to think of real-life examples in any field. Even financial advisors need to look out for themselves. They’ve got families to feed, right? Would

I want to share some experiences and reflections about my change to a more plant-based, whole-food life. (My last blog post talks about how I got started on this ride.) Health is a relative term. This is great news, because you don’t need to change everything to be healthier. Just eat a little more of the good stuff and squeeze out a little more of the bad stuff, and you’ve done yourself a huge favor. I still eat things I know aren’t good for me. Friday fish-fries. Celebrations. Social events. But it's more the exception than the rule. Having said that, eating is a zero-sum game . There’s only so much room in your belly, only so many things you can make for breakfast, and only so many things that will fit in your fridge. When you build your eating habits, each unhealthy food crowds out the healthy foods your body is desperate for. Each food that’s been weaponized with some combination of salt/sugar/fat makes the heathier unweaponized foods pale a bit in comparison. Withdraw tho