Should You Slap A Simple Single Or Swing For The Fences?

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This could easily become a column on successful investing, but it’s not. It does, however, reflect a Noble Prize-winning concept that has propelled successful investors for more than half a century. It’s simple. I’ll explain it quickly.

Every investment option possesses two critical factors: risk and return. Scholars credit economist Harry Markowitz as the first to identify the correlation of risk and return. In his 1952 paper “Portfolio Selection,” Markowitz, the father of “Modern Portfolio Theory,” says low-risk investments can yield low returns and high-risk investments must yield high returns. The “can” and “must” refer to the price you should reasonably pay for the investment.

But this column isn’t about successful investing, it’s about life. Specifically, your life. More precisely, the choices you face in your life. Understanding the dichotomy between “low-Continue Reading “Should You Slap A Simple Single Or Swing For The Fences?”

Who Owns Your Data?

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Towards the end of the day, I finally rediscovered how to use Twitter on my Blackberry. Then I discovered I could retweet faster than I could type. Since a lot of 965897_88613402_data_stock_xchng_royalty_free_300folks had similar ideas to mine, retweeting became the most efficient method for me to get those ideas out of my head and into the Twittosphere known as #SMACSRIT.

#SMACSRIT was the hashtag for the Rochester Institute of Technology’s Social Media and Communication Symposium (SMACS) II, a lively, entertaining and enlightening event held on – at least what started out as – a rainy Thursday on September 29, 2011. I could write about each session, but, perhaps bowing to the behavioral phenomenon called “recency” – the tendency to overweight the last thing seen – I’ll focus on the final keynoter, who posed an intriguing question while Continue Reading “Who Owns Your Data?”

3 Essential Public Speaking Lessons I Accidentally Learned While Playing the Violin

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There I sat, fear pulsing through my veins. I had never seen anything like this before. The page had so much black ink it seemed more like a string of 918308_53296922_violin_royalty_free_stock_xchng_300incomprehensible Chinese characters than the opening music to the Overture of My Fair Lady. Mind you, I had dwelled with the elite of the orchestra pit since my freshman days in high school. Nothing scared me. Usually. This thing did.

Bluntly facing me lay four measures of thirty-second notes – a “run” in the vernacular of the musician. I had easily tackled runs of eighth notes and, perhaps with a little more practice, runs of sixteenth notes. I’ve even snuck in a furtive trill of a thirty-second note – but never a four measure run of these speedy bars. I looked at my teacher and agonizingly admitted, “I can’t play these.” What she said next stunned me.

Continue Reading “3 Essential Public Speaking Lessons I Accidentally Learned While Playing the Violin”

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