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Don’t do stupid. The gotchas of investing. And your web site needs fixing.

I’m not the best investor. But I’ve learned some expensive lessons:

1. You get rich from starting and running your own business.

2. You’ll be most successful if know (and love) what you’re doing, and love your customers.

3. Your only obsession in all those years of your own business should be learning how to make your business more successful.

After you’ve sold your business, you magically morph into an investor. Everything you learned up until then is now for naught. You’re starting from scratch.

1. You used to believe in concentration. Now you have to believe in diversification. Instead of knowing a lot about a little, you now have to know a little about a lot. That gives new meaning to being uncomfortable.

2. You will now never get pleasure from being right — because you don’t know why you were right. You don’t know why the stock went up. But you will get constant agita from being wrong. There’ll always be a wrong somewhere in your miserable “portfolio.” You’ll be wrong regularly, if not constantly. It’s awful.

As an entrepreneur I never woke up without 20 ideas to make the business better or bigger.

As an investor, I wake up with ten ideas. Then I “research” them and find none of them make any sense. What’s amazing is how many great ideas have a “gotcha.” (And how long it takes to find that gotcha.) Maybe every great idea has a “gotcha?” But when you’re managing the business yourself, you can manage your way around the gotchas. When some other idiot is in charge, you’re screwed.

Solar electricity is a great idea. Until you find the “gotcha.” The Koch Brothers. They successfully lobbied the regulators in Florida for new rules to make solar uneconomic there. It’s self-interested and dishonest. But they made it the law. It looks a bit better in California. But there are gotchas there too.

My other problem is that I often come late to great investments — like Facebook and Amazon. These two are probably the greatest companies on earth today. But they’re both ultra-pricey. I keep hoping for a pullback… I keep buying more when I feel flush.

Your web site is probably all wrong.

These days everybody learns what you sell by visiting your web site. That’s fact number one..

Number two fact is 60%+ of the people visiting your web site come via a smartphone.

This is how your web site was designed:
Slide1

 This is how it looks to 60%+ of the visitors to your site:

Slide2

Here’s an example of a web site viewed on a laptop/desktop horizontal screen.

ArtOmi2

This is what it looks like on my iPhone.

ArtOMi1

It looks this bad because it’s not designed to work for mobile devices. I bet your web site has the same problem.

Here’s how it works. Every time you go to a web site, your browser sends code called a “user agent.” That tells the web site you’re on a laptop or  a smartphone and that you’re using Mozilla or Safari, etc. You can read more on user agents here.

Your web site should respond to your user agent and present you with a web site optimized for you.

If you’re selling something, (e.g. pizza) your smartphone website should be response oriented. Big buttons. “Order Now.” “Sign up for our specials.”

Web sites for iPhones and other smartphones are very different to web sites for laptops. Look at Amazon on your laptop. Look at it on your iPhone.

Most businesses do not have a mobile version of their web site.

This is costing you sales. Want more? Send my friend Mark an email. actionnow4all@gmail.com.

Don’t do stupid.

You’re not getting any younger. These are true stories:

+ A friend wrecked his shoulder’s rotator cuff by using  chain saw too often.

+ A friend made himself a paraplegic by dropping a tree on himself. He used a chainsaw.

+ A woman gave herself a stroke by going off her blood thinner.

+ A friend can’t ride his beloved bicycle because he didn’t allow himself enough time to recover from his hip replacement operation.

+ A friend threw out his back by lifting his heavy bag onto an airline’s overhead rack.

“We need to downsize.” That’s Susan’s latest mantra. Hence this evening we will be watching:

TinyHouseBigLiving

And we’ll be learning

TinyHouseSecrets

And maybe we’ll move into a 100 square foot house, which may look like this.

TinyHouse

The show is at 9:00 PM tonight on HGTV. For more, click here.

Don’t eat from the floor. Don’t double dip. Don’t bite some someone’s else food. Here’s how to be paranoid. From National Geographic: BugsontheFloor

For the full page, click BugsOnTheFloor

US Open Tennis 2016 begins tonight on ESPN. It starts at 6 PM.

My friend Todd likes this joke.

A father buys a lie detector robot that slaps people when they lie. He decides to test it out at dinner one night.
The father asks his son what he did that afternoon.
The son says, “I did some schoolwork.”
The robot slaps the son.
The son says, “OK, OK. I was at a friend’s house watching movies.”
Dad asks, “What movie did you watch?”
Son says, “Toy Story.”
The robot slaps the son.
Son says, “Ok, Ok, we were watching porn.”
Dad says, “What? At your age I didn’t even know what porn was.”
The robot slaps the father.
Mom laughs and says, “Well, he certainly is your son.”
The robot slaps the mother.

Robot for sale.

HarryNewton

Harry Newton who keeps playing one and a half hours of tennis a day. Which is great and pleasurable, but not as pleasurable as granddaughter Sophie who had her second birthday last Thursday:

SophieBirthdayCrown

4 Comments

  1. TomFromVa says:

    I’ve never gotten the downsizing idea. You have enough money to have a maid once a week so its not the housework. I have had 3 operations that required some time at home and I was so glad to have a house large enough to walk around in and also have a spare bedroom that I could sleep in.

  2. Fderfler says:

    Excellent insight in the top third of this column, Harry. Hard won, insightful, and valuable. Now, all you need is a way to send that insight back into time.

    Tell Susan just to close off some rooms for now. You’ll need them in a few years for the caregiver.

  3. Devon says:

    Tiny home advocates act like they’ve invented something new – news flash – these are nothing more than mobile homes that are built to look like tiny houses. These tiny home are general built on trailers and need electricity and water hookups and well as a way to deal with the toilet/shower waste water.
    Would like to see a follow up show , a year after people have lived in these.I’m sure that there would be plenty of people where they were driven crazy by being in such a tight place for such a long time. Maybe if you’re a hermit or live in an area with nice weather all year so you aren’t cooped up due to weather it could work, but this seems like just a fad made for TV.

    • Lucky says:

      Check out
      http://www.techinsider.io/five-people-who-abandoned-their-tiny-homes-2015-7
      Or just Google “Tiny houses one year later” there are a host of sad tales about Tiny Houses.
      We have a 500 sq ft summer cottage that is fine for 2 retires with no kids to visit…space in our yard to relax and 3 storage sheds for our washer/dryer and water softener in one, garden tools in another and miscellaneous junk in the 3rd…adding an additional 200 sq ft…….2 bdrm 2 bath home to go home to.