Recently I got to talking with my friend Dave Jilk about happiness, flourishing, and my future book Being Human. While relating my ideas about the goals of life (as captured in a recent blog post), I described the importance of taking a balanced approach and including all or most of these goals in one's life pursuits. He likened this to portfolio management in investing, which is a great analogy. This spurred me to thinking further about the value that each area of life brings to one's overall success in life. Consider a few somewhat fanciful extensions of this analogy:
As I mentioned a few years ago, the approach to financial investing I have adopted (the Permanent Portfolio) involve equal weighting of four asset classes: cash, stocks, long-term bonds, and gold. Supposedly, the ultra-rich (who often think of maintaining wealth across generations) typically invest in real estate, gold, and art. Putting these together yields six asset classes, similar to those I'm exploring for investing in life. Although these analogies might be merely suggestive, I find them intriguing nonetheless.
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