Alan C. Fox's Blog, page 31

I am cruising down the Danube River on a brand new Viking River Cruises boat. For me this is an ideal vacation for two reasons:

1. It is reliable. I will sleep in the same bed each night. No need to check into different hotels. I will savor my meals in the same dining room. There is no pressure to search for a new restaurant every few hours. I won’t have to pack and unpack, suffer through security at airports, or deal with unpredictable taxi drivers. I will enjoy the reliability and comfort...

“Cuddles” is not your local lady of p . . . leisure. She, or he, is you, and me.

Skin to skin contact is important for every human being. A great deal of research has indicated that infants who lack enough physical touch may never achieve full emotional development. In 2010 Katherine Harmon reported in The Scientific American, “. . . many stories of delayed development and troublesome behavior, such as in the seven-year-old Russian orphan who was returned by his adoptive family in the U.S....

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One enchanted afternoon, I met my wife while I was shopping in a rare bookstore where she worked. As I walked past bookshelves filled with first editions, she barely caught my eye from where she was sitting behind a desk at the other end of the room.

“Yes!” a voice screamed inside my head. “This woman is for you!”

At that moment I didn’t know if she was married (she wasn’t). I didn’t know if she had a sense of humor (she did). I didn’t even know what she really looked like (I had caught onl...

When we were kids, my brother and I had the mother of all pillow fights. It ended with a shriek of glee when David swatted me squarely on the top of my head. His pillow burst, liberating thousands of feathers. For weeks afterward gypsy bits of white fluff roamed through our house, rising from dresser drawers, drifting out of folded clothes, and even, to my surprise, peeking out from the corner of a small red carton of cloves in the kitchen pantry.

But each time I tried to trap one of these...

Bosses are inherently intimidating, even though most of them aren’t actually big, or bad. Still, they are “the boss” and they have a great deal of control over your life, which can make them scary.

I met my first boss when I was eighteen. He seemed nice enough, but did expect a day’s work for a day’s pay. I had a summer job as a stock boy in a warehouse, unpacking, stocking shelves, and filling orders.

About a month into the job, my family was leaving for an extended weekend vacation. Being...

I like investments because they work for me while I sleep. They also work for me while I vacation on a beach in Hawaii.

The difficulty, of course, is finding a profitable investment.

Basically you invest in either a company or a person. Either way, an investment should have three key attributes:

An innovative idea.


A ripe market.


Great execution.

IDEA

While a good idea is important, the idea alone is not enough to guarantee a profitable return.

I used to invest in projects based solely o...

[image error]I just returned from my father’s 100th birthday celebration at the Sheraton Universal City. In 1914 Dad was born into a working class family near New York City. When he was in high school the Great Depression hit, so he learned to play the French Horn, practicing more than three hours a day, to escape from poverty and earn a decent living.

In a recent video interview with Dad, my son Craig noted that Dad is one of the best brass instrument teachers in the world. (His book, Essentials of Bra...

Whenever I visit a buffet restaurant I eat more than I had intended. This was true when I was twelve years old. It remains true today, and I’m now seventy-four.

Patterns persist.

When I hired Karen five years ago to be my assistant her references were outstanding. She was extremely personable at her interview and earned a very high score on our thirty-question logic test. There was only one item on her resume which concerned me.

“Karen, you’ve held a number of previous positions, but you ha...

When I was twelve years old my mother took me and my younger brother to Hawaii to meet my father who had been traveling in Asia with the Xavier Cugat band. We stayed for one week at a small motel in Waikiki. By now a fifty-story hotel has undoubtedly risen from that same small plot of land.

While in Honolulu we toured the Dole pineapple plantation where I was treated to what felt like Christmas in April. Sweet, delicious pineapple. The sight of it. The scent of it. The taste of it in unlimi...