Business Pundit

Culture shock (n): A state of bewilderment and distress experienced by an individual who is suddenly exposed to a new, strange, or foreign social and cultural environment. Two weeks was all it took. Once it set in, the culture shock numbed me to… Read more

Business Pundit will be a little different in July. I’m going to spend the next couple of weeks sitting on an inflated device one mile beneath the earth. This is otherwise known as rafting the Grand Canyon, a once-in-a-lifetime trip that I was… Read more

Yesterday, I met three strangers for lunch. It was part of my local Chamber of Commerce’s “Connect 4 Lunch” program, which sets up four small business owners in non-competing industries for networking lunches. The idea is to meet people you… Read more

I recently learned about the Holmes and Rahe stress scale, a psychological scale that predicts how likely you are to get sick based on certain life events.* This scale, originally designed in the 1960’s, produced an aha! moment for me. Several… Read more

I generally ignore Google AdWords ads, but this one caught my eye: Life of a Farm Blog – blog.mahindrausa.com – Follow the stories of a guy with 3 kids, a red tractor and 170 acres Mahindra & Mahindra is an Indian automaker. At first, it… Read more

Thanksgiving in America is a combination package. On the one hand, dragging oneself through endless security lines and traffic jams to visit relatives with dubious entertainment value does not count as one of life’s most pleasurable activities…. Read more

Common dogma has it that no value can be placed on a human being. Our lives are priceless. So are our bodies. If one location consistently and emphatically proves that dogma wrong, it is the hospital. If one hospital branch has the unmitigated… Read more

In honor of NANOWRIMO, I thought I’d share with you some of the ways writing a novel has impacted my business! I’ve been writing memoir and fiction for about five years. On a couple of occasions I’ve tried to write a novel. So far… not so good…. Read more

This past Saturday was miserable, for two reasons. Reason #1: A doctor prescribed me medication that did the exact opposite of what it was supposed to do. If you’ve ever taken medication that gives you more symptoms than it cures, you know… Read more

I never heard of National Boss’s Day until yesterday. Did the National Boss Day people set up a hardcore PR campaign or something? This was simply not celebrated during my office days, which admittedly took place not too long ago. In honor… Read more

For those of you who haven’t read my previous posts on the topic, I’ve started writing a series on my stumbling progress from clueless investing to market intelligence. My timing, like the timing of my book, was a little strange. The book,… Read more

I’m writing this post aboard a Washington, DC-bound US Airways flight. I don’t fly this airline much. In fact, all I knew about them coming in is that they charge you for water. This fact at first sounded grim, like a human rights… Read more

I’ve decided to try out this confessional series to open up a discussion with other investors, both experienced and amateurs. I’ve invested in index funds for years, but it seems like these days, the index fund isn’t quite as infallible as… Read more

What is it with the biography? I’m not talking about a book or movie, but my own. Specifically, for this very website. So far, the per-hour ROW (Return On Writing) my Business Pundit biography has been dismally low. I’ve stared at this… Read more