On Heritage: "Elevate" - Part 5 of ...

Re-cap - where did these posts come from?

The song “Elevate” from the Enter the Spider-Verse Soundtrack is one of those songs that sticks with you. You can use it on a run for some direct motivation, or just feel pumped when you watch the movie and think, “well that was catchy” and move on with your life.

Or, like me, you can over-analyze it to death and take it entirely out of context.

So here we are!

Today’s lyrics -

…I just plan to be
Somethin' powerful for my family
Tried to balance life and my sanity

The end of the year, the end of a decade is a natural point to figure out what you did wrong and what you did right. And on top of all that, we get together with family who have their expectations of what they want for us merged with possible regrets of their own life.

There’s no better time to put a stake in the ground, and project what you want to be for the continuation of your family’s legacy.

In Spider-Man, one of the understated conflicts of the movie is the decision to follow the family member - uncle Aaron - who is living his own life, turning his back on the “right” path, or Jefferson Davis-Morales, Miles’ father who lives his life as a by-the-book cop - on the job and off the job.

As the son of a father who group in a big family that included three brothers (the youngest) is my Dad and two sisters, there was a lot of time for comparison among siblings.

And yet, no matter how many times I learn about how my Dad and his brothers and sisters grew up, I learn something new every holiday season. Usually it comes in the form of - “Did you know Granddad owned a ____ “?

Granddad Avant - who I remember, but only faintly - seemed to have done it all.

• College graduate in the ‘30s? Check.

• Owned his own home? Check (still standing in Newark)

• Owned additional properties. Check. Check. Check. Check. Check. At last count, I’d understood this to be five properties, with up to six tenant families at the same time, which he sold to pay for the educations of the siblings pictured above.

• Ran his own business? Check.

• Oh and by business I mean - taxi company, restaurant, and property management. Check. Check. Check.

• Master’s degree? Check (MBA).

• Teacher? Check.

• Principal? Check.

This was all one man, in a time where doing one of the above bullets was a feat in itself. Even today, doing any of these things takes a lot of passion and possibly a large wallet.

And yet, for all of these accomplishments, the grandparent I am I impressed by as I piece together the fabric of her life is my grandmother. Grandma Doris passed away when I was even younger, so my memories are more impressions than anything concrete. The last impression I have was being carried by her as she walked down the “good” stairs of that house in Newark (or perhaps more probably I remember the photo where this occurred). Note: messy kids were supposed to use the back stairs.

Doris was by Avant’s side for all of the above and has her own list of checks to go through.

• College graduate in the ‘30s? Check.

• Raised 5 kids when fathers were expected to do very little? Check.

• Traveled with her girlfriends across the US as an adult? Check.

• Dealt with my Grandpa’s stubborn personality while he jumped from business to business? Check.

• Took family road trips in the Jim Crow south, preparing food for 7 to enjoy without having to stop at restaurants that may or not serve her family? Check.

The legend of my Grandfather is no doubt deserved - he accomplished concrete things in an era that was built to stand in his way.

But when I think about heritage, that thought is not complete without wanting to honor my Grandma Doris as well. It’s fitting that our family reunions are based around Doris and her four sisters, born roughly 2 years apart. Our family tree centers around these ladies because they were the starting point for the decades to follow.

Heritage encompasses:

• Carrying on the traditions that were meaningful for your family

• Enjoying the cultural icons that your family experienced together, and for me, it’s meant

• Trying to make a generational improvement based on what has already come before.

My Dad’s generation had their own struggles with growing up in Newark, an area that was recovering from riots, implementing housing discrimination, and experiencing a period of violence. I know my parents made it a point to shield me and my brother from all of that - we spent the majority of our lives in a small Rhode Island town where safety was never a concern and opportunities were plentiful, as long as you were willing to work.

So where does that leave me in terms of honoring and building on family heritage?

More practically, to me it means being a behind-the-scenes Doris:

• Continuing to make music a big part of my life - and any good music will involve black icons - Louie, Stevie, Ella, Etta, Nina. It means

• Striving to learn continuously, whether by earning another degree (unfortunately I don’t think a PhD is in the cards), it means

• Exploring the world, it means

• Preserving and building on what little we know about our own family’s roots,

• Helping others execute what they are passionate about,

• Cooking good food,

• Being patient but stern,

• Challenging yourself to go as far as whatever societal limitations there are will let you.

I think this is what Grandma Doris would approve of in honoring my heritage.

Some of those questions are still unanswered for me, now it’s just time to be something powerful (and stay sane).

On Style: "Elevate" - Part 4 of ...

No chaos or killings, my style is so brilliant

-Spider-Man Enter the Spider Verse, “Elevate”

This week I had the opportunity to visit and be an exhibitor in the Dubai air show. The first time I ever heard of Dubai I was taking my first international trip in 2004, and I had a layover in the Heathrow airport. There was a sign there advertising for “The World,” a group of man-made islands made in the shape of… the world, off of one of Dubai's beaches. I thought to myself - what a weird advertisement for a sci-fi movie, and then later doing some googling and finding - holy sh*t - that's going to be a real place. Clicking through, I also found it somewhat amusing that at the time, the bought islands mirrored the order of colonial occupation. Man-made Europe was full-up, America was getting crowded, South America was growing, and Africa… well, still developing. Regardless, I had found out about a place that was inventing itself from the riches if oil and hoping to position itself as the transportation center of the world.

15 years later, I'm getting to see it for myself, even more fortunate to have work pay for the trip. This post is about style and design because as a modern city with unique history, Dubai was the blank canvas a city could hope for. Unlike rapid expansion in the US, which builds horizontal, sprawling communities, Dubai knew from the beginning that to get on the map, it had to go vertical (although it has its share of sprawl).

High skyscrapers surrounded by barren dessert creates a striking contrast of opulence for opulence's sake.

To me, style is what remains when you take everything else that is unneeded away. If the unneeded vastly outweighed the substance, what you are left with is flourish and embellishment, not style. That’s why, I’ll argue that designing a spacesuit could be a great analogy to what makes something stylish. A few thoughts on writing style which also applies to things outside of writing, from a literary classic:

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.

-Strunk & White, The Elements of Style

I’m sure there are fashion essays that describes this perspective more clearly, but I’ll approach it as an analyst. To me - discussion of design incorporates three things: Style, Fashion, and Trends. I see Style being anything that directly relates to the function being performed. Its why the pieces of clothing that sem to be the most timeless are those that are used for a specific purpose - think uniforms - military, police, maybe clergy. I’d argue that there aren’t many typical women’s garments in that category because they have historically been more toward the fashion side. Where fashion is more closely aligned with ornamentation - decisions made that are on top of the purpose of the clothing. If women had had the opportunity to be the designers of their own clothing earlier, I think there would be more timeless styles to point to. And lastly, there are trends -things that are tied to a time period, such as materials available, predominant climate, the way of displaying the clothes.

Design can be only stylish - completely made for function, but that is almost impossible to do without being pulled by trends or fashion influences. Similarly, something can purposefully be solely fashionable to evoke a certain feeling or idea without needing to worry about what the clothing is supposed to “do” as much (think New York fashion show).

My impressions of Dubai are very surface level. I was there for five days, but saw very little of the city. I did, however see how people interacted, and the attractions to which the city aspires - the tallest building, and planning for a global Expo 2020, which is basically a re-invention of World’s Fairs of the past. Perhaps the reason Dubai seems cool to visit but less tempting to want to live is that the designs move purely toward the trendy side. If someone has done it, Dubai will follow, but move it to the over-the-top category. I liken it to a distant family member who has recently come into some money. It’s impressive to visit with them, but in the back of your mind, you’re left wondering - what’s the point of all of this?

The three components of design choices: Style, fashion and trends

So all that preamble to say that a spacesuit is a really interesting design problem that gets back to the purest expression of style. Invent something that has to keep high-paying toursts extremely comfortable while being conscious that it needs to contribute to these people’s ability to stay alive in a harsh atmosphere, not weigh a lot, provide options for carrying many different things - notebooks, personal mission statement, and still photograph well to preserve the memory and visuals from the experience.

To the point above on there not being many timeless women’s style expressions, women’s and men’s suits look the same, because there isn’t room for much ornamentation. However, a spacesuit can’t be purely stylish (read completely built for function), because there are limits on cost, sponsors to please, and some trends that are just implicit in our approach to clothes at this point in history.

Relating this back to Spider-man, we all love the flashy superhero costume - the primary colors of Superman, the contrasting red and blue of Spider-Man, the flashy green of The Riddler… OK, nevermind. The point is that these colors make the superheros easy to identify, especially when they were introduced subject to being printed in grainy newspapers and black and white TV. But fast forward to now, and the Black Panther’s spacesuit-esque costume in Avengers makes a whole lot more sense and will age a lot better than whatever it is Wolverine wears.

So in your next design project - website, essay, artwork, get back to the very core expression of what you are doing. And then make conscious decisions to add ornamentation or trendy things. They will stand out that much more.

On Investing: "Elevate" - Part 3 of ...

The song Elevate for sure wasn't talking about investing, but bear with me here. It is talking about choosing a side, and in terms of investing, you are picking the companies who you think will win. With investing, though, you have to remember that you can bet on everyone at once, and while sometimes you will lose the battle if an economic cycle, you can still win the overall investment war. Most of my opinions here are based off of The Simple Path to Wealth. (If you disagree, take it up with Mr. Collins or check out a podcast).

You gotta choose a side, you gotta choose a side
You gotta pick
You gotta do what's right or you gonna lose the fight (I gotta elevate)

…

My boy, you better choose a side
I may have lost the battle but I will not lose the war
I can promise you I will not lose this time

On Monday, a stock I held went up 15% in a single day. The next day, it went up another 30%. Killer right?

Unfortunately, the previous Sunday night I had decided to cut my losses with that stock and dump it, putting the selling wheels into motion I probably caught some if the rise of Monday's activity but overall I missed that almost 40% upswing. Whoops.

My point here is that I was choosing a stock that I wanted to be a winner. The stock I'm talking about is the electric vehicle manufacturer NIO. I don't want to get into the details of the company here (this video does a better job of that), but when I bought a few shares, it was more like placing a bet than making an investment. Maybe the bet would hit, maybe it wouldn't. This is not an investment strategy.

NIO stock performance since IPO

If we treated investments like Spider-man chooses being good and fighting evil, we would lose both the battle and the war (eventually).

A better approach is to invest in the fact that there will always be companies battling to be better. In practice, this looks like buying an index fund like:

• Total stock market exchange traded fund - VTI or IWV

• Total market index mutual fund - VTSAX or FSKAX (minimum balance needed)

• Real estate index funds - VGSIX or VNQ or FSNRX

There are also managed funds that I'd say are equivalent to investing on Marvel vs. DC comics. You know the characters (companies) who are involved in each universe, you know the style of the fund managers, but you also pay a premium to have someone else do the thinking for you instead of assembling your own group of companies. Of course there's no guarantee here that either managed fund (Marvel or DC), has any better idea of what they're doing than investing in the whole game itself, but you never know. You could get an Avengers portfolio that lasts for 20 years and makes billions are the fifth reboot of Superman that somehow never takes off.

One of the funds I like in this space, is ARKK. It is a tech-heavy managed fund run by a woman and betting on disruptive Innovation. I like the founder, I like their analysis and I'm willing to sacrifice some investment returns on paying for their time. Overall, though it's still only a small fraction of my investment savings.

ARKK stock performance since IPO

So, if you're new to investing, here we're doing the opposite of what Spider-man has to do. You don't have to pick a side, and the best way not to lose is to bet on the game itself (index fund) rather than choosing a particular company.

In terms of practical steps, i'd do something like this just to get started learning more:

1. Open a Roth IRA if you don't have one already

2. In that IRA, buy shares of an index fund - this should be like 95% if the money you're setting aside assuming you're already contributing to a retirement account

3. Open a brokerage account (account that holds stocks), choose one company you like in an industry you're familiar with. You could use Robinhood or Acorns to be trendy.

4. Periodically follow the financial news about that company. Odds are it will put into context everything that's happening to your bigger index fund holdings, and you will learn more and retain more about investing.

5. In the meantime, keep contributing to the index fund,no matter what the market is doing, you will not have to time highs or lows or choose companies, you're just betting that everyone around you is choosing sides while you sit back and win the war.