The Pepper Game
The breakfast was going wrong. Justin Whitmel Earley, a business lawyer from Richmond, Virginia, was on a mountain-cabin vacation with his wife and their four boys, and the family had walked into a...
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The breakfast was going wrong. Justin Whitmel Earley, a business lawyer from Richmond, Virginia, was on a mountain-cabin vacation with his wife and their four boys, and the family had walked into a...
Dustin Jensen was eighteen when he moved out, and the first thing he did with his freedom was stop going to church. "I decided I was my own person and I didn't have to follow everything my parents...
In a semirural community in Southern California, in a devout Evangelical family called the Wilsons, the father was a night owl. His wife Elaine described the habit to a team of researchers: "He would...
Nothing about a good year announces danger. The harvest sells at twice last season's price. The shop has its best quarter since it opened. The contract lands, the remittances from the family abroad...
There is a dream sold to every generation that discovers investing, and it goes like this: build or buy assets that work while you sleep, step back, and let the money compound on its own. Passive...
Some financial arguments need a whiteboard. The best one in Get Rich, Stay Rich, Pass It On needs three sentences. Catherine S. McBreen and George H. Walper, Jr., whose research firm Spectrem Group...
At ninety-one years old, Gloria Vanderbilt was asked a question by her own son, the journalist Anderson Cooper, in the conversations that became their book The Rainbow Comes and Goes. Had anyone...
Every founder eventually meets the moment. A daughter who answers questions about the shop with polite, escaping eyes. A son who studied something the business has no use for, on purpose. A niece who...
A young woman is exploring the attic of her childhood home when she finds a box. Inside are Christmas and birthday presents, years of them, addressed to her and her twin sister, every one unopened....
In American families with a summer house, there is one argument that returns every year like a season: who gets the Fourth of July weekend. The house is small, the family is growing, the holiday is...
Dennis T. Jaffe spent his working life as a clinical psychologist advising families in business together, and at the time of the story he tells on himself in Working with the Ones You Love: Conflict...
In January 2004, a salesman walked out of the industrial abrasives company where he had worked for years, and on his way out he told a co-worker exactly why. "I am tired of busting my butt so that...
Jackie Joyner-Kersee is, by many accounts, the greatest female athlete of the twentieth century: three Olympic Games, two heptathlon gold medals, world records that stood for decades. Her coach,...
In Belgium there is a family that has owned a steel wire company since 1880. Bekaert employs 27,000 people, sells into more than 120 countries, and is listed on the Brussels stock exchange, yet the...
A father asked his son to come home and run the family company, and the son said no. Not because the business was failing; it had been trading for over three hundred years. Not because the son was...
A founder once described his situation to a consultant in five sentences that deserve to be studied the way engineers study a collapsed bridge. "I have had my son working for me in the family...
John and Georgia White built a retail business worth several million dollars, and they flew their own small plane. That second fact is the hinge of the whole story. Flying together, frequently, they...
Stew Leonard ran a dairy store in Connecticut so successful that people wrote about it in business school cases. One day he called a son into his office. The son had been performing badly at work,...
For three years, an accountant came home from work, ate his dinner, and sat down to a second job that paid him nothing. He wanted to become a software engineer, so he taught himself to code: side...
Buried in the middle of a 2020 personal finance primer is a small, quiet experiment with a brutal ending. Three savers agree to the same discipline. Milton is twenty-two, Adam is thirty-two, Joseph...
In September 1992, Stanley Druckenmiller and George Soros looked at the Bank of England and saw something almost no one else had fully priced: the bank did not have the reserves to keep defending the...
There is a new guilt circulating among African and diaspora parents, and it sounds like ambition. It says that steering your teenager toward a job, a plain, salaried, work-for-someone-else job, is...
Somewhere tonight, a young woman is rehearsing a sentence. She has the idea, she has priced the equipment, she has even quietly found her first two customers. What she has not done is say it out loud...
In a Machakos courtroom in the 1990s, a married daughter came to claim a share of her late father's estate. Her father, a Kamba man, had died in 1988. The judge ruled against her, and the reasoning...