Welcome to Billion Dollar Behavior.

A billion dollars allows one to think and act at scale. For example, it cost half that for SpaceX to develop the Falcon 1 and 9 rockets. At $62M each, a billion dollars gives you 16 Falcon 9 rocket launches. To yourself.

But that’s just launches. How about going somewhere? OSIRIS-REx is a 7 year mission to get a rock sample from the asteroid Bennu. In 2020 they were successful getting one and the spacecraft will return in 2023. The mission itself was $800M, the launch was $184M. So for less than a billion you could touch a flying asteroid.

So, how to get to the point of paying to develop the world’s best known rocket, or flying to an asteroid and back? When it comes down to it, it’s how you behave.

This newsletter shortcuts things a bit. We have found that the fastest way to grow your money is through owning businesses. This also means it’s the fastest way to start acting, at scale, on projects that mean a lot to you. Like multiplanetary humans. There are challenges behaving the right way though when it comes to buying businesses, especially on the stock market. Hence, the newsletter reports on:

• Business:

  • Progress to $1B through business ownership.

  • Businesses we’ve checked.

  • Businesses we own will not be disclosed to avoid the consistency bias.

• Sustaining the progress through good behavior:

  • Harnessing emotions to through industrial-strength, fixation-inducing inspiration (such as one day owning Mars real estate).

  • System 2 thinking:

    • Avoid System 1 thinking about investments as it turns the market into a casino or makes you try timing the market.

    • Use System 2 to systematically analyse and buy businesses that:

      • We understand.

      • Show good capital stewardship.

      • Have a bright future.

      • Are cheap.

    • Exploit the laziness it induces with effortful opt-outs such as to stop an automatic investing system.

  • Industrial-strength conviction:

    • A concentrated portfolio of 10 businesses tops but the goal of just 1 (remembering Nike in 1985, Monster Energy in 2004).

    • Buying with the paytience to never sell (otherwise known as using uninterrupted, multigenerational compounding).

  • Anticipating:

    • biases (writing about how each one potentially impacts a buy decision).

    • priming.

    • anchoring.

    • cognitive ease/substitution.

    • framing.

    • mental accounting.

    • regression to the mean.

    • hindsight bias/memory distortion (keep a journal on each decision and track the price at all decision points using a spreadsheet).

    • overconfidence (you cannot tell the market what to do).

    • the sunk cost fallacy.

    • availability heuristics (salient, dramatic or personal events).

    • psychological pain.

• Life at scale:

  • It is likely to take longer than our generation to get to a scale of $1B, but if we make it in time, we’ll report on our own projects off Earth here.