You Don’t Have to Be a Bride to Listen In to This Hodgepodge of Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Blue

Motley Fool co-founder David Gardner has a lot to share in this episode of Rule Breaker Investing.

To catch full episodes of all The Motley Fool’s free podcasts, check out our podcast center. To get started investing, check out our quick-start guide to investing in stocks. A full transcript follows the video.

This video was recorded on Feb. 21, 2024.

David Gardner: Every once in a blue moon or a new moon, or an old moon, or a borrowed moon, I queue up a hodgepodge of points that I want to share. They’re not really related to each other. They’re a hodgepodge, but I forced them to fit into this mold, something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. You probably know the expression, don’t you? It’s what brides traditionally are supposed to wear on their wedding day for good luck. Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. While I won’t be providing this on this podcast, you’re also supposed to have a silver sixpence in your shoe. Now, if you want to locate a dime or a quarter, slip it in your shoe for this week’s podcast. I think you might have even better luck.

Anyway, as winter here in the Northern Hemisphere, which by now feels a bit old and does make some people blue, as winter begins to wane, it’s time to crank back up this episodic series, old, new, borrowed, and blue. We’re going to talk about style boxing and the story of the golden ticket about how to strengthen the bonds of your employees at work and their bonds with your customers. We’ll close it out this week with My Study in Blue. Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue only on this week’s Rule Breaker Investing.

Welcome back to Rule Breaker Investing. It’s been a fun month for this podcast. We kicked it off with our first ever investigation into investing in art. Thank you again to Tonya Turner, Carol and Michael Carroll. What a delight it was. Gotten some great mailbag items. If you heard that investing in art podcast and were inspired to either invest in art or to not invest in art, we’d love to hear from you, [email protected] is our email address to make the Rule Breaker Investing mailbag. Then last week, mental tips, tricks, and life hacks, we had a timeless lesson learned from a Cabernet Sauvignon blind taste tests, and a brief meditation last week on when you’ll be happy.

You know, you’ll be happy, when? Before starting this week’s podcast, I do want to mention next week. It is our 100th Mailbag episode. I’ll be joined on air for the first time for our mailbag with some of my favorite contributors to this podcast over the years, most of all through our interactive mailbag. Of course, you’re going to get to know these people behind the mail. Many interviews with Fool favorites. I think we’ll see if we can stand up a group discussion as well. A mailbag, unlike any other, this will be one of our best, the Rule Breaker Investing 100th Mailbag next week. Just to hype it up a little bit in advance of March, in college basketball, a lot of us are familiar in the United States of America with March, specifically March Madness, the big tournament for the men and the women, determining who is the national champion in college basketball.

Well, on this podcast, we’re going to have our own March Madness. It’s March Market Cap Madness. That’s right. We’re going to have three consecutive Market Cap Game Shows with returning champions, the final four semifinals, and then the final. It’s going to be March Market Cap Madness for Rule Breaker Investing the Market Cap Game Show all month long. Emily Flippen and others coming back to compete to see who will be our 2024 national champion. I am excited. I hope you are too, and a reminder, if you haven’t already, I hope you’ll subscribe this podcast on iTunes or Spotify or [Alphabet’s] Google Play. You can follow us on Twitter @RBIPodcast. You can follow me on Twitter. Some people say X, if you like, I’m @DavidGFool.

As we celebrate our 100th Mailbag next week, I would really appreciate it, if you’ve never given this podcast a review before. If you type up a few sentences with your feelings about the Rule Breaker Investing podcast. Give us a review, throw me some stars, let us know how we’re doing. It helps other people to discover this podcast and get on their own path toward smarter, happier, and richer. Throw us some stars. We read every comment. All right. Four points this week, something old comes first. I first told this story in 2015. By the way, I define old as we’ve done this one before, but I have not told the story in about nine years, 2015 was the first year of this podcast. It starts like this.

Fool HQ once had a summer investing intern named, Igor. Igor Meyerson was a very talented Russian American who brought along his own investing smarts. I wish every 19 to 20-year-old was as thoughtful as energized and as wise beyond his years about money. I asked Igor, “How did you get started?” He said, “I had a mentor who got me started investing. He was a guy year ahead of me at college.” “The funny thing is,” Igor went on, “he’s no longer investing.” His friend had exhibited two distinctive tendencies with his investing.

Igor conveyed the first was that his friend loved to find very early so-called development-stage companies. These are, of course, companies that not only don’t have profits, but in some cases, they don’t even have revenues. His friend’s passionate about these companies, so it inspired him to teach others, like Igor, about investing. Now, the second thing was that he loved this friend to go almost all in when he invested. He was a so-called focused investors. He had very few companies. When he found something that he liked and he believed in, he would just pile what you and I might think of as, as an alarmingly high percentage of his money into those few ideas.

So this particular summer with this particular summer intern across the table from me, I said, “I’m not surprised your mentor’s no longer still in the game. Because if you play that approach forward a bit, that system doesn’t take too long to see what happens.” Highly focused development stage investors might get it right a few times. But when they get it wrong, they lose a lot of money. When they’re specifically targeting early stage, development-stage companies, it’s highly likely that a few of those aren’t going to play out so very well, in this guy’s case, which means he’s no longer investing, which is a shame because you have to love the passion. Young people are so advantaged in that the wealth they’re building is going to compound their whole lives long. Picture a four quadrant matrix where the vertical y-axis labeled company goes from development stage up to mature.

Then the x-axis, let’s label that investor, and it goes from, all in as you go right to diversified, all in to diversified. If you’re picturing with me the simple four-quadrant matrix, my question for you is, dear listener, where is Igor’s mentor plotted? Because now we’re talking about style boxing. Again, there’s a two-by-two style box explicated in the story of Igor’s friend, it’s y-axis company goes up from the development stage to mature. It’s x-axis labeled investor goes right from focused to diversified. Raise your hand if you’ve got it right, and yes, you did. Igor’s friend was a focused investor investing in development stage companies, otherwise known as a recipe for disaster.

There are other choices in that matrix. For example, there’s a ton of money in big index funds today that track indices like the S&P 500. Those are obviously diversified investors, highly so, concentrating their capital in mature companies. Now, that’s the very opposite in our two-by-two style box matrix. That’s the very opposite from Igor’s friend. On the other hand, venture capitalists invest in development stage or at least early stage companies, but they diversify. That’s one box over. Broadening it out a little bit from this meditation on style boxing, you can invent your own. Morningstar did and became a billion-dollar enterprise in part because of that. Famously, Morningstar created that three-by-three matrix for stock funds gauging the size of market cap on one axis, either small, mid-size, or large and what it terms of fund’s investments style on the other, value or blend or growth. While I often inveigh against value versus growth distinctions, we certainly can’t argue with the overall healthfulness of Morningstar’s innovation.

It’s ubiquitous and it’s made the whole complicated world of investment choices, a lot more intelligible for a lot more people. As I say, you could invent your own style box. An entire industry of business consultants has done it. The cliche is, of course, you want things to go from the lower left to the upper right box, which always it seems to me, the good one. You know, who else did some style boxing? The Myers-Briggs women. They built an industry of their own premised on four-by-four, 16 personality types. To start to bring this one to a close in my own way, I’ve done the same thing.

Mine is as simple two-by-two matrix, which explains simply and clearly at least to me, what makes the Rule Breaker Investing approach tick and why we win. I would say creating simple style boxes is a worthy and illuminating exercise across many areas of life. Put on your Morningstar, summon your inner Myers-Briggs, and now I’m going to give you the secret style box of Rule Breaker Investing. First, remember that style boxes over-simplify, they’re cartoonish views of the world. But when we make things as simple as we can, Einstein said, but no simpler, we give ourselves a clarity that many others lack.

So here’s the style box I use to explain why Rule Breaker Investing works. The y-axis labeled time frame goes upward from short-term to long-term. This is the holding period of your investing with traders at the bottom and investors at the top. Then the x-axis labeled company type goes rightward from predictable out to innovative. Predictable companies predominate the world of business, whether they’re operating oilfields or selling Dunkin Donuts, these are companies that stay within the defined lines of their industries in their core businesses. The innovators, by contrast, of course, are what I call the rule-breakers. So for time frame, well more than half the financial world operates in what I believe to be a short-term time frame, so if you’re fishing in the long-term pond, you’re already feeling lonely.

For company type, I would again say, well more than half the corporate world is not only predictable, but most of its drives to be even more predictable than that. Businesses at scale that challenge the status quo or completely unravel it are few and far between. So if you’re investing in the quadrant of long-term and innovative, you are among a tiny subset of investors. Most of the long-term capital out there, the Buffett crowd, if you will, has been actively coached and reinforced to avoid innovation.

Meantime, most of the innovator companies stocks are highly volatile, people think of them as overpriced. “Make your money fast before they blow up,” some short-termers say. Treating them, of course, as a trade. Malcolm Gladwell has shown that the best way for David here, individual investors to beat Goliath, institutional investors is by playing the game completely differently. So I would say Rule Breaker investors, ironically, serve as lonely fishers at the market’s most stocked pond. The fish swimming here are the world’s great innovators who will provide the most market-crushing long-term returns, and yet so much the world doesn’t want to look at these kinds of companies, or if they do, they’re treating them as short-term trades.

That’s why in conclusion, I love this pond. I love this style box. It’s enriched me so much in part because so few find their way here to what I would call our quadrant. Well, again, thank you to our wonderful summer intern, Igor, who is certainly not a college student anymore. Best wishes to his friend who I trust got back in the investing game. But most of all, I hope this point enriches each of us as we think about what are some of the old lessons that we may have learned way back in the day, but it’s good to be reminded of in the present? Style boxing, something old. Point Number 2, onto something new. Now, this is new in the sense that it’s a story I’ve never told before on this podcast and it’s one of my favorites. Yet it did happen years ago, so one aspect of it is something old, but I would say more than anything for this something new, something timeless. I think there’s a timeless lesson or two baked into something new. So this is a story about my friend Chuck.

Chuck is one of my good friends over many years. In a lot of ways, our families grew up together, our kids, three each for our two families, all the same ages to the point that we, as just fellow parents at our kids’ schools, befriended each other and over the course of time, found ourselves going to Disney World together. It’s that kind of special relationship where it’s not just friends that you met that first day of kindergarten, his parents, but they end up being your best friends 25 years later. So that’s my friend Chuck, and this is a story about being at Disney World back when our kids, who are these days, in their mid-to-late ’20s, were about 20 years younger than that. Chuck and his daughters were standing outside waiting to be picked up at the end of Day 1 or 2 at Disney World in Orlando, Florida, and the bus wasn’t coming.

He was standing there with his cute young daughters waiting, maybe it was 40 minutes and the buses were supposed to come every 15 minutes. It was 5:15 near the end of an exhausting first or second day, and a Disney employee happened by the bus stop where Chuck and some others had been waiting and asked, “What’s up?” Chuck explain to the Disney employee that the bus was supposed to be there 30 minutes ago and then 15 minutes ago and yet it’s still hadn’t shown up and they’re hoping to get back to their hotels before it gets dark. The Disney employee did what he or she, I’m sure was coached to do empathize, but not just empathize, reward. So that Disney employee said, “Well, I’m so sorry,” and handed Chuck a golden ticket. As he and his girls finally made it back to the hotel and maybe over a glass of wine it’s just the parents later that night. Chuck told us more about the golden ticket and we realized, wow, phenomenal, this is a FastPass all day long the next day.

Chuck had waited an extra half an hour or so and got the reward of a Disney fan’s lifetime FastPass all day long. So the next morning, we all woke up early psyched because we were all covered by this golden ticket. So there we were in line for Space Mountain, and we got right near the front of the line, used the golden ticket, enjoyed Space Mountain, and then it was off to Pirates of the Caribbean, and then maybe back to Space Mountain again, and then over to Space Mountain.

We were enjoying rides about 5X the frequency of the typical Disney visitor. It started to get late in the morning, we all thought, well, we shouldn’t stop for lunch because we have the golden ticket. So it would be a crazy mistake to actually do a sit-down lunch with the kids. So Chuck offered, through the goodness of his heart, to go get everybody some snacks while he directed me to take everybody back to Space Mountain and he handed me the golden ticket. So everybody, about 10 people piled behind me as we marched right up to the front of the FastPass lane, got ready to present the golden ticket again for maybe a third ride on Space Mountain, and the woman checking passes there stopped me.

She said, “Hold on, what do you have here?” I said, “We’ve been calling this the golden ticket, but it’s a FastPass that we got as a gift for our travel the day before,” and she looked at it again and she said, “No, that’s not what this is.” I said, “Well, we’ve been using this all morning.” We’ve gotten to the front of all of the rides because a bunch of us yesterday just didn’t get picked up by the bus for the longest time, and she said, “Look at the ticket yourself, sir” and I did. It said, good for one ride, one ride on the FastPass. Again, we had been using this all morning long to get to the front of every line, FastPass all morning long and the one thing that had changed is that my friend Chuck was no longer holding it and leaving us.

All of a sudden, it was me, Dave, and clearly, some of the magic, one might even say here the Disney Magic, had disappeared. As we were redirected to the back of the normal line right around lunchtime and Chuck came back and saw we were in the FastPass lane and what are we doing at the end of this line? We commiserate it and we all realized all of a sudden that it was always just for one ride. Yet because Chuck himself had truly believed that this Disney cast member had handed him a golden ticket that would be good all day long for the FastPass, he had treated it that way and clearly, through some force of charisma and conviction at the front of every line all morning long, he had convinced the Disney ticket taker that we didn’t need to wait in line like everybody else because we had a golden ticket.

Needless to say, the rest of the afternoon wasn’t nearly as fun as the morning, and yet, I think we laughed our way through the afternoon, having learned, I think, a profound lesson. Some people might put it this way, fake it till you make it. You hear that a lot these days. I was talking beforehand with Rick, my producer, and Rick said, there’s that line about walk with purpose and carry a clipboard and you can get in almost anywhere. But I think the key here is that Chuck himself believed. There was no cynicism. There was no attempt to mislead. He truly believed we had a golden ticket, Velveteen Rabbit anyone, in that belief, he caused the golden ticket to become real because he loved the prospects so much.

He actually made that prospect happen for two families, numbered 10 people altogether, for at least one morning. The only reason the magic ended is because he handed me the ticket and I didn’t have the same persuasive charisma and forcefulness to make it happen. Then it all unraveled and we all realized we had been deluding ourselves and not just ourselves from the very beginning. So I think there’s something beautiful in this about the power of belief, about optimism. Again, there was no intent on our part. We were truly innocently wrong.

No intent to take advantage of anybody else or get in front of anybody’s line. In retrospect, we were laughing at the end of that day as adults that in our minds that extra half-hour we waited for the bus clearly would be worth the value of an entire day’s free FastPass for all the rides for 10 people and sure enough, for at least half that day, it was. That’s the story, something new, of Chuck and the golden ticket. Maybe you, dear listener, can pull out an additional lesson or two for yourself. Let’s move on to point number 3, and now for something completely different, something borrowed.

This is the eighth episode of this episodic series, and as I look back over the previous seven, Something Borrowed, I discovered most of them are me referencing something I’ve learned from someone else I’ve borrowed from an author or a book I really admired. Sure enough, here we are with the eighth episode in the series, and I’m doing the same thing again, a book I really enjoyed reading when it came out in 2010. I’ve talked about it a little bit here and there over the years, but I think it’s time to borrow a few more lessons, especially for business people. I think this point is intended to work for profit, but also not-for-profit. This can and should work for any organization.

The book I’m thinking of is The Why of Work by Dave and Wendy Ulrich. The Why of Work is most of all about the importance of purpose in your organizational culture. Now, when the Ulrich’s wrote this book in 2010, the word purpose wasn’t coming as trippingly to the tongue as it seems to in so many TED Talks these days, coming out of the business world, many of which I admire by the way, but I want to credit the Ulrich’s because I think they were really onto this before so many of the rest of us caught on. The Why of Work is about an abundance mentality and abundance orientation at your organization.

How to spread that across your employees and indeed across your customers, of course, and the world at large. There’s a lot of conscious capitalism laced in here as we talk about The Why of Work. There’s some great quotes from that book. I just wanted to share a few of these with you in Something Borrowed. At one point, Ulrich’s quote, former president, Woodrow Wilson, a President, not as admired today as he probably was in 2010, but nevertheless, I like this quote and I quote, thinking of you and me, “You’re not here merely to make a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement.

You are here to enrich the world and you impoverished yourself if you forget the errand.” I love that quote from Woodrow Wilson, which I encountered in The Why of Work by Dave and Wendy Ulrich. I was texting one of the people I admire most in the conscious capitalism movement, and that would be Kip Tindell, the former CEO and founder of The Container Store, who had a birthday this past week and I just dropped him a happy birthday text and he texted me back and I quote, “Love to you and here’s to a wonderful, happy, foolish year ahead where we make everyone around us thrive.” That is so Kip Tindell. As I said back to him in text, that kind of describes my own life purpose.

That’s how I think about what I’m trying to do out there in the world. If you think about, at least for The Motley Fool, a company that I hope you’ve gotten to know a little bit over the years, whose purpose is to make the world smarter, happier, and richer. That sounds a lot like a world where we’re trying to make everyone around us thrive. My favorite people in this world, my favorite institutions, my favorite movements and things are as Kip Tindell would say, there to make every one around them thrive. Abundance. Another chapter in Ulrich’s book mentions how to build abundant organizations. That’s the whole purpose of the book. But at an internal level, here a couple of great quotes and this is for you as a leader in your workplace.

Dave and Wendy Ulrich write, “As a leader, you create a more abundant organization when you help employees clarify their personal identity and enhance their signature strengths. And then help them see how those strengths fit with the goals and values of the organization.” They go on to suggest a valuable team exercise, which is to ask team members to describe examples of the strengths, not of themselves, you can do that too, but of the other people on their team. That affirming report generally results in team members bonding more tightly with each other. When you ask a person describe the strength of the other people on this team and then the Ulrich’s bleed that point out from an internal facing standpoint to external with this simple exercise.

And again, I will quote, “A simple exercise is to have all members of your team right down three things they want your organization to be known for, by its best customers in the future. Cluster these answers by themes and then see what percentage of the answers coalesce into the top three categories. Ideally,” they write, “at least 80 percent of the answers will fall into these three top clusters. For example, if there are 15 members of your team, you have 45 total answers. If 30 of these answers fall into the top three clusters of answers, you have a 67 percent shared identity. Repeat the exercise,” the authors write, “until you get close to 80 percent shared identity, which means your team has a shared view of what you want to be known for by your customers.” They asked a beautiful question at the end of that section.

I quote here again, Something Borrowed. Here it is, “Are you hiring employees that your customers would want you to hire?” As I start to shut down this point and prepare for our final point, something blue. I’ll mention as well, another little passage in the book near the end. This is from 2010, mind you, not from 2024. This is published 14 years ago, but maybe it will ring true for you in this election year. They wrote, “In political debates, we’re strongly held positions often lead to degrading others’ points of view, civility has too often been replaced by hostility.

As a result, the gears of the political process becomes stuck, and no one benefits. Why is politicians can disagree without being disagreeable, and have tension without contention? Political organization and personal civility shifts the debate from how we differ to how we can come to agreement, from how the other person is wrong, to what we can learn from the other person, and from demeaning others, to respecting them even if we disagree.” I really appreciate those points. Those points were put up on the scoreboard on this podcast some months ago by Arthur Brooks as well in 2023.

The importance of being agreeable, even in disagreement, to having tension without contention, really appreciate that from the Ulrich’s. This is a wonderful book, The Why of Work, it will stand the test of time. It’s certainly been influential, for me it’s one of the Motley Fool’s culture builders over the long term, and I think if you’ve enjoyed some of what I’ve just shared with you borrowed from The Why of Work by Dave and Wendy Ulrich, you might want to check out a copy, and let it influence your actions on behalf of your employees and your customers as a leader of an abundant organization. Something old, something new, something borrowed, and now, something blue. I’m gonna title this, A Study in Blue. There are four blues I want to kick around with you briefly.

Let’s start with the first, blue sky. The term blue sky, when we talk about thinking, it represents boundless optimism, and creativity, free from the constraints of the current realities or limitations. It’s about envisioning what could be, rather than what is. It encourages an open-minded approach to problem-solving and innovation. When I think about those things in my own background, it’s been shared with you on this podcast, Warren Berger, the author of A More Beautiful Question and The Book of Beautiful Questions, he’s been a three time guest on this podcast over the years.

A more beautiful question is all about that blue sky, thinking blue sky the first of our study in blue, blues, blue-sky thinking on the cover of his book, a more beautiful question, it’s just a big question mark on the cover, and guess what color that question mark is? Yes. It’s blue, and when I think more about blue and blue sky, I think of my friend Bill Burke. A year ago, Bill launched his podcast, The Blue Sky podcast. Bill is headed the Optimism Institute. I’m very happy to say I was his first guest. It was March 1st of last year, so congratulations on a first year anniversary coming up in a few weeks for Bill Burke and the Optimism Institute and his Blue Sky podcast.

The line that starts off every one of his podcasts, “There’s always blue sky above, sometimes you just have to get your head above the clouds to see it.” In fact, if you didn’t get a chance to hear me on that podcast, if you want an optimistic pep talk from somebody, I’m speaking here of myself in the third person, who believes that optimism is what has made me successful as an investor. Optimism is a required personality trait. It needs to be laced into your character for you to be a successful entrepreneur. So these things are enabled by the blue sky. The first of my study in blue blues as we transition to the second, I should just mention I was forgetting this, and then somebody pointed this out to me in the investment world, blue sky laws are what protect investors against fraudulent sales practices and securities fraud.

This whole movement started state by state about a century ago. These days many states in the United States have based their blue sky laws on regulations that were put in place decades ago, but it’s all there for clear visibility. Much like the clarity of a cloud lists blue skies. Blue sky embodies both the spirit of unbridled optimism in creating visionary solutions, and the foundational principles of transparency and protection in finance. Blue sky, next, let’s go to Blue Ocean. The Blue Ocean Strategy is a business theory that suggests companies are better off searching for ways to gain uncontested market space, the so called blue ocean, rather than compete head to head with other companies in an existing industry. The authors, W. Chan Kim, and Renee Mauborgne would call that red ocean.

Chan and Renee, the authors of the book Blue Ocean Strategy, which is focused on creating new demand. So that’s the best way to make your competition irrelevant. When you create new demand, you encourage innovation, you emphasize the importance of offering something unique to your customers, it opens up new frontiers, opportunities for growth, and profitability. When I think about some of my, maybe yours too, favorite Rule Breakers, these are classic blue ocean companies, Airbnb. Airbnb and its founders realize there’s a huge amount of underutilized real estate worldwide. There is a huge growth opportunity.

Let’s create new demand rather than just another hotel or motel chain. What if we help people realize that room in their basement that they’re not using or that vacation home that they only visited a couple of weeks a year. What if we unlocked the value of underutilized real estate, a classic blue ocean example, a couple of more that come to mind. These are, again, all Rule Breakery thoughts in classic Rule Breaker company’s stock recommendations of ours at the Motley Fool. Netflix, talk about creating new demand. Hey, rather than rent DVDs, come online, stream with us. Reed Hastings saw that ahead of everybody else, he created a site where people could do that.

The rest is history. Netflix and its shareholders, certainly me, I hope you too have been so enriched by that blue ocean recognition of uncontested market space and creating new demand, and of course, how can we not also think of electric vehicles and what Tesla and Elon Musk has done. All of these, by the way, especially Netflix and Tesla, fantastic stocks. Ones that I’ve held for a long time, and I expect to hold a long time longer. These are Blue Ocean companies, as we’ve moved from the sky to the ocean, A Study in Blue.

Let’s go from the ocean next, to the moon. A blue moon is when you get a second full moon within the same calendar month. I think it’s every 29.5 days the Lunar cycle happens, the moon fully rotates around the earth and because our months are not 29.5 days every one of them, but closer to an average of just over 30 days, what that means is every couple of years, we get a month with two full moons, and that’s second full moon, that’s what we call a blue moon. Hence the saying once in a blue moon, which we, as humans, generally mean to denote something that happens very infrequently. But in the context of investing in business, a blue moon opportunity can be seen as a rare and valuable chance that shouldn’t be missed.

It’s those unexpected moments or market conditions that if seized upon, can lead to significant achievements or breakthroughs. At a personal level, think of your once in a blue moon moments and the ones you took up, or the ones maybe you’ve failed to take advantage of. A career leap, that all of a sudden presented itself involve some risks, but maybe you took it. Once in a blue moon, and it’s made all the difference. Or in other contexts, how about that once in a lifetime travel adventure you got invited on? You said yes, and you climbed that mountain or you went across that ocean and you’ve got the pictures to show it and stories for the rest of your life. A once in a blue moon opportunity. So from blue skies to blue ocean, we get to blue moon.

Let’s close with blue spaces. Blue spaces refer to the beneficial effects that bodies of water have on our mental and physical well-being. Research suggests that being near in or around water can significantly boost your happiness, reduce your stress, and improve your overall health. The color blue itself, often associated with calmness and serenity. Blue spaces tap into design principles. They emphasize your connection, my connection with nature. So incorporating blue spaces into our lives, whether it’s walks by the beach, living near water, or just simply choosing travel destinations that offer aquatic tranquility can be a profound source of rejuvenation and joy. Study in Blue.

I want to remind you that next week is our 100th Mailbag joined by special guests voices. If you’re a long time listener that you’ve heard me read over the years, but next week, you’re going to hear them in person. It’s going to be a lot of fun. I’m so looking forward to that. Let’s close now with a quick look back at old, new, borrowed, and blue. Something old, it was style boxing. Morningstar’s style boxing, and the value of that, and I gave you the secret Rule Breaker style box that works for me. Something new, the golden ticket. I hope the lesson spoke for itself. Something borrowed, why we work. I love this line. You are here to enrich the world and you’ve impoverished yourself if you forget the errand. Finally, our Study in Blue just concluded, and I must say, in conclusion, this entire podcast, I’ve gotten a cast my gaze over the ocean myself. Watching the blue-green Atlantic row toward me, wave after wave. Herein, the Tar Heel blue state, North Carolina. Have a great week, Fool on.