When I started swimming, I could barely swim one length of the pool before being exhausted. I needed minutes to recover before swimming another one.

Here I was, thinking I would compete in triathlons. I couldn’t even swim more than 25 meters continuously. Despite running track and being able to run fast for miles, I could barely catch my breath after swimming a single length.

That’s when I found Total Immersion by Terry Laughlin. It’s a set of drills that breaks down swimming into basic components. After a couple of weeks, I was swimming laps like it was nothing.

It turns out technical sports like swimming are really hard to pick up from scratch. It takes building up unintuitive motions one by one. It’s only after those individual motions become familiar that you can put it all together.

With the wrong technique, your legs drag like a parachute, your arms cut through the water, and everything is out of sync. You quickly use up all your oxygen, and run out of breath.

With the right body position in the water; a smooth, high-elbow motion with your arm to pull on the water and push on it; and a simple rotating motion from your core that coordinates everything, you glide through the water.

Instead of resisting you—when you know what you’re doing—the water supports and propels you.

Life tends to work like that too. Moving through time can be hard or it can be easy. It can feel like resistance or like leverage. Your approach—how you move through it—makes all the difference.

Every pitch should answer three questions.

• What are you proposing?
• Why is that the right thing to do?
• How are you planning to do it?

As far as the pitch goes, it doesn’t really matter if you’re right. That only matters for the outcome.

The goal of the pitch is action--ideally fast action. That means, the message needs to be simple and concise.

Anything else is fluff; friction that should be cut.

The Global Financial Crisis exposed how a sector meant to be a neutral utility for capital allocation can abuse its position with opacity and complexity.

The financial system exists to route financial capital towards value creating activities.

It fails when it exploits its privileged position to maximize profits for itself.

In a way, the financial system is a utility. It’s distributing a commodity.

Unlike a traditional utility, it doesn’t require a monopoly to be efficient.

Electricity is a commodity. Transmission of electricity is a natural monopoly. Building multiple transmission systems would be a massive waste of capital.

But money is more abstract, especially modern money that is basically digital entries on a ledger. It’s bits not atoms.

Moving money doesn’t require tightly controlled physical infrastructure connecting all the destinations in the real economy. Well, in theory.

In practice, much of modern finance relies on core systems (Fedwire, CHIPS, SWIFT, Visa) that are centralized. Some of these exploit their centralization, others are basically state-run. Stablecoins and other blockchain technologies might change all of this. We’ll see.

Financial institutions, particularly depositor banks, live and die by their reputation. The moment they forget that their power and profit comes from living up to that reputation, they lose everything.

Finance as a percent of GDP has grown from ~4% in the 1960s to ~7% in 2000. A lot of this has to do with globalization and the role of the US dollar as the global reserve currency.

After reading about opaque markets, I wonder how much of that growth is just extractive activities that should be decentralized, or at least much more transparent.

The temptation is too high to cheat the system otherwise.