Rule Breaker Investing has been built on episodic series. It's not true every week, but many a week we are. We're adding the next episode toward a mailbag or an author in August, a great quote, or a mental tip, trick, or life hack, all of which are episodic series with many past entries. Each episode is brand new, mind you. No repeats, but these are big broad themes that we can return to time and again. Here's another one, pet peeves.
Yep. I've done nearly ten episodes of those where I've shared with you. I counted them. Sixty six original pet peeves coming across, I guess, as a peevish old fool. Well, three years ago, fellow fool, Ben Adams, at ben adams fifty on Twitter x dropped me a line. He said, I think I just had a great idea. For the next Rule Breakers podcast, you've done pet peeves. Maybe it's time for pet perks, the little things that make everything seem better. Ben went on optimism is contagious after all.
Full on. Well, thank you for that note, Ben. Let's do it. Pet perks volume one only on this week's Rule Breaker Investing. It's the Rule Breaker Investing podcast with Motley Fool cofounder David Gardner. Welcome back to Rule Breaker Investing. Yes. It's a month of new episodic series. I hope you enjoyed my conversation with my ace interviewer, Chad GBT, last week asking me provocative questions about investing, specifically rule breaker investing, the topic of this podcast.
I had a lot of fun with Chad GPT's questions last week. I think you're gonna enjoy that exchange if you didn't get a chance to hear it because we delve deep into Rule Breaker Investing, a very investing oriented podcast. This one is also kicking off a new episodic series, but this one is an investing slash business slash life podcast. It's pet perks. I mentioned up top Ben Adams and his note to me. It was three years ago that Ben wrote and suggested pet perks.
And, yeah, Ben, I guess I save notes, don't I? And I save good ideas, and we eventually get to them. And so here we are the second week of June twenty twenty four with our first Pet Perks volume one. I've got eight saved up, three from the world of investing, two from business, and three from life. Before we get started, I just wanna mention next week's show, it's gonna be the market cap game show. That's right. It's the penultimate Wednesday of June twenty twenty four. I will have two guests.
They will be competing for a slot in next year's world championships. That's right. You now know as a long time listener that March is market cap madness month for this podcast. And so each of the four slots needs to be filled by the winner of each of our coming Market Cap game shows. We have one in June, one in September, and one in December. Of course, world champion Andy Cross won't be competing because he's already got his seat filled waiting for this coming March.
We'll have two prospective finalists with me next week, and you too, the Market Cap Game Show. Alright. Pet Perks, the little things that make everything seem better. Now I do wanna say before I kick off this series, I do so with a little bit of caution because some of us, especially the older ears among us, will remember Larry King, the very talented interviewer, media celebrity, somebody well known for being well known.
Larry King over the years, he had a coast to coast radio show and ended up being a show on CNN. Certainly, one of the more famous media figures of the last generation. Larry with us until twenty twenty one. In fact, Larry lived to be eighty seven, not a bad age for many of us to aspire to. So Larry King, a talented interviewer, but I wasn't a big fan of his USA Today column. I'm sure some of you will remember he wrote a column in the life section of USA Today.
About that column, the Observer, Observer dot com characterized it this way. I think this is fairly accurate. Quote, his column was at times parodible, what with the apparently aimless concatenation of musings and meanderings, plugs, name drops, and nostalgia. All those one and two sentence assertions, questions, cracker barrel philosophizing, etcetera, end quote.
Larry would write an observation, drop in an ellipsis, three dots after it, and then go with his next one, and the whole thing read like that. It was something like this. Here's my own personal parody. That Dolly Parton, she still got it. Dot dot dot. Buttercups are so misunderstood. Dot dot dot. I won't keep doing the dots, but let me keep going. There's nothing like a good Reuben sandwich on rye. Are we really gonna trust robots with our finances?
My dentist, doctor Kaplan, best in the business. Remember when the Beatles ruled the world? Kittens in the springtime, what's not to love? I miss the days when a handshake meant something. Is there anything better than a sunset over the rockies? Don't get me started on modern art, and it would just go like that, the whole calm. And the reason I'm expressing that upfront is my intention is not to do that with this week's podcast.
There is a danger when you're doing pet perks that you could start to glide into the Larry King rhythm of the Larry King life column, and I'm trying not to do that. So let me know how I did. Our email address is r b I at fool dot com. We'll have a mail back at the end of this month. If you'd like to liken me to Larry's column, you're welcome to. If you'd like to provide your own pet perks, I would love to read those. You could tweet us at r b I podcast. Okay. Now let's actually get started.
As I mentioned, the first three are from the world of investing. Pet perk number one. I'm just gonna call it call it out right now, dividend day. Getting them, reinvesting them, it's like planting money trees that grow more leaves every season. Dividend day. For those of us who have stocks that pay dividends, some of us have portfolios replete with them. Others, people like me, have a few dividend stocks. We're not really purposing it, but isn't it nice?
Isn't the little thing that makes everything better when you look at your brokerage statement or your online account or your app and you see, oh, I I just got free money. I got money paid to me to my account today by my stock that pays a dividend. And, of course, some foolish investors, some of you listening to me right now, ladder these up. You actually set them up. Certain companies pay dividends in March, others in April, others in May.
You set yourself up so you're getting getting money every month. You're that well organized. You've planned it out. You're making dividend days happen many a day. So, yeah, pet perk number one, dividend day and and reinvesting them because you can use those dividends, many will, to buy more shares. And that's why I say it's like planting money trees. Each reinvested dividend grows your holdings. More shares mean more future dividends just like leaves dropping off a money tree.
Pet perk number one, dividend day. I will mention we had a wonderful conversation, dividend fools volume two just last month. You'll remember Buck Hartsell and Matt Argersinger joining me from The Motley Fool. We talked it out. We don't do a lot of dividend talk on Rule Breaker Investing, but we did that month, And you just got pet perk number one for me right here, right now. Let's move on to pet perk number two. Pet perk number two is stock watch lists.
You know, curating a watch list, being reminded, oh, yeah, Warby Parker. I'd forgotten. They're public. That's kind of fun. Maybe I'll add Warby Parker to my stock watch list, and you look up what the ticker symbol is. Feel free to use our site, fool dot com, Yahoo, Google. There are many places to find the ticker symbols. You add that ticker symbol to your watch list. I hope you're using an app or a site that enables you to curate your watch list.
It's the financial equivalent of window shopping, but potentially much more rewarding as you look up and down your watch list and you're thinking, which one do I wanna pluck off my watch list with my next salary check, getting paid every two weeks. I'm putting some money away back into my IRA and my four zero one k, maybe into individual stocks. That's what I've always liked to do. Invest directly in stocks themselves. Which one do you wanna pick up off your watch list?
You know, there's some other benefits to maintaining a stock watch list. Market awareness is a good example because when you when you curate that watch list of your own, it it keeps you informed. You're you're in the game. You're paying more attention to Warby Parker. When their ads come up on TV, you ask a friend, what'd you think of that ad? Or maybe you drop by the store because maybe maybe they have one of their retail shops in your home city.
It just makes you more aware not just of the company itself, but of overall market trends and the stock market's overall performance. I love sorting my watch lists by how well they're doing. Is that stock up? I prefer stocks that are up in my watch list. I would rather add or buy stocks that are winning, not the ones that are dropping. I realize a lot of people look at their watch list as what's on sale, and that's a perfectly fair approach to take, but not my rule breaker approach.
It also helps with decision making because you've already decided ahead of time it's gonna be one of these stocks. So there's less reason to sit there and dawdle. In fact, if you're like me, the best approach is to mechanically invest in these companies. Pick a day of the month, the seventeenth. Let's say do that every month. Just mechanically dollar cost average into one of your watch list stocks. So, yeah, pet perk number two from the world of investing.
You know, the little things that make everything seem better. Stock watch lists. Alright. And on to pet perk number three. Many longtime listeners will know what I mean when I say this phrase, spiffy pop. But with many a new listener, you may not know exactly what I was just talking about. You know, people talk about stocks popping, and I would say at a minimum, a stock pop is what? Maybe five percent? I don't think stocks pop when they go up three percent or four maybe five percent.
But often people say, yeah, that stock popped. It was up fifteen percent after hours because of strong earnings. The stock popped, and we've heard that. Anybody who's invested for some years now will have heard that phrase many a time. Years ago, I started thinking, you know, there's actually a better kind of a pop, and we need a word for it. It's this kind of a pop. It's when a stock goes up, not a certain percentage.
It's when it goes up by the amount that you paid for it when you first bought it. When it goes up that amount or more, that is an amazing pop. That's not just the stock pop. That's knuckle knocking the random person next to you going, hey. My stock went up today sixteen dollars a share. My cost basis was eleven and a half. That's right. The stock in one day made more money than I paid for it way back when, and that is not just a pop. That is a spiffy pop. This is a term we coined on our website.
We did this through the My Motley Fool Rule Breaker service. I think the year was two thousand fifteen, so it's nearing ten years old. This word is now in the urban dictionary. Check it. So spiffy pop is a a pleasure that I I'm trying to create for as many people worldwide as I can over the span of my years.
I want to get as many people you, dear listener, invested, and then I want you to be patient, find great companies and hold them long enough that you'll get to a day where you have your first ever spiffy pop. It sounds unimaginable, especially to new to new investors, but that day is gonna come. You're gonna make more money in that single day than you paid for the stock when you first bought it. That is a spiffy pop, but that is not pet perk number three.
I just need to lay the track there so we could get to where we're going because pet perk number three is actually the forget me pop. Now, again, a small percentage of my audience will know exactly what I mean when I use this most critical of phrases, one of my favorite phrases in the English language, forget me, pop. But for the vast majority who probably have never heard that phrase before, I wanna make it clear that once your stock spiffy pops for the first time, it's gonna happen again.
And if the stock is a great one, it'll go up some more. It'll happen again and again. And at a certain point, it's no longer that exciting to to announce the random stranger next to you holding out your knuckle for a knuckle knock that your stock spiffy popped again. Because once it happens thirteen times for that stock. The thirteenth at the baker's dozen, that's the time that we decide we're no longer gonna count these anymore. You might have counted your first definitely, you should.
For that stock, your second, third, fourth, fifth, maybe your tenth, but once you get to your thirteenth, we call that your forget me pop. From then on, that stock, if it continues to do well like Amazon or Nvidia have, you'll get more of them, but it's no longer interesting. It's no longer exciting. And so we celebrate that final thirteenth spiffy pop for any great stock we've held usually for a long time and we say forget it. I'm no longer gonna count spiffy pops for this stock.
So when a stock has spiffied out, a delightful feeling. One of those little things that makes everything better, the forget me pop. I do wanna mention something really delightful happened just this week when it comes to investing. I'm closing up our pet perks investing section with this. NVIDIA, as you may have heard, completed its ten for one stock split.
So for every share of Nvidia that you had, it turned into ten shares, but of course, the stock price was one tenth of what it was before that stock split. So in the end stock splits even you out. You get more shares, but the price reduces by the exact same proportion. But what happens when a stock like Nvidia rises over the course of time and I first picked it on tax day of two thousand five. So here we are nineteen years later. In two thousand six, NVIDIA split two for one.
In two thousand seven, NVIDIA split three for two. Two thousand twenty one, it split that's fourteen years later four for one, and then three years after that this week, it split ten for one, which means holders of shares since my original recommendation now have one hundred and twenty shares for every share they started with.
I do hasten to add the stock price is reduced by one hundred nineteen, one hundred twentieths in order to even those out, but it causes many people when they see very low cost basis driven by stock splits. It makes people think, oh, it was a penny stock when you first picked it. You know, when I first picked Nvidia, I think it was around nineteen dollars a share. But once you divide that by one hundred and twenty, you end up with sixteen cents.
That's the cost basis that we have for NVIDIA stock today. But you couldn't possibly have bought it for sixteen cents back in two thousand five. It cost nineteen and a quarter. The reason I'm mentioning this is because the forget me pop for Nvidia occurred long ago, and I stopped counting the hundreds of spiffy pops we've had for for NVIDIA ever since. But since it just did its big ten for one number this week, I thought it was fun to mention that our cost basis is now sixteen cents for NVIDIA.
The stock is trading around a hundred nineteen as I speak. It's been a fantastic investment, but I especially wanna put a footnote, an asterisk on that sixteen cents because that's also the exact same cost basis that I have for our members, for people who followed me in Amazon dot com when I first picked it in nineteen ninety seven. Here we are twenty seven years later. Our cost basis on Amazon is also sixteen cents.
So really fun parallelism between the two greatest stock picks I think I've ever made through our services. And by the way, still holding both. I hope you are too. That's the that's the way we invest. That's what Rule Breaker Investing is about. So a little pleasure, a pet perk, my lucky number, sixteen. Alright. Onto pet perk number four. This is the first of two business oriented pet perks. Again, these are not earth shattering things. These are not what's gonna rock your world.
These are small pleasures, perks, the little things that make everything better. And one of them in business, I think, is morning huddles. You know, starting the day with a quick team huddle, a few moments to align and share a laugh, can set the tone for a productive day, especially since many of us are working from home these days or in hybrid situations. I think a little check-in makes even more sense. We certainly do it.
Some of our teams here at The Motley Fool, a lot of agile oriented development teams in the world of software worldwide, I'm sure do this every day and have since well before COVID. But anyone in any organization with a team of any size, as long as it's more than one, a team of two, you can have a morning huddle. It sets a positive tone for the rest of the day. Here are a few things just to note about the morning huddle. It's aligning. Right?
Because especially if you're in the lead, you can remind people what we're doing, what we're about, and where we are in the project. So that opportunity to create daily alignment is very powerful. Of course, it's gonna help you boost morale as well. Starting the day with a quick laugh I mentioned, a positive affirmation depending on what we're up to here, where we are on the progress. It can be, should be, not every day, but a morale booster.
I guess two other things I wanna mention about morning huddles. One is huddles encourage open communication. So it's easier for people to be transparent with each other, to share anything that we're going through, either personally or as a team, sharing concerns, ideas, updates, enhanced communication, another pleasure of the morning huddle. And then finally, yeah, increased accountability too.
Having a daily goal, finding out about it, my progress last week, our progress last month, team members holding each other accountable, leading to improved performance and results. So any one of those alignment, morale boost, enhanced communication, increased accountability, any one of those on its own would be a great reason to do a morning huddle.
But when you think that it does all of those and a little bit more, I think morning huddles deserve a place in your morning, especially if you're a professional, especially if you're a team lead. Think about it. Simple, effective way to foster teamwork. That's pet perk number four, morning huddles. Alright. One more for business. I guess these are related. Pet perk number five, celebrating small wins.
Now those can be, of course, done at morning huddles, but let's just isolate briefly on celebrating small wins. You know, Michael Phelps, the world champion, the Olympic multi champion swimmer, often talked in interviews about how winning a race is just a series of laps. And if you break down just doing one lap really well or one stroke really well and celebrating that small win, it enables you. It opens you up to bigger wins. Teresa Amabile, the long standing Harvard academic.
She's the author of the book, The Progress Principle, has talked a lot about this. The key to motivation and productivity is making progress. Is your and my making progress daily. Just little bits of progress in meaningful work. And so that's why small wins are so valuable. They're incremental advancements. They they significantly contribute to your personal and or your team's overall motivation and job satisfaction.
Another great author, a past guest on Rule Breaker Investing, David Allen, the genius behind the getting things done approach to productivity in life, GTD. I know there are a lot of GTDers. Shout out to you. I'm one. Two, David Allen talks all about the momentum that you create when you get a small win. And you can make the win as small as you need to to still feel good about it, to know it was real, and yet it doesn't have to be all the way up the mountain.
It can be we just spent one solid hour moving up the mountain. Let's let's celebrate what just happened. We didn't quit for an hour. We made progress. Look at the beautiful view that we have now that we didn't have an hour before, Small wins and using that as motivation as momentum toward your overall goal. You know, there's something about celebration too.
Something about celebrating achievements truly with a smile on your face, looking your teammates in the eye and saying, look what we're doing. Isn't this amazing? We're growing together. We're learning. And if we're doing something consciously capitalistic, we're truly winning for everybody. We're winning for our customers. Whoever they are, they're the reason we exist. We're winning for each other as fellow employees. Of course, all paddling the same direction.
We're winning for our shareholders if we're for profit. Because if you're pleasing your customers and if employees feel great and are treated well, almost always great stocks follow in that wake. And so that sense of win win win starting with that small win. You know, win win win only works if you have that first one, that that first win, then the other two can come after it. So pet perk number five. This yeah. This works in business. It also works throughout life. Celebrating small wins.
Alright. We're gonna move on now to my final three. Three pet perks for life. Before we do, I wanna mention again the Market Cap Game Show coming to a podcast aggregator near you, whether you listen to us on Apple, Spotify, whoever your favorite podcast aggregator is, the market cap game show hits next week. Okay. Let's move on to pet perk number six. This is the first of three from life. Pet perk number six, handwritten notes.
You know, sending and receiving handwritten notes in the digital age, it feels like receiving a small treasure. When you take the time to do this, and I have, I bet you have too. I don't think I ever do it enough. But when you take the time to convey a personal touch, you show the recipient, you've taken the time and effort. Chat GPT didn't write this one. You wrote it out by hand.
Maybe you received some coaching from Chat GPT or a friend or maybe somebody maybe you quoted a great poem, but you took the time to write it out yourself. Stick it in an envelope, lick it, put on a stamp, and send it. That makes an emotional impact that I think most of us probably forget until we receive that note and then we put it somewhere and then years later, we're still holding on to it because somebody took the time to write that thing to you and handwrite it out.
I save most of the personal notes I get these days. I think I'm a little bit of a pack rat. I don't think you necessarily need to. I even have Christmas cards people sent us years ago. It's very meaningful, but especially just the benefit of a short handwritten thank you. What a great pet perk. Pet perk number six, drawn from the world of life. These become cherished keepsakes, some of them. Think about it.
You wouldn't have that thing unless that person had taken the time to ride it out by hand. Alright. Last two. Pet perk number seven. This is another thing I've done before. I never do it enough. It's a little uncomfortable. It can be a little embarrassing to do, but when you do do it, you usually remember that you did it for quite a long time, and it'll continue to bring a smile to your face. Pet perk number seven, paying for someone in the line behind you.
This used to be easy, almost impersonal back in the days of toll booths and toll booth operators. These days, most of us are rocking the E ZPass. If we're driving long distance or even shorter distances, we maybe go for the fast lane. We just blast through the E ZPass toll booth. It electronically records that we went through. There are no there are very few people who are at toll booths taking money. It still happens, but many fewer than once were.
In an earlier age, that's how we got from one section of a highway to another. We stopped. We sometimes waited in line for ten minutes to get up to line in the toll booth, and we would say to the toll booth operator, here's my quarter, here's my buck or whatever. You throw it into the little machine or hand it to a person. But if a person was there, you could say, by the way, here's an extra dollar for my friend behind me. Say hello. And the trick was, you didn't know who was behind you.
You probably didn't know who that person was. But as they come up, you could look in your rear view mirror very briefly. You'd see a surprise and a smile and wait. They paid for me? I don't know that person. That's something my parents taught me when I was a kid and was fun to watch, but this works just as well at Chipotle. This works just as well at Starbucks. You can simply, ahead of time, turn to the person behind you and say, you know what? Random act of kindness time, I'm paying for you.
What are we getting? And I'll tell you, if you will not raise a smile every time when you do that and just like optimism is contagious as Ben Adams said at the top of this week's podcast, generosity is contagious as well. Usually, when you pay it forward for somebody else, they'll pay it forward for somebody else, and the world gets a little bit better. Paying for someone in the line behind you. Of course, it's free for them.
What a great benefit for them that they got to be lucky enough to be behind you in the line that day. But as we all know, the personal satisfaction that you and I get making small gifts like that small random acts of kindness, could be an act of pure selfishness because it's so personally rewarding for many of us. But, of course, it isn't pure selfishness. It's pure connection. Paying for someone in the line behind you. Try it this week, this month.
Write me, r b I at fool dot com. Let me know what happened. Alright. Let's close it out with pet perk number eight. A short book. A short poem. A short podcast, if you will, like like this week's podcast. You know, there's something beautiful about smaller things, isn't there? Anytime you found out you had required reading but it was a short book, didn't that make you happier than when you saw a big fat book?
Anytime somebody hands you their poem, isn't it so much better when it's on one page, not an eighteen page poem that they're asking you to read for them? And sometimes I've done one hour eighteen minute podcasts. Other times, most times, under an hour. But I think with this week's podcast, we're doing a little bit shorter than that. And isn't that its own pleasure? Short form content, distilling complex ideas or emotions into succinctness, making them easier to access and understand.
When I see a podcast and and it's fifty seven minutes, and then I see another one, it's twenty seven minutes. I think, you know, I may not ever listen to that first one, but that second one, that's only asking time efficiency. Twenty seven minutes of my time. I think I'll listen to that one. Pet perk number eight, a short book and a short podcast, and that's what we had for you this week. I'm trying to live my truth. Let's close out by mentioning again our eight pet perks.
Here they are in order. Number one, dividend day. Number two, stock watch lists. Number three, forget me pops. Number four, morning huddles. Number five, celebrating small wins. Number six, handwritten notes. Number seven, paying for someone in the line behind you. And finally, number eight, a short book, a short poem, and, yeah, that's what I tried to deliver this week, a short podcast. Full on.
As always, people on this program may have interest in the stocks they talk about, and The Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against. So don't buy or sell stocks based solely on what you hear. Learn more about rule breaker investing at r b I dot fool dot com.