Read the Wikipedia page on the sunk cost fallacy. Knowing what you know now , would you have continued down this path ? The biggest costs are always opportunity costs and investing in something that isn’t likely to pay off robs you from higher value alternatives (including rest, recharging and joining a more successful venture) .
Your instincts are good here. Whatever complexity Pizza Hut has it comes from being the weakest of the Yum! Brands siblings — KFC carries the international profit, Taco Bell owns domestic. Pizza Hut is slow growth, perpetual restructuring, and a weird inherited obligation to always serve Pepsi.
Scott Adams died today. I want to acknowledge something complicated.
He always felt culturally like family to me. His peaks—the biting humor about corporate absurdity, the writing on systems thinking and compounding habits, the clarity about the gap between what organizations say and what they do—unquestionably made me healthier, happier, and wealthier. If you worked in tech in the 90s and 2000s, Dilbert was a shared language for everything broken about corporate life.
His views, always unapologetic, became more strident over time and pushed everyone away. That also felt like family.
You don’t choose family, and you don’t get to edit out the parts that shaped you before you understood what was happening. The racism and the provocations were always there, maybe, just quieter. The 2023 comments that ended Dilbert’s newspaper run were unambiguous.
For Scott, like family, I’m a better person for the contribution. I hope I can represent the good things: the humor, the clarity of thought, the compounding good habits with health and money. I can avoid the ugliness—the racism, the grievance, the need to be right at any cost.
Taking inventory is harder than eulogizing or denouncing. But it’s more honest.
Only about half of Americans who go to college finish their degree. The saddest part of the college debt crisis are the kids with debt and no degree to pay it off.
If you are looking where to start, Mortimer Adler and Charles van Doren's "How to Read a Book" is an excellent and practical introduction to reading these books. They offer some very practical advice on how to go about this : Elementary Reading (basic decoding), Inspectional Reading(skimming for structure), Analytical Reading (deep, thorough engagement with one book), and Syntopical Reading (comparing multiple texts on a topic).
Tax planning can help here. By converting the house to ownership by a tax-advantaged trust , a family absolutely can continue to extract rent from a former property without selling. Doubly so if the mortgage is paid off.
Classic PE healthcare playbook hitting a wall: governance red flags (board resignations over antitrust violations), Medicaid exposure nobody’s buying their hedge on, and 5x leverage on a home health rollup that can’t get financing done at any price. Market’s saying no for good reason.
When Goldman can’t get your $2.5B home healthcare deal done in this market, and you need to come back with audited financials hoping for better conditions… the market’s already told you everything you need to know.
Good marriages are built on aligned goals : what kind of family you want, the balance between spending now and saving for the future, how you spend your time . Focus finding a partner who is aligned on where you want to go : rest will follow.
I feel this article acutely. My mother has a house full of antiques, fine china, and silverware that she values enormously but has essentially zero market value. Most pieces wouldn’t cover my monthly electric bill.
Here’s my plan - you’re welcome to copy it:
1. Make a video documenting each piece and its story while she’s still alive. Get her to tell the family history, where items came from, what they meant to her. This preserves what actually matters.
2. Set aside exactly three pieces that genuinely speak to me. Not “might be useful someday” - just three things I actually want.
3. At the funeral, announce anyone can take anything they want to remember her by. Let family self-select what has meaning to them.
4. Donate the rest wholesale to charity. Tax deduction should be around $25k - likely more financial benefit than selling piece by piece, with infinitely less hassle.
This honors the emotional value without inheriting the burden. The video preserves family history better than storing unused objects. And it avoids the soul-crushing experience of discovering your inheritance is worth less than a tank of gas.