Pet Peeves Are Fun to Talk About, but Don’t Forget Pet Perks

For the second week in a row, Motley Fool co-founder David Gardner launches a new episodic series for the Rule Breaker Investing podcast. This time it’s “pet perks,” a celebration of the small joys that enhance our investing, business, and life. What little things make a big difference? Let’s dive in.

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This video was recorded on June 12, 2024.

David Gardner: 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 mail bag 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. I’ve done nearly 10 episodes of those where I’ve shared with you, I counted them, 66 original pet peeves coming across, I guess, as a peevish old fool. Well, three years ago, fellow fool Ben Adams at Ben Adams 50 on Twitter X, dropped me a line. He said, I think I’ve 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, fool on. Well, thank you for that note, Ben, let’s do it. Pet Perks Volume 1 only on this week’s Rule Breaker Investing.

Welcome back to Rule Breaker Investing. Yes, it’s a month of new episodic series. I hope you enjoyed my conversation with my AC interviewer, ChatGPT last week, asking me provocative questions about investing, specifically Rule Breaker Investing, the topic of this podcast. I had a lot of fun with ChatGPT’s questions last week. I think you’re going to 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/business/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. Ben, I guess I saved notes, don’t I? I saved good ideas, and we eventually get to them, and so here we are the second week of June 2024 with our first Pet Perks Volume 1. 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 want to mention next week’s show. It’s going to be the Market Cap Game Show. That’s right. It’s the penultimate Wednesday of June 2024. 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 longtime 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.

Pet Perks, the little things that make everything seem better. Now, I do want to 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 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 2021. In fact, Larry lived to be 87, not a bad age for many of us to aspire to. 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.com characterized it this way.

I think this is fairly accurate, “His column was at times parodiable, 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, etc.” 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’s still got it, dot, dot, dot. Butter cups 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 going to trust robots with our finances? My dentist, Dr. Kaplan, best in the business. Remember when the Beatles ruled the world, Kittens in the springtime, what’s not to love? I missed 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 column. The reason I’m expressing that up front 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. Let me know how I did. Our email addresses [email protected]. We’ll have a mailback 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 can tweet us at RBI podcast. 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 going to 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 it a 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 just got free money. I got money paid to my account today by my stock that pays a dividend. 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 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 1 dividend day 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 1, dividend day. I will mention, we had a wonderful conversation Dividend Fools Volume 2 just last month. You’ll remember Buck Hartzel 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 1 from me right here right now.

Let’s move on to Pet Perk number 2. Pet Perk number 2 is stock watch lists. Curating a watch list, being reminded. Oh, yeah, Warby Parker. I’d forgotten. They’re public, that’s 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.com, Yahoo, [Alphabet‘s] 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 want to 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 401(k). Maybe into individual stocks.

That’s what I’ve always liked to do. Invest directly in stocks themselves. Which one do you want to pick up off your watch list? There’s some other benefits to maintaining a stock watch list. Market awareness is a good example, because when you curate that watch list of your own it keeps you informed. 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 did you think of that ad or maybe you drop by the store, because 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 markets 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 going to 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 17th, let’s say, do that every month, mechanically dollar-cost average into one of your watch list stocks. Pet Perk number 2 from the world of investing. Yeah, the little things that make everything seem better. Stock watch lists. And onto Pet Perk number 3. 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. People talk about stocks popping and I would say at a minimum, a stock pop is, what, maybe 5%? I don’t think stocks pop when they go up 3% or maybe 5%. But often people say, that stock popped. It was up 15% 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, $16 a share. My cost basis was 11 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 2015, so it’s nearing 10 years old. This word is now in the urban dictionary. Check it.

Spiffy pop is a pleasure that 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 investors. But that day is going to come. You’re going to 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 3. I just need to lay the track there so we could get to where we’re going because Pet Perk number 3 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 want to make it clear that once your stock spiffy pops for the first time, it’s going to happen again, and if the stock is a great one, it’ll go up some more, it’ll happen again and again. At a certain point, it’s no longer that exciting to announce to the random stranger next to you, holding out your knuckle for a knuckle knock that your stock spiffy popped again, because once it happens, 13 times for that stock. The 13th, the baker’s dozen, that’s the time that we decide, we’re no longer going to count these anymore. You might have counted your first definitely, you should.

For that stock, your second, third, fourth, fifth, maybe your 10th. But once you get to your 13th, 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 13th spiffy pop for any great stock we’ve held, usually for a long time, and we say, forget it. I’m no longer going to count spiffy pops for this stock. When a stock has spiffed out, a delightful feeling. One of those little things that makes everything better the forget me pop. I do want to 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 10-for-one stock split so for every share of Nvidia that you had, it turned into 10 shares. But of course, the stock price was 1/10 of what it was before that stock split. 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 2005, so here we are, 19 years later. In 2006, Nvidia split two for one, in 2007, Nvidia split three for two, 2021, it split, that’s 14 years later, four for one. Then three years after that, this week, it split 10 for one, which means holders of shares since my original recommendation now have 120 shares for every share they started with. I do hasten to add the stock price is reduced by 119, 120th in order to even those out, but it causes many people when they see very low cost bases driven by stock splits. It makes people think, oh, it was a penny stock when you first picked it. When I first picked Nvidia, I think it was around $19 a share. But once you divide that by 120, you end up with 16 cents. That’s the cost basis that we have for Nvidia stock today. But you couldn’t possibly have bought it for 16 cents back in 2005, it cost 19 and a 1/4.

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 Nvidia ever since. But since it just did its big 10 for one number this week, I thought it was fun to mention that our cost basis is now 16 cents for Nvidia. The stock is trading around 119 as I speak. It’s been a fantastic investment, but I especially want to put a footnote, an asterisk on that 16 cents because that’s also the exact same cost basis that I have for our members, for people who’ve followed me in amazon.com when I first picked it in 1997, here we are 27 years later, our cost basis on Amazon is also 16 cents. 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 way we invest. That’s what Rule Breaker Investing is about, so a little pleasure a Pet Perk, my lucky number 16.

Onto Pet Perk number 4, this is the first of two business-oriented Pet Perks. Again, these are not earth-shattering things. These are not what’s going to 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. 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 a few things just a note about the morning huddle. It’s aligning, because, especially if you’re in the lead, you can remind people what we’re doing, what we’re about, and where we are on the project. That opportunity to create daily alignment is very powerful. Of course, it’s going to 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 want to 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, enhance communication, another pleasure of the morning huddle. 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. Any one of those alignment, morale boost, enhanced communication, increased to 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, its simple, effective way to foster teamwork. That’s Pet Perk number 4: Morning huddles.

One more for business, I guess these are related. Pet Perk number 5, celebrating small wins. Now, those can be, of course, done at morning huddles, but let’s just isolate briefly on celebrating small wins. 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 Principal, has talked a lot about this. The key to motivation and productivity is making progress. Is your and my making progress daily, little bits of progress in meaningful work. That’s why small wins are so valuable. They’re incremental advancements; 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 and life GTD. I know there are a lot of GTDs here, shout out to you, I’m one too. 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 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. 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 first win, then the other two can come after it. Pet Perk number 5, this works in business. It also works throughout life, celebrating small wins. We’re going to move on now to my final three.

Three Pet Perks for Life. Before we do, I want to 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. Let’s move on to Pet Perk number 6. This is the first of three from Life. Pet Perk number 6, handwritten notes. 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 to, 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. ChatGPT didn’t write this one. You wrote it out by hand.

Maybe you received some coaching from ChatGPT 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 onto 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 6, 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 write it out by hand. Last two, Pet Perk number 7. 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 7, 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 easy pass. If we’re driving long distance or even shorter distances, we maybe go for the fast lane. We just blast through the easy pass toll booth. It electronically records that we went through. 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 10 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 rearview 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 it 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? 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, rbifool.com. Let me know what happened. Let’s close it out with Pet Perk number 8. A short book, a short poem, a short podcast, if you will, like this week’s podcast. 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 18-page poem that they’re asking you to read for the and sometimes I’ve done one-hour 18-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 it’s 57 minutes, and then I see another one, it’s 27 minutes. I think, I may not ever listen to that first one, but that second one, that’s only asking time efficiency, 27 minutes of my time. I think I’ll listen to that one. Pet Perk number 8, 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 1, dividend day. Number 2, stock watch lists. Number 3, forget me pops. Number 4, morning huddles. Number 5, celebrating small wins. Number 6, handwritten notes. Number 7, paying for someone in the line behind you, and finally, number 8, a short book, a short poem and that’s what I tried to deliver this week, a short podcast. Fool on.