Dear Reader, The first dramatic pivot of my career happened in the summer before my senior year of college, in the rain, staring at a military tank. I was at Ft. Lewis, WA attending a four-week-long ROTC training with a thousand other cadets. It was branch orientation day, where all the branches of the Army […]
I started my career as an advisor the old-fashioned way: With a telephone and a list of numbers. Cold calling was the way to find clients for decades on Wall Street. But in the ‘Do Not Call’ days of 2006, the path to success was not the same. Still, each day I had a piece […]
Dear Reader, For over a month, my wife Gina, and our four kids (17, 13, 9, and 7) recently hiked and toured our way through the villages and mountains of Europe. There are surprisingly few options for crews as large as ours so we Airbnb’d our way through Germany, Slovenia, and Italy. This was a […]
Men are struggling. The narrative is everywhere. It includes how it shows up at work (via distraction, withdrawal, etc.), the lack of emotional intimacy in friendships, and the struggle to ask for help. It is hard to remember a time when the words “aggressive balance” were more applicable than over the last few years. It […]
I am happy to report we are in the final stages of our patio/yard project at the Morton house! On Monday evening, Gina told me the landscapers had come out to start planting grass seed. My immediate thought was: “Uh oh…I don’t have any sprinklers!” So, I raced to Home Depot at 7:30 pm to […]
Before I was fired from Wall Street, I wrote a business plan detailing how I would develop client relationships and bring revenue to the brokerage firm looking to hire me. I called it the “Morton Wealth Management Business Plan”. It confused the branch manager who reminded me that I was working for Smith Barney, not […]
We’ve all heard the saying that luck is what happens when opportunity meets preparation. I have found in both my life and my career that amazing things happen when VISION meets preparation. In life, marriage, and business, there are no smooth rides. But it is possible to build a mindset rooted in optimism and confidence that helps […]
As we approach Super Bowl Weekend, I’ve been thinking about the characteristics of the teams, players, and leaders who make it to the peak of their sport. Eleanor Roosevelt once said, “Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people.” Greatness as a function of where we focus attention got me thinking […]
The best prediction that I ever made was not a prediction at all. It was more of an observation. In the summer of 2019, I wrote about The Good Old Days and presented this idea: What if these are the days you will look back on and say “Remember when…?” As it turned out, compared […]
With the recent Powerball jackpot win of over $2 billion, it is fascinating to think of just how complicated it could be to become that wealthy that quickly. In this interview in The Atlantic, a wealth advisor who specializes in sudden wealth talks about the “lottery curse” and how we weren’t meant to do nothing […]