In fact, I don’t even know why they cast Will Smith for the part: there is absolutely nothing humorous about Robert Neville. In fact, the character of Robert Neville is at best confusing, and at worst shallow, poorly developed, and contradictory.

Anyways. I so hated losing 2 hours of sleep last night for this movie (and waking up too late), that I had to vent somewhere—and it had to be you.

… Not!

I also bought the newest edition of Graham’s Intelligent Investor. That was 3 days ago. I am now almost halfway through the book, or, at location 4811.

Clearly the problem wasn’t either with the length of the text or how interesting the material is (from purely intellectual level, I think they are of about the same interesting value, as can be attested from the approximately the same number of notes I made reading). So, how was it that I could read through almost twice as much of the latter book in much less than half the time?

I think it comes down to motivation, and more specifically, profit motive. Adam Smith’s book, while it offers a valuable insight into capitalism and market economy (which is why I started reading it in the first place), it is not, in the practical sense, applicable to today’s economy, e.g. the stock market. On the other hand, the information in Graham’s book is the information I need right now in order to make prudent investments in the stock market, as I have been moving my liquid assets into stocks for a week or two and will be buying even more dollar value of stocks in the next few days. I think this profit motive is what made so big a difference in my, ah hem, performance.

I wonder if something similar could be instituted for my, er, day job, if I would be a more productive researcher.