A few years before Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton's famous voyage to the South Pole (as told in Endurance), Robert Falcon Scott attempted the same thing in his Terra Nova expedition.
To ensure that his team would survive the 1,800-mile journey to the South Pole and back safely, Scott devised a meticulous plan with every detail accounted for. He calculated the amount of food each man needed and laid supplies in advance along their intended route. He relied on three forms of transportation including sled dogs, Manchurian ponies, and motorized sleds (which were state-of-the-art in 1910). He even erected a "One Ton Depot" which would act as a supply lifeline to his team on their return trip.
After setting off on November 1, 1911, Scott and his team reached the South Pole on January 17, 1912. This was just one month after Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen and his team first arrived. Though Scott's team arrived second, they were determined to beat the Norwegians back to base camp to radio their accomplishment to the rest of the world.
When they set off on their return journey in early January, things initially looked good. At one point, they were even a few days ahead of schedule. But when they reached their first supply depot, tragedy struck.
Upon arriving at their supply depot, they noticed that their tins were missing a significant amount of paraffin oil, their main fuel supply for cooking. As Scott noted in his diary (from The Worst Journey in the World):
Each tin had a small cork bung, which was a decided weakness; paraffin creeps in the most annoying manner, and a good deal of oil was wasted in this way, especially when the sledges were traveling over rough ground and were shaken or, as frequently happened, capsized.
The faulty stoppers meant that paraffin had leaked out of the tins, leaving Scott and his team without enough fuel for their return journey. Nevertheless, they reduced their consumption and continued onward with what they had. But as weather conditions worsened and the men became more exhausted, their trip came to an end. They perished in late March 1912, just 11 miles from the One Ton Depot.
Scott's Terra Nova expedition exemplifies how even the most detailed plans can go awry when unforeseen risks present themselves. Every so often I think about things like this. I wonder, "What risks am I ignoring? What danger am I overlooking? What are the unknown unknowns that I can turn into known unknowns?"
Of course, we can't plan for everything. A prudent restaurant owner can have six months of extra cash on hand, but then COVID-19 comes along and shuts them down for a year. That's difficult to predict and almost impossible to survive.
Nevertheless, planning for unknown risks is an exercise we should do periodically. For example, I just moved to a new apartment with my wife and we have much more space than before. When you've lived in 500-600 square foot spaces for the last 13 years, moving to a 1,250-square-foot two-bedroom feels unreal.
And with this extra space (along with my first child on the way), I've started to think a lot more about risk. As a result, I'm loading up on survival gear. I recently purchased multiple types of water filtration systems (in case our water goes out). I own a tourniquet and Israeli bandages (for any major accidents). I even bought storm-proof matches (to have fire in any conditions).
I know it's overkill. I know I'll never use 95% of this stuff. Most of it will seem like a mistake when I look back years from now. But 5% of this stuff might end up saving my life. I only know this because it kind of happened before.
In 2019, when I was living alone in Manhattan, I stocked up on some survival gear. One of the things I purchased was a chemical spill kit in the event of some sort of attack on NYC. I told Michael Batnick about this and he found it funny enough to tweet about it.
Well, less than a year later as COVID-19 hit, we were being told by the CDC that masks weren't necessary. That didn't feel right to me. I wanted a mask, but couldn't find a good one in any of the local stores. That's when I remembered my survival gear.
I rummaged through my stuff and, lo and behold, inside the chemical spill kit was an N95 mask! I didn't even know the mask was in there.
I started wearing it in March 2020 and never got COVID the entire year. For all I know, it saved my life. Remove one seemingly paranoid decision in 2019 and you may not be reading this sentence right now.
I know that such an outcome would've been statistically unlikely, but you never know. My best friend in NYC (who's my age and otherwise healthy) got COVID in 2020 and was hospitalized for a few days. He could barely breathe at times and was legitimately worried whether he'd make it.
The real lesson I learned from my chemical spill kit experience is that the cost of these items pales in comparison to their value. After all, how much would you pay for emergency food when you have none? How much would you pay for clean water when yours is contaminated?
The answer is infinite dollars. It's literally life or death. So why not spend some minuscule fraction of your net worth (<0.5%) now to hedge this scenario?
Of course, I'm not saying you need to go full doomsday prepper and have a supply bunker, but some basic emergency supplies can make all the difference when it counts.
But this idea translates far beyond survival gear—it applies to your entire financial life as well. What risks are you taking that you don't realize? Where might there be cracks in your plan? How could your financial life fall apart?
As 2025 comes to a close, it's the perfect time to take stock (no pun intended) of your finances and the money choices you've made in recent years. We can bucket these into a few key areas:
Career
- Income Fragility: Are you relying too much on a single client, platform, or source for your income? If that client left, the platform changed, or that source dried up, what would you do?
- Skill Obsolescence: How might AI impact your industry and how can you prepare for such changes?
- New Projects: Is it time to consider something new? Or should you double-down on what you're already doing?
Finances
- Concentration: Are you too concentrated in your home country, within one industry, or with one counterparty?
- Emergency Fund/Liquidity: How long could you cover your spending during a recession or extended bear market? What liquid assets could you access in an emergency?
- Insurance/Estate Planning: For those with families, do you have the right insurance coverage and estate plans in place?
Such questions are easy to overlook in the busyness of life. Nevertheless, these are some of the things you could be thinking about as you set yourself up for 2026 and beyond.
Of course, I don't know the future. But I do know that it's easy to plan when things are going well. The real challenge is to plan for when they aren't.
Happy investing and thank you for reading!
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This is post 482. Any code I have related to this post can be found here with the same numbering: https://github.com/nmaggiulli/of-dollars-and-data