Gratitude: 2025

0:00What do you have to be grateful for? Pull up a chair and stay a while. Let's be grateful together this week. Let us reflect on our world at the end of another year. Let us rejoice in the good things that we have. Only on this week's Rule Breaker Investing. It's the Rule Breaker Investing Podcast with Motley Fool co-founder David Gardner. Welcome back to Rule Breaker Investing. A delight to have you join me during what is for me anyway. I bet for you too. one of the busier months of the year. So thank you for sparing some time to suffer. Fools gladly. Speaking of thanks, well, that's the theme of this week's podcast.

0:45Near the end of another year, I want to think together from a position of gratefulness, gratitude, and the power of that. I started this five years ago after having a talk with my son, Gabe. He had just read the book, Thanks, How the New Science of Gratitude Can Make You Happier by Robert Emmons. He said the thesis of the book centers on research that determined how just a bit of gratitude every day can increase our baseline level of happiness. Now, maybe you, dear listener, have a practice of gratitude. Maybe you say a prayer each morning or have a meditation. Well, gratitude can take many different forms.

1:28For my own part, I often start my day in the shower enumerating 10 things I'm grateful for in that coming day. The people I'll meet, the places I'll go, the things I'm looking forward to. It's a very fine way to start every day with a smile. The great 20th century humanitarian physician, theologian, and Nobel Peace Prize winner Albert Schweitzer called gratitude, quote, the secret to life, end quote. In one particular sermon, he summarized his position by stating, and I quote, the greatest thing is to give thanks for everything. He who has learned this knows what it means to live. He has penetrated the whole mystery of life, giving thanks for everything, end quote.

2:18Well, everything sounds like too long a podcast this week, But I do have eight things queued up to give thanks for. Before I start with the first one, let's just think briefly about the opposite of gratitude. And that would be, of course, ingratitude. For me, it sounds a lot like complaining about everything. I hope you don't have anybody like this in your life. If I ever did, I don't have now, I'm happy to say. But people whose first instinct is to complain. Whenever I have in mind those feverish, selfish little clods of ailments and grievances, I have to go back, speaking of quotes, to another of my favorite quotes previously covered on a great quotes Rule Breaker Investing podcast.

3:04And that would be the George Bernard Shaw quote from Man and Superman on living a great life. Let's do it one more time here, and I quote, This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one, the being a force of nature, instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community. As long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can I want to be thoroughly used up when I die For the harder I work, the more I live I rejoice in life for its own sake Life is no brief candle to me It is a sort of splendid torch Which I've got a hold of for the moment And I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

4:07End quote. Well, thank you, George Bernard Shaw, for that beautiful contrast between feverish clods of ailments and grievances complaining the world won't devote itself to making you happy and the exact opposite. And that is gratefulness, in Schweitzer's words, for everything. Gratitude number one for my first gratitude. dude, well, darn it, I do this every year. I want to thank you. Yes, you, whoever you are, wherever you are, and you're in many places and you are all different. But I'm speaking to you right now. You, a rule breaker, brother or sister in arms, fellow fools all, a community to which I can say with Bernard Shaw, my life belongs.

4:58Thank you for being there. And not just, of course, to my Rule Breaker Investing podcast listeners, although most of all to you, but I want to thank all Motley Fool members and prospective Motley Fool members everywhere, especially I think of people who are not yet members today, but who are awakened to the beauties of questioning conventional wisdom, which is at the heart of foolishness. Those whom we will be reaching through your help with our Motley Fool Foundation in 2026. So for all fools everywhere, for that spirit of challenge, for doing it in a fun way, which has to be the case, by the way, if you're a Motley Fool, it's one thing to be a fool challenging conventional wisdom as a fool.

5:47But if you're a Motley Fool, you're bringing some humor to it, just like Shakespeare's gestures. So to every foolish spirit everywhere, I say thank you. Especially thank you to my mailbag correspondence this year. Thank you. If you're somebody who's shared your story, if you've shared your question, if you've written in this year, or really any other year, thank you. This podcast is powered a quarter of the time by you. About one week in every four It's Mailbag, and it's your awesome stories, poems, and questions which power this podcast. So, and a special thanks to you. By the way, it's Mailbag next week.

6:34Our email address is rbi at fool.com. You can tweet us on Twitter X. We are at RBI podcast. The email address again, rbi at fool.com. I would love to hear some reactions to this week's podcast or this month's podcast or whatever is happening in your own financial life that you might want to celebrate or question here near the end of 2025. All right, let's move on. Gratitude number two. Gratitude number two this year traces along the same lines as the first one I just shared, but it is unique to 2025 because it was just this year of 2025. just a couple of months ago that my final stock market book was published, and I hope you've read it.

7:222025 was the year that Rule Breaker Investing broke out. Rather than just being a set of themed ideas or just being a weekly podcast that I brought you from one week to the next ever changing, now Rule Breaker Investing is also this year a book chiseled out of stone, unchanging, readable from page one in logical order to page 230. I spent 15 years taking notes for it. I spent 41 years picking stocks for it. I spent six months writing it and I loved every moment. And I hope you'll love it too. My aim with Rule Breaker Investing the book is to make you smarter, happier, and richer. So if you have already read it, thank you.

8:10And if you've already listened to it as I read you the whole thing as an audible audiobook. Thank you. And especially if you've taken the time to leave a review on Amazon, that's the best help you can actually give authors these days. If you haven't yet and are inspired by these words to do so, I would really appreciate you making a point of signing into Amazon, finding my book page, and sharing a few sentences with your reactions. So yes, gratitude number two is that I'm thrilled the book is finally out there in the world this fall. And gratitude to you, my readers, and my real hope, my deepest one, is that it becomes more than just a 2025 book.

8:55I hope it becomes a generational companion, read and re-read over the years handed to a daughter, a nephew, a friend starting out, a colleague curious about the market. I want to help people discover, in some cases rediscover, the beauty of true investing, the kind that builds freedom and optimism across decades. So I hope my magnum opus keeps doing so for a long, long time. To my readers, thank you. Gratitude number three. This one goes out to someone who occasionally listens to my podcast, and I always appreciate it when he does. My dad. He's never been much of a podcast guy, which is perfectly fine because he's always been supportive in all the ways that mattered most.

9:48He could not have been more encouraging as Tom and I built The Motley Fool. But long before the fool, before adulthood, before memory, he began shaping my financial life in ways I couldn't possibly have understood. When I was born, he quietly opened an investment account for me. He funded it over the years. He invested it thoughtfully. When I turned 18, he placed it in my hands. Here you are, he said in so many words. This is for you. You know why it works and how it works. And he never said, don't screw up, but that was gently implied. And he added, quite straightforwardly, that this was pretty much all I'd get from him.

10:34Whatever remains at his death would go to his grandkids. 88 years in, happily, I'm here to say that hasn't come to pass yet. So starting that portfolio for me and more importantly, teaching me to invest, That remains one of the greatest gifts I've ever received He taught me not just what to do, but how to think And he did another thing that great parents do He let me make my own mistakes At 18, I chased a penny stock Or two, no doubt against his instincts But he let me learn That freedom mattered And as I found my own footing Leaning into a creative, fun, subversive new way to invest Yes, the rule breaker approach, which was not his style, but has certainly been his enjoyment.

11:25He trusted my instincts and that trust has stayed with me. So, yes, gratitude to my dad, Paul Gardner Jr. And I would be remiss not to close gratitude number three without gratitude to our mother. She died in 2008 and I don't speak of her as often because, well, she isn't here and she wasn't a stock picker. She was an artist, a homemaker, a society woman. And as I wrote in my book, she was the family rule breaker. If you ever want a glimpse of her spirit, just Google Comforts of the Carlisle. You'll find a lovely story, one that surprised us all, that appeared on the front page of the New York Times in October 2008.

12:12So gratitude number three, thanks, Dad, and thanks, Mom. Gratitude number four is for great companies. Because without great companies, there are no great stocks. Every winning investment comes down to the men and women who imagine, build, ship, and serve year after year, decade after decade. So today, as we approach Thanksgiving 2025 here in the United States, I want to highlight one remarkable example among many. But here it is. Apple, the apple that keeps ripening. Apple first IPO'd on December 12, 1980, probably a cold day. I imagine December 12, 1980, the stock pre-split was at$22 a share.

13:06The company offered 4.6 million shares. It raised just about$100 million. That was the largest raise by a technology-oriented company since Ford in 1956. Apple ended that day a$1.8 billion business, which sounded big then. It sounds quaint now. One of the lessons of Apple is that it has been with us for our entire lives. Most of us. I'm 59. You may be older, you may be far younger, but Apple has been part of your lifetime. And here's a key investing lesson as well. With truly great companies, you haven't missed it. Not in 1980, not in 1990, not in 2008, and I would say not today either. Apple is just a wonderful reminder that excellence compounds and that we should never assume a great company has run its course.

14:05So let me take you briefly through the decades. Through the 1990s, from January 1st of 1990 to December 31st, 1999, Apple tripled. But all of that gain came in the final nine months of 1999. If you'd owned Apple for nine and a half years, you'd gone sideways and then tripled in one dramatic sprint at the end. The stock market in the 1990s throughout was roaring, but Apple made you wait. And then came the 2000s, starting in the year 2000 at the modern day equivalent now, post-split of about a dollar a share. Apple finished 2009 around$7.50. So a seven and a half bagger in the decade when the market itself was often pretty miserable.

15:00And that's when I finally made Apple an official Motley Fool recommendation. It was another cold day, January 18, 2008. To my surprise, no one of the Motley Fool had picked Apple before then. Thousands of members on our discussion boards were begging us to do it. The iPhone had launched the year before. The stock was at$4.89 when I recommended it. And as I said, I felt like we'd missed it. But in hindsight, well, it's actually become a 54 bagger for us and counting. So, yep, from 2010 through 2019, Apple went from seven and a half to$75 a share. So almost exactly a 10 bagger in one decade. And now this decade, well, Apple began 2020 at 75.

15:52It sits around 265 today. that's more than a triple in five years. And that's what great companies do. They keep ripening. So here are a few lessons from Apple as we close gratitude number four. The first one, and I've already said it is, you haven't missed it. Not Apple, not Amazon, not Nvidia, not Tesla, not any truly great rule breaker. The past is the past. All that matters is the future. and the teams inside these companies these days, they don't show up to work every day thinking, my gosh, we're just too big now. There's no more value left to create. They don't think that and neither should you.

16:38Lesson number two, great founders can be succeeded beautifully. You know, Tim Cook became CEO of this company in 2011. Apple's market cap was around$300 billion. Today, it's$4 trillion, meaning that Tim Cook has added quite a bit of value to Steve Jobs' startup, and both were exceptional leaders for different eras. And lesson number three, even the greatest investors can't see it all. And that's okay, because I'm looking, and I quoted this in my Rule Breaker Investing book, I'm looking at a 2011 Bloomberg headline, which read, Buffett to extend aversion toward Apple. The article was about how Buffett said he couldn't make predictions about electronics companies the way he could simpler companies like Coca-Cola.

17:35So he wasn't buying Apple. Now, check it. Since that article was published 14 years ago, Coke has about doubled. Apple is up more than 20 times. Now, of course, history will show that Buffett eventually reversed his course. At one point, he made Apple Berkshire Hathaway's largest public holding. And now these days, if you're following headlines, Berkshire's buying up Alphabet stocks. So you and I are never going to have anything remotely close to the size of those holdings. But there is one thing that we do have as rule breakers in Apple and Alphabet and their ilk. We have way lower cost bases.

18:20So that's gratitude number four. Gratitude for great companies, for the entrepreneurs and engineers and designers and operators who create products we love. They solve problems we didn't know we had. They reward those of us who have the optimism to partner with them as shareholders. Great companies make great stocks possible. And Apple, as just one rule breaker example, remains among the greats.

19:059 ,99€ per month. With 50€ Wechselbonus surfst du 5 months lang gratis. Green Flag Alarm. Now finish with your old Handy-Tarif and get you until the 17th February your new Lieblingsdeal on Spasim.de.

19:23Alright, on to Gratitude number 5. This is one I shared years ago. And I'm gonna run it back up the flagpole because it's an old favorite. I'm gonna express Gratitude right now for the power of a candle, the power of candles. Thomas Jefferson's great line about the power of ideas is really what I'm talking about here, and I quote, he who receives an idea from me receives instruction himself without lessening mine, as he who lights his taper at mine receives light without darkening me. Taper, of course, being Jefferson's word for a candle. So when you light someone else's candle, you are brightening theirs without dimming your own.

20:11And I've always loved that line because it is so true. Gratitude number five is thanking you for your great idea. And you're welcome for any good idea I've given you. We're talking here about the power of ideas. You know, on this podcast every week, as the months and years go by, we're lighting each other's candles and no one is diminished as I share a great idea with you or you share a great idea with me. There's incredible power in sharing. One of my favorite aphorisms, I'm reminded of this every few years, I never keep it top of mind, but is this a great line? Here it is. a burden shared is halved, a joy shared is doubled.

20:57At the heart of this podcast, every week, every month, every year now, for 11 years and counting, is that I light you and you light me back. In a lot of ways, it's actually the story of the Motley Fool's business. We come up with what we hope will be a good stock market recommendation. We light your candle. You light ours back by paying us for it. And then as that stock does well, good news enough of them do do pretty well. Some spectacularly well enough. We all win together. But how many times did somebody bring me a great stock that I got to share with others? I got new ideas about stocks and trends and technologies from my podcast listeners, from fellow fools at events.

21:44And of course, our Motley Fool Rule Breakers service in particular. I've always had great teammates. I'm not on the team anymore, but I think about a stock like Shopify, which came picked by Carl Thiel, or Chipotle, which came picked by Rick Munarez, or Salesforce, which came picked by Tim Byers. These are my teammates, and these were some of the stocks they brought me, and all of these stocks are up dozens of times in value for our members as we all light each other's candles. So he who receives an idea from me receives instruction himself without lessening mine, as he who lights his taper at mine receives light without darkening me.

22:32Thomas Jefferson, gratitude number five, gratitude to all those who share. Gratitude number six goes out to the Fool Community Foundation and to all of you who support its work. Every gift, every note of encouragement, and every hour volunteered helps fuel a mission that I believe in deeply, helping others take their next step toward financial freedom. We talk a lot about investing on this podcast, but the foundation reminds me every day that that investing isn't just what we do with our money, it's what we do with our lives and whom we choose to lift along the way. I want to call out the leadership of our executive director, George Haloff, whose steady, generous vision has shaped our organization from the inside out.

23:27George has built a team that is talented, thoughtful, fully aligned with our mission, whether they're advancing our Impact Fool Fund or evolving the Fredometer, You can go to foolfoundation.org to see what I mean by these terms and our programs. These things are all there to better serve families across the country. And I'm grateful for our team's creativity, for their persistence, and the way they turn hope into action every day. And speaking of George, he and I have a Rule Breaker Investing Weekend Extra that's coming your way this Saturday morning. So we've got an extra podcast this week for those interested.

24:07George and I are going to be joined by Gooding. Now, Gooding is the Nashville musician who uses rock and roll as a Trojan horse to teach financial literacy. Gooding tours schools across America, guitar in hand, teaching kids about money, debt, credit, and the power of starting early. It's going to be an inspiring conversation. It's a joyful one, a reminder of why this work matters. I hope you'll give it a listen. Gratitude number six, the Fool Community Foundation. And those of you, thank you, who support us, foolfoundation.org. Well, if that was number six, that means we have two left. Let's move on to gratitude number seven.

24:52This one goes out to the people who unite. At this moment in our country, it can sometimes feel, especially if you spend time watching the news or scrolling social media, as if we're being split into two camps. There's the good guys on your side and then the bad guys on the other side. That storyline gets clicks, it gets ratings, and it gets attention. But it doesn't come close to describing the country that I know. because the truth is most of us are somewhere near the middle. Most of us are centrists, thoughtful, curious, generous people who don't live at the extremes. And while the extremes can be loud, they're not actually that large.

25:37The great quiet majority of Americans are not shouting, they're not posturing, and they aren't trying to provoke or divide. They're simply living their lives, helping their families, supporting their communities, treating the people around them, with decency. They, I'm going to call them the unifiers. So gratitude number seven is to the unifiers because they rarely get the spotlight. So I want to shine one right here. I'm grateful for the people who instinctively look for common ground. The ones who lower the temperature instead of raising it. The ones who listen first. The ones who assume goodwill.

26:21These are the bridge Builders and every healthy society depends on them. And in a season where it's easy to get swept into cynicism, they remind us that unity isn't naive. It's actually necessary. And it's still happening everywhere you look, if you just look in the right places. And that leads to a favorite quote of mine. I had to look up who it came from. It's Joseph Fort Newton. But here's the line. People are lonely because they build walls instead of bridges. So again, today I want to thank the people who build bridges, not walls. And I'd love to offer five quick, intentional ways that you, my fellow Foolish listener, can build a bridge this week.

27:10Try any one of them. And yes, you earn yourself a gold jester cap if you can accomplish all five. Here we go. Number one, Send a spontaneous message. Text someone that you haven't spoken to in a while just to check in. No agenda, just, hey, thinking of you. Number two, turn a transaction into a conversation. So you're at the coffee shop, you're at the grocery store. Go beyond thanks. Offer a genuine compliment and ask a question. Learn something about the person serving you. Number three, extend an unexpected invite. Let's say maybe it's a lunch or a coffee or maybe a short walk with someone you wouldn't normally think to spend time with.

27:58Number four, give a small unsolicited gift. Might be a handwritten note or a book recommendation, an article that made you think of them. Small gestures go a long way, which leads us to the fifth and final suggestion for your week ahead, and that would be reconnect in person. So if you work remotely, maybe pop into the office one day. If you always text, maybe make a phone call. If you rely on email, hey, try Zoom. Small bridges, each of these, but built intentionally, these are what changed the world. more in my experience than any headline ever will. Gratitude number seven to the unifiers, fool on to you.

28:50And finally, gratitude number eight. Now I don't do this every year, but I certainly will when the S &P 500 is up again this year, even in a year where so many market pundits at the start of 2025 were saying it would be a down year this year. Well, as of now, it hasn't been. In fact, as we record just past market close on Tuesday, November 18th this week, the S &P 500 for 2025 is up exactly 12.00 % for the year. That's ahead of historical averages. So yeah, yeah, I want to thank the stock market. And I hope you do too. that we even can invest is worthy of our gratitude. For many of us hearing me right now, we were born into a society that we're in danger of taking sometimes too much for granted.

29:46It's hard to appreciate all the things that have privileged us that we've inherited in some cases or just naturally been surrounded by or fallen into through serendipity. One of those things is that we have currency that lets us store up value. My good friend Wikipedia reminds us that originally currency was a form of receipt representing grain stored in temple granaries in Sumer, in ancient Mesopotamia, and in ancient Egypt. They eventually realized that coinage would be easier than grain. Anyway, yeah. So thank you, currency. And thank you, banks, which enable us, most of us, though not everyone in the world today, most of us, to protect our savings.

30:39Guard it. Know that it will be there for us from one day to the next. So yeah, thank you, banks. And then actually through the stock market, we can translate those savings into part ownership of companies whose products and services and work in this world we admire, companies you can take pride in, that you can actually become a part owner of through the small miracle of the stock market that we so often, too often, take for granted. I mean, that's pretty great. Even better, because it gets even better if you've invested it well and you give time, You let time happen. Those good stocks grow in value over time, which is great news for you and me.

31:27And we're doing very little when you think about it. I mean, I've done very little to power the stocks that have powered my life and the lives of many who follow The Motley Fool over the last three decades. And we're just still getting started at Fool HQ. So I hope it's true over the next three decades, too. I mean, I've done very little to actually help great companies like Apple or Intuitive Surgical or Mercado Libre. 50 plus baggers, all of them, for me and our members, they have done so very much to empower many, many others toward financial freedom. So, yeah, gratitude number eight, thank you, market, that you were even there.