The average man is unfulfilled at work, slightly obese, and drowning in debt.

How do we avoid the tyranny of average, the subtle danger of good enough?

How do ensure we’ll sidestep Thoreau’s vision of modern man and his “quiet life of desperation?”

How do we achieve more from our relationships, businesses and investments?

There are many paths up the mountain, but setting high standards and focusing on dogged, consistent improvement seems to have served great men.

I love taking our kids to national parks - I know, lame Dad alert. These trips were the vacations of my youth. If we couldn’t drive there the Johnsons weren’t going.

It took me 32 trips around the sun before I realized sitting on beach in Hawaii and having nice people bring you things was even possible.

But I’m grateful for these character building trips. Yosemite, Yellowstone, Sequoia and Glacier and all the outhouses along the way.

You can’t help but feel the weight of these places. Their sheer size should make you feel small, yet you walk away feeling inspired.

I suppose it’s not a coincidence that it took someone great to protect these sites.

Teddy Roosevelt is an underrated President.

His early biography The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (1979) should be required reading for every young American man. The book is great in it’s own right. It won the Pulitzer.

TLDR version of Big Ted’s life:

My favorite of his accomplishments is the last, finishing his speech AFTER being shot in the chest.

This was one hell of a man. Even his mustache was great.

(BTW, if there’s a better male compliment than “he was a great man”, I haven’t heard it.)

Roosevelt literally exercised his way out of crippling childhood illness. Therefore he believed that effort and sweat were moral imperatives.

He was chock-full of manly wisdom:

Despite his billions, Jerry Seinfeld’s greatness is more attainable than Teddy’s. Jerry’s version of success is not his wealth, fame or hit TV show. It’s the fact that he is still doing - and enjoying - standup at age 72.

Quality has staying power.

I share most of Jerry’s stoic views on life and what it takes if you want to excel as a husband, father and craftsman. His version of greatness is mostly about showing up with the right attitude, day after day. Forget your mood, stick to the plan type of effort.

“No one's born great. You know who's great? The people that just put tremendous amount of hours into it. It's a game of tonnage.” - Jerry Seinfeld

In other words, it’s hard but not complicated.

Perfection isn’t the bar. It’s not a realistic goal and it’s often an excuse to procrastinate.

Whereas consistently good is the clearest, highest probability path to greatness.

This is true of investing success as well.

You don’t need spectacular years to build a spectacular investment record.

In his first memo, “The Route to Performance” (1990), Howard Marks shared a story about a pension fund whose investment portfolio performance never cracked the top 25% in a single year.

Yet over 14 years, it miraculously finished in the top 4%.

The investor was David VanBenschoten, who ran the General Mills pension fund. His annual results were consistently good. His long-term record was exceptional.

Consistently above average, while protecting against big down years (aka a lower risk portfolio).

Marks summed up the lesson: “the best foundation for above-average long-term performance is an absence of disasters.”

I love this because so much of investing is sold around the opposite idea. Find the next big winner. Chase the hottest manager.

Meanwhile, a 50% loss requires a 100% gain to recover.

We’ll all have our losers. That’s the price of admission. The goal is to keep those losses from undoing years or worse, decades of progress.

This is why consistently good turns into great returns and it’s why we focus on durable cash flow, manageable debt and growing income. We want investments built to withstand difficult conditions.

To be great you must first survive.

Quality is just a modest word for great and it’s consistently mispriced by the market, which is dominated by short-term thinking.

By quality, I mean high cash flowing businesses with high returns on invested capital and a defensive moat - aka pricing power. There are so few of these business models, which makes them (can you guess what I’m going to say by now?)…great.

Higher returns usually require taking higher risk (there is no free lunch), but historically, high-quality stocks and even quality real estate have bucked that pattern by delivering better returns with less risk than their lower-quality peers.

Academics call this the “quality anomaly.”

Quality delivers more for less over the long-term.

The same quality anomaly exists with debt investing and most other asset classes. I’ve certainly found investing in higher quality real estate to generate higher risk-adjusted and “drama-adjusted” returns (fewer problems).

The idea is to deliver more income and higher returns with less volatility (the only practical measure of risk). That smoother ride is a higher probability path to compound capital.

Investing in quality and growing income for the long-term enables an investor the time to pursue greatness in your own way, whatever it means to you.

This isn’t about delusions of grandeur or trying to be the best ever.

If you want to be Jordan, Tiger, Hemingway, van Gough you probably have to sacrifice too much for your craft. Call me crazy, but that type of unbalanced, tortured success doesn’t look worth it to me.

I’m talking about the simple pursuit of excellence. Seeking quality in life and bringing the same discipline to our roles as devoted husbands and fathers.

And doing the work despite knowing that greatness is a moving target you’ll never quite reach (If you’ve ever read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance you know what I mean here).

Excellence is not just a technical skill; it is an emotional commitment to care. It’s a standard we set.

Because the work will feed your soul and the world has a way of rewarding people who give a sh*t.

So we raise the bar at work and at home. We invest in things worth owning for the long haul to help achieve our goals. And we remember our kids will inherit much more than our money.

Go for great,

Brad Johnson

Evergreen Capital

P.S. Speaking of great, my talented wife runs a cancer care nonprofit holding its annual fundraising gala on September 12. Join us or help them reach their $1 million fundraising goal: attend or support here.