One of the great things about the rule breaker investing mailbag is that it reminds me again and again that investing is never just about numbers.

Sometimes it's about values, how you feel owning a business whose tools can be used well or misused badly.

Sometimes it's about family, teaching kids how to think about money,

about winning and losing, about what average actually means, and sometimes it's about games we play,

rules we bend, whether always clicking disagree, for example, would be a smart strategy

in the market cap game show.

And sometimes, these are my favorite times, it's about a life well-lived, patiently, optimistically,

capital F foolishly, one raise saved at a time.

This week's mailbag takes us to all of those places, different notes, different voices, same question underneath it all. How do we invest in a way that reflects who we want to be? Only on

this week's Rule Breaker Investing. It's the Rule Breaker Investing podcast with Motley Full

co-founder, David Gardner.

Welcome back to Rule Breaker Investing.

Here we are at the end of the first month of 2026.

And as I usually like to do for our mailbags, I'd like to look back briefly at the weeks that were for this podcast.

We had three essays from

yesterday, volume eight, followed by healing leaders, and then calculating risk foolishly. And because I

go back over the month that was, because I like to remind, especially people who may have missed

one of these, why you might enjoy listening to them. Let's briefly survey

where we've been this month. We started with essays from yesterday, Volume 8, kicking off

the year by revealing what I called an investor's secret weapon, and that would be history.

We went all the way back to 2006, 2010, 2012, and 2014, revisiting opening essays written in the middle of, yeah,

forgotten sell-offs, dispiriting markets, moments that felt like the worst possible time

...