Investing

What Star Trek Can Teach Us About Business Practices and Successful Investing

Enterprise-D_crew_quarters.jpg: Derek Springer from Los Angeles, CA, USAPatrickStewart2004–08–03.jpg: Cdt. Patrick Caughey[1]derivative work: Loupeznik, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

I’m not quite sure how I found myself watching the first few episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation over winter break years ago with my older son, Haden.

For all I know, he might have been feigning interest to con me out of something later on.

In any case, I hadn’t watched the show since … did that show really first air in 1987?! I actually remember how excited all of us Star Trek nerds were about the show, and how cool we all thought everything was — the costumes, the sets, the new-improved Klingons. It was so much less cheesy than the original show.

Except, with the benefit of twenty-five years of hindsight, it really wasn’t.

The ’80s are writ large all over the futuristic costuming, not to mention (for those characters who had any hair) the hairstyles. Somehow, futuristic imagining can’t ever seem to achieve escape velocity from the present in which it’s being imagined.

But it did remind me of something: Just a few weeks earlier, I had another brush with the late 20th century, this time in the guise of a company we were visiting. Apparently, one of its vendors had observed that striking a deal with them was “like doing business in the ’80s.”