The Rational Walk on Substack

Why Rational Reflections has been renamed

Dear Readers,

As I announced last week, paywalls have been removed from this Substack and all content is now available for everyone to read. As part of the transition, I also decided to rename this Substack to “The Rational Walk”.

The Rational Walk website was created almost exactly fourteen years ago and remains my primary online presence. Since 2020, most of the content on the Rational Walk website has also been posted to this Substack which was previously named “Rational Reflections”. These two very similar names caused occasional confusion so now both sites are simply named “The Rational Walk”.

Why does it make sense to post the same content in two places? I fully control The Rational Walk website because I pay to have it hosted.¹ It is a minimalistic website that is simple to maintain but has no community interaction like comments. Readers can subscribe using an RSS feed, but there is no native email capability.

The Rational Walk on Substack allows readers to subscribe to receive new articles via email. Although I do not have much control with Substack, it has a more modern user interface which some readers might prefer. Most importantly, Substack provides this email service at no cost to free publications (they take a 10% cut of paid publications).

Readers who prefer to go to a website to read articles or use RSS feeds can continue to read The Rational Walk website. The website is also the only place where articles from prior to 2020 appear. Those who prefer emails or the look and feel of Substack’s website can subscribe to receive new articles when they are published.

The Rational Walk no longer uses Twitter or any other social media except for posting automated links on Twitter when new content is published. I do not look at or respond to anything on Twitter (replies or direct messages). If you would like to provide feedback on an article, using Substack’s comment feature works well and The Rational Walk also has a contact form that I occasionally monitor.

Finally, after I announced an end to paid subscriptions, some readers asked if I will continue writing. The answer is definitely yes, and in fact there were two articles last week after the paywalls came down: Managing Decline and Different Types of Mistakes.

I am planning to write a book review of Four Seasons: The Story of a Business Philosophy in the near future.² I am also looking forward to writing about Berkshire Hathaway when the annual report comes out at the end of the month.

Whether you prefer the Rational Walk website or Substack, thanks for reading!

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1. The Rational Walk is hosted by Pressable which I highly recommend. When the site was hosted by lower quality providers, there were frequent outages and slowdowns. Although more expensive than low end providers like GoDaddy, Pressable is worth the added cost.

2. I’ve owned the book for a few years (which I received as a gift) but was only inspired to read it after listening to The Founders Podcast episode on Isadore Sharp.