(TheReformedBroker) “My friend Brian likes to make himself feel better whenever he sees a hot girl walking down the street or waiting tables in a restaurant we’re eating at or working out at the machine next to him in the gym.  He says to himself (or sometimes out loud) that “no matter how hot she is, somewhere in this city there’s a guy dating her who is just absolutely sick of her.  It makes him feel better that even though he can’t have her, whoever does have her is totally over it anyway.  Brian is (mysoginistically) hitting on an important concept here about happiness and the trouble with establishing a new baseline happiness of comfort and expectation.”

“… after the close Tuesday night Apple severely disappointed The Street by reporting a quarter in which revenue was only 40% higher than Q3 2010, sales only came in $3.3 billion above the company’s own expectation.  Investors reacted by ripping 29 points off the share price over the next three days.  Talk about a hard-to-please group.  On the same night Yahoo shareholders rewarded the company with a 5% jump after they reported an earnings beat so small you’d need an electron microscope to see it.  Yahoo’s shareholders have absolutely zero expectations..”

“Sienna Miller is quite possibly one of the most gorgeous and talented actresses of the aught’s decade.  Had my friend Brian ever happened to hop onto a treadmill next to her at Equinox, his internal monologue would have sounded something like this: ‘Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod…..but somewhere, there’s a guy who comes home to that every night, and he’s just sick of it.’  And he’d have been right, because Sienna’s husband fiancé at the time was the actor Jude Law, who was so ‘sick of her’ that he began sleeping with the overweight nanny who was taking care of their his children.”

“Is it possible for a giant corporation like Apple to grow any faster when we’re talking about a $100 billion annual revenue run-rate?  Obviously not.  Was it humanly possible for Sienna Miller to have become any more desirable and alluring to Jude Law?  Short of magically sprouting an identical twin sister who would also be sexually available to the young man, obviously it was not.”

“Both Jude Law and Apple’s shareholders have had their baseline happiness adjusted higher and higher, to a point where ‘happiness’ is almost unattainable.  When you’re along for the greatest growth stock ride in history during a time when the overall markets produce nothing for everyone else, you have become spoiled to the point of no return.”

“Sienna can hardly do any more crunches and Tim Cook can hardly release any more iPhone iterations to ever keep up with the expectations.  Because the baseline happiness levels are simply too high to hurdle.”

Full Story: Baseline Happiness, Apple and Sienna Miller (TheReformedBroker)

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