Archives for January 2019

How to Go from Riches to Rags

Richard Branson is a British business magnate, investor, author, and philanthropist. He’s the founder of the Virgin Group, which controls more than 400 companies.

When someone asked Branson how to be a millionaire, he replied, “Start with a billion dollars and invest in an Airline.”

Vijay Mallya would probably be questioning Branson, “Aisa tha to pehle kyun nahi bataya?” (translation: why didn’t you tell me this earlier?)

So that’s the first way to go from riches to rags — buy an airline. Now, I don’t know of a way to verify if Branson actually said that. So let me tell you another story which is true, verifiable, and recent.
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The Untold Story of A Self-Made Investing Millionaire

In a world dominated by men, here is a rare untold story of a woman who quietly made it big as a stock market investor.

Anne Scheiber was 51 years old when she retired from her job as a low-level auditor from the American Internal Revenue Service in 1944. She never earned a salary of more than $4,000 per year, and although she was an exemplary worker, she never received a promotion. Maybe, because she was a woman and a Jew, the lots that were discriminated against in the workforce in general in the west during that period.

As per the executor of her Will, Benjamin Clark, Scheiber, who was already investing her small savings in the stock market when she retired in 1944, started here post-retirement life with a portfolio of about $21,000. Adjusted for inflation, that was about $297,000 in today’s money. Not really a large sum to retire in the US.

Seven Big Ideas from Fooled by Randomness

I have been re-reading Nassim Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness. The book is about “luck disguised and perceived as non-luck (that is, skills) and, more generally, randomness disguised and perceived as non-randomness (that is, determinism).”

It’s an enlightening read in its entirety, but here are seven key ideas I have picked up from the book.

2019: My Depth Year

One of the best books on learning I’ve read is Josh Waitzkin’s The Art of Learning. Josh is a champion in two distinct sports – chess and martial arts.

In his book, Josh recounts his experiences and shares his insights and approaches on how you can learn and excel, using examples from his personal life. Through stories of martial arts wars and tense chess face-offs, Josh reveals the inner workings of his everyday methods, cultivating the most powerful techniques in any field, and mastering the psychology of peak performance.

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