Archives for June 2023

Life is Short

The Sketchbook of Wisdom: A Hand-Crafted Manual on the Pursuit of Wealth and Good Life

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Well, if you were to believe the Roman philosopher Seneca, life is not short but long if we know how to use it –

It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.

But since we often fail to use our limited time on this planet well, life indeed turns out to be short, or so it seems.

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Are You Prepared for the Grind?

The Sketchbook of Wisdom: A Hand-Crafted Manual on the Pursuit of Wealth and Good Life

This is the stock price chart of Titan Company over the past 16 years (2007-2023).

Our brain that works with perfection in hindsight would lead us to believe that buying and holding the stock during these 16 years would have been an easy choice for anyone who did it. After all, the only thing the investor would have done during these 16 years was, well, nothing.

I wish investing was that easy.

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Being (Approximately) Right

When the weather report says there’s a 40% chance of rain, and it rains, do you lose faith in its predictions?

No — you recognize that the weather is inherently uncertain and that a definitive statement of whether it will or won’t rain tomorrow is usually the wrong thing to offer.

And that’s where most new investors go wrong. They want a precise answer to the question — which stock should I buy?

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Non-Linearity of Investing Process

Investing, like running a business, requires one to be on his toes all the time. And just like a business operation can’t be reduced to a template, the art of investing can’t be boiled down to a static step-by-step process.

Sachin Tendulkar, in his 22-year long career, never opted for a runner. He was the first batsman to score a double century in one-day cricket history. During the tail end of this special inning, it looked like he badly needed a runner but he continued to run on his own.

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Dealing with Failure in Life and Investing: Lessons from the Chaos Monkey

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the Titanic of cloud hosting. It provides on-demand cloud computing platforms to both individuals, companies, and governments, on a paid subscription basis. The platform is designed as a backup to the backups’ backups that prevents hosted websites – including some of the largest in the world – and applications from failing.

Yet, like the Titanic, AWS crashed in April 2011, taking with it popular websites like Reddit, Quora, FourSquare, HootSuite, and New York Times, among many others, for four days.

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Investing and the Art of Cloning

My friend Ravi was home for lunch on weekend. After food, as we went out for a stroll, he told me a story of a famous motivational speaker.

At a huge gathering once, the speaker proclaimed, “The best years of my life were spent in the arms of a woman, who wasn’t my wife.”

The audience was in a state of shock and silence at thus revelation, especially because it was coming from someone they looked up to.

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The speaker than added, “She was my mother.”

What followed then was a huge round of applause and laughter.

Ravi then told me the story of a male participant at this event who was his friend from school. This gentleman tried to trick his wife with a similar joke.

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