Wit. Wisdom. Value Investing.
Dear Tribe Member,
Trust 2019 treated you well. It certainly was good for Safal Niveshak. The tribe crossed 60,000 members.
Anyways, right before the year ends, I thought I’d share a handful of ideas I’ve learned, re-learned, and wrote about in the past twelve months. Here are 51 of them categorized under the subjects of investing, learning, and life. I hope you find these useful, as much as I did.
Okay, people change all the time.
School back-benchers turn around, finish college with top scores, get jobs or start businesses and lead mature, responsible lives.
Introverts move out of their shyness and make friends.
Stammerers get over their difficulties and become great speakers.
Alcoholics stop drinking and become mature.
Criminals convert to religion and leave the life of crime behind.
Lazy and selfish people become altruistic and devote their lives to the service of others.
Sinners become saints.
Traders who cannot see beyond an hour become investors (rare, but still) who see beyond years.
My 8-year-old son Chaitanya, like most kids his age, paid little attention as I showed him how to make a paper elephant for what seemed like the hundredth time. I said, “Fold the paper into half, then fold here, and then here.”
As I was talking, he kept looking at everything except at what I was doing. He fidgeted and played with his pencil. I kept pulling his attention back to what we were doing and my constant refrain was, “Pay attention!”
Ultimately, I lost my patience, and moved on to reading a book.
It’s not that Chaitanya is uninterested all the time. He is completely focused when he reads his favorite books, or when he is playing with his Lego blocks. But at other times, asking him to focus is an exercise in frustration.
Now if you think kids with their terribly short attention spans are tough to deal with, consider this. In 2000, the average human attention span was 12 seconds i.e., we could focus on any one particular thing just for 12 seconds before being distracted or allowing our minds to wander. If you think that was terribly low, please note that this number has now fallen to just eight.
When I look back to that time when I lost my patience on Chaitanya and moved onto reading a book, I realize that I was onto a second book in the next five minutes.
[Read more…] about Long Term Investing in the Age of Small Attention Spans
I read this story recently about a man who went fishing in his boat. After some waiting, something tugged on the line. He got it out.
He saw the fish had silver and gold-coloured fins. It was very beautiful. He put it in the boat, even as the fish started struggling for life.
Then, to his surprise, the fish spoke, “Let me go into the river. Just put me back in the water. I will give you three wishes. You can ask for anything but put me back in the water now.”
The man thought for a few minutes. The fish was struggling for life, getting weaker and weaker.
Then he said, “Okay make it five wishes, I’ll let you go.”
The fish said, “No, three.” Its voice was already weak.
Money often costs too much. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
The tragedy dates to 1859, when around 450 passengers on the Royal Charter, returning from the Australian goldmines to England, drowned when their ship was wrecked off the north coast of Wales.
What caused this shipwreck? Well, many of those on board were weighed down by the gold in their money belts that they just wouldn’t abandon so close to home.
This is the second post in the series — Writing, the Kaizen Way.
Let’s dive straight into the things that will make an immediate difference in your writing skills. So without wasting any time, here are five concrete writing tips that will instantly make you 2X effective than average people.
I am not making that claim to sound convincing. I am making this claim based on the common mistakes I have observed (including my own old habits) many people making all the time.
About one year back, I remember telling Vishal that we should create a course on “How to become a better writer.”
Go ahead and create it, he said, “What’s stopping you?”
With a lot of excitement, I immediately started working on it. Now, we haven’t published any such course yet and that tells you something about the eventual state of my initial excitement. It barely lasted a few days.
“You know Vishal,” I messaged him a few days back, “the reason I haven’t been able to make much progress on the writing course is that I keep getting bogged down by the enormity of the task. The thought of creating an online course on writing is so overwhelming that I find it hard to resume the work on this project.”
Randall Monroe has an incredible mind. Even if his name doesn’t ring a bell, I am sure you’ve seen his work. He’s the creator of XKCD comic strip. Monroe, a physicist, was working for NASA before he became a full time cartoonist.
Monroe had a significant fan following among nerds because of the XKCD but he shot into fame when his book The Things Explainer caught the attention of Bill Gates. Monroe’s genius is revealed in his book where he takes up the challenge to explain complicated things using a vocabulary of only one thousand simple words.
[Read more…] about Let Your Curiosity Take You Places
Every Saturday, I send out this special post with a few ideas I am reading and thinking about. Plus, a question I am meditating on.
If you wish to receive this post – apart from others I write regularly on investing, decision making, behavioral finance – please sign up below.
Book I’m Reading – With the End in Mind
I never saw Papa reading a book. Yes, he read a lot of magazines and stuff online, but I don’t remember when I saw him with a book to read the last time. So I was surprised when I found out about this book he started reading some time back, recommended by my doctor friend who was treating him.
On the morning of 17th October 2019, I lost the first-ever subscriber to my posts, my greatest motivator and my most vocal critic.
I lost my father.
This was one year, one month, one day after I lost my grandmother.
Papa was seventy and had been struggling for the previous eighteen months. His passing away was peaceful, if not the closing ten days of life.
