Investing

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Writing, the Kaizen Way

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.”

Let Your Curiosity Take You Places

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

With the End in Mind

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.

Anyways, here is some stuff I am reading and thinking about this weekend…

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.

[Read more…] about With the End in Mind

An Ode to My Father

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.

When he died, family and friends told me that the grief would subside with time, that time would dull the pain. It’s been less than a month, but the grief has not really subsided, so I am pinning my hopes for a longer time.

[Read more…] about An Ode to My Father

The Orangutan Theory

I am a big fan of Calvin and Hobbes comic strip. According to me, it’s the greatest comic ever created. Sadly, Bill Watterson, the creator of Calvin and Hobbes, developed an interest in other creative pursuits and stopped making Calvin and Hobbes after 1995.

For the uninitiated, Calvin is a 6-year-old boy who is a little too smart for his age. But judging by his performance at school, one would think of him as a slow learner. However, Calvin’s genius is revealed when Watternson lets you peek into the little boy’s life outside the classroom. The kid may not know basic mathematical operations like addition or multiplication but he can outsmart any adult when it comes to imagination. And let me remind you what Albert Einstein said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”
[Read more…] about The Orangutan Theory

Scaling Fallacy in Investing

December 17, 1903, was a momentous date in the history of human transportation. On this day, Wright brothers — Oliver and Wilbur — made the first controlled, sustained flight of a powered, heavier-than-air aircraft.

We all know, Wright brothers weren’t the first to attempt human flight. For centuries curious adventurers had been trying to decode this puzzle — how to fly. They looked at nature and noticed that birds fly by flapping wings. So do insects and butterflies.

But mimicking nature can be dangerous — this was a painful lesson that was learned by many early pioneers of human flight. There’s a long list of men who plunged to their death when they jumped from towers wearing large artificial wings.

Small Steps to Change Your Life, Simplicity, and Living with Acceptance

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.

Anyways, here is some stuff I am reading and thinking about this weekend…

Book I’m Reading – One Small Step Can Change Your Life
“Go big or go home,” is a glorified adage. To change a habit, most people believe that they must take drastic steps. Like an austere lifestyle to get out of personal debt, quitting an addiction “cold turkey,” removing all their favorite foods from a diet. In most such cases, either the task is finished or they are. (often, it’s the latter.)

Forces Shaping Our World, Fixed Vs Growth Mindset, And Handling Failure

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.

Anyways, here is some stuff I am reading and thinking about this weekend…

Book I’m Reading – Mindset
Tolstoy and Darwin were considered as ordinary as children. Iconic photographer Cindy Sherman failed her first photography course. Amitabh Bachchan got rejected by All India Radio. What differentiates them from other people who encountered similar setbacks was their mindset.

Three Types of Management

People come in different shades, and managers are people.

Here are three different types of management (there may be more, but let’s go with these three for now), and my thoughts on how you may want to deal with them when it comes to investing in the businesses they manage.

Most of us overlook the human aspect of operating a business, yet, in most cases, the future success of a business is directly tied to the quality of the people managing its affairs.

Recipe for Successful Long-Term Investing, Biggest Financial Regrets, and Applying Stop Loss in Life

Every Saturday, I plan to 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.

Anyways, here is some stuff I am reading and thinking about this weekend…

Book I’m Reading – A More Beautiful Question
Since early childhood, most of us learned that our parents did not like us asking many questions and that only authority figures – most grown-ups – had the right to ask them. The result was that we stopped questioning things and accepted what we saw, heard, and were told with meek acceptance.

Sadly, this approach worked well in the industrial era, but proves futile in the knowledge era, because it compromises our ability to think and understand deeply.