#bc my schooling was more about learning about the overall processes and how systems work.

[orcelito]

Wild to me that people choose to be in whatever field ever and here I am accidentally an IT person. Like some people went to school to be dentists. And what do I do? Look at computers, I guess. It doesn't feel like much of a specialty.

[cruddyborderlandstheories]

so i’d really like to finish my guardian takedown lore analysis, but honestly the game isn’t really fun to play at the moment anymore (even with the health debuffs they added) so I think im going to be taking a break for now because I’m just not having fun anymore.

this game has a lotta mechanical problems i think need to be addressed so im gonna summarize it as bullet points below. I’ll play the new dlc when it drops, but idk if i’ll be on more than that (grinding, end-game stuff) until they make some serious changes. I’ve been playing (near) daily since launch, followed the patch/hotfix notes every single week, and my patience has finally, FINALLY run dry, especially with that really disappointing Phase 1 Patch and then the hotfix this week not adding anything else. What is the balancing team doing??? 😩

tl;dr: FIX THE VAULT HUNTERS!!!!

anyway. That’s all I needed to get outta my system. I might log on to this blog every now and again to post some random shit that pops into my head (probably with regards to my AU), but I’m not going to be actively playing and posting for the time being. Goodbye (for now), and here’s hoping the new DLC is good!! 

guardian takedown only problems:

there’s a lot of waiting around, and sometimes it’s not explicitly stated that you’re waiting for something, so you’ll be lost on what to do next (not sure if that’s a dialogue glitch or not)

the crystal charge insta-death is bull. just. what the hell. at least make it so you just have to start over. killing ur players for failing a “puzzle” that they then have to fight all the way back to is so infuriating.

dying because you fell off a platforming puzzle is also bull. 

i remember playing the first DMC on my playstation in middle school and having a conniption over the part in the observatory(? it’s been a hot minute since I played DMC 1) with the disappearing/invisible platforms. I h a t e jumping puzzles. why are they in a section of the game where death is semi-permanent and a detriment to your teammates. i tried the takedown 2x with friends and both times one friend didn’t make the first big jump to the temple and had to wait for our inevitable deaths. that’s so unfair to them.

there’s absolutely no reason for a boss to have 12 fuckin immunity phases. 4 per health bar with 3 health bars? Who the fuck designed this? *pumps shotgun* i just wanna talk. 

i appreciate a tasteful immunity phase every now and again (the ones in the Valkyrie fight are actually p reasonable), but christ. that is overkill. I don’t mind the main boss fight, since u can end those early through certain actions, but jesus. the mid-boss fight is annoying as hell. you spend more time running from the immunity phases and finding the damn boss than u do actually shooting it.

drop rates are crap, which I guess should be expected given what happened with the Maliwan Takedown and the handful of months it took for them to fix that, but also you think they’d have learned.

in the maliwan takedown there’s a sense of progression thru the facility after you kill each area’s batch of enemies, but in this one it’s... dampened by the crystal charging sequences. you kill all the enemies in an area, press a button, and now you have to kill 3x that number of enemies in the same area, expect you’re just standing there motionless. It’s not fun.

the crystal charging stuff is just not fun in general. standing in a square is not entertaining. it’s worse that it was clearly designed for 3+ players when a majority of people play/grind solo

i gotta admit the boss fights just aren’t as fun as the Maliwan Takedown fights overall. I felt like a real badass fighting Wotan for the first time, but the main boss for this Takedown is kind of a bitch. Wotan’s fight is chaos, there’s so much shit happening at once and you don’t really have time to process everything and I love it. This one is p meh...

This would be fine and I’d 100% not care that much if there weren’t all these OTHER problems

General Issues with the Game

There’s no endgame stuff to play outside of the takedowns. 

I assume they’re working on the first raid given some stuff I found in the Guardian Takedown files, but I really wish they’d keep the seasonal events/areas. They give us the option to disable/enable them while they’re ‘active’, just give us the ability to do it whenever we want.

when i hop on i either run through Athenas (my favorite map), or farm a boss or two. I have all the loot i really need from the maliwan takedown/elsewhere, and the guardian takedown just... isn’t fun atm, so i have nothing to do.

I’ve reset my playthru multiple times to play the main story at m10, but u can only play it (and the dlc) so many times

Mayhem levels and modifiers are a hot m e s s

a majority of the modifiers just aren’t fun to play with

they incorporated like 2-3 fun modifiers (from the community), then added a bunch that straight-up aren’t. I’m fine with the game being more difficult, but at least give us modifiers that make it more entertaining to play at a higher level instead of more annoying. I like the ones that have trade-offs or add new ‘enemies’, but I hate the ones that just straight up reduce your damage output.

a majority of the weapons with the mayhem 10 anointment (scaling) do not work on mayhem 10 (we’ll go more in-depth with this later)

Player Characters (Vault Hunters!!!) are also a hot mess and a lot of problems plaguing them haven’t been fixed SINCE LAUNCH

theyre literally the basis of the game and its balance. why havent you guys fixed them yet. stop adding new content until they’re fixed. no new skill trees until the base 3 trees work ON EVERY CHARACTER.

seriously. Why is amara p much limited to using Phasegrasp. Why does Iron Bear not matter to Moze except to proc anointments. MAKE ALL ACTION SKILLS EQUAL AND HAVE HEFT.

i wrote an essay here about it bc i feel that strongly about this

SERIOUSLY FIXING UR VAULT HUNTERS WILL MAKE BALANCING SO MUCH EASIER PLEASE IM BEGGING YOU THEY ARE THE BASE OF UR BALANCING WOES

ZANE IS STILL UNUSABLE WITHOUT THE SEEIN’ DEAD CLASS MOD!!!!!!!!!!!

MOZE IS SCREWED BC HER DAMAGE IS TOO RELIANT ON ASE ANOINTMENTS!!

AMARA DOESN’T HAVE A FUCKING MELEE BUILD AS THE ADVERTISED MELEE CHARACTER???

FL4K’S HEADCOUNT SKILL IS S T I L L BROKEN EVER SINCE THE RELEASE OF THE MALIWAN TAKEDOWN

ARE YOU GUYS LISTENING TO THE COMMUNITY *PLEASEEEEEEE*

BUFF AND FIX THE GODDAMN VAULT HUNTERS

Anointments were a mistake. Damage end-game is wayyyy too reliant on them

anoints should have a maximum of, like, a 20% damage bonus. the damage necessary to kill enemies *should be coming from the VHs themselves*. i don’t care if you have to revamp every single Vault Hunter’s skill trees and buff them all by 9000%. THEY DESERVE IT AT THIS POINT

at the moment in m10 there really isn’t much build diversity *even between Vault Hunters*. We’re all using the same 5 guns (OPQ System. Kaoson. idk. fuckin brainstormer? is that still a thing? jesus fuck) with the same 3 anointments (100% on ASE, cryo while SNTL, and 300% while 90%).

you want to diversify builds like you said during the gameplay reveal???? you want our choice in Vault Hunter to actually fuckin matter???? FIX THEM!!!! THEY SHOULD BE ABLE TO DEAL DAMAGE WITHOUT STUPID POWERFUL LEGENDARIES AND ANOINTMENTS!!!

Anoints also shouldn’t be common. At all. They should be, like, Pearl rarity. To let that happen, their damage needs to be tuned way the fuck down (again, 20ish % bonus MAX) and ALL ANOINTS NEED TO BE USEFUL IN SOME WAY

NOBODY IS GOING TO USE THE AIRBORNE OR SLIDING ANOINTMENTS JUST REMOVE THEM ALREADY AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

obviously these changes can’t happen because they fucked up and buckled down with everything being anointed in m10, but still

imagine a world where the VHs actually did damage on their own without anointments and the damage buff from them was just an incentive to grind for the 100% perfect weapon and NOT A REQUIREMENT TO DEAL DAMAGE

>:(

A majority of gear is borderline worthless at M10

I’m fine with the difficulty of M10, i should let it be known. The enemy health isn’t really the problem IF ALL GUNS ACTED THE SAME AS THE OPQ SYSTEM

ffs.

you know, if you fixed ur vault hunters so they all did damage with just purple weapons (abt the same damage as legendaries w/o special effects) and removed the anointment requirement from late-game play, balancing your guns would be sooo much easier. you know. just saying.

right now only 10% (im being generous) of guns in the game are viable. 90% are worthless. We need AT LEAST 60-70% viable at M10. WHERE IS MY BUILD DIVERSITY. WHY ARE ALL LEGENDARIES NOW JUST “HEY THIS GUN IS STRONGER THAN THE LAST 4 WE RELEASED. HAVE FUN”

how to fix this problem? do as above: BUFF YOUR PLAYER CHARACTERS. MAKE ANOINTMENTS LESS STRONG.

then, at least the 10% already strong weapons would be stupid strong and OP as fuck, BUT AT LEAST WE COULD HAVE BUILD VARIETY!!! I don’t care if other people are dummy strong one-shotting everything in sight. I don’t! so long as they don’t play with me, I couldn’t care less!!! I want to be able to play with the unique, interesting legendaries. instead of the OPQ System. which, by the way, I dislike compared to the normal Q-System. let me use the frozen heart shield and the infiltrator mod. I don’t wanna be chained to the Seein’ Dead anymore :(

honestly at this point im starting to think removing slag was a mistake bc then at least we could use guns that aren’t solely damage-based guns. you know how fucked up you’ve got me that im thinking maybe slag wouldn’t be so bad this time around??? YOU GOT ME FUCKED UP B A D.

FIX THE GAME

IM TAKING A BREAK

MAYBE I’LL BE LESS UPSET WHEN I COME BACK FOR THE DLC BUT HOT. DIGGITY. SHIT.

[luckyspike]

big day in spike neurology world

so basically 3 weeks ago i started a new job sort of - i remained within the neurology department at the same hospital, but switched from the epilepsy center to the multiple sclerosis center. which fine, i love neurology, so whatever, go for it, right? when i accepted the job, it was pitched to me as being a majority (32hrs/wk) clinical (aka seeing patients) with 8 hrs/wk of “asynchronous” work and/or management duties

and i am rapidly learning that my friends, 8 hours/week is not going to be enough

my bosses are both absolute workaholic machines with high expectations which is fine, i can deal with that but i’m on week 3 and they’re having me evaluate systems processes and trying to address/resolve inefficiencies and form standard protocols and there are certain staff members that are extremely inefficient but also extremely insecure and anxious about it and somehow i’m going to have to address this without freaking them out and making them want to quit bc they actually are in spite of a few inefficient processes extremely valuable and a good worker

meanwhile, i am only passingly familiar with all the drugs for MS, so I’m cramming on the daily trying to learn about how they all work and the mechanisms and remembering what the monitoring criteria are for all of them, etc. (which btw, “Spike, you can organize some folders so that there are already pre-written order sets for each drug both pre- and post-initiation”)

PLUS MS is a lot of auto-immune management too, so I’m trying to learn more about that beyond the basics I got in school!!

AND ALSO today the big boss was like “hey you’re learning how to do lumbar puncture/spinal tap today” and just SCHEDULED ME TO DO 3 OF THEM EVEN THOUGH I HAVE ONLY EVER ASSISTED WITH THAT PROCEDURE

i mean i did have a doctor there to talk me through it and help out as needed and i HAVE assisted with like 1000 of them but still

so overall today was a bit overwhelming and i am glad i have tomorrow morning to do some quiet study and recover. also i am thankful for the poke bowl place down the street that gave me extra salmon because i guess i looked a little harassed

and God bless the patient i did my very first lumbar puncture on, who knew it was my first and was kind and made jokes the entire time and kept me so relaxed that i did the procedure no problem. that gave me enough confidence to do the second one on a very nervous patient (understandable) without any issue either. the third unfortunately we had to abort because of some anatomical issues with the patient but man. Bless that first patient forever. <3

[urfavmurtad]

What are some things about Judaism and Christianity that you learned that surprised you? What about polytheistic religions like native american animism, Buddhism, Shinto and Jainism? Zoroastrians? Baha’i? Yazidi?

Anon this is… such an in-depth question! Idek where to begin here. Of all those religions, I have learned the most about Judaism since I stopped being religious. What I knew about Judaism prior to maybe 5 years ago was mostly just what Islam says about Judaism. Meaning, you know, from Adam to Moses, then it skips ahead to David/Solomon/Saul, then there are some brief mentions of Jonah and Ezekiel and that’s really it.

So I didn’t know a lot, and I wasn’t very interested in what I did know tbh. The only reason why I started reading the Bible is bc I wanted to compare it to the Quranic versions of the stories and see how much Mohammed fucked them up. And that was fun but I didn’t bother to look much further into Judaism past that. The Books of Kings and Chronicles, for example, I took one look at them, decided they were boring, and didn’t read them until only a couple of years ago. That’s when I first got into the whole Biblical history thing. I tried reading a book about how the Bible was put together and realized I didn’t know enough about the Bible itself to even begin.

I forced myself to read those four books and then some of the prophet books (side note: all of the female prophets were left out of Islam, I didn’t even know they existed. Damn it Mohammed!!!). And I’m glad I did, because it changed my whole view of the Jewish Bible. It’s a history book!! Like… that’s literally what it’s supposed to be, a (legendary) history of Israel/Judah, and every bad thing that happens to them is ascribed to YHWH getting pissed off at them, but then like my friend and her trash boyfriend he always forgives them and takes them back even tho they just go on to disappoint him again. The Bible is the world’s oldest and greatest self-drag!!!

Once I actually knew the general chronology of the Biblical kings and shit I could actually make my way through this book without getting confused (mostly). Highly recommend this one for beginners btw, there is a PDF online and it’s not overly long.

And damn… I know there’s some debate about certain elements of it like the exact nature of the “documentary hypothesis” but even just focusing on the stuff that people agree upon, I didn’t know any of it before reading this, beyond there being no evidence for the Exodus/the huge kingdom of Solomon etc. I also knew that early Judaism was a system where multiple gods existed but YHWH was just their patron god, but I didn’t fully understand the process in how he got conflated with El and became the god.

More relevant to this topic, though, I didn’t understand the history behind the Bible itself. Deuteronomy being written separately/earlier than the rest and the Bible claiming that it was “found” in the Temple after like 900 years in Josiah’s time… like I had never even heard of Josiah prior to a few years ago and here I am realizing that this bitch perpetrated fraud that would make Linda Taylor proud. Tf. AND, the whole thing with Judah being way, way less developed than Israel, and Israel was actually a multi-ethnic and prosperous society, but then after the Assyrians handed Israel its ass the Judeans were suddenly the top bitch in school and wrote the whole Bible to make their former northern neighbors out to be assholes?? Wow Team Israel tbh.

Then when you get to the time of the Babylonian Exile tho you have to feel a bit bad for the people of Jerusalem, like the Babylonians were uncommonly dickish even for their time and the ppl of the city were clearly traumatized tbh… a lot of the stories in the Bible, especially those believed to have been added only after the exile, make a hell of a lot more sense when you realize the huge changes occurring in Jewish society at the time. The transition from “there are lots of gods but YHWH is our god” to “YHWH is the god” is completely understandable when you realize that people were searching for some explanation as to why they had all been uprooted and thrown out of their homes, and the obvious explanation is that, yet again, they had pissed YHWH the fuck off by worshiping other gods.

I feel like both Christianity and Islam (but especially Islam) try to separate many of Judaism’s better-known stories from the context of ancient Israel/Judah itself, presenting them as more universal stories that apply to everyone, but tbh the whole over-arching story doesn’t work unless you look at it as a history written by and for Jews who were rebuilding their religion and society in a volatile period. I’m reading this rn and it’s relevant to that topic.

It’s truly a damn shame that pretty much like 0% of Muslims have been exposed to any of this tbh? I feel like almost all scholars of Biblical history come from non-Muslim countries. I have more feelings on this subject but let me answer the rest of your question. First of all, Christianity. I read the New Testament in full a couple of years ago as well. It was obviously way easier to read because the Gospels are all different versions of the same story and the rest is just supplementary material, basically. I think the text itself is pleasant and Jesus was a chill dude. I like him. And the whole… sequence of events made much more sense after I’d read the Book of Isaiah and realized that the authors of the Gospels were viewing Jesus in light of those prophecies. Revelation is a fascinating shrooms trip. The Acts of the Apostles were fun to read, but all the letters were just like w/e. More historically interesting (if they’re real) than interesting in terms of content. Though I do think some of the content in them is very nice, idk if people know this but Muslims think Paul was responsible for perverting the (non-existent) “real” Gospel of Jesus and paint him very poorly. But I dunno, the letters seemed fine to me.

Tbh I was surprised to see how different Islam’s version of Christianity/Christian stories is compared to the “real thing”. I don’t even mean his disastrous misconceptions of Christian theology but just like… with the stories Mohammed pulled from the Jewish Bible (and the Talmud–which I also enjoyed flipping through btw, it’s like a bunch of old guys yelling at each other in written form), he gets details wrong but the overall stories are basically the same. But with the Christian stories, barely anything in the Quran is from the Bible. I think I’ve said this before but like 90% of the stuff pulled from Christianity in Islam is about baby Jesus, not adult Jesus, and even that stuff isn’t from the Bible. It’s understandable when you realize that he was listening to these stories, not reading them, and just picked the ones he liked best… which happened to be later texts. That brings me to a subject that is near and dear to my heart:

Apocryphal texts bih. I love this shit, with full sincerity and zero irony. The weirder it gets, the better. I started out just reading the ones that made it into the Quran, like the Life of Adam and Eve, the Infancy Gospels that I’ve mentioned before, and the Testament of Solomon. Then some Gnostic stuff, which I only read because it has the same substitute-crucifixion thing going on as Islam, but WHEW chile the DRUGS these ppl were on while writing this shit…! The Sethians and the Nag Hammadi library produced such treasures of crazy-ass literature. It makes me sad how so much of this stuff is just totally forgotten now that Christianity is mostly just Catholic/Protestant+Orthodox. There were so many sects and people had so many divergent ideas, some more drug-assisted than others probably!! And Middle Eastern Christianity was very diverse even in the 7th century. Some of the stories they produced had such rich lore. My fave right now is this Syriac collection:

I came across this one while looking for the origins of the al-Khidr story in the Quran. There were all sorts of opinions about who he was, bc Mohammed never really gave any details on his life, but Ibn Ishaq recorded an opinion that al-Khidr was the one who buried Adam and Allah granted him long life in return. So I looked for the source of that story and it was the story of Melchizedek in this book. Then I read the whole thing and man this would make for some weird psychedelic series or sth. It’s online, look it over and you’ll see how trippy it is.

Um… anon this is getting rly long tbh so let me sum up my knowledge of Shinto, Native American animism, and Jainism: not much!! Buddhism I have only an intro-level knowledge of, I know the basics but I don’t know more than that. The beliefs of Yazidis I don’t fully understand, but the little I know is pretty cool. From what I understand it’s a blend of pre-Islamic Kurdish religion + early Islamic influence + some other influences thrown in. It’s sad how they’re branded as devil-worshipers or w/e when the story of Melek Taus is actually really interesting and has a good moral and is way, way better than the story of Iblis. I also enjoy Yazidi architecture and that unique ribbed cone top of theirs. I hope they’re able to live on as a community after, uh, recent events.

I actually was taught about Bahai people growing up but I was told it was some heretical offshoot of Islam comparable to Ahmadiyya people. I didn’t realize it was considered its own religion until fairly recently tbh. I did read the Kitab al-Aqdas (which is blessedly short, this makes Bahai a great religion automatically!!) once. It’s definitely super inspired by the Quran in terms of style and to me clearly seems to be an attempt to make a Kinder And Also More Iranian Islam. I think it’s pretty neat. In fact I think a lot of attempts to magically make Islam “nicer” would just end up making it more like Bahai tbh. And it has a really fascinating history, with the Bab basically being a new John the Baptist and Bahaullah being the one he foretold. He even accidentally ended up in Israel lmao. I also really love Bahai architecture in terms of how diverse it is, with the only unifying feature being visual interest, and I would love to see the temple in India irl one day. India always has the best architecture anyway.

I saved Zoroastrians for last bc I have to be honest here. I tried to look into it, because it’s ancient and had an influence on Judaism etc and that makes it important. Fam I got about 3% of the way through the Avesta before giving up. I was still in the hymns part and just like… every other word was something I didn’t understand. I will go back and try again one day but for now the answer is “lol idk”.

ANYWAY… yeah… I’ve enjoyed reading about religion way more now that I’m not religious, both in terms of Islam and other religions, I can appreciate the process or w/e now that I’m not constantly trying to make it fit into Islam or panicking every time I spot something that makes me question my faith. I know a lot of atheists either fall away from religion altogether or just look at it like it’s something dumb, but even if it’s fake, that doesn’t make it worthless imo. The history itself is always worth studying.

[ireneelsewhere]

Core course week: Gothenburg, Sweden

After three weeks of settling into a normal routine in Stockholm, we all went off on our first study tour. My core course, Forensic Psychology, took a 3-hour train to Gothenburg, Sweden, but for our long tour week in October we’ll be going to Scotland. The point of core course week and the long study tour is to immerse yourself in the subject material that you’re presumably most interested in. It’s not only a chance to place classroom material into real-world context by going on field studies around Europe but also an opportunity for the class to bond over shared cultural experiences as we all travel together. 

In Gothenburg, we stayed at the Spoton Hostel (I shared a room with 5 other girls, i’ve been told i gently snore and i’m sorry ok). Our main mode of transportation was their infamous tram system, which run on cable lines and honestly kinda look like they don’t really value human life? because they literally just pummel down the streets with jerky brake systems (my host dad told me that some people are run over by the trams each year because they weren’t paying attention or they slipped and fell at an unfortunate time.......thankfully I learned this after I got back from Gothenburg). 

DIS provided two meals a day - we ate breakfast at the hostel and either ate a group lunch or dinner. Not sure how the administration breaks down parts of our tuition but DIS definitely did not skimp out on our food. I thought we were going to survive off of PB&J’s and Chips Ahoy (bc that’s how school trips like to go, i’m looking at u @vanderbilt asb) but we actually ate at the fanciest places, with at least two courses and sometimes wine/beer. Truly amazing, so thank you DIS from the bottom of my stomach.  (I registered as a vegetarian so all meal descriptions will only be relevant to the veggies. Meat eaters got a lot of lamb.)

Long post ahead but lol honestly all my posts are long. 

Day 1: Monday, 9/10/2018

Woke up at 5am to catch the 6:40am train. This day was actually my best friend’s birthday and I was lowkey sad I couldn’t be with her (if you know us in real life, then you know we’re annoyingly inseparable), but days like this had me extra thankful for inventions like snapchat and facetime that make it easier to stay connected even when you’re thousands of miles apart. (I actually got to watch her open my present while I was on the train to Gothenburg bc her boyfriend facetime’d me! Hehe ily ivy)

Our first field study of the week was to Halvvägshuset Göteborg (Halfway House), a non-profit organization designed as the last stop in an inmate’s rehabilitation process right before they finish their sentence. They provide resources to help update individuals who’ve been in prison for a long time on the modern ways of living, such as using smartphones or paying your bills online. Individuals who enter the halfway house get their own bedroom, the freedom for family members to visit, and access to telephones and computers, in exchange for holding down a job and earning income. They get the opportunity to settle into a normal routine with (some) freedom and to start feeling like a person again rather than as inmate #23420.  The lady who spoke to us was the most genuine, kind-hearted woman, and emphasized that in the end we’re all human beings and sometimes people commit crimes due to their situation rather than due to some inherent evil that we like to use as a convenient explanation for crime (see strain theory). She also said that it’s less costly for society to help reintegrate these individuals (assuming they are willing/able/ready) rather than to further isolate them and prevent them from contributing to society. Overall, I think we all left the halfway house understanding the powers of empathy and rehabilitation a bit more. 

Later, we went to the Boule Bar and learned how to play Pétanque. It’s a European sport where you throw boules (balls), aiming at a target jack. 

(The target jack is the tiny orange sphere in the right pic. As u can see, most of our aims sucked.)

(Dinner, at the same place @BouleBar, included an incredible round of salad starters; the vegetarian entree was falafels with large couscous. Honestly this was probably my favorite meal out of the ones DIS provided!)

Day 2: Tuesday, 9/11/2018

Tuesday was busy because we had field studies in both the morning and afternoon. We went to CLIP, a research unit for Criminal, Legislative, and Investigative Psychology, and learned about the current research on deception detection, eyewitness memory, and child sexual abuse from PhD candidates at the Göteborg Universitet. Later, we went to the ADA Women’s Shelter, a feminist non-profit organization that provides support to abused women and their children. We weren’t able to see the actual shelter because the location is kept secret from the public, to protect the women inside, but we were able to listen to a presentation from probably the most bad ass woman I’ve ever seen in real life. Think “the girl with the dragon tattoo” with a #nastywoman attitude. Her passion for her work was contagious - I left feeling inspired and very motivated to combat the patriarchal society that we live in. 

(Dinner @SpisaMatbar. Vegetarian entree was salad with oyster mushrooms. Dessert was chocolate creme brulee. So good, ugh.)

(Cheers to core course week. School-sponsored wine is the best kinda wine.)

Day 3: Wednesday, 9/12/2018

Our last day in Gothenburg was reserved for fun activities - no more field studies in Gothenburg! We went to Prison Island, which honestly WAS SO FUN i can’t believe no one has capitalized on this recreational business opportunity in the states yet. It’s kinda like an escape room, except there were many rooms and each room had a challenge that you had to solve based on a combination of wit, technical skill, and physical ability. The place was more high tech than it looked, filled with motion detectors and tiny lasers that, for example, make sure you’re not touching the floor when you’re not supposed to. The challenges required lots of teamwork, as perhaps one person needed to be in a certain part of the room shouting out instructions that only they can see to another person who’s in a pitch black tunnel trying to find hidden buttons to press. 

My team included Maya, Megan, and Meiling (our teacher) and we ended up being the winning team! Meiling later told our class that because she already played the game in previous semesters, she purposefully tried to be dead weight and not help us for the challenges... but there was a room full of bouncy balls that we all hesitated to dive into exCEPT for her. Meiling dove in headfirst to retrieve clues. So honestly, she was our MVP.  

(Maya & Megan with a maze that you have to physically tilt.)

(Maya in the Shark Room. Look at her balancing on that teeny tiny rock!! trying to press a button at the top! Our rock climbing hero!)

Prison Island has been one of my favorite activities done in Sweden so far, and I’ll probably try to visit the location in Stockholm as well. Highly highly recommend!

(Lunch at the cutest French restaurant: Brasserie Lipp. I scratched out the guys’ faces because Europe is serious about their data privacy and i don’t wanna get sued ok)

(It was baked zucchini. @BrasserieLipp)

Day 4: Thursday, 9/13/2018

Back in Stockholm. We went to the Center for Psychiatric Research at the Karolinska Institutet to learn about the role of psychologists in assessing the mental state of offenders. Our afternoon field study got cancelled, so for the rest of the day we debriefed everything we did, ending our week’s schedule a day early. Overall I think our class learned a lot and we all bonded with each other - which were exactly the goals of core course week :) 

Day 5: Friday, 9/14/2018

Since our class was the only one to get Friday off (haha suckas), some of us went to Grona Lund, the amusement park in Stockholm. It was the perfect end to core course week! Now, I just have to mentally prepare myself for six hours of sitting in a classroom on Monday again.....

Tack for coming on this journey with me. It’s been fun so far,

Irene 

[collegeeducationnewsllcusa]

2021 MBAs To Watch: Gráinne Dunne. Boston College (Carroll)

“Loyal and pragmatic with a thirst for adventure.”

Hometown: Athy, Ireland

Fun fact about you: I’m on a mission to visit all 63 national parks in the United States. I’ve visited 10 since moving to the US.

Basic studies and degree:

Trinity College Dublin, Bachelor of Science (Pharmacy)

Royal College of Surgeons, Master of Science (Pharmacy)

Where was the last place you worked before enrolling in business school? I worked in Operations at AbbVie, where I led a team of 13 pharmaceutical technicians at a drug manufacturing facility.

Where did you do an internship in summer 2020? PwC, Chicago / Remote.

Where will you work after you graduate? I have accepted an offer from PwC and will return to their Pharma Life Sciences Advisory Group after graduation.

Teamwork and leadership roles in the business school: As part of my community ministry at Boston College, I volunteer as a tutor on the Invest ‘N Kids (INK) program. INK is run by PhD students as a tutoring program designed to help disadvantaged middle school students with their homework.

I also volunteer at the West End House. This is the largest youth development agency in the Allston-Brighton community in Boston, offering impactful programs that ensure local young people are academically successful, develop professional skills, and adopt healthy lifestyles.

As a member of the Graduate Consulting Club, I took part in workshops and mentored a group of first-year MBA students. I’ve also participated in several case competitions. I worked with the admissions team in recruiting prospective students and acted as an ambassador for the program at information events.

I am a member of IntEnt, the Graduate Intrapreneurship & Entrepreneurship Association at Boston College. I participated in the IntEnt Apprenticeship Program, a volunteer opportunity that connects Boston College graduates with local Boston organizations.

I am a recipient of the Denis O’Brien Fellowship. Irish businessman Denis O’Brien created this merit-based scholarship, which offers two Irish students a year a fully funded MBA in BC, where O’Brien himself earned his MBA in 1982.

What school or extracurricular achievement are you most proud of during your studies? I am proud of how my relationship with the church has changed, inspired by the Jesuit tradition of service at Boston College. A strong sense of community was instilled in me. I don’t think I really understood before business school that individuals rarely change needles on big issues, but there is great power in having individuals consistently support their community. This is a change of perspective for which I am very grateful.

What success in your professional career are you most proud of? Working with an innovative biotech company like AbbVie offered excellent opportunities for exciting and meaningful work. As a Technical Operations Pharmacist, I was responsible for the technical transfer of a new oncological drug from pilot to commercial scale. It’s incredible to work on projects that have such a real impact on the lives of patients around the world. I was also the supply chain representative on the rollout team for a new hepatitis C (HCV) treatment at the rollout manufacturing site. Prior to the introduction of this therapy, there was no cure for HCV. Treatment at the time required long-term maintenance and was incredibly debilitating. AbbVie’s HCV treatment cleared the virus from your body within 12 weeks, allowing patients to live full and healthy lives.

Why did you choose this business school? Boston College has a very strong data analytics track – that was very important to me when choosing a program. I really enjoyed mastering data tools like SQL, Tableau, SPSS, Alteryx, and Python and learning how to use these tools for strategic insights. These are skills that will set me apart in the workplace.

Boston College has a deep connection to Ireland and a great sense of community, which makes it a special experience for me and where I feel very at home.

What was your favorite MBA event or tradition at your business school? The Tuck Winter Carnival, an annual intercollegiate event that BC is invited to, was my favorite MBA event – especially since it happened just before last year’s lockdown. I was fortunate enough to take part as a freshman MBA student. It was great not only getting to know MBA students from other schools, but also building stronger connections with my classmates and high school students.

Looking back on your MBA experience, what would you do differently and why? There isn’t much that I would change. I was hoping to go on a volunteer trip. With the lockdown, however, this was not possible. Otherwise, I might have changed a course or two afterwards. However, by dealing with various topics, I was able to understand my personal interests, strengths and weaknesses.

What’s the biggest myth about your school? Boston College is known as a strong financial school. That’s true, but the BC MBA also has a broad curriculum and we are fortunate to have very talented professors everywhere. For example, we have an incredibly strong data analytics track. Professors like Pieter Vanderwerf, George Wyner, Sam Ramsbottom and Jonathan Reuter make their respective fields accessible, practical and entertaining.

What surprised you most about the business school? I was surprised that I liked the more technical and quantitative subjects, although I am probably qualitatively stronger. There is a great sense of satisfaction in tackling a difficult problem and overcoming the challenge.

What did you do during the application process that gave you an advantage at the school you chose? A face-to-face visit to a school and a face-to-face meeting with faculty and students is invaluable, not only to give you an edge during the application process, but also to determine if the school is a good culturally fit for you.

Which MBA classmate do you admire most? Kimberly Hay Strauss is remarkable. She is always up to date in class while doing internships and looking after her son during school time. Despite her humble, low-key style, it is evident that she is incredibly intelligent and hardworking. She is also very generous with her classmates.

How disruptive was switching to an online or hybrid environment after the COVID outbreak?

The pandemic was certainly a shock and the MBA experience was one of many things that were hit by these unprecedented times. Regardless, BC and the professors did a great job adapting to an online environment quickly and providing personal support to the students. I also took the opportunity to get the most out of the online MBA experience by setting up zoom workouts in the morning, using virtual office hours, and making daily check-in calls with my friends. I was incredibly grateful that I had the opportunity to build relationships with my fellow students in the first semester. That was a great support network.

Who most influenced your decision to start a business while studying? Several people inspired and influenced my decision to do business while in college. My father is my role model. He is a serving leader within the local community. He set high standards for my siblings and me and taught us to do our best in everything we did. He instilled in us the confidence that great opportunities are open to us.

My younger sister is a trained pharmacist and also attended business school. She is a health counselor and opened my eyes to the impactful work available to those who can marry a health and business perspective.

James Hughes, a director at AbbVie, taught me a lot about strategic thinking and how to effectively support and engage a team. He is a great mentor who has actively supported my personal development and professional career.

What are the top two items on your professional bucket list? In the short term, I’m excited to come to PwC to work with life science clients to solve their greatest challenges. I am interested in building based on my data analysis skills that I acquired at BC. This is in line with PwC’s goal of training its employees with new data tools. Ideally, I want to help companies design and leverage data systems to achieve operational efficiencies and improve the overall patient experience.

In the long term, I would like to start my own company. Ideally, I want to start a small or medium-sized business that offers job opportunities or drives growth in my community.

What did … do Gráinne such an invaluable addition to the 2021 class?

“Gráinne has the ideal qualities that we expect from a BC MBA student. She is smart, hardworking, and dedicated to giving back to the community. Her exemplary achievements and contributions at BC – in the classroom and her work with Invest N ‘Kids, in her summer internship and at BC MBA admissions events – testify to her consistent pursuit of excellence.

Born and raised in Ireland, Gráinne attended Trinity College, where she earned both a BS and an MS in pharmacy. After graduation, she was hired by AbbVie, the Illinois-based pharmaceutical company, to work on the company’s business development program in Dublin, Ireland. Because of the high quality of her work, she was given the opportunity to work at AbbVie’s Chicago office.

Gráinne applied to the Carroll School, where she received the highly selective Denis O’Brien Scholarship, which is awarded to students expressing an interest in the economy or business development in Ireland. After a successful first year in the program, Gráinne completed the consultant internship program at PwC in Chicago in the summer of 2020 and will return there for a full-time position after graduation. We have been fortunate to have Gráinne as a member of the 2021 class and she is a real pleasure to work with. In addition to all of her successes in the program, Gráinnes’ humility and her commitment to the BC MBA program make us proud to have her as a member of our community. “

Marilyn Eckmann Associate Dean, Graduate Program, Carroll School of Management

source https://collegeeducationnewsllc.com/2021-mbas-to-watch-grainne-dunne-boston-college-carroll/

[sunshineweb]

51 Ideas from 2019

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.

I. INVESTING 1. Don’t Be Blind to Alternative Histories Nassim Taleb writes in Fooled by Randomness –

…one cannot judge a performance in any given field (war, politics, medicine, investments) by the results, but by the costs of the alternative (i.e., if history played out in a different way). Such substitute courses of events are called alternative histories. Clearly, the quality of a decision cannot be solely judged based on its outcome, but such a point seems to be voiced only by people who fail (those who succeed attribute their success to the quality of their decision).

We are blind to alternative histories – those silent events that could have happened but didn’t. In the language of behavioural finance this irrationality is known as Survivorship Bias. The outcome which is visible, ‘survived’ and the ones which didn’t survive are hidden. As Taleb writes –

Imagine an eccentric (and bored) tycoon offering you $10 million to play Russian roulette, i.e., to put a revolver containing one bullet in the six available chambers to your head and pull the trigger. Each realization would count as one history, for a total of six possible histories of equal probabilities. Five out of these six histories would lead to enrichment; one would lead to a statistic, that is, an obituary with an embarrassing (but certainly original) cause of death.

The problem is that only one of the histories is observed in reality; and the winner of $10 million would elicit the admiration and praise of some fatuous journalist (the very same ones who unconditionally admire the Forbes 500 billionaires).

Like almost every executive I have encountered during an eighteen-year career on Wall Street (the role of such executives in my view being no more than a judge of results delivered in a random manner), the public observes the external signs of wealth without even having a glimpse at the source. Consider the possibility that the Russian roulette winner would be used as a role model by his family, friends, and neighbors.

In effect, the general belief is that if the outcome is good, the process and decisions made to arrive at that outcome must have been sound. Alas, life doesn’t follow such straight patterns. The randomness and ‘external factors’ play a defining role in life and investing.

2. Give Due Credit to Luck The world of investing, like most things in life, produces success stories and failures. It’s human nature to wish to copy success. However, the ironic truth is this: To accept success at face value without acknowledging the role of luck is a strategy for failure.

But it’s also important to note that luck, like love, is a verb. It requires dedication and effort and the conviction and courage to act. Like the father of value investing, Ben Graham, wrote –

…behind the luck, or the crucial decision, there must usually exist a background of preparation and disciplines capacity.

3. Avoid Ruin You or me are not the market. Earning the long-term returns of the market, of the past or the future, is not in our control. Managing our risks and avoiding ruin, mostly is.

“Rationality is avoidance of systemic ruin,” Nassim Taleb writes.

Trying to avoid the ruin the stock market system enforces upon people who disregard its workings is rational. Believing that you can beat the system at it, by playing the game mindlessly, isn’t.

Peter Bernstein writes in his brilliant book Against the Gods –

Survival is the only road to riches. Let me say that again: Survival is the only road to riches.

4. Obsession with Outcomes is Damaging Most investment experts selling their services always highlight the outcome – so much return in so many months or years – and never the process they used to get this outcome. This is simply because, while the outcome is there for everyone to see (availability bias), investors rarely ask the question whether that outcome was due to the skill of the expert (a proper investment process) or merely luck.

This is not to say that results don’t matter; obviously they are extremely important in measuring success. But if the results have been largely thanks to luck, they may not come in as expected in the future.

What is more, if you focus only on the outcome, you are less likely to achieve it. Instead, if you focus on the process, the outcome will take care of itself.

But then, as published in here –

Despite the problems of using results as a barometer of decision quality, it remains endemic in investment. We use outcomes as a simple indicator and then weave narratives around these views. We take a difficult problem, simplify it (are results good or bad?) and then create a story to justify the outcome. This pattern of behaviour is evident in a range of poor investment decisions, such as: susceptibility to financial frauds, participation in investment bubbles, performance chasing and excessive short-term trading.

5. Seek Wealth, Not Money or Status Here’s an excerpt from an insightful discussion that Naval Ravikant had with Babak Nivi –

Nivi: What’s the difference between wealth, money, and status?

Naval: Wealth is the thing that you really want. Wealth is assets that earn while you sleep. Wealth is the factory, the robots that’s cranking out things. Wealth is the computer program that’s running at night, that’s serving other customer. Wealth is… even money in the bank that is being reinvested into other assets, and into other businesses. Even a house can be a form of wealth because you can rent it out, although that’s probably a lower use of productivity of land than actually doing some commercial enterprise. So, my definition of wealth is much more businesses and assets that can earn while you sleep. But really the reason you want wealth is because it buys you your freedom.

So, you don’t have to wear a tie like a collar around your neck. So, you don’t have to wake up at 7:00 AM, and rush to work, and sit in commute traffic. So, you don’t have to waste away your entire life grinding all the productive hours away into a soulless job that doesn’t fulfill you.

6. Warren Buffett’s Checklist I recently came across a video of Warren Buffett talking to a few B-School students on his trip to India in 2011.

The host asked him this question – What exactly goes through your mind when you’re actually making an investment?

Buffett’s reply to this question was brilliant for it contained the crux of everything he has said over the years about how to evaluate a certain business and it’s future economic potential (text in bold and brackets are mine) –

Well, if I drive by a McDonald’s stand or a Kentucky Fried Chicken stand I will automatically think to myself “What is this business worth?”

You know, how many customers can walk in the door (demand, scalability, growth potential)? What kind of gross margins (profitability, pricing power) can they have? How many people do they need (scalability)? How likely is it that another chicken stand opens across the street (competition, entry barriers, moat)?

I mean, all of those things. And that’s true of the chicken stand and it’s true of Google or you name the business. I mean, it’s all about evaluating the economic potential, the economic future of a given business. And most of them you don’t know the answer on (say no to most businesses, because you really don’t understand them).

But every now and then you run into one where you know the answer (simple businesses). But that’s all business is.

It’s what Aesop said a long time ago: “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.” (well, that’s the definition of discounted cash flow) You know, that was said in 600 BC and that’s now what’s called discounted cash flow and all that sort of thing. But he saw that and figured it out, you know, twenty-six hundred years ago. And all I’m trying to figure out is if I could take that dollar in my hand: When do I get the two dollars out of the bush (timing of future cash flows)? How sure am I of getting it out of the bush (certainty of future cash flows)? Is there some other bush where I can get three dollars out of it instead (opportunity costs, better alternatives)?

I mean, it’s very basic stuff (investing is simple, you see, but only if you keep it simple). And a lot of times you look at it and you say “I don’t know how many birds there will be in the bush.” (complex businesses, or those that undergo a lot of changes due to nature of industry, competition, etc.) So you go in to the next one until you find the answer (you just need a few good ideas in a lifetime).

Buffett, once more, makes it clear that rather than obsessing with the bewildering fusion of news and noise, you should concentrate on a few key elements in stock selection.

7. Know Thyself Taleb again from Fooled by Randomness –

It certainly takes bravery to remain skeptical; it takes inordinate courage to introspect, to confront oneself, to accept one’s limitations – scientists are seeing more and more evidence that we are specifically designed by mother nature to fool ourselves.

One of the most underrated but among the most valuable skills required to succeed in stock market investing is resilience i.e., the ability to properly adapt to stress and adversity – either in the market or in the businesses one is owning.

How easily can you bounce back from a market crash? What would be your reaction to a sharp decline in your stocks’ prices? How many ‘surprises’ can you withstand in quick succession? How safe are your overall finances in light of extreme stress on the equity component of your portfolio?

As Taleb says, we are anyways designed by mother nature to fool ourselves. But don’t forget what the noted financial writer George J.W. Goodman – who used the pen name of Adam Smith – wrote in his wonderful book, The Money Game –

If you don’t know who you are, this is an expensive place to find out.

8. Keep It Simple, Please In stock investing, often we focus so much on trying too hard that either we never start working on the process of picking up great businesses (seeing the enormity of the task), or we start believing that our immense hard work and knowledge gives us great control over the future of stocks we own.

The reality is that, no matter how hard we try to analyze the intricacies of business, we may not be as important to the results as we’d like to think we are.

Like Seth Klarman wrote in Margin of Safety –

Investors frequently benefit from making investment decisions with less than perfect knowledge and are well rewarded for bearing the risk of uncertainty.

The time other investors spend delving into the last unanswered detail may cost them the chance to buy in at prices so low that they offer a margin of safety despite the incomplete information.

9. Investing’s False Positives The field of medicine has a term called “false positive.” It is an erroneous result that indicates that a given condition is present when it is not. An example of a false positive would be if a medical test designed to detect cancer returns a positive result (that the person has cancer) when, in reality, the person does not have cancer.

While medicine’s false positives often create panic about things that turn out to be nothing to worry about, investing’s false positives create euphoria about things that should have been worrisome in the first place.

And the underlying reason is that most people out there in the stock market judge the quality of their investment decisions by one single factor – the short-term price movement of the underlying security. And that’s exactly what they are looking forward to while making the investment, even while talking about the virtues of long-term investing and the need to ignore short-term price movements.

Noted French writer and philosopher Voltaire said –

It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong.

10. Doing Nothing is Hard The idea of buying and holding high-quality businesses over a long period of time is simple. Everyone knows that, and even those who don’t practice it appreciate that this works with most high-quality businesses as history has proven time and again.

But then, it’s important to understand that the action of not doing anything over such a long period of time involves hundreds of decisions over months and years that lead to such inaction.

Of course, one way is to buy stocks and forget for 20 years and hope to end up with a fortune. There are quite a few such fairy tales you may have heard of. But the other side of the picture is that countless people have also ended with duds in their portfolios, or vanished companies, when they realized their father or grandfather had bought some stocks and forgot about them for 20 or more years.

11. Being Prepared In one of his lectures published in Poor Charlie’s Almanack, Charlie Munger said this –

Our experience tends to confirm a long-held notion that being prepared, on a few occasions in a lifetime, to act promptly in scale, in doing some simple and logical thing, will often dramatically improve the financial results of the lifetime.

A few major opportunities, clearly recognizable as such, will usually come to one who continuously searches and waits, with a curious mind, loving diagnosis involving multiple variables.

And then all that is required is a willingness to bet heavily when the odds are extremely favourable, using resources available as a result of prudence and patience in the past.

What Charlie says here is that it pays to be prepared in your investing life – prepared not just for the risks that may be lurking around the corner, but also for opportunities that may appear anytime.

Ironically, we are often prepared for none, and that is what causes us grief during the market’s ups (when we keep sitting on the sidelines) and downs (when we are enjoying the madness of the party).

Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca wrote in Letters from a Stoic –

Everyone faces up more bravely to a thing for which he has long prepared himself, sufferings, even, being withstood if they have been trained for in advance. Those who are unprepared, on the other hand, are panic-stricken by the most insignificant happenings.

12. Seek Uncertainty Mohnish Pabrai wrote in his brilliant book The Dhandho Investor –

Wall Street sometimes gets confused between risk and uncertainty, and you can profit handsomely from that confusion. The Street just hates uncertainty, and it demonstrates that hate by collapsing the quoted stock price of the underlying business. Here are a few scenarios that are likely to lead to a depressed stock price:

High risk, low uncertainty High risk, high uncertainty Low risk, high uncertainty

The fourth logical combination, low risk and low uncertainty, is loved by Wall Street, and stock prices of these securities sport some of the highest trading multiples. Avoid investing in these businesses. Of the three, the only one of interest to us connoisseurs of the fine art of Dhandho is the low-risk, high-uncertainty combination, which gives us our most sought after coin-toss odds. Heads, I win; tails, I don’t lose much!

While value investors are typically averse to taking high risks, that’s more a reflection of the price they’re willing to pay for any given investment than the types of situations they most often pursue, which are often fraught with uncertainty.

As businesses constantly evolve and change in response to challenges and opportunities, the lack of clarity around those changes. And the risks inherent in the potential outcomes can cause share prices to diverge widely from underlying business values.

The ability to recognize and capitalize upon that dynamic, and understand whether it’s temporary or permanent, is a key element of what sets the best investors apart.

13. Why Most People Will Never Be Good at Investing …because most people in the stock market, most of the time, don’t do investing, which is…

Thinking how markets work,

Understanding how people behave,

Studying businesses,

Sticking only with what is simple and what they understand, and

Buying stocks at appropriate valuations.

Instead, they are busy…

Envying (others making money fast or losing money slow),

Cloning (others’ stock ideas mindlessly),

Predicting (future of markets, stock prices, and economy),

Fearing (missing out on future gains),

Regretting (past mistakes),

Avoiding (accepting current mistakes),

Denying (reality, especially when it’s harsh), and

Indulging (in useless information and noise)

And if that’s not all, these often lead us to –

Trading (frequently, which adds to our costs),

Averaging down (on bad businesses),

Boasting (about our lucky short-term gains), and sometimes

Trolling (other investors on social media, who have not performed as well as us in the recent past).

With such a busy schedule, where is the time to practice investing?

14. Pay Attention In the story The Adventure of Silver Blaze, Sherlock Holmes asked Inspector Gregory to consider a curious incident involving a dog. Gregory replied that nothing happened, and Holmes proclaimed, “That was the curious incident.” This clue enabled Holmes to deduce that the culprit must have been someone familiar to the victim’s dog. Most people would miss this important clue because most people, like Gregory, pay little attention to nonevents.

Now, some information is always available, but some is always silent – and it will remain silent unless we actively stir it up. In investing, such information that remains silent – or that you fail to notice – can be dangerous to your capital.

To pay attention means to pay attention to it all, to engage actively, to take everything around us, including those things that don’t appear when they rightly should. It means asking important questions and making sure we get answers.

Even when you do this, you may not be able to emerge with the entire situation in hand, and you may end up making a choice that, upon further reflection, is not the right one after all. But it won’t be for the lack of trying.

15. Be a Curator of Stocks, Not Warehouse Manager We spend the first half of our lives adding things, and the second half subtracting most of them.

Investing follows life, and this is also what a lot of investors end up doing. They create crowded warehouses of portfolios in the initial years of their investment careers, realize most of their choices were mistakes, and then they start subtracting vigorously.

Lest you lose out on the positive compounding timeframe, you will do yourself a world of good by respecting and practicing this lesson – of saying no to most things, of not adding a lot of unwanted stocks to your portfolios – early.

In other words, be a curator of stocks, not a warehouse manager.

16. Bharat Shah on Investing Successfully One of the best theories I have read on the importance of investing in high-quality businesses in the Indian context comes from Bharat Shah of ASK Group, who has written a book (sad, it’s not available publicly) titled “Of Long Term Value and Wealth Creation from Equity Investing.”

I recently came across his old interview where he shared his insights on value investing and how he formed his investment process and principles. A passage from the interview reads thus (emphasis mine) –

…successful long-term investing calls for two vital technical capabilities or craft and two personality traits. While craft can be honed and refined by observing and absorbing, character traits have to come from within and be developed.

The two essential skills are: ability to comprehend and grasp the true character and the innards of diverse businesses as well as the ability to value them. Till these abilities are developed, one cannot become a good investor.

The two vital character traits are: discipline (or temperament) and wisdom. Discipline lies in investing only into quality businesses and the temperament of not getting carried away by the fads of the markets and buying such quality businesses only at a meaningful margin of safety.

17. Biggest Financial Regrets One of my favourite financial writers, Barry Ritholtz, wrote about the biggest financial regrets people have. This was based on a survey of over 2000 people by American life insurer giant New York Life, and found these as the biggest financial regrets –

Image Source: Biggest Financial Regrets – Barry Ritholtz Barry concluded thus, and I completely agree with this –

The sooner you begin to accept mistakes are inevitable, stop beating yourself up over them, and just fix what is not working, the faster the compounding can start.

18. No Stock is Safe The bulls may want you to believe this, but no stock is safe.

There are businesses that may remain good (earning return on capital greater than cost of capital) for some time, maybe a long time, but you must not attach infinite values to them.

This is because high returns attract competition, generally causing return on capital to move towards the cost of capital. While such companies may still earn excess returns, but the return trajectory is down.

Everything in this world, after all, is momentary. So, your best bet is to just stick with quality (even that is momentary, just for longer moments that allows time for compounding to work its magic).

The good thing about high-quality stocks is that you can pay up for them (never overpay), expensive looking prices, and still do well till the underlying businesses remain good.

With poor quality, most probably, you have no hope.

19. Businesses will Die Death will happen to all of us and to all of our businesses, and that must not worry you. It’s the stagnation and gradual decline that diseases (bad management, capital misallocation, etc.) bring along, that you must watch out for (and try working backward now so as to avoid them, except for bad luck).

20. Equanimity and Investing When it comes to investing, making money in stocks when everyone is making money in stocks isn’t a big deal. Rather, it’s the ability to handle good and bad times with equanimity, combined with courage and decisiveness, that really matters in the long run.

Of course, most of us simply aren’t wired to be equanimous at most of the times, and it’s terribly difficult to rid ourself of the emotions of ecstasy (when things are looking up) and misery (when things are looking down).

And that’s why ensuring that we avoid all of those ways that can cause us wealth destruction – trading, timing, high fee, inadequate diversification, and leverage – is paramount.

Everything, including our triumphs and disasters, anyways shall pass. But the equanimity with which we allow them to pass will keep us sane always.

As Lord Krishna taught Arjuna, as we wade through the ocean of life, it throws up all kinds of waves that are beyond our control. If we keep struggling to eliminate negative situations, we will be unable to avoid unhappiness. But if we can learn to accept everything that comes our way, with equanimity and without sacrificing our best efforts, that will be true Yog.

So, give equanimity a shot, and see what happens.

21. Five Ways We Destroy Our Wealth It’s common if you are wealthy to worry about losing your fortune due to forces beyond your control. Like market meltdowns or economic stagnation.

But what many of us don’t realize is that our own behavior may be the root of significant losses.

“The road to hell is paved with good intentions,” goes a proverb. The road to investing hell is paved with bad behaviors, and here are the five roads which initially look like paved with gold, but which often take us towards wealth destruction.

Daniel Kahneman was right when he said this –

A human being is a dark and veiled thing…and whereas the hare has seven skins, the human being can shed seven times seventy skins and still not be able to say: This is really you, this is no longer outer shell. So said Nietzsche, and Freud agreed: we are ignorant of ourselves.

We certainly are.

22. Avoid Stress I recently read this passage from Nassim Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness that tells something about why we must avoid stress –

…people who look too closely at randomness burn out, their emotions drained by the series of pangs they experience. Regardless of what people claim, a negative pang is not offset by a positive one (some psychologists estimate the negative effect for an average loss to be up to 2.5 the magnitude of a positive one); it will lead to an emotional deficit.

…people in lab coats have examined some scary properties of this type of negative pangs on the neural system (the usual expected effect: high blood pressure; the less expected: chronic stress leads to memory loss, lessening of brain plasticity, and brain damage). To my knowledge, there are no studies investigating the exact properties of trader’s burnout, but a daily exposure to such high degrees of randomness without much control will have physiological effects on humans (nobody studied the effect of such exposure on the risk of cancer).

…wealth does not count so much into one’s well-being as the route one uses to get to it.

23. Why Value Investing Works Jack Schwager, the author of Market Wizards series, when answering a question on whether value investing works, turned to the wisdom of Joel Greenblatt, one of the foremost experts on the subject.

Schwager quoted this from his interview with Greenblatt –

Value investing doesn’t always work. The market doesn’t always agree with you. Over time, value is roughly the way the market prices stocks, but over the short term, which sometimes can be as long as two or three years, there are periods when it doesn’t work. And that is a very good thing.

The fact that the value approach doesn’t work over periods of time is precisely the reason why it continues to work over the long term.

24. Patience Wins Most people participating in the stock market don’t really understand what they are doing. This is especially when making money gets quick and easy, and they are doing great at it.

Like Aesop’s wolf in sheep’s clothing, they play a role contrary to their real character, which often leads them to the slaughterhouse.

However, the lack of patience of such people to invest with a long-term horizon creates the opportunity for the few committed to long-term holding periods.

In the battle between impatience and patience, the latter wins.

25. Eternity and Investing The Heilbrunn Center for Graham and Dodd Investing created a wonderful video in 2013 titled ‘Legacy of Ben Graham,’ which contains bytes from some of his students on how Graham’s teachings changed their lives.

Marshall Weinberg, one of the students from Graham’s class said that the biggest lesson he drew out of that class was on long-term thinking. Here’s what he said –

One sentence changed my life…Ben Graham opened the course by saying: ‘If you want to make money in Wall Street you must have the proper psychological attitude. No one expresses it better than Spinoza the philosopher.’

When he said that, I nearly jumped out of my course. What? I suddenly look up, and he said, and I remember exactly what he said: ‘Spinoza said you must look at things in the aspect of eternity.’ And that’s what suddenly hooked me on Ben Graham.

Spinoza actually said, “Sub specie aeternitatis,” which translates to “under the aspect of eternity,” or “from the perspective of the eternal.”

Critics of this idea may believe that with such thinking, there is no reason to believe that anything matters. But where Spinoza may be coming from is the idea that, in the larger scheme of things, nothing matters, which leads us to put our pains and struggles – including, as investors – into perspective.

26. Types of Managements 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.

27. Skin in the Game Having skin in the game means being exposed (equally as other stakeholders) to both positive and negative consequences of an outcome which was made possible by your decisions/actions/approval.

Superficially, the concept of ‘skin in the game’ may look like a case for morality in human transactions but if you go deeper, you will find that it’s a wonderful trick for improving our own decisions.

When you own 50 stocks and one goes to zero, your portfolio isn’t going to move down by more than 2 percent (assuming you had equal allocation for each stock). Which means you’re not really bothered about a couple of bad decisions for it’s not going to create meaningful damage to your net worth. However, when you run a relatively concentrated portfolio of 10 stocks, you’d be more careful about choosing those stocks. Won’t you?

28. It’s Not Supposed to Be Fair Warren Buffett had high regards for David Sokol. Over the years Sokol established a reputation inside Berkshire Hathaway as Mr. Fixit. Buffett often referred to Sokol as a terrific manager, a brilliant dealmaker and a huge asset to Berkshire.

In 2011, Sokol abruptly resigned. It was speculated that his resignation was because of insider trading allegations. For a second put yourself in Buffett’s shoes and imagine how you would feel when one of your most trusted business partners who has worked with you closely for decades behaves in a totally unexpected and undesired way? Like Sokol did.

When asked in one interview if he had felt betrayed by Sokol’s behaviour, Munger replied —

It’s not my nature … when you get little surprises as a result of human nature … to spend much time feeling betrayed. I always want to put my head down and adjust. I don’t allow myself to spend much time ever with any feelings of betrayal. If some flickering idea like that came to me, I’d get rid of it quickly. I don’t like any feeling of being victimized. I think that’s a counterproductive way to think as a human being. I am not a victim. I am a survivor.

The world around us is largely a soup of random events loosely connected by a few broad patterns. And one of those patterns is that the universe doesn’t care for any individual’s personal agenda.

If your investment journey has thrown a few bad apples your way, if you feel that the world is not fair then be reminded that the world is not supposed to be fair. It’s not supposed to be fair in your favour or in anyone’s favour.

29. Avoid Multiplying by Zero Two academicians were debating on the superiority of their respective fields of study.

“What would you do if I brought Alexander The Great’s army in front of you?” The history professor challenged.

The mathematician rolled his eyes and replied, “I’ll enclose the army in a bracket and multiply by zero.”

In an additive system, each component adds on to one another to create the final outcome. Such systems are unaffected when they encounter a zero. Multiplicative systems, on the other hand, are non-linear because anything times zero must still be zero, no matter how large the string of numbers preceding it. A zero can wreak havoc on multiplicative systems. Like it did to Alexander’s army.

Shane Parrish, on his excellent blog, explains the functional equivalent of multiplicative system in the world of business –

Most businesses, for example, operate in a multiplicative system. But they too often think they’re operating in additive ones: Ever notice how some businesses will add one feature on top of another to their products but fail at basic customer service, so you leave, never to return? That’s a business that thinks it’s in an additive system when they really need to be resolving the big fat zero in the middle of the equation instead of adding more stuff… General Motors, founded in 1908 by William Durant and C.S. Mott, came to dominate the American car market to the tune of 50% market share through a series of brilliant innovations and management practices, and was for many years the dominant and most admirable corporation in America. Even today, after more than a century of competition, no American carmaker produces more automobiles than General Motors. And yet, the original shareholders of GM ended up with a zero in 2008 as the company went into bankruptcy due to years of financial mismanagement. It didn’t matter than they had several generations of leadership: All of that becomes naught in a multiplicative system.

Benefit of looking at the downside or what can go wrong is efficiency, writes Peter Bevelin, “Take investments as an example – If you first eliminate what doesn’t work or what won’t achieve what you want, you don’t have to spend a lot of time and attention of analyzing the company. If there is a huge downside – for example a catastrophe risk of the key factors that are needed for success aren’t there or any other disqualifying factors like no sustainable advantage, bad and untrustworthy management of something else – just say ‘no thank you.’”

II. LEARNING 30. Being Average in the Age of Alpha Our society and culture values high achievement in every area of our lives. We want to become alpha men and women, have the brightest careers, accomplished children, ideal bodies, investment performances that beat everyone, and financial prosperity that leads us to possess more stuff than others.

Amidst this, being satisfied with having “enough” is considered shameful. Being unambitious is considered lazy. Thinking “I have enough” is a sin. “Average” is a dirty word.

I recently read an article written by one Krista O’Reilly, which echoed exactly what I have felt about being average all my life –

The world is such a noisy place. Loud, haranguing voices lecturing me to hustle, to improve, build, strive, yearn, acquire, compete, and grasp for more. For bigger and better. Sacrifice sleep for productivity. Strive for excellence. Go big or go home. Have a huge impact in the world. Make your life count.

But what if I just don’t have it in me? What if all the striving for excellence leaves me sad, worn out, depleted? Drained of joy. Am I simply not enough?

31. Two Big Lessons from History I believe there are two things that have stood the test of time, and that apply to everything we do in life, investing, work, everywhere –

We have much less control over the future than we hope, and that it will always surprise us (surprisingly!). We can’t control what would happen to us or our investment portfolios, we can’t control what people around us would say or do, and we can’t even fully control our own bodies, which would get damaged and sick and ultimately die without regard for our preferences. In fact, much of our unhappiness is caused by thinking that we can control things like these that, in fact, we can’t.

We have far more ability to make an impact than we expect. And this ability is more important than we can imagine. All it requires for us is to be learning and adapting machines, be sensible in our decision making, keep things simple, and trust the role of sincere hard work. Some people are aware of it; most are not. Frankly, it is easier to sit on the sidelines and whine about the stuff we can’t control (like stock prices) than to own up to what we do control (like our process of investing).

In short, while we can’t control the future, we can be courageous enough to jump into life with both feet and take responsibility for how we would like to mold it (without trying to control it), and how we would react to what happens to us on the way.

No success guarantees here, but history proves that’s how the world has always worked.

32. 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.

In his book, A More Beautiful Question, which I glanced through recently at a bookstore, Warren Berger led me to the importance of asking thoughtful, ambitious “beautiful questions” — the kind that can help us grow into happier and more useful human beings. An insightful passage from the book reads thus –

We’ve transitioned into always transitioning…In such times, the ability to ask big, meaningful, beautiful questions – and just as important, to know what to do with those questions once they’ve been raised – can be the first step in moving beyond old habits and behaviors as we embrace the new.

In the modern era, we must use unfamiliar tools in our attempt to take on new challenges without clear instructions, and with the clock ticking. In such times, Berger writes –

…questioning…will be even more important in helping us figure out what matters, where opportunities lie, and how to get there.

“Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers,” said Voltaire. Now, more than ever, the quality of our lives depends on the quality of our questions.

33. How Not to Bet 90-year-old Jeanne Louise Calment struck a deal with a forty-seven-year-old lawyer named André-François Raffray. Raffray agreed to pay a low monthly subsistence payment of 2,500 francs to Jeanne in exchange for the right to own Jeanne house when she dies. The ninety-year-old French woman had already exceeded the French life expectancy by more than ten years. She could die any day.

Ms. Calment turned out to be the biggest outlier in human history. When she died aged 122, her age at death exceeded the lawyer’s age at this death by forty-five years. He ended up paying Calment the equivalent of €140,000. That was more than double the apartment’s value.

Where did Raffray go wrong? His blunder was in taking the statistics and applying it to a sample size of one.

Legendary investor, Howard Marks relates a funny story his father told him about a gambler who bet everything on a race with only one horse in it. How could he lose? “Halfway around the track, the horse jumped over the fence and ran away. Invariably things can get worse than people expect.”

Jeanne and Raffray’s story has a valuable lesson for investors. Never bet the farm on a single stock no matter how certain you are about the outcome. You never know when the luck hands you the equivalent of a crazy horse or a supercentenarian.

34. Possessing Vs Pursuing I believe our lives are not defined by what we possess, but by what we pursue. History has ample proof that it is not what people (like Alexander and Hitler) have tried to possess, but what people (like Einstein and Gandhi) pursued that brought meaning to their lives and to those around them.

“I enjoy life,” Seneca said, “because I am ready to leave it.”

In his book On the Shortness of Life, Seneca wrote this –

As far as I am concerned, I know that I have lost not wealth but distractions. The body’s needs are few: it wants to be free from cold, to banish hunger and thirst with nourishment; if we long for anything more we are exerting ourselves to serve our vices, not our needs.

Imagine if we can unburden ourselves of 90% of our worldly goods, it should not be difficult to leave the remaining 10% behind?

35. What Stories Do You Believe? A story is a very effective tool to package any message or an abstract idea. Stories themselves are unimportant. What’s more important is the idea the construct of a story is enclosing inside it. An idea doesn’t stick well if it’s not packaged in the form of a story.

Our experience of the world is almost completely derived from the stories we have told ourselves.

Celebrated historian Yuval Noah Harari writes —

Over the years, people have woven an incredibly complex network of stories. The kinds of things that people create through this network of stories are known in academic circles as ‘fictions’, ‘social constructs’ or ‘imagined realities’. An imagined reality is not a lie. Unlike lying, an imagined reality is something that everyone believes in, and as long as this communal belief persists, the imagined reality exerts force in the world. Most millionaires sincerely believe in the existence of money and limited liability companies. Most human-rights activists sincerely believe in the existence of human rights.

Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens have thus been living in a dual reality. On the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees and lions; and on the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations and corporations. As time went by, the imagined reality became ever more powerful, so that today the very survival of rivers, trees and lions depends on the grace of imagined entities such as the United States and Google.

Take a pause and question yourself, “What stories do I believe in about the reality and have they served me well?”

36. Writing is a Thinking Tool Writing, apart from being a communication tool, is a thinking tool too. Famous author, Dan Pink, recommends – “write things to figure out your thoughts”.

Writing is a powerful weapon for focusing thoughts. The more you write, the more precision of thought you build. It allows you to take fuzzy thinking and distill it into precise line of thought. If you want to think better you have to start writing your thoughts.

When Michael Mauboussin posed the question to Daniel Kahneman, what is a single thing an investor can do to improve his or her performance, he said –

…go down to a local drugstore and buy a very cheap notebook and start keeping track of your decisions. And the specific idea is whenever you’re making a consequential decision, something going in or out of the portfolio, just take a moment to think, write down what you expect to happen, why you expect it to happen and then actually, and this is optional, but probably a great idea, is write down how you feel about the situation, both physically and even emotionally. Just, how do you feel? I feel tired. I feel good, or this stock is really draining me. Whatever you think…When you’ve got a decision-making journal, it gives you accurate and honest feedback of what you were thinking at that time.

Writing is a thinking exercise and it acts as a shield against the mental rust.

37. Opposite of a Good Idea Both Amazon and Apple are technology companies with close to trillion-dollar market cap each. Amazon sells products as cheap as possible. Apple prices its devices as expensive as possible.

In marketing, there are two equally potent, but completely contradictory, ways to sell a product. Luxury goods offer the promise of owning something which can’t be owned by everybody, i.e., a scarcity bias informs the worth of the product. And we also find comfort in buying stuff which has been rated high by millions of others, i.e., we look for social proof in making our decision.

Similarly, two opposite points of view can both be rational without violating any laws of logic or physics.

Remember, situations where we get two accounts of the same event, but the versions are dramatically different, it’s because they’re informed by different facts and perspectives.

In other words, understanding the context is very important before announcing your verdict on what’s right or wrong.

38. Curiosity Kills the Cat, but You’re not a Cat Sometimes, when you’ve figured out the answer to a question, you realize that the path between the question and its answer was more interesting than the two endpoints.

Which means the journey that your curiosity takes you through becomes more rewarding than the end result. And the great thing about following your curiosity is that no one can stop you and you can keep going.

Follow the process. And the process is — keep scratching the itch of a probing mind and never letting the fire of inquisitiveness to die down.

Put simply, it doesn’t matter what question you begin with. What matters is —

How rigorously you chase the clues,

What assumptions you make to simplify a complex problem and transform it into a more useful one, and

How long you’re willing to remain discontent with your discoveries.

To expect to begin your quest with only intelligent questions could be overwhelming and you may never get started.

So, start small, start stupid and let your curiosity take you places.

39. Risk of Avoiding the Non-Risk In 2014, an AirAsia flight crashed into Java Sea killing all 162 people on board. Investigations revealed that it was caused by a pilot error because he performed a non-standard reset of the onboard flight control computers. Why did he do that? Because he wanted to get rid of a non-critical warning light that was flashing on his panel.

The gap between what’s risky and what feels risky is significant. The perception of risk is often misplaced in most people’s head.

Nick Maggiulli writes —

…you can hold 100% bonds and experience little short term volatility (i.e. low risk right?), but you now risk not having enough principal in the future after your portfolio battles against the scourge of inflation for multiple decades…remember that you are always taking risks. The key is understanding what risks you are taking and when you are taking them.

Risk and the perception of risk are two different beasts. What doesn’t seem to hurt in the short run lulls people into complacency and just when they feel the safest the storm of accumulated risk arrives with no advance notice and causes the blow-up.

III. LIFE 40. Weathering Life’s Storms In Kafka On The Shore, Murakami wrote –

Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn’t something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn’t get in, and walk through it, step by step. There’s no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That’s the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine.

And you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You’ll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others.

And once the storm is over you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.

41. Dealing with the Scary World In Aaron Thier’s wonderful new novel, The World Is A Narrow Bridge, there is a scene where Eva and Murphy, the two young prophets of the god Yahweh, are sent on a mission that terrifies them. As they begin the mission, Eva and Murphy are approached by Satan, who has been sent by Yahweh, to give them their final instructions. After Satan gives the instructions, he begins to leave for his next mission:

“You have to go so soon?” says Eva. “Right away?”

She looks devastated. Murphy, too, is unhappy. Satan frowns and chews on his lip. He doesn’t like to leave them like this.

“I’ll teach you a trick,” he says. “I’ll teach you an incantation that will protect against despair. If things are dark, and I’m not around to help, you can repeat it a few times and it’ll help.

It would go something like this: ‘The world is a narrow bridge, and the most important thing is not to be afraid.’”

Murphy and Eva both repeat this very slowly. Eva says, “That’s lovely.”

Satan nods. “Just repeat it to yourself when things are bad. You could try different translations too. ‘Do not make yourself afraid, the whole world is a narrow bridge.’

The point is this life we’re living—this world we inhabit—is a scary place. If you peer over the side of a narrow bridge, you can lose your heart to continue. You freeze up. You sit down. So too with life. If we think too much about the journey we have to make, the one that begins with the trauma of birth and ends with the tragedy of death, the one that is so perilous and unpredictable, we’ll never make it.

The important thing is that we are not afraid. That we don’t overthink things. That we don’t give way to fear, as the Stoics tell us over and over again. Just repeat it to yourself—The world is a narrow bridge and I will not be afraid—and keep going. Like the thousands of generations who have come before you.

42. Life’s Purpose and Meaning Tuesdays with Morrie was one of the best books I read in 2019. In one passage, the author wrote something that resonated well with me –

So many people walk around with a meaningless life. They seem half-asleep, even when they’re busy doing things they think are important. This is because they’re chasing the wrong things. The way you get meaning into your life is to devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning.

43. Hope and Fear Seneca wrote –

Limiting one’s desires actually helps to cure one of fear. ‘Cease to hope … and you will cease to fear.’ … Widely different [as fear and hope] are, the two of them march in unison like a prisoner and the escort he is handcuffed to. Fear keeps pace with hope … both belong to a mind in suspense, to a mind in a state of anxiety through looking into the future. Both are mainly due to projecting our thoughts far ahead of us instead of adapting ourselves to the present.

44. Power of Meditation Yuval Harari, the author of Sapiens, wrote this beautiful passage in his book –

According to Buddhism, the root of suffering is neither the feeling of pain nor of sadness nor even of meaninglessness. Rather, the real root of suffering is this never-ending and pointless pursuit of ephemeral feelings, which causes us to be in a constant state of tension, restlessness and dissatisfaction. Due to this pursuit, the mind is never satisfied. Even when experiencing pleasure, it is not content, because it fears this feeling might soon disappear, and craves that this feeling should stay and intensify.

People are liberated from suffering not when they experience this or that fleeting pleasure, but rather when they understand the impermanent nature of all their feelings, and stop craving them. This is the aim of Buddhist meditation practices. In meditation, you are supposed to closely observe your mind and body, witness the ceaseless arising and passing of all your feelings, and realise how pointless it is to pursue them. When the pursuit stops, the mind becomes very relaxed, clear and satisfied. All kinds of feelings go on arising and passing – joy, anger, boredom, lust – but once you stop craving particular feelings, you can just accept them for what they are. You live in the present moment instead of fantasising about what might have been. The resulting serenity is so profound that those who spend their lives in the frenzied pursuit of pleasant feelings can hardly imagine it. It is like a man standing for decades on the seashore, embracing certain ‘good’ waves and trying to prevent them from disintegrating, while simultaneously pushing back ‘bad’ waves to prevent them from getting near him. Day in, day out, the man stands on the beach, driving himself crazy with this fruitless exercise. Eventually, he sits down on the sand and just allows the waves to come and go as they please. How peaceful!

45. Karma One of the best books I read this year was No Shortcuts to the Top. This is an autobiography of Edmund Viesturs, wherein he documents his 16-year journey summitting all 14 of the world’s eight-thousander mountain peaks (more than 8,000 meters above sea level), and his strategies to manage risk in extreme environments.

In one beautiful passage from the book, Viesturs wrote –

Although I remain uncertain about God or any particular religion, I believe in karma. What goes around, comes around. How you live your life, the respect that you give others and the mountain, and how you treat people in general will come back to you in kindred fashion. I like to talk about what I call the Karma National Bank. If you give up the summit to help rescue someone who’s in trouble, you’ve put a deposit in that bank. And sometime down the road, you may need to make a big withdrawal.

46. Widening our Circles of Compassion Long before Carl Sagan wrote of compassion as our only mechanism for moving beyond “us vs. them,” Einstein wrote in 1950 –

A human being is part of a whole, called by us the “Universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

47. Humility In The Apology, the Greek philosopher Plato wrote that the oracle at Delphi had pronounced Socrates the wisest man in Athens.

No one was more astonished and disbelieving than Socrates himself. So, he immediately set out to disprove the oracle by finding a wiser man. Here is what Socrates found as he met a few supposedly wise men –

I went to one who had the reputation of wisdom, and observed to him – his name I need not mention; he was a politician whom I selected for examination – and the result was as follows: When I began to talk with him, I could not help thinking that he was not really wise, although he was thought wise by many, and wiser still by himself; and I went and tried to explain to him that he thought himself wise, but was not really wise; and the consequence was that he hated me, and his enmity was shared by several who were present and heard me.

So I left him, saying to myself, as I went away: Well, although I do not suppose that either of us knows anything really beautiful and good, I am better off than he is – for he knows nothing, and thinks that he knows. I neither know nor think that I know. In this latter particular, then, I seem to have slightly the advantage of him.

Then I went to another, who had still higher philosophical pretensions, and my conclusion was exactly the same. I made another enemy of him, and of many others besides him.

In the end, Socrates discovered he was indeed the wisest man in Athens. Not because of how much he knew, but because he was the only one who understood how much he did not know.

Knowing that you don’t know is the dawning of wisdom.

Knowing that you don’t know, accepting it and not being ashamed about it is the start of a continuing journey of wisdom.

Recognizing the darkness is the prerequisite for bringing on the light. Only when the darkness is brought out of hiding does the light have the opportunity to illuminate it.

48. Meaning of Life One of the best books I have read on the pursuit of the world’s highest peak, Mount Everest, is George Mallory’s Climbing Everest. George was possibly the first man to summit Everest (nobody knows whether he did it), almost 30 years before Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay began their ascent. It was during his third expedition to the Everest that he lost his life, last seen about 800 feet from the summit.

Anyways, all his writings on climbing are collected in Climbing Everest, which started out as letters to his wife Ruth. One of my favourite parts from the book is when George shared his response to one question asked by a journalist about why he would risk his life to attempt to reach the Everest.

His profound response outlines an undeniably powerful way to perceive life –

People ask me, ‘What is the use of climbing Mount Everest?’ and my answer must at once be, ‘It is of no use.’ There is not the slightest prospect of any gain whatsoever. Oh, we may learn a little about the behaviour of the human body at high altitudes, and possibly medical men may turn our observation to some account for the purposes of aviation. But otherwise nothing will come of it. We shall not bring back a single bit of gold or silver, not a gem, nor any coal or iron…

If you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won’t see why we go.

What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life. We do not live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to be able to live. That is what life means and what life is for.

What a beautiful, inspirational thought!

Life is never perfect. And as George wrote, living is not just about eating and making money.

Facing adversities and challenges head on, and stepping away from what is comfortable and familiar to us and into the unknown, is what often brings us real joy.

That’s what gets us life’s real worth.

49. Triumph and Disaster One of the most life-changing books I have ever read is Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. The book is a chronicle by Frankl of his experiences as a German Nazi concentration camp inmate during World War II.

In this book, Frankl describes his psychotherapeutic method, which involved identifying a purpose in life to feel positively about, and then immersively imagining that outcome.

The central theme of Frankl’s book is ‘survival.’ Although he witnessed and experienced horror, the book focuses less on the details of his own experience and more on how his time under Nazi rule showed him the human ability to survive and endure against all odds.

As Frankl wrote, he saw the lowest parts of humanity while in the camps. He saw fellow prisoners promoted to be in-camp guards turning on their fellow prisoners. He watched as they beat their lifeless, malnourished campmates. He watched sadistic guards treating them as if they were lower than animals. But he also saw individuals rising up like saints above it all.

The part that impacted me the most from the book was this –

When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves…Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

Life (investing included) isn’t easy. And unlike, what we imagine in both scenarios of triumphs and disasters, life isn’t supposed to move in a straight line of happiness and smiles, or sadness and pain. It’s not supposed to stay the same, just like you’re not supposed to stay the same.

Life is evolving and changing. It is a constant surge of ups and downs, twists and turns, and as Rudyard Kipling said, “…triumphs and disasters.” Like you have your happy and blissful moments, you are supposed to feel pain, get hurt, and experience losses occasionally. And some of them can be really bad!

Now, that does not mean that you deserve every bit of the sadness, defeats, and tragedies that life hands over to you. It’s just part of the journey that we are walking through. It’s just part of what makes us human.

50. Meditating on Mortality Meditation on mortality (that we are going to die one day) is one of the oldest practices in all Buddhist traditions. In the words of the Buddha, “…of all the footprints, that of the elephant is supreme. Similarly, of all mindfulness meditation, that on death is supreme.”

But why should we contemplate our own death while we are still alive?

“It cures you,” the Bhutanese say. Not just the Hindu and Buddhist scriptures, even Stoicism talks about Memento Mori that is the practice of reflection on mortality, especially as a means of considering the vanity of earthly life and the transient nature of all earthly goods and pursuits.

Now, the thing about meditating on your own mortality is that it doesn’t make life pointless. Instead, knowing that you will die one day creates priority and thinking about it helps you live with a more positive perspective. So you can focus on what’s important.

Death is, however, a subject mostly shunned by our cultures and societies. Nothing explains this resistance better than what the American actor and comedian Woody Allen said in one of his movies, “It’s not that I’m afraid of dying; it’s just that I don’t want to be there when it happens.”

51. What Papa Taught Me I lost my father late this year. Papa was a genuinely good man – good in a pure, innocent, unfailing way. He wanted, more than anything, to do good in the world, to always do the right thing. That is one attribute I picked up from him, and I thank God I did that.

Another thing I learned from Papa was that the best life one could live was not one in which a person did big, great things that influenced the lives of millions, but one in which you made a difference in the part of the world you touched, no matter how small.

He said that a life in which you helped only one person because that was the only opportunity you had to help someone else was just as great a life as that of someone who changed the lives of millions.

Perhaps the best way I can celebrate Papa’s life is to try as hard as I can to walk in the world with the same compassion, humility, love, and joy that he carried with him so that the light of his life will not extinguish even after the passing of his mortal body.

“Your parents, they give you your life, but then they try to give you their life,” said Chuck Palahniuk, the noted American fiction novelist.

Papa, I realize now, gave me his life. I hope I stand up to it.

Thank You Before I close, let me share with you the Serenity Prayer that has helped me a lot in facing my personal, professional, and investing turmoils. I am sure if you keep this prayer close to your mind and heart, it will help you face your own turmoils well, including those related to your investing.

The Serenity Prayer

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, And wisdom to know the difference.

~ Reinhold Niebuhr

I wish you a happy, healthy, and peaceful 2020.

With respect, Vishal

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Move over oil, Big Data is the new fuel to run the world

The centrepiece of Canada’s innovation strategy is the $950-million “supercluster” initiative. The goal, according to the federal government, is for companies of all sizes, academia and the non-profit sector to collaborate on new technologies, to spur economic growth and create jobs. As part of the Innovation Nation series, the Financial Post is taking an in-depth look at each of the five regional projects, and provide continuing coverage of their progress. You can find all of our coverage here.

Drugs tailored to a person’s genetics don’t appear to have a lot in common with airplane assembly line simulations or smart devices that monitor tree cutting in remote forests.

But all three technologies are among the first to get funding from British Columbia’s digital technology supercluster, one of five innovation hubs the federal government is investing $950 million in over five years in hopes of spawning world-leading technologies and companies.

Innovation, Science and Economic Development granted the B.C. hub $153 million, with 29 members pitching in another $200 million. An additional 500 organizations including non-profits have signed on as associates without making a financial commitment.

The West Coast cluster is an amalgamation of post-secondary institutions and large and small businesses from sectors including health care, mining, forestry and aerospace.

What unites these disparate players is big data and, more critically, a need to analyze the huge volumes of information being collected. Some say the ability to analyze this data could become the currency that fuels every element of the economy, much like oil was the currency of the last century.

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“Just like oil coming out of the ground is not a very useful resource, data that’s swirling around in big pools is not a very useful resource,” Sue Paish, chief executive of the digital technology supercluster, said. “But if you can actually extract the data that you need, analyze it, refine it, leverage it, deploy it, monetize it, it becomes an incredibly powerful part of society.”

Paish knows she’s not the first to make the analogy between oil and data, a comparison often drawn by major tech executives despite the former’s finite nature and the seeming limitlessness of the latter, but she believes the digital technology supercluster can unlock big data’s potential.

The cluster formed after the federal government announced its supercluster funding plan in the 2016 budget. It anticipated a regional distribution of money, Paish said, and wanted to have a strong proposal for B.C.

Realizing that the province has a depth of digital knowledge in sectors ranging from entertainment and gaming to health care and resource extraction, Paish said the group decided to focus on “harnessing the power of the data that’s being created, but not leveraged.”

Only 0.8 per cent of all data collected is ever analyzed, according to a 2018 white paper by research firm IDC. That amount is expected to go up to one per cent by 2020, IDC senior vice-president John Gantz said in an email.

But that still leaves an almost unfathomable amount of untouched data, since the overall amount of data collected is expected to hit 175 zettabytes (one ZB is a trillion gigabytes) in 2025 from 33 ZB in 2018, according to IDC estimates. (One zettabyte is enough data to stream one trillion movies.)

Paish said there’s a competitive advantage to be had for the first jurisdiction that becomes known for successfully analyzing big data. Collaborating across industries is expected to help B.C.’s supercluster do just that.

“The best innovation and the best deployments of innovation come from different perspectives coming together around a table,” she said. “It’s harder to come to a final product or a final plan, but that final plan is richer.”

More specifically, the digital technology supercluster intends to develop data visualization tools such as mapping and virtual reality; data analysis tools like cloud and quantum computing; and data collection tools such as the Internet of Things and data repositories. It will apply these tools in the precision health, natural resources and industrial sectors.

Over the next five to 10 years, the supercluster hopes the projects it funds will create 13,000 jobs and increase Canada’s gross domestic product by $5 billion.

One of the supercluster’s major players is Telus Corp. The telecom, which has a health division that serves 22,000 physicians and 6,300 pharmacies, is involved in a pharmacogenomics project that is studying how genetics affect a person’s reaction to different drugs. Other partners in the project include GenXys Health Care Systems Inc., LifeLabs BC LP and Genome B.C.

The supercluster’s mix of big and smaller companies is important, because it gives large organizations a chance to focus on new ideas around the common theme of data, said Ohad Arazi, Telus Health’s chief strategy officer, while also giving smaller players the ability to strike deals that could help commercialize their research.

“The reality is that innovation is very difficult for big companies,” he said. “They have to continue delivering value; it’s hard to step back and pursue innovative ideas.”

Arazi sees the supercluster as an opportunity for B.C. players to band together and develop global ambitions, a goal echoed by other members including the University of British Columbia.

“This is a really exciting opportunity for post-secondary and industry to come together to build disruptive technology to really help make sure Canada is at the lead creating the knowledge economy,” said Gail Murphy, UBC’s vice-president of research and innovation.

UBC is participating in a digital twin project, which is creating a simulation of two complex industrial production lines used to make Boeing Co. aircraft parts. This “learning factory” will enable Boeing and partners — including AMPD Game Technologies Ltd., a Vancouver-based video-game company; Avcorp Industries Inc., an aircraft supply chain company in Delta, B.C.; and LlamaZOO, a Victoria-based 3D data visualization company  — to test new factory processes in real time.

On top of the learning factory’s industry applications, Murphy said it can give students a chance to develop the talent and skills that companies are looking for. Projects such as these also show the value in sharing ideas and collaborating, something she said would be very hard to do without supercluster funding.

“It’s breaking down barriers,” she said. “Having Microsoft and Finger Food Studios at the same table as Canfor and TimberWest and Telus, that kind of cross-sectoral discussion, in my experience, doesn’t happen a lot in regular life.”

Collaboration across industries is part of what drew mining giant Teck Resources Ltd. and space robotics company MDA Corp. to the supercluster. Both have pledged funding, although neither is participating in one of the initial projects.

“We see there being tremendous opportunity,” said Victoria Sterritt, Teck’s lead of technology and innovation.

Teck already uses data extensively, such as getting information from X-ray sensors on its shovels to distinguish between ore and waste, and from remotely operated bulldozers, which use automation to extract coal from otherwise unstable areas of a pit.

Industries can be fairly insular, Sterritt said, but Teck sees an opportunity to share knowledge across sectors rather than talk only to other miners.

“We understand we just can’t get to as good of a result on our own,” she said.

Chris Pogue, president of MDA Government and a veteran of the Canadian Air Force, agreed that having variety around the table is more effective, even if it is messier.

“A certain amount of chaos is healthy, to be quite frank,” he said.

Given MDA’s line of work, it is well aware of the challenges of analyzing vast amounts of data. “We’ve been dealing with the big data problem as a space agency before anyone called it big data,” Pogue said. The company plans to work on virtual and augmented reality projects as part of the cluster.

Joining together to grapple challenges that companies such as MDA previously tackled alone is the crux of the strategy behind the supercluster since researchers believe in cross-pollinating ideas.

Catherine Beaudry, Canada Research Chair on the Creation, Development and the Commercialization of Innovation at Polytechnique Montréal, said innovation often results from combining knowledge pools that already exist.

“Mixing and matching from different sectors can be highly beneficial,” she said. “Learning from one another and not having to do everything from scratch within a silo, I think that’s very, very important.”

As an example, Beaudry pointed to the aerospace industry’s link to the gaming community through the use of technologies such as flight simulators.

As for the risks in collaborating, she said partners have to be careful with intellectual property management, but could potentially benefit from casting a wider geographical net beyond B.C.

“Our superclusters are very much seen as a Canadian experiment,” she said.

Of course, the idea of concentrating regional players to spark innovation isn’t new. It dates back to U.S. economist Michael Porter’s theories from the 1990s, but it has become a buzzword as politicians around the world strive to create their own Silicon Valleys.

Rune Dahl Fitjar, a professor at the University of Stavanger Business School in Norway who studies what types of interactions lead to innovation, said he has found very little evidence about the effectiveness of cluster policies, but said they continue to appeal to policy-makers trying to stimulate industry development.

“It’s the need to appear to be doing something,” he said.

Fitjar said companies that look beyond a particular region to find international partners tend to find the most success.

“The wisest way to go is trying to improve diversity,” he said, adding that a multi-industry approach may help develop new ideas closer to home. “Going across sectors is helpful, because it then makes it easier to find emergent industries that can benefit and can also participate. It helps companies go beyond the networks they develop anyway.”

• Email: ejackson@nationalpost.com | Twitter: theemilyjackson

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Colorado Brewers Pour Over Heritage and History to Honor Cultural Traditions

Brewers pull from their culture and traditions to impact U.S. craft beer. (Credit: From the Hip Photo)

November 22, 2017

No sooner had humans erected the world’s first cities than they turned their attentions to fermenting beverages that could tame the stresses of their newfound urban lifestyles. Beer, one of several alcoholic elixirs developed along with permanent settlements, became an integral component of most of the world’s ancient and present civilizations. From a potion associated with divinity to a drink steeped in the folklore of blue-collar America, beer has since filled many important roles throughout human history.

However, today’s modern iteration of craft brews as a conduit to rant on social media about mouthfeel, nonics and “Vinnie nails” can make it seem like good beer has been entirely co-opted by beer literati, leaving the rest of us Joe Swiggers, who can’t tell a Brettanomyces from a brontosaurus, to twiddle our thumbs on the sidelines.

To bring back beer traditions and culture to “the people,” several innovative brewers in Colorado have taken it upon themselves to scour time and geography. Some are looking toward antiquity for inspiration while others are stepping no further than grandma’s pantry.

(READ: American Pale Ale is the Style that Changed Everything)

Brewer Borrows from His Mexican Heritage

Javier Pérez, founder of Cheluna Brewing, uses Mexican culture to influence his beers. (Credit: From the Hip Photo)

“I want to create beer that isn’t intimidating and to have Mexican cuisine and culture influence our beers,” says Javier Pérez, founder of Cheluna Brewing Company in Aurora, Colorado. “My wife and I want beer to be like food; before food becomes a gourmet, high-end dish served and priced to pay off someone’s culinary school loans, it’s first about common people creating amazing meals in grandma’s kitchen, and we want our beer to be about celebrating those common people coming together. I love that I can walk into our brewery and it feels like it’s my living room filled with friends.”

While Pérez revels in the Mexicanism of Cheluna, he also welcomes American sensibilities to play a role in how his beers are marketed, especially to Hispanic people. Despite Mexico’s cultural wealth, the country of 125 million inhabitants has at times struggled to craft inclusive messages in its pop culture. La India María, a famous indigenous television character whose buffoonery in Mexican slapstick comedies has been the topic of social justice grievances in many a collegiate theses, is just one example of mainstream disaffection toward ethnic minorities. Pérez says he wants to develop an IPA rendition paying tribute to Mexican indigenous women instead of mocking them.

“I want to make an IPA that’s really, really hoppy and call it La India Pale Ale, but our logo for it would be a Zapotec tribal woman, maybe with a rifle or something, so we don’t think of La India as an ignorant, barefoot person, but as a warrior who is intelligent and strong.”

(READ: Advice for Your Next Bottle Share)

Some of the many nods to Mexican culture and cuisine served up at Cheluna include a mezcal barrel-aged blackberry imperial stout, a German-style witbier with habanero and chile (reminiscent of a popular street food treat in Mexico), a tamarind gose, and a porter infused with cacao, vanilla and toasted coconut. The Rozha hibiscus lager, the brewery’s most visually striking beverage, is Cheluna’s take on agua de Jamaica, a refreshing hibiscus tea sold in street stalls throughout all of Mexico.

If you visit this colorful taproom in Aurora, you can also expect to be served complimentary peanuts with lime and chile, Mexican style. Prepackaged bags of these delicious snacks are also available for purchase, in case you want to continue the fiesta at home.

Cheluna Brewing brews a gose with tamarind. (Credit: From the Hip Photo)

Another brewery dabbling with Mexican ingredients is the Epic Brewing Company. In August, Epic and Mexico City’s Casa Cervecera Cru Cru brewed a beer together as part of an 18-brewery binational endeavor spearheaded by the Brewers Association (publishers of CraftBeer.com), ACERMEX (Mexican Craft Beer Association), and the USDA office in Mexico City.

“It was a really good experience,” says Matthew Allred, communications director at Epic. “The head brewers from Cru Cru and Epic got together stateside to make Chapuline Gose, a gose seasoned with crickets and an interesting critter called an agave worm.”

(VISIT: Find a U.S. Brewery)

Although the ingredients might sound exotic, the flavor profile of the beer keeps with how a more conventional gose would taste.

“The crickets mostly contribute in color and add a bit of earthiness and smokiness,” Allred says. “The agave worm salt does add a bit of a spicy punch, but overall, it tastes like a gose.”

The beer goes on sale at the end of November.

Recreating Ancient Beer Recipes

Not many breweries can boast about having an in-house “beer archeologist,” so Avery Brewing’s Travis Rupp takes his title seriously. He says the position came about as a fusion of his two professions: researching and developing beer for Avery and teaching archaeology and ancient history at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

“When I was working in the taproom as a bartender, a bunch of employees asked if they could come to one of my lectures to listen in,” Rupp recalls. “Once a month, I would go buy a selection of beer that was BJCP (Beer Judge Certification Program) true-to-style, then I would give a lecture about the beer style and history. Once I moved into production, I started to put together more formal presentations at the production meetings.”

In his research, Rupp discovered there were large gaps in the documentation of certain beers in history, so he set out to find out everything he could about those beers. Not satisfied with knowledge unapplied, he decided to recreate the beers as best he could in the modern age, which led to the production of his line of beers, Ales of Antiquity.

(READ: Women’s Evolving Contributions to Beer)

The series focuses primarily on what common people drank, not royalty. It includes an ancient Mycenaean-inspired beer from 1600-1100 BC brewed with 6-row barley, einkorn wheat, acorn flour, figs, and elderberries. There’s also a ninth-century Viking beer brewed with Scandinavian malt, juniper berries, juniper branches, and baker’s yeast.

The painstaking process for creating these beers has had some significant and at times hilarious missteps. Pachamama, a corn beer intended to replicate ancient Peruvian chicha had to be adapted to contemporary times after a bout with historical accuracy proved that sometimes the past is best left in the past.

In the original Chancay culture of the 1000-1400 A.D. period, chicha was produced by chewing a combination of corn, quinoa and beans and spitting the pulp into a mash so the saliva enzymes could stimulate natural fermentation. When Rupp enlisted the staff of Avery to chomp and spit corn into mash, the whole process took so long that the whole mixture solidified into a rock-hard mass that jammed the system. Rupp now uses an extract to simulate the effects of saliva.

Live and learn!

Brewers Pull Inspiration from Their Culture

There are other newcomers to Colorado’s beer scene hoping to focus on heritage ingredients and processes. Judd Belstock, one of the founders of Denver’s upcoming Dos Luces Brewery, says his brewery will be about reimagining beer.

Chapulin Gose is a collaboration from Epic Brewing and Mexico’s Casa Cervecera Cru Cru. (Credit: Epic Brewing)

“The core idea of what we’re trying to do is to create a world where what we think of beer isn’t limited to barley, hops, yeast and water,” Belstock says. The brewery, slated to open in the spring of 2018, will specialize in chicha and pulque, the traditional Mexican drink made from the sap of the maguey plant (an agave variety).

Like Rupp, Belstock will use purchased enzymes to ferment the chicha as opposed to trying to do it with saliva.

“I have no interest in doing 500-pound batches through chewing corn,” Belstock chuckles.

(LEARN: Beer 101 Online Course)

Although he is adapting the recipe a bit for the modern age, he stresses that the ingredients will be sourced either from their indigenous origins or from local suppliers.

“I want to honor the cultures from which I’m borrowing,” he says. “But also, if you think about what inspires craft brewers in general, if you look back five- or six-thousand years ago, it’s making use of the local ingredients and technologies at hand.”

His pulque offerings will be hybridized with corn.

“Sour beer junkies will immediately recognize pulque’s flavor profile as familiar,” says Belstock. “Pulque is pretty easy to explain to people, I just say it’s basically a beer made out of mezcal.”

Sean Guerrero and his family lived in China, and his brewery, Jade Mountain, explores Chinese culture. (Credit: Jade Mountain Facebook Page)

Also opening in Denver in the spring of 2018 is Jade Mountain (current proposed site is on 1925 South Rosemary St., Suite D), a brewery that originated in Asia when Sean Guerrero and his wife, Jojo, moved their family from Denver to Huzhou, China.

“Surprisingly, there’s not much to opening up a brewery in China,” Guerrero says. “There is no licensing required, so I rented a small tea house, remodeled it and turned it into a small brewhouse.”

(READ: Brewery Accepting Your Old T-Shirts from Former Craft Breweries)

Guerrero, who was born and raised in Denver, says he is proud to share part of his adopted culture with his fellow American beer drinkers.

“I felt a little bit lost with my own culture because I’m Hispanic but my parents and grandparents never spoke Spanish,” Guerrero says. “So when I met my wife and traveled throughout China, I got assimilated into what they were doing. Now I’m fluent in Chinese, my kids are half Chinese and the whole experience gave me more of an identity than I had before, so I hope to share some of that through beer.”

Many of the ingredients will be imported directly from China with some guidance from Guerrero’s wife.

“My wife helps me understand each ingredient,” Guerrero says. “She’s a scientist at the University of Denver so she is good with helping with different yeasts and she’s also great with pairing various flavors.”

Some of the more exotic elements found in the beers served at Jade Mountain will include bamboo leaves and shoots, hawthorn berries, jasmine, osmanthus flowers and other herbs and sweet woods Guerrero says he cannot name in English.

So what is next stage in the evolution of beer?

“The future has yet to be written,” says Steve Kurowski, director of operation at the Colorado’s Brewers Guild. “It’s impossible to predict how these creative minds are going to innovate this classic historic liquid.”

Efraín VillaAuthor Website

Efraín is a photographer, actor, writer and global wanderer whose endless quest for randomness has taken him to more than 50 countries in five continents. His writing has appeared on NPR’s Weekend Edition, the Good Men Project, TravelWorld International Magazine, Zymurgy, as well as Spanish language publications. While not running his consulting firm in Albuquerque, he is busy devouring exotic foods in faraway countries and avoiding adulthood while wearing the least amount of clothes possible. His travel stories dealing with the messiness, humor and beauty of cultural collisions can be found on his website: Aimless Vagabond. Read more by this author

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51 Ideas from 2019

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.

I. INVESTING 1. Don’t Be Blind to Alternative Histories Nassim Taleb writes in Fooled by Randomness –

…one cannot judge a performance in any given field (war, politics, medicine, investments) by the results, but by the costs of the alternative (i.e., if history played out in a different way). Such substitute courses of events are called alternative histories. Clearly, the quality of a decision cannot be solely judged based on its outcome, but such a point seems to be voiced only by people who fail (those who succeed attribute their success to the quality of their decision).

We are blind to alternative histories – those silent events that could have happened but didn’t. In the language of behavioural finance this irrationality is known as Survivorship Bias. The outcome which is visible, ‘survived’ and the ones which didn’t survive are hidden. As Taleb writes –

Imagine an eccentric (and bored) tycoon offering you $10 million to play Russian roulette, i.e., to put a revolver containing one bullet in the six available chambers to your head and pull the trigger. Each realization would count as one history, for a total of six possible histories of equal probabilities. Five out of these six histories would lead to enrichment; one would lead to a statistic, that is, an obituary with an embarrassing (but certainly original) cause of death.

The problem is that only one of the histories is observed in reality; and the winner of $10 million would elicit the admiration and praise of some fatuous journalist (the very same ones who unconditionally admire the Forbes 500 billionaires).

Like almost every executive I have encountered during an eighteen-year career on Wall Street (the role of such executives in my view being no more than a judge of results delivered in a random manner), the public observes the external signs of wealth without even having a glimpse at the source. Consider the possibility that the Russian roulette winner would be used as a role model by his family, friends, and neighbors.

In effect, the general belief is that if the outcome is good, the process and decisions made to arrive at that outcome must have been sound. Alas, life doesn’t follow such straight patterns. The randomness and ‘external factors’ play a defining role in life and investing.

2. Give Due Credit to Luck The world of investing, like most things in life, produces success stories and failures. It’s human nature to wish to copy success. However, the ironic truth is this: To accept success at face value without acknowledging the role of luck is a strategy for failure.

But it’s also important to note that luck, like love, is a verb. It requires dedication and effort and the conviction and courage to act. Like the father of value investing, Ben Graham, wrote –

…behind the luck, or the crucial decision, there must usually exist a background of preparation and disciplines capacity.

3. Avoid Ruin You or me are not the market. Earning the long-term returns of the market, of the past or the future, is not in our control. Managing our risks and avoiding ruin, mostly is.

“Rationality is avoidance of systemic ruin,” Nassim Taleb writes.

Trying to avoid the ruin the stock market system enforces upon people who disregard its workings is rational. Believing that you can beat the system at it, by playing the game mindlessly, isn’t.

Peter Bernstein writes in his brilliant book Against the Gods –

Survival is the only road to riches. Let me say that again: Survival is the only road to riches.

4. Obsession with Outcomes is Damaging Most investment experts selling their services always highlight the outcome – so much return in so many months or years – and never the process they used to get this outcome. This is simply because, while the outcome is there for everyone to see (availability bias), investors rarely ask the question whether that outcome was due to the skill of the expert (a proper investment process) or merely luck.

This is not to say that results don’t matter; obviously they are extremely important in measuring success. But if the results have been largely thanks to luck, they may not come in as expected in the future.

What is more, if you focus only on the outcome, you are less likely to achieve it. Instead, if you focus on the process, the outcome will take care of itself.

But then, as published in here –

Despite the problems of using results as a barometer of decision quality, it remains endemic in investment. We use outcomes as a simple indicator and then weave narratives around these views. We take a difficult problem, simplify it (are results good or bad?) and then create a story to justify the outcome. This pattern of behaviour is evident in a range of poor investment decisions, such as: susceptibility to financial frauds, participation in investment bubbles, performance chasing and excessive short-term trading.

5. Seek Wealth, Not Money or Status Here’s an excerpt from an insightful discussion that Naval Ravikant had with Babak Nivi –

Nivi: What’s the difference between wealth, money, and status?

Naval: Wealth is the thing that you really want. Wealth is assets that earn while you sleep. Wealth is the factory, the robots that’s cranking out things. Wealth is the computer program that’s running at night, that’s serving other customer. Wealth is… even money in the bank that is being reinvested into other assets, and into other businesses. Even a house can be a form of wealth because you can rent it out, although that’s probably a lower use of productivity of land than actually doing some commercial enterprise. So, my definition of wealth is much more businesses and assets that can earn while you sleep. But really the reason you want wealth is because it buys you your freedom.

So, you don’t have to wear a tie like a collar around your neck. So, you don’t have to wake up at 7:00 AM, and rush to work, and sit in commute traffic. So, you don’t have to waste away your entire life grinding all the productive hours away into a soulless job that doesn’t fulfill you.

6. Warren Buffett’s Checklist I recently came across a video of Warren Buffett talking to a few B-School students on his trip to India in 2011.

The host asked him this question – What exactly goes through your mind when you’re actually making an investment?

Buffett’s reply to this question was brilliant for it contained the crux of everything he has said over the years about how to evaluate a certain business and it’s future economic potential (text in bold and brackets are mine) –

Well, if I drive by a McDonald’s stand or a Kentucky Fried Chicken stand I will automatically think to myself “What is this business worth?”

You know, how many customers can walk in the door (demand, scalability, growth potential)? What kind of gross margins (profitability, pricing power) can they have? How many people do they need (scalability)? How likely is it that another chicken stand opens across the street (competition, entry barriers, moat)?

I mean, all of those things. And that’s true of the chicken stand and it’s true of Google or you name the business. I mean, it’s all about evaluating the economic potential, the economic future of a given business. And most of them you don’t know the answer on (say no to most businesses, because you really don’t understand them).

But every now and then you run into one where you know the answer (simple businesses). But that’s all business is.

It’s what Aesop said a long time ago: “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.” (well, that’s the definition of discounted cash flow) You know, that was said in 600 BC and that’s now what’s called discounted cash flow and all that sort of thing. But he saw that and figured it out, you know, twenty-six hundred years ago. And all I’m trying to figure out is if I could take that dollar in my hand: When do I get the two dollars out of the bush (timing of future cash flows)? How sure am I of getting it out of the bush (certainty of future cash flows)? Is there some other bush where I can get three dollars out of it instead (opportunity costs, better alternatives)?

I mean, it’s very basic stuff (investing is simple, you see, but only if you keep it simple). And a lot of times you look at it and you say “I don’t know how many birds there will be in the bush.” (complex businesses, or those that undergo a lot of changes due to nature of industry, competition, etc.) So you go in to the next one until you find the answer (you just need a few good ideas in a lifetime).

Buffett, once more, makes it clear that rather than obsessing with the bewildering fusion of news and noise, you should concentrate on a few key elements in stock selection.

7. Know Thyself Taleb again from Fooled by Randomness –

It certainly takes bravery to remain skeptical; it takes inordinate courage to introspect, to confront oneself, to accept one’s limitations – scientists are seeing more and more evidence that we are specifically designed by mother nature to fool ourselves.

One of the most underrated but among the most valuable skills required to succeed in stock market investing is resilience i.e., the ability to properly adapt to stress and adversity – either in the market or in the businesses one is owning.

How easily can you bounce back from a market crash? What would be your reaction to a sharp decline in your stocks’ prices? How many ‘surprises’ can you withstand in quick succession? How safe are your overall finances in light of extreme stress on the equity component of your portfolio?

As Taleb says, we are anyways designed by mother nature to fool ourselves. But don’t forget what the noted financial writer George J.W. Goodman – who used the pen name of Adam Smith – wrote in his wonderful book, The Money Game –

If you don’t know who you are, this is an expensive place to find out.

8. Keep It Simple, Please In stock investing, often we focus so much on trying too hard that either we never start working on the process of picking up great businesses (seeing the enormity of the task), or we start believing that our immense hard work and knowledge gives us great control over the future of stocks we own.

The reality is that, no matter how hard we try to analyze the intricacies of business, we may not be as important to the results as we’d like to think we are.

Like Seth Klarman wrote in Margin of Safety –

Investors frequently benefit from making investment decisions with less than perfect knowledge and are well rewarded for bearing the risk of uncertainty.

The time other investors spend delving into the last unanswered detail may cost them the chance to buy in at prices so low that they offer a margin of safety despite the incomplete information.

9. Investing’s False Positives The field of medicine has a term called “false positive.” It is an erroneous result that indicates that a given condition is present when it is not. An example of a false positive would be if a medical test designed to detect cancer returns a positive result (that the person has cancer) when, in reality, the person does not have cancer.

While medicine’s false positives often create panic about things that turn out to be nothing to worry about, investing’s false positives create euphoria about things that should have been worrisome in the first place.

And the underlying reason is that most people out there in the stock market judge the quality of their investment decisions by one single factor – the short-term price movement of the underlying security. And that’s exactly what they are looking forward to while making the investment, even while talking about the virtues of long-term investing and the need to ignore short-term price movements.

Noted French writer and philosopher Voltaire said –

It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong.

10. Doing Nothing is Hard The idea of buying and holding high-quality businesses over a long period of time is simple. Everyone knows that, and even those who don’t practice it appreciate that this works with most high-quality businesses as history has proven time and again.

But then, it’s important to understand that the action of not doing anything over such a long period of time involves hundreds of decisions over months and years that lead to such inaction.

Of course, one way is to buy stocks and forget for 20 years and hope to end up with a fortune. There are quite a few such fairy tales you may have heard of. But the other side of the picture is that countless people have also ended with duds in their portfolios, or vanished companies, when they realized their father or grandfather had bought some stocks and forgot about them for 20 or more years.

11. Being Prepared In one of his lectures published in Poor Charlie’s Almanack, Charlie Munger said this –

Our experience tends to confirm a long-held notion that being prepared, on a few occasions in a lifetime, to act promptly in scale, in doing some simple and logical thing, will often dramatically improve the financial results of the lifetime.

A few major opportunities, clearly recognizable as such, will usually come to one who continuously searches and waits, with a curious mind, loving diagnosis involving multiple variables.

And then all that is required is a willingness to bet heavily when the odds are extremely favourable, using resources available as a result of prudence and patience in the past.

What Charlie says here is that it pays to be prepared in your investing life – prepared not just for the risks that may be lurking around the corner, but also for opportunities that may appear anytime.

Ironically, we are often prepared for none, and that is what causes us grief during the market’s ups (when we keep sitting on the sidelines) and downs (when we are enjoying the madness of the party).

Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca wrote in Letters from a Stoic –

Everyone faces up more bravely to a thing for which he has long prepared himself, sufferings, even, being withstood if they have been trained for in advance. Those who are unprepared, on the other hand, are panic-stricken by the most insignificant happenings.

12. Seek Uncertainty Mohnish Pabrai wrote in his brilliant book The Dhandho Investor –

Wall Street sometimes gets confused between risk and uncertainty, and you can profit handsomely from that confusion. The Street just hates uncertainty, and it demonstrates that hate by collapsing the quoted stock price of the underlying business. Here are a few scenarios that are likely to lead to a depressed stock price:

High risk, low uncertainty High risk, high uncertainty Low risk, high uncertainty

The fourth logical combination, low risk and low uncertainty, is loved by Wall Street, and stock prices of these securities sport some of the highest trading multiples. Avoid investing in these businesses. Of the three, the only one of interest to us connoisseurs of the fine art of Dhandho is the low-risk, high-uncertainty combination, which gives us our most sought after coin-toss odds. Heads, I win; tails, I don’t lose much!

While value investors are typically averse to taking high risks, that’s more a reflection of the price they’re willing to pay for any given investment than the types of situations they most often pursue, which are often fraught with uncertainty.

As businesses constantly evolve and change in response to challenges and opportunities, the lack of clarity around those changes. And the risks inherent in the potential outcomes can cause share prices to diverge widely from underlying business values.

The ability to recognize and capitalize upon that dynamic, and understand whether it’s temporary or permanent, is a key element of what sets the best investors apart.

13. Why Most People Will Never Be Good at Investing …because most people in the stock market, most of the time, don’t do investing, which is…

Thinking how markets work,

Understanding how people behave,

Studying businesses,

Sticking only with what is simple and what they understand, and

Buying stocks at appropriate valuations.

Instead, they are busy…

Envying (others making money fast or losing money slow),

Cloning (others’ stock ideas mindlessly),

Predicting (future of markets, stock prices, and economy),

Fearing (missing out on future gains),

Regretting (past mistakes),

Avoiding (accepting current mistakes),

Denying (reality, especially when it’s harsh), and

Indulging (in useless information and noise)

And if that’s not all, these often lead us to –

Trading (frequently, which adds to our costs),

Averaging down (on bad businesses),

Boasting (about our lucky short-term gains), and sometimes

Trolling (other investors on social media, who have not performed as well as us in the recent past).

With such a busy schedule, where is the time to practice investing?

14. Pay Attention In the story The Adventure of Silver Blaze, Sherlock Holmes asked Inspector Gregory to consider a curious incident involving a dog. Gregory replied that nothing happened, and Holmes proclaimed, “That was the curious incident.” This clue enabled Holmes to deduce that the culprit must have been someone familiar to the victim’s dog. Most people would miss this important clue because most people, like Gregory, pay little attention to nonevents.

Now, some information is always available, but some is always silent – and it will remain silent unless we actively stir it up. In investing, such information that remains silent – or that you fail to notice – can be dangerous to your capital.

To pay attention means to pay attention to it all, to engage actively, to take everything around us, including those things that don’t appear when they rightly should. It means asking important questions and making sure we get answers.

Even when you do this, you may not be able to emerge with the entire situation in hand, and you may end up making a choice that, upon further reflection, is not the right one after all. But it won’t be for the lack of trying.

15. Be a Curator of Stocks, Not Warehouse Manager We spend the first half of our lives adding things, and the second half subtracting most of them.

Investing follows life, and this is also what a lot of investors end up doing. They create crowded warehouses of portfolios in the initial years of their investment careers, realize most of their choices were mistakes, and then they start subtracting vigorously.

Lest you lose out on the positive compounding timeframe, you will do yourself a world of good by respecting and practicing this lesson – of saying no to most things, of not adding a lot of unwanted stocks to your portfolios – early.

In other words, be a curator of stocks, not a warehouse manager.

16. Bharat Shah on Investing Successfully One of the best theories I have read on the importance of investing in high-quality businesses in the Indian context comes from Bharat Shah of ASK Group, who has written a book (sad, it’s not available publicly) titled “Of Long Term Value and Wealth Creation from Equity Investing.”

I recently came across his old interview where he shared his insights on value investing and how he formed his investment process and principles. A passage from the interview reads thus (emphasis mine) –

…successful long-term investing calls for two vital technical capabilities or craft and two personality traits. While craft can be honed and refined by observing and absorbing, character traits have to come from within and be developed.

The two essential skills are: ability to comprehend and grasp the true character and the innards of diverse businesses as well as the ability to value them. Till these abilities are developed, one cannot become a good investor.

The two vital character traits are: discipline (or temperament) and wisdom. Discipline lies in investing only into quality businesses and the temperament of not getting carried away by the fads of the markets and buying such quality businesses only at a meaningful margin of safety.

17. Biggest Financial Regrets One of my favourite financial writers, Barry Ritholtz, wrote about the biggest financial regrets people have. This was based on a survey of over 2000 people by American life insurer giant New York Life, and found these as the biggest financial regrets –

Image Source: Biggest Financial Regrets – Barry Ritholtz Barry concluded thus, and I completely agree with this –

The sooner you begin to accept mistakes are inevitable, stop beating yourself up over them, and just fix what is not working, the faster the compounding can start.

18. No Stock is Safe The bulls may want you to believe this, but no stock is safe.

There are businesses that may remain good (earning return on capital greater than cost of capital) for some time, maybe a long time, but you must not attach infinite values to them.

This is because high returns attract competition, generally causing return on capital to move towards the cost of capital. While such companies may still earn excess returns, but the return trajectory is down.

Everything in this world, after all, is momentary. So, your best bet is to just stick with quality (even that is momentary, just for longer moments that allows time for compounding to work its magic).

The good thing about high-quality stocks is that you can pay up for them (never overpay), expensive looking prices, and still do well till the underlying businesses remain good.

With poor quality, most probably, you have no hope.

19. Businesses will Die Death will happen to all of us and to all of our businesses, and that must not worry you. It’s the stagnation and gradual decline that diseases (bad management, capital misallocation, etc.) bring along, that you must watch out for (and try working backward now so as to avoid them, except for bad luck).

20. Equanimity and Investing When it comes to investing, making money in stocks when everyone is making money in stocks isn’t a big deal. Rather, it’s the ability to handle good and bad times with equanimity, combined with courage and decisiveness, that really matters in the long run.

Of course, most of us simply aren’t wired to be equanimous at most of the times, and it’s terribly difficult to rid ourself of the emotions of ecstasy (when things are looking up) and misery (when things are looking down).

And that’s why ensuring that we avoid all of those ways that can cause us wealth destruction – trading, timing, high fee, inadequate diversification, and leverage – is paramount.

Everything, including our triumphs and disasters, anyways shall pass. But the equanimity with which we allow them to pass will keep us sane always.

As Lord Krishna taught Arjuna, as we wade through the ocean of life, it throws up all kinds of waves that are beyond our control. If we keep struggling to eliminate negative situations, we will be unable to avoid unhappiness. But if we can learn to accept everything that comes our way, with equanimity and without sacrificing our best efforts, that will be true Yog.

So, give equanimity a shot, and see what happens.

21. Five Ways We Destroy Our Wealth It’s common if you are wealthy to worry about losing your fortune due to forces beyond your control. Like market meltdowns or economic stagnation.

But what many of us don’t realize is that our own behavior may be the root of significant losses.

“The road to hell is paved with good intentions,” goes a proverb. The road to investing hell is paved with bad behaviors, and here are the five roads which initially look like paved with gold, but which often take us towards wealth destruction.

Daniel Kahneman was right when he said this –

A human being is a dark and veiled thing…and whereas the hare has seven skins, the human being can shed seven times seventy skins and still not be able to say: This is really you, this is no longer outer shell. So said Nietzsche, and Freud agreed: we are ignorant of ourselves.

We certainly are.

22. Avoid Stress I recently read this passage from Nassim Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness that tells something about why we must avoid stress –

…people who look too closely at randomness burn out, their emotions drained by the series of pangs they experience. Regardless of what people claim, a negative pang is not offset by a positive one (some psychologists estimate the negative effect for an average loss to be up to 2.5 the magnitude of a positive one); it will lead to an emotional deficit.

…people in lab coats have examined some scary properties of this type of negative pangs on the neural system (the usual expected effect: high blood pressure; the less expected: chronic stress leads to memory loss, lessening of brain plasticity, and brain damage). To my knowledge, there are no studies investigating the exact properties of trader’s burnout, but a daily exposure to such high degrees of randomness without much control will have physiological effects on humans (nobody studied the effect of such exposure on the risk of cancer).

…wealth does not count so much into one’s well-being as the route one uses to get to it.

23. Why Value Investing Works Jack Schwager, the author of Market Wizards series, when answering a question on whether value investing works, turned to the wisdom of Joel Greenblatt, one of the foremost experts on the subject.

Schwager quoted this from his interview with Greenblatt –

Value investing doesn’t always work. The market doesn’t always agree with you. Over time, value is roughly the way the market prices stocks, but over the short term, which sometimes can be as long as two or three years, there are periods when it doesn’t work. And that is a very good thing.

The fact that the value approach doesn’t work over periods of time is precisely the reason why it continues to work over the long term.

24. Patience Wins Most people participating in the stock market don’t really understand what they are doing. This is especially when making money gets quick and easy, and they are doing great at it.

Like Aesop’s wolf in sheep’s clothing, they play a role contrary to their real character, which often leads them to the slaughterhouse.

However, the lack of patience of such people to invest with a long-term horizon creates the opportunity for the few committed to long-term holding periods.

In the battle between impatience and patience, the latter wins.

25. Eternity and Investing The Heilbrunn Center for Graham and Dodd Investing created a wonderful video in 2013 titled ‘Legacy of Ben Graham,’ which contains bytes from some of his students on how Graham’s teachings changed their lives.

Marshall Weinberg, one of the students from Graham’s class said that the biggest lesson he drew out of that class was on long-term thinking. Here’s what he said –

One sentence changed my life…Ben Graham opened the course by saying: ‘If you want to make money in Wall Street you must have the proper psychological attitude. No one expresses it better than Spinoza the philosopher.’

When he said that, I nearly jumped out of my course. What? I suddenly look up, and he said, and I remember exactly what he said: ‘Spinoza said you must look at things in the aspect of eternity.’ And that’s what suddenly hooked me on Ben Graham.

Spinoza actually said, “Sub specie aeternitatis,” which translates to “under the aspect of eternity,” or “from the perspective of the eternal.”

Critics of this idea may believe that with such thinking, there is no reason to believe that anything matters. But where Spinoza may be coming from is the idea that, in the larger scheme of things, nothing matters, which leads us to put our pains and struggles – including, as investors – into perspective.

26. Types of Managements 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.

27. Skin in the Game Having skin in the game means being exposed (equally as other stakeholders) to both positive and negative consequences of an outcome which was made possible by your decisions/actions/approval.

Superficially, the concept of ‘skin in the game’ may look like a case for morality in human transactions but if you go deeper, you will find that it’s a wonderful trick for improving our own decisions.

When you own 50 stocks and one goes to zero, your portfolio isn’t going to move down by more than 2 percent (assuming you had equal allocation for each stock). Which means you’re not really bothered about a couple of bad decisions for it’s not going to create meaningful damage to your net worth. However, when you run a relatively concentrated portfolio of 10 stocks, you’d be more careful about choosing those stocks. Won’t you?

28. It’s Not Supposed to Be Fair Warren Buffett had high regards for David Sokol. Over the years Sokol established a reputation inside Berkshire Hathaway as Mr. Fixit. Buffett often referred to Sokol as a terrific manager, a brilliant dealmaker and a huge asset to Berkshire.

In 2011, Sokol abruptly resigned. It was speculated that his resignation was because of insider trading allegations. For a second put yourself in Buffett’s shoes and imagine how you would feel when one of your most trusted business partners who has worked with you closely for decades behaves in a totally unexpected and undesired way? Like Sokol did.

When asked in one interview if he had felt betrayed by Sokol’s behaviour, Munger replied —

It’s not my nature … when you get little surprises as a result of human nature … to spend much time feeling betrayed. I always want to put my head down and adjust. I don’t allow myself to spend much time ever with any feelings of betrayal. If some flickering idea like that came to me, I’d get rid of it quickly. I don’t like any feeling of being victimized. I think that’s a counterproductive way to think as a human being. I am not a victim. I am a survivor.

The world around us is largely a soup of random events loosely connected by a few broad patterns. And one of those patterns is that the universe doesn’t care for any individual’s personal agenda.

If your investment journey has thrown a few bad apples your way, if you feel that the world is not fair then be reminded that the world is not supposed to be fair. It’s not supposed to be fair in your favour or in anyone’s favour.

29. Avoid Multiplying by Zero Two academicians were debating on the superiority of their respective fields of study.

“What would you do if I brought Alexander The Great’s army in front of you?” The history professor challenged.

The mathematician rolled his eyes and replied, “I’ll enclose the army in a bracket and multiply by zero.”

In an additive system, each component adds on to one another to create the final outcome. Such systems are unaffected when they encounter a zero. Multiplicative systems, on the other hand, are non-linear because anything times zero must still be zero, no matter how large the string of numbers preceding it. A zero can wreak havoc on multiplicative systems. Like it did to Alexander’s army.

Shane Parrish, on his excellent blog, explains the functional equivalent of multiplicative system in the world of business –

Most businesses, for example, operate in a multiplicative system. But they too often think they’re operating in additive ones: Ever notice how some businesses will add one feature on top of another to their products but fail at basic customer service, so you leave, never to return? That’s a business that thinks it’s in an additive system when they really need to be resolving the big fat zero in the middle of the equation instead of adding more stuff… General Motors, founded in 1908 by William Durant and C.S. Mott, came to dominate the American car market to the tune of 50% market share through a series of brilliant innovations and management practices, and was for many years the dominant and most admirable corporation in America. Even today, after more than a century of competition, no American carmaker produces more automobiles than General Motors. And yet, the original shareholders of GM ended up with a zero in 2008 as the company went into bankruptcy due to years of financial mismanagement. It didn’t matter than they had several generations of leadership: All of that becomes naught in a multiplicative system.

Benefit of looking at the downside or what can go wrong is efficiency, writes Peter Bevelin, “Take investments as an example – If you first eliminate what doesn’t work or what won’t achieve what you want, you don’t have to spend a lot of time and attention of analyzing the company. If there is a huge downside – for example a catastrophe risk of the key factors that are needed for success aren’t there or any other disqualifying factors like no sustainable advantage, bad and untrustworthy management of something else – just say ‘no thank you.’”

II. LEARNING 30. Being Average in the Age of Alpha Our society and culture values high achievement in every area of our lives. We want to become alpha men and women, have the brightest careers, accomplished children, ideal bodies, investment performances that beat everyone, and financial prosperity that leads us to possess more stuff than others.

Amidst this, being satisfied with having “enough” is considered shameful. Being unambitious is considered lazy. Thinking “I have enough” is a sin. “Average” is a dirty word.

I recently read an article written by one Krista O’Reilly, which echoed exactly what I have felt about being average all my life –

The world is such a noisy place. Loud, haranguing voices lecturing me to hustle, to improve, build, strive, yearn, acquire, compete, and grasp for more. For bigger and better. Sacrifice sleep for productivity. Strive for excellence. Go big or go home. Have a huge impact in the world. Make your life count.

But what if I just don’t have it in me? What if all the striving for excellence leaves me sad, worn out, depleted? Drained of joy. Am I simply not enough?

31. Two Big Lessons from History I believe there are two things that have stood the test of time, and that apply to everything we do in life, investing, work, everywhere –

We have much less control over the future than we hope, and that it will always surprise us (surprisingly!). We can’t control what would happen to us or our investment portfolios, we can’t control what people around us would say or do, and we can’t even fully control our own bodies, which would get damaged and sick and ultimately die without regard for our preferences. In fact, much of our unhappiness is caused by thinking that we can control things like these that, in fact, we can’t.

We have far more ability to make an impact than we expect. And this ability is more important than we can imagine. All it requires for us is to be learning and adapting machines, be sensible in our decision making, keep things simple, and trust the role of sincere hard work. Some people are aware of it; most are not. Frankly, it is easier to sit on the sidelines and whine about the stuff we can’t control (like stock prices) than to own up to what we do control (like our process of investing).

In short, while we can’t control the future, we can be courageous enough to jump into life with both feet and take responsibility for how we would like to mold it (without trying to control it), and how we would react to what happens to us on the way.

No success guarantees here, but history proves that’s how the world has always worked.

32. 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.

In his book, A More Beautiful Question, which I glanced through recently at a bookstore, Warren Berger led me to the importance of asking thoughtful, ambitious “beautiful questions” — the kind that can help us grow into happier and more useful human beings. An insightful passage from the book reads thus –

We’ve transitioned into always transitioning…In such times, the ability to ask big, meaningful, beautiful questions – and just as important, to know what to do with those questions once they’ve been raised – can be the first step in moving beyond old habits and behaviors as we embrace the new.

In the modern era, we must use unfamiliar tools in our attempt to take on new challenges without clear instructions, and with the clock ticking. In such times, Berger writes –

…questioning…will be even more important in helping us figure out what matters, where opportunities lie, and how to get there.

“Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers,” said Voltaire. Now, more than ever, the quality of our lives depends on the quality of our questions.

33. How Not to Bet 90-year-old Jeanne Louise Calment struck a deal with a forty-seven-year-old lawyer named André-François Raffray. Raffray agreed to pay a low monthly subsistence payment of 2,500 francs to Jeanne in exchange for the right to own Jeanne house when she dies. The ninety-year-old French woman had already exceeded the French life expectancy by more than ten years. She could die any day.

Ms. Calment turned out to be the biggest outlier in human history. When she died aged 122, her age at death exceeded the lawyer’s age at this death by forty-five years. He ended up paying Calment the equivalent of €140,000. That was more than double the apartment’s value.

Where did Raffray go wrong? His blunder was in taking the statistics and applying it to a sample size of one.

Legendary investor, Howard Marks relates a funny story his father told him about a gambler who bet everything on a race with only one horse in it. How could he lose? “Halfway around the track, the horse jumped over the fence and ran away. Invariably things can get worse than people expect.”

Jeanne and Raffray’s story has a valuable lesson for investors. Never bet the farm on a single stock no matter how certain you are about the outcome. You never know when the luck hands you the equivalent of a crazy horse or a supercentenarian.

34. Possessing Vs Pursuing I believe our lives are not defined by what we possess, but by what we pursue. History has ample proof that it is not what people (like Alexander and Hitler) have tried to possess, but what people (like Einstein and Gandhi) pursued that brought meaning to their lives and to those around them.

“I enjoy life,” Seneca said, “because I am ready to leave it.”

In his book On the Shortness of Life, Seneca wrote this –

As far as I am concerned, I know that I have lost not wealth but distractions. The body’s needs are few: it wants to be free from cold, to banish hunger and thirst with nourishment; if we long for anything more we are exerting ourselves to serve our vices, not our needs.

Imagine if we can unburden ourselves of 90% of our worldly goods, it should not be difficult to leave the remaining 10% behind?

35. What Stories Do You Believe? A story is a very effective tool to package any message or an abstract idea. Stories themselves are unimportant. What’s more important is the idea the construct of a story is enclosing inside it. An idea doesn’t stick well if it’s not packaged in the form of a story.

Our experience of the world is almost completely derived from the stories we have told ourselves.

Celebrated historian Yuval Noah Harari writes —

Over the years, people have woven an incredibly complex network of stories. The kinds of things that people create through this network of stories are known in academic circles as ‘fictions’, ‘social constructs’ or ‘imagined realities’. An imagined reality is not a lie. Unlike lying, an imagined reality is something that everyone believes in, and as long as this communal belief persists, the imagined reality exerts force in the world. Most millionaires sincerely believe in the existence of money and limited liability companies. Most human-rights activists sincerely believe in the existence of human rights.

Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens have thus been living in a dual reality. On the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees and lions; and on the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations and corporations. As time went by, the imagined reality became ever more powerful, so that today the very survival of rivers, trees and lions depends on the grace of imagined entities such as the United States and Google.

Take a pause and question yourself, “What stories do I believe in about the reality and have they served me well?”

36. Writing is a Thinking Tool Writing, apart from being a communication tool, is a thinking tool too. Famous author, Dan Pink, recommends – “write things to figure out your thoughts”.

Writing is a powerful weapon for focusing thoughts. The more you write, the more precision of thought you build. It allows you to take fuzzy thinking and distill it into precise line of thought. If you want to think better you have to start writing your thoughts.

When Michael Mauboussin posed the question to Daniel Kahneman, what is a single thing an investor can do to improve his or her performance, he said –

…go down to a local drugstore and buy a very cheap notebook and start keeping track of your decisions. And the specific idea is whenever you’re making a consequential decision, something going in or out of the portfolio, just take a moment to think, write down what you expect to happen, why you expect it to happen and then actually, and this is optional, but probably a great idea, is write down how you feel about the situation, both physically and even emotionally. Just, how do you feel? I feel tired. I feel good, or this stock is really draining me. Whatever you think…When you’ve got a decision-making journal, it gives you accurate and honest feedback of what you were thinking at that time.

Writing is a thinking exercise and it acts as a shield against the mental rust.

37. Opposite of a Good Idea Both Amazon and Apple are technology companies with close to trillion-dollar market cap each. Amazon sells products as cheap as possible. Apple prices its devices as expensive as possible.

In marketing, there are two equally potent, but completely contradictory, ways to sell a product. Luxury goods offer the promise of owning something which can’t be owned by everybody, i.e., a scarcity bias informs the worth of the product. And we also find comfort in buying stuff which has been rated high by millions of others, i.e., we look for social proof in making our decision.

Similarly, two opposite points of view can both be rational without violating any laws of logic or physics.

Remember, situations where we get two accounts of the same event, but the versions are dramatically different, it’s because they’re informed by different facts and perspectives.

In other words, understanding the context is very important before announcing your verdict on what’s right or wrong.

38. Curiosity Kills the Cat, but You’re not a Cat Sometimes, when you’ve figured out the answer to a question, you realize that the path between the question and its answer was more interesting than the two endpoints.

Which means the journey that your curiosity takes you through becomes more rewarding than the end result. And the great thing about following your curiosity is that no one can stop you and you can keep going.

Follow the process. And the process is — keep scratching the itch of a probing mind and never letting the fire of inquisitiveness to die down.

Put simply, it doesn’t matter what question you begin with. What matters is —

How rigorously you chase the clues,

What assumptions you make to simplify a complex problem and transform it into a more useful one, and

How long you’re willing to remain discontent with your discoveries.

To expect to begin your quest with only intelligent questions could be overwhelming and you may never get started.

So, start small, start stupid and let your curiosity take you places.

39. Risk of Avoiding the Non-Risk In 2014, an AirAsia flight crashed into Java Sea killing all 162 people on board. Investigations revealed that it was caused by a pilot error because he performed a non-standard reset of the onboard flight control computers. Why did he do that? Because he wanted to get rid of a non-critical warning light that was flashing on his panel.

The gap between what’s risky and what feels risky is significant. The perception of risk is often misplaced in most people’s head.

Nick Maggiulli writes —

…you can hold 100% bonds and experience little short term volatility (i.e. low risk right?), but you now risk not having enough principal in the future after your portfolio battles against the scourge of inflation for multiple decades…remember that you are always taking risks. The key is understanding what risks you are taking and when you are taking them.

Risk and the perception of risk are two different beasts. What doesn’t seem to hurt in the short run lulls people into complacency and just when they feel the safest the storm of accumulated risk arrives with no advance notice and causes the blow-up.

III. LIFE 40. Weathering Life’s Storms In Kafka On The Shore, Murakami wrote –

Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn’t something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn’t get in, and walk through it, step by step. There’s no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That’s the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine.

And you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You’ll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others.

And once the storm is over you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.

41. Dealing with the Scary World In Aaron Thier’s wonderful new novel, The World Is A Narrow Bridge, there is a scene where Eva and Murphy, the two young prophets of the god Yahweh, are sent on a mission that terrifies them. As they begin the mission, Eva and Murphy are approached by Satan, who has been sent by Yahweh, to give them their final instructions. After Satan gives the instructions, he begins to leave for his next mission:

“You have to go so soon?” says Eva. “Right away?”

She looks devastated. Murphy, too, is unhappy. Satan frowns and chews on his lip. He doesn’t like to leave them like this.

“I’ll teach you a trick,” he says. “I’ll teach you an incantation that will protect against despair. If things are dark, and I’m not around to help, you can repeat it a few times and it’ll help.

It would go something like this: ‘The world is a narrow bridge, and the most important thing is not to be afraid.’”

Murphy and Eva both repeat this very slowly. Eva says, “That’s lovely.”

Satan nods. “Just repeat it to yourself when things are bad. You could try different translations too. ‘Do not make yourself afraid, the whole world is a narrow bridge.’

The point is this life we’re living—this world we inhabit—is a scary place. If you peer over the side of a narrow bridge, you can lose your heart to continue. You freeze up. You sit down. So too with life. If we think too much about the journey we have to make, the one that begins with the trauma of birth and ends with the tragedy of death, the one that is so perilous and unpredictable, we’ll never make it.

The important thing is that we are not afraid. That we don’t overthink things. That we don’t give way to fear, as the Stoics tell us over and over again. Just repeat it to yourself—The world is a narrow bridge and I will not be afraid—and keep going. Like the thousands of generations who have come before you.

42. Life’s Purpose and Meaning Tuesdays with Morrie was one of the best books I read in 2019. In one passage, the author wrote something that resonated well with me –

So many people walk around with a meaningless life. They seem half-asleep, even when they’re busy doing things they think are important. This is because they’re chasing the wrong things. The way you get meaning into your life is to devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning.

43. Hope and Fear Seneca wrote –

Limiting one’s desires actually helps to cure one of fear. ‘Cease to hope … and you will cease to fear.’ … Widely different [as fear and hope] are, the two of them march in unison like a prisoner and the escort he is handcuffed to. Fear keeps pace with hope … both belong to a mind in suspense, to a mind in a state of anxiety through looking into the future. Both are mainly due to projecting our thoughts far ahead of us instead of adapting ourselves to the present.

44. Power of Meditation Yuval Harari, the author of Sapiens, wrote this beautiful passage in his book –

According to Buddhism, the root of suffering is neither the feeling of pain nor of sadness nor even of meaninglessness. Rather, the real root of suffering is this never-ending and pointless pursuit of ephemeral feelings, which causes us to be in a constant state of tension, restlessness and dissatisfaction. Due to this pursuit, the mind is never satisfied. Even when experiencing pleasure, it is not content, because it fears this feeling might soon disappear, and craves that this feeling should stay and intensify.

People are liberated from suffering not when they experience this or that fleeting pleasure, but rather when they understand the impermanent nature of all their feelings, and stop craving them. This is the aim of Buddhist meditation practices. In meditation, you are supposed to closely observe your mind and body, witness the ceaseless arising and passing of all your feelings, and realise how pointless it is to pursue them. When the pursuit stops, the mind becomes very relaxed, clear and satisfied. All kinds of feelings go on arising and passing – joy, anger, boredom, lust – but once you stop craving particular feelings, you can just accept them for what they are. You live in the present moment instead of fantasising about what might have been. The resulting serenity is so profound that those who spend their lives in the frenzied pursuit of pleasant feelings can hardly imagine it. It is like a man standing for decades on the seashore, embracing certain ‘good’ waves and trying to prevent them from disintegrating, while simultaneously pushing back ‘bad’ waves to prevent them from getting near him. Day in, day out, the man stands on the beach, driving himself crazy with this fruitless exercise. Eventually, he sits down on the sand and just allows the waves to come and go as they please. How peaceful!

45. Karma One of the best books I read this year was No Shortcuts to the Top. This is an autobiography of Edmund Viesturs, wherein he documents his 16-year journey summitting all 14 of the world’s eight-thousander mountain peaks (more than 8,000 meters above sea level), and his strategies to manage risk in extreme environments.

In one beautiful passage from the book, Viesturs wrote –

Although I remain uncertain about God or any particular religion, I believe in karma. What goes around, comes around. How you live your life, the respect that you give others and the mountain, and how you treat people in general will come back to you in kindred fashion. I like to talk about what I call the Karma National Bank. If you give up the summit to help rescue someone who’s in trouble, you’ve put a deposit in that bank. And sometime down the road, you may need to make a big withdrawal.

46. Widening our Circles of Compassion Long before Carl Sagan wrote of compassion as our only mechanism for moving beyond “us vs. them,” Einstein wrote in 1950 –

A human being is part of a whole, called by us the “Universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

47. Humility In The Apology, the Greek philosopher Plato wrote that the oracle at Delphi had pronounced Socrates the wisest man in Athens.

No one was more astonished and disbelieving than Socrates himself. So, he immediately set out to disprove the oracle by finding a wiser man. Here is what Socrates found as he met a few supposedly wise men –

I went to one who had the reputation of wisdom, and observed to him – his name I need not mention; he was a politician whom I selected for examination – and the result was as follows: When I began to talk with him, I could not help thinking that he was not really wise, although he was thought wise by many, and wiser still by himself; and I went and tried to explain to him that he thought himself wise, but was not really wise; and the consequence was that he hated me, and his enmity was shared by several who were present and heard me.

So I left him, saying to myself, as I went away: Well, although I do not suppose that either of us knows anything really beautiful and good, I am better off than he is – for he knows nothing, and thinks that he knows. I neither know nor think that I know. In this latter particular, then, I seem to have slightly the advantage of him.

Then I went to another, who had still higher philosophical pretensions, and my conclusion was exactly the same. I made another enemy of him, and of many others besides him.

In the end, Socrates discovered he was indeed the wisest man in Athens. Not because of how much he knew, but because he was the only one who understood how much he did not know.

Knowing that you don’t know is the dawning of wisdom.

Knowing that you don’t know, accepting it and not being ashamed about it is the start of a continuing journey of wisdom.

Recognizing the darkness is the prerequisite for bringing on the light. Only when the darkness is brought out of hiding does the light have the opportunity to illuminate it.

48. Meaning of Life One of the best books I have read on the pursuit of the world’s highest peak, Mount Everest, is George Mallory’s Climbing Everest. George was possibly the first man to summit Everest (nobody knows whether he did it), almost 30 years before Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay began their ascent. It was during his third expedition to the Everest that he lost his life, last seen about 800 feet from the summit.

Anyways, all his writings on climbing are collected in Climbing Everest, which started out as letters to his wife Ruth. One of my favourite parts from the book is when George shared his response to one question asked by a journalist about why he would risk his life to attempt to reach the Everest.

His profound response outlines an undeniably powerful way to perceive life –

People ask me, ‘What is the use of climbing Mount Everest?’ and my answer must at once be, ‘It is of no use.’ There is not the slightest prospect of any gain whatsoever. Oh, we may learn a little about the behaviour of the human body at high altitudes, and possibly medical men may turn our observation to some account for the purposes of aviation. But otherwise nothing will come of it. We shall not bring back a single bit of gold or silver, not a gem, nor any coal or iron…

If you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won’t see why we go.

What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life. We do not live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to be able to live. That is what life means and what life is for.

What a beautiful, inspirational thought!

Life is never perfect. And as George wrote, living is not just about eating and making money.

Facing adversities and challenges head on, and stepping away from what is comfortable and familiar to us and into the unknown, is what often brings us real joy.

That’s what gets us life’s real worth.

49. Triumph and Disaster One of the most life-changing books I have ever read is Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. The book is a chronicle by Frankl of his experiences as a German Nazi concentration camp inmate during World War II.

In this book, Frankl describes his psychotherapeutic method, which involved identifying a purpose in life to feel positively about, and then immersively imagining that outcome.

The central theme of Frankl’s book is ‘survival.’ Although he witnessed and experienced horror, the book focuses less on the details of his own experience and more on how his time under Nazi rule showed him the human ability to survive and endure against all odds.

As Frankl wrote, he saw the lowest parts of humanity while in the camps. He saw fellow prisoners promoted to be in-camp guards turning on their fellow prisoners. He watched as they beat their lifeless, malnourished campmates. He watched sadistic guards treating them as if they were lower than animals. But he also saw individuals rising up like saints above it all.

The part that impacted me the most from the book was this –

When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves…Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

Life (investing included) isn’t easy. And unlike, what we imagine in both scenarios of triumphs and disasters, life isn’t supposed to move in a straight line of happiness and smiles, or sadness and pain. It’s not supposed to stay the same, just like you’re not supposed to stay the same.

Life is evolving and changing. It is a constant surge of ups and downs, twists and turns, and as Rudyard Kipling said, “…triumphs and disasters.” Like you have your happy and blissful moments, you are supposed to feel pain, get hurt, and experience losses occasionally. And some of them can be really bad!

Now, that does not mean that you deserve every bit of the sadness, defeats, and tragedies that life hands over to you. It’s just part of the journey that we are walking through. It’s just part of what makes us human.

50. Meditating on Mortality Meditation on mortality (that we are going to die one day) is one of the oldest practices in all Buddhist traditions. In the words of the Buddha, “…of all the footprints, that of the elephant is supreme. Similarly, of all mindfulness meditation, that on death is supreme.”

But why should we contemplate our own death while we are still alive?

“It cures you,” the Bhutanese say. Not just the Hindu and Buddhist scriptures, even Stoicism talks about Memento Mori that is the practice of reflection on mortality, especially as a means of considering the vanity of earthly life and the transient nature of all earthly goods and pursuits.

Now, the thing about meditating on your own mortality is that it doesn’t make life pointless. Instead, knowing that you will die one day creates priority and thinking about it helps you live with a more positive perspective. So you can focus on what’s important.

Death is, however, a subject mostly shunned by our cultures and societies. Nothing explains this resistance better than what the American actor and comedian Woody Allen said in one of his movies, “It’s not that I’m afraid of dying; it’s just that I don’t want to be there when it happens.”

51. What Papa Taught Me I lost my father late this year. Papa was a genuinely good man – good in a pure, innocent, unfailing way. He wanted, more than anything, to do good in the world, to always do the right thing. That is one attribute I picked up from him, and I thank God I did that.

Another thing I learned from Papa was that the best life one could live was not one in which a person did big, great things that influenced the lives of millions, but one in which you made a difference in the part of the world you touched, no matter how small.

He said that a life in which you helped only one person because that was the only opportunity you had to help someone else was just as great a life as that of someone who changed the lives of millions.

Perhaps the best way I can celebrate Papa’s life is to try as hard as I can to walk in the world with the same compassion, humility, love, and joy that he carried with him so that the light of his life will not extinguish even after the passing of his mortal body.

“Your parents, they give you your life, but then they try to give you their life,” said Chuck Palahniuk, the noted American fiction novelist.

Papa, I realize now, gave me his life. I hope I stand up to it.

Thank You Before I close, let me share with you the Serenity Prayer that has helped me a lot in facing my personal, professional, and investing turmoils. I am sure if you keep this prayer close to your mind and heart, it will help you face your own turmoils well, including those related to your investing.

The Serenity Prayer

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, And wisdom to know the difference.

~ Reinhold Niebuhr

I wish you a happy, healthy, and peaceful 2020.

With respect, Vishal

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