Safal Niveshak

Wit. Wisdom. Value Investing.

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Archives for November 2019

Behaviouronomics: The Cargo Cult

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Elon Musk has built multiple billion-dollar companies — Paypal, SpaceX, and Tesla. His IQ is off the charts. But even a more remarkable thing about Musk is that he can find, attract, and retain very smart people to work with him on moonshot ideas like space travel, underground highways, electric cars, etc.

Before you can convince and retain brilliant co-workers, you need to have a robust filtering mechanism. Given a chance, very few people would  refuse an opportunity to associate with Elon Musk. Which means, he would be receiving thousands of requests.

How does Musk find these people with super thinking abilities? What is his method of separating genius problem solvers from average thinkers?
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Bookworm: A Mind for Numbers

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Whether you hate numbers or love them, there’s no denying that being in the business of investing you can’t afford being numbers shy. Of course, successful investing doesn’t require you to be a mathematician but having an intuitive feel for numbers goes a long way in making the process of finding great businesses fun and intellectually stimulating.

If you’re reading this I won’t hesitate to make the assumption that you’re a knowledge worker, i.e., someone who gets paid not for the physical labour but for their knowledge and cognitive abilities to turn that know-how into something valuable and useful. And one skill that knowledge workers need the most is the ability to learn quickly and efficiently.

This means you should always be on the lookout to find the best strategies about meta-learning — learning how to learn.

Barbara Oakley teaches an online course Learning How to Learn and it wouldn’t be an overstatement if I say that this course has been the most popular online course in the world for many years.

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Writing, the Kaizen Way

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About one year back, I remember telling Vishal that we should create a course on “How to become a better writer.”

Go ahead and create it, he said, “What’s stopping you?”

With a lot of excitement, I immediately started working on it. Now, we haven’t published any such course yet and that tells you something about the eventual state of my initial excitement. It barely lasted a few days.

“You know Vishal,” I messaged him a few days back, “the reason I haven’t been able to make much progress on the writing course is that I keep getting bogged down by the enormity of the task. The thought of creating an online course on writing is so overwhelming that I find it hard to resume the work on this project.”

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Let Your Curiosity Take You Places

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Randall Monroe has an incredible mind. Even if his name doesn’t ring a bell, I am sure you’ve seen his work. He’s the creator of XKCD comic strip. Monroe, a physicist, was working for NASA before he became a full time cartoonist.

Monroe had a significant fan following among nerds because of the XKCD but he shot into fame when his book The Things Explainer caught the attention of Bill Gates. Monroe’s genius is revealed in his book where he takes up the challenge to explain complicated things using a vocabulary of only one thousand simple words.
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With the End in Mind

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Every Saturday, I send out this special post with a few ideas I am reading and thinking about. Plus, a question I am meditating on.

If you wish to receive this post – apart from others I write regularly on investing, decision making, behavioral finance – please sign up below.

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

Book I’m Reading – With the End in Mind
I never saw Papa reading a book. Yes, he read a lot of magazines and stuff online, but I don’t remember when I saw him with a book to read the last time. So I was surprised when I found out about this book he started reading some time back, recommended by my doctor friend who was treating him.

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An Ode to My Father

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On the morning of 17th October 2019, I lost the first-ever subscriber to my posts, my greatest motivator and my most vocal critic.

I lost my father.

This was one year, one month, one day after I lost my grandmother.

Papa was seventy and had been struggling for the previous eighteen months. His passing away was peaceful, if not the closing ten days of life.

Papa and Me

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

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