Poke the Box: Focus on Process, Get Worldly Wisdom, and Buy Happiness

Let’s Start with Safal Niveshak
Just in case you missed any of this on Safal Niveshak over the last few days…

• Released first StockTalk 2.0 report…on India’s leading automotive battery maker, Amara Raja Batteries. See some interesting discussion in the Comments section of the report.
• Here’s the Safal Niveshak Investor Manifesto that I shared recently on my Facebook Wall. Print it. Stick it. Follow it. Or simply junk it.
• Can money buy happiness? A tribesman, Jana Vembunarayanan, writes that it can…and explains how to get more happiness when spending your money. On a side note, given that Jana resides in the US and the rupee has touched 60 to a US dollar, he certainly seems to be happier sending money home. 🙂

“Individual decisions can be badly thought through, and yet be successful, or exceedingly well thought through, but be unsuccessful, because the recognized possibility of failure in fact occurs. But over time, more thoughtful decision-making will lead to better overall results, and more thoughtful decision making can be encouraged by evaluating decisions on how well they were made rather than on outcome.” ~ Robert Rubin, American economist.

Research has identified a common trait amongst successful performers in fields where probabilities play a big role – they all emphasize process over outcome.

Look at investing, and look around you. 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.

Thus, judge decisions – especially yours – not only on results, but also on how they were made. This matrix may be of some help to you…

Book Worm
Seeking Wisdom from Peter Bevelin is one of the most amazing books I’ve ever come across on human behaviour and mental models. Here is an excerpt that Bevelin carries in this book where Charlie Munger is talking to students of Stanford Law School in 1997, about how to get worldly wisdom…

I’ve long believed that a certain system – which almost any intelligent person can learn – works way better than the systems that most people use. What you need is a latticework of mental models in your head. And you hang your actual experience and your vicarious experience (that you get from reading and so forth) on this latticework of powerful models. And, with that system, things gradually get to fit together in a way that enhances cognition.

And you need the models – not just from one or two disciplines, but from all the important disciplines. You need the best 100 or so models from microeconomics, physiology, psychology particularly, elementary mathematics, hard science and engineering [and so on].

You don’t have to be a huge expert in any of those fields. All you’ve got to do is take the really big ideas and learn them early and well. You can’t learn those 100 big ideas you really need the way many students do – where you learn ’em well enough to bang ’em back to the professor and get your grade and then you empty them out as though you were emptying a bathtub so you can take in more water next time.

If that’s the way you learn the 100 big models you’re going to need, [you’ll be] an “also ran” in the game of life. You have to learn the models so that they become part of your everused repertoire.

Stimulate Your Mind
Here’s some amazing content I read during the week gone by…

• Coffee did not boost my creativity, so I opened a coffee shop that does. (Keep your speakers on)
• Bill Gates writes about three things he has learned from Warren Buffett…things that are not just about investing but more important in life, like time.
• Charlie Munger has long talked about the importance of knowing where you are going to die so that you don’t go there. Here’s another proof that eliminating stupidity is easier than creating brilliance.
• In order to find success as an investor, the question you must ask isn’t “Am I smart enough to be a good investor?” but rather “Am I rational enough to be a good investor?” Why? Here’s a framework from Daniel Kahneman, one of the best thinkers of our times, that will help you condition your brain (hopefully!) for a better investment behaviour it the future.
• Email seems pervasive in your lives. You check email on the bus. You check it first thing in the morning, and last thing at night. You even check it while reading Safal Niveshak’s posts. 🙂 In short, you suffer the tyranny of email, but here are a few simple yet effective ways to save you.
• Amartya Sen writes a hard-hitting piece on why India trails China. Things are just getting worse here, he says.
• Stop giving excuses for not exercising for the lack of time. Here’s a 4-minute workout for you.

If you haven’t done it already, sign up here to receive Poke the Box in your email…and get ready for stimulating Saturday mornings.

Keep poking.

Exercise for four minutes.

Buy some happiness.

Till next weekend…

Vishal Khandelwal
Chief Poker – Poke the Box