A Surprising Sunday
I was almost getting warmed up yesterday for my weekend post and had just taken my seat at my home office, but I had no idea about the surprise that was heading my way in a few seconds. My sister was on her way from Belgium and had decided to stop over in Dubai for a few days, and we were not informed about it. So when I saw her entering the room, I couldn’t believe it and took me a few seconds to accept the fact that she is there. It was special 💞
And since we met, we have only been chatting, hitting our favorite joints, shopping, and consuming all the sugar-loaded feasts on offer in Karama and Jumeirah. This has derailed my plans to write a piece for this weekend and hence I thought of sharing with you a few remarkable and/or interesting pieces I recently came across.
These are covering different topics but are worth the time you may choose to invest in them.
Mental Models
Morgan Housel delivered a jackpot of a piece recently and it was the best thing I’ve read in the whole of 2023. It breaks down the events around me into their simplest form and gives a unique perspective to it all. An excerpt provided from the piece below -
Shane Parrish once described the difference between passive and active stability. A rock is passively stable – it’ll keep its form without any intervention. Marriage is not. It can be stable over time, but it requires constant work, compromise, and maintenance to keep it intact.
Most things in your life are, at best, actively stable. Left alone they’ll follow the natural path of cyclicality. But if there’s constant intervention and management – managing your expectations, managing your reputation, managing how you advertise yourself and who you surround yourself with – you have at least a shot at keeping something good going for the longest period of time.
Productivity
If you have ever stressed about being productive on a daily basis, about completing your to-do lists on time, about scheduling everything on your calendar, and about setting alarms for umpteen reminders - then this piece from The Imperfectionist is just for you.
It provides a delicious take on your to-do list and turns it into a menu of sorts. Just the way we cannot eat everything on the menu in our favorite restaurant, we also cannot get everything done today, the pursuit of which is known to drive some people mad. Hence this perspective becomes even more important in a hyperconnected world where everyone is primed to multitask their way to success.
An excerpt is provided below -
aren’t all to-do lists really menus anyway, whether I choose to think of them that way or not? After all, if there are vastly more things I could do with any given hour or day than I actually can do – if there are a million ways to do good work, be a better parent, spouse or citizen, live healthily, and so on, yet only time for a handful – then in fact we’re always picking from a menu, even if we delude ourselves that what we’re doing is getting through a list.
Risk Return Tradeoff
Nick Magiulli is one of the most respected personal finance bloggers and he writes a newsletter called ‘Of Dollars and Data’. His recent piece is called ‘Return on Hassle’ and it beautifully takes us through various investment options on the risk-return spectrum. These include the safest of options like Treasury Bills and all the way to the riskiest ones like Equities and Real Estate.
What’s most important is that he covers these from the perspective of the hassles that each of them entails, and once you become aware of this specific component, you might start making choices not only on the basis of risk and returns.
An excerpt is provided below -
Return on hassle is the idea that you need to consider the time and work associated with an investment in addition to its expected return. In the case of real estate investors, you have to factor in the mental and physical work associated with finding tenants, maintaining your properties, and taking on debt, among other things. These are all “hassles” that most traditional investments (i.e. stocks, bonds, etc.) don’t require.
Building an Awesome Life
Graham Weaver is the Founding Partner at Alpine Investors and also a Lecturer at Stanford University Graduate School of Business. He penned a fantastic piece on July 18th and there is even a video on the same subject. Whether you like reading or watching, I highly recommend consuming this content in your preferred format.
His 20+ years of experience in Private Equity Investing is distilled in its most fundamental form and he expresses it with analogies and real stories from his life. You will get tons of wisdom from this talk, and an excerpt is provided below -
The equation for returns is X = (1+R)^N, where N is quadratic. Consider this equation where X represents your competence in any given role. The R represents everything you’re doing to improve yourself: coaching, reading, learning, writing out your goals, using your imagination, etc. The most powerful part of the equation is the N, the number of years you are in your role. If you love what you do, you will do it for a long time, and your N will be large. And if you improve at a reasonable rate over a long period, you can become the best in the world at what you do.
There is almost no obstacle that won’t yield to you at full power for a decade.
If you want to live an asymmetric life: Do hard things. Do your thing. Do it for decades.
Value of Reading Books
Gene Roddenberry, television screenwriter and creator of Star Trek, on the value of reading books:
“I consider reading the greatest bargain in the world. A shelf of books is a shelf of many lives and ideas and imaginations which the reader can enjoy whenever he wishes and as often as he wishes. Instead of experiencing just one life, the book-lover can experience hundreds or even thousands of lives. He can live any kind of adventure in the world. Books are his time machine into the past and also into the future. Books are his “transporter” by which he can beam instantly to any part of the universe and explore what he finds there. Books are an instrument by which he can become any person for a while—a man, a woman, a child, a general, a farmer, a detective, a king, a doctor, anyone.
Great books are especially valuable because a great book often contains within its covers the wisdom of a man or woman’s whole lifetime. But the true lover of books enjoys all kinds of books, even some nonsense now and then, because enjoying nonsense from others can teach us to also laugh at ourselves. A person who does not learn to laugh at his own problems and weaknesses and foolishness can never be a truly educated or a truly happy person. Also, probably the same thing could be said of a person who does not enjoy learning and growing all his life.”
Source: Letters to Star Trek
Wishing you all a fantastic weekend ahead.
Sending you loads of love and luck 🧿
Manish