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Thursday, 18 February 2021

Weekend Reading


Reading across disciplines is one of the best ways to improve our investment acumen. Here is a summary of some of the best articles I read this week. If you like this collection, consider forwarding it to someone who you think will appreciate it.


Use tech to your advantage for preventing bad habits and nurturing good ones

Technology often creates a level of convenience that enables you to act on your smallest whims and desires. At the mere suggestion of hunger, you can have food delivered to your door. At the slightest hint of boredom, you can get lost in the vast expanse of social media.

When the effort required to act on your desires becomes effectively zero, you can find yourself slipping into whatever impulse arises at the moment. The downside of automation is that we can find ourselves jumping from easy task to easy task without making time for more difficult, but ultimately more rewarding, work.

When working in your favor, automation can make your good habits inevitable and your bad habits impossible. It is the ultimate way to lock in future behavior rather than relying on willpower in the moment.

By utilizing strategic onetime decisions and technology, you can create an environment of inevitability—a space where good habits are not just an outcome you hope for, but an outcome that is virtually guaranteed.

https://jamesclear.com/how-to-automate-a-habit

 

Build a "Murder Board" to kill your favourite ideas!!

We learn more from people who challenge our thought process than those who affirm our conclusions. Strong leaders engage their critics and make themselves stronger. Weak leaders silence their critics and make themselves weaker. This reaction isn’t limited to people in power. Although we might be on board with the principle, in practice we often miss out on the value of a challenge network.

Some organizations and occupations counter those tendencies by building challenge networks into their cultures. From time to time the Pentagon and the White House have used aptly named “murder boards,” enlisting tough-minded committees to shoot down plans and candidates. At X, Google’s “moonshot factory,” there’s a rapid evaluation team that’s charged with rethinking proposals: Members conduct independent assessments and only advance the ones that emerge as both audacious and achievable.

https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/why-you-need-a-challenge-network/

 

The algebra of wealth: follow your talent

please read the full article and not just the excerpts here…

Successful people often unwittingly head fake young people with the humblebrags of “follow your passion” and “don’t think about money.” This is (mostly) bullshit. Achieving economic security requires hard work, talent, and a tremendous amount of focus on… money. Yes, some people’s genius will be a tsunami that overwhelms a lack of focus and discipline. Assume you are not that person. Rich is having passive income greater than your burn. People on a path to money focus on their earnings; people on a path to wealth also focus on their burn. Anyway, it’s not your income, but your income-to-expense ratio, that determines if you’re rich.

My observation is that there are four factors in the algebra of wealth: focus, stoicism, time, and diversification.

https://marker.medium.com/the-algebra-of-wealth-5798df7753d3

 

On how to change your mind

Changing your mind, more often than not, requires you to grapple with your own identity. Admitting that you were wrong feels personal. We have to face the fact that we’ve been walking around the world all this time believing in something that isn’t true. Even worse, we have to admit that we’re the type of person who walks around being wrong.

If somebody sees an idea, or an opportunity, or forms an opinion that is different from mine, I should say, This is an interesting opportunity to learn something from someone who sees things differently from me, and I wonder if they know something I don’t.

https://behavioralscientist.org/your-ideas-are-not-your-identity-adam-grant-on-how-to-get-better-at-changing-your-mind/

 

Remove "society's soundtrack" from your ears to be successful

By the age 45, Beethoven was completely deaf. He considered suicide, one friend reported, but was held back only by the force of “moral rectitude.” It’s here that Beethoven’s story veers toward legend. Cut off from the world of sound around him, working only with musical structures dancing through his imagination, at times holding a pencil in his mouth against his piano’s soundboard to feel the consonance of his chords, Beethoven produced the best music of his career, culminating in his incomparable Ninth Symphony, a composition so daringly new that it reinvented classical musical altogether.

Beethoven’s diminished hearing limited the influence of “prevailing compositional fashions.” Whereas his earlier work was “pleasantly reminiscent” of his instructor, Josef Haydn, his later work was spectacularly innovative. “Deafness freed Beethoven as a composer because he no longer had society’s soundtrack in his ears.”

https://www.calnewport.com/blog/2021/02/05/on-beethoven-and-the-gifts-of-silence/


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