The One Percent Almanack

Wit and Wisdom on Investing, Business, and Life

Vishal Khandelwal

📚 On Filters And Rules – Part 1

Peter Bevelin’s book, All I Want to Know Is Where I’m Going to Die So I’ll Never Go There, is a compendium of life-changing wisdom. A must-have book for anyone who wants to avoid living a regretful life. Bevelin’s volume is based on the teachings of Charlie Munger.

On 1st January 2021, Charlie Munger turned 97 years old. Being a nonagenarian is a rarity, especially when the subject is a billionaire too. But Charlie Munger isn’t just a very-old-rich-guy, he’s also mentally the sharpest. Even at this age, in just a few seconds he can cut through the noisy balderdash and arrive at decisive insights that most other smart people would miss.

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Behaviouronomics: Mind Projection Fallacy

Once upon a time, there were two merchants. Jaggeryman and Oilman. As the name suggests, they used to sell jaggery and oil, respectively. Doing business in their village was simple. People would come to their shops, buy the stuff, pay cash and leave.

But humans get impatient with simple things. So our merchant duo decided to move their shops to a city, rented shops next to each other and hoped that their products would start flying off the shelf. But when sales didn’t pick up even after a few weeks, during a brainstorming session, Oilman suggested that they should do a simulation — a customer-shopkeeper role-play — to figure out if they’re missing something obvious.
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When I (Almost) Dumped Ben Graham’s Intelligent Investor

It was sometime in 2005 when a close friend of mine gifted me Ben Graham’s The Intelligent Investor, knowing that I was working as a stock analyst and aspired to become a sensible investor (aspirations are always sensible, you see).

“Is this a good book?” I asked him.

“Seek for yourself,” he told me.

I read through the first few pages of the book, and it didn’t seem to catch hold of my attention, forget captivating me to any extent.

I realized Graham was the teacher of Warren Buffett, whom I’d first read about during my MBA in 2003 (not in the class, but in the library). But the book still did not interest me.

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Spotlight: Lindy Beyond Books – Part 4

This is the fourth part of the series where I’m sharing with you those essays, articles, and speeches that pass the Lindy Filter. If you haven’t heard about this strange term called Lindy Filter, please read a detailed post I had written about Lindy Effect a few years back.

20 Rules of Formulating Knowledge

It’s estimated that one thing common between forty percent of medical students in western countries is a tool called Anki. Anki assists them in assimilating a gargantuan amount of information that medical education requires. Similarly, many language learning enthusiasts also use Anki to memorize the vocabulary of a new language. However, outside these two cohorts, Anki software is pretty much unknown. Recently, Anki has been picking up interest among people from the programming community and a bunch of self-proclaimed life-long-learners — Yours truly being one of them.
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