There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” ~ Maya Angelou

One of the key characteristics of the world’s most charismatic men is their uncanny ability to engage people. After all, this is what makes them charismatic.

All these men – like Warren Buffett or Jack Welch – engage people like no one else. As they speak their first words, the world is all ears.

Take Buffett for instance. He is inarguably the world’s best investor. After reading his annual reports for the past ten years, I also count him among the most charismatic writers I’ve ever come across.

Buffett’s annual letters to shareholders are masterpieces, year after year. And he’s writing those plain-white zero-graphic booklets for the past five decades.

Pick up any annual report other than Berkshire’s (Buffett’s company), and you will know what I’m talking about. Almost 99% of other annual reports follow the ‘safe, bland, reassuring’ route. The ‘letter to shareholders’ are written by expert writers (and not CEOs themselves), and most contain language that is best fit for a dull, dreary advertisement.

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The environment we live in today is pretty complex. No moment is exactly the same. History, as they say, never repeats itself. You can never claim confidently that a set of causes will always replicate the same set of effects unless you’re dealing with hard physical laws.

Even if you do something with good intentions, the inherent complexity of the world will tend to produce results which you could never have anticipated. The world is complex and unfair. Here’s an anecdote to prove my point.

During the British government in India, the city of Delhi was facing the problem of too many venomous cobra snakes. To deal with the issue, government officials offered a bounty for every dead cobra. Initially this was a successful strategy as large numbers of snakes were killed for the reward. Eventually, however, enterprising people began to breed cobras for the income. When the government became aware of this, the reward program was scrapped, causing the cobra breeders to set the now-worthless snakes free. As a result, the wild cobra population further increased. The apparent solution for the problem made the situation even worse.

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