Special Report

This is the fourth leaf of the multi-part series based on Peter Bevelin’s excellent book — All I Want to Know Know is Where I’m Going to Die, So I’ll Never Go There. The goal is to cover 27 insights on “what should be avoided” in business, investing, and in life.

The greatest — and most robust — contribution to knowledge consists in removing what we think is wrong — subtractive epistemology, writes Nassim Taleb in his book Antifragile.
[Read more…] about Special Report: 27 Ideas on What Doesn’t Work — Part Four

In this series we’re distilling few ideas from Peter Bevelin’s book — All I Want to Know Know is Where I’m Going to Die, So I’ll Never Go There. A mouthful of a title, isn’t it? But if you’re familiar with Charlie Munger, you’d instantly recognize the title as Munger’s favourite saying. Hidden inside this wisecrack is a profound philosophy on how to make important decisions in life and business to ensure better outcomes.

What has been reinforced in writing this memo, writes Bevelin in the introduction, “is efficiency, simplicity, clarity and common sense or judgement that are the hallmarks of Buffett and Munger. Both have remarkable ability to eliminate folly, simplify things and boil down issues to their essence and get right to the point — and focus on simple and timeless truths. They are the Einsteins of business and wisdom. So if there is one goal of this book, it is simplicity and to better understand how they think.”
[Read more…] about Special Report: 27 Ideas on What Doesn’t Work — Part Three

Inspired by Charlie Munger’s super quote — All I want to know is where I’m going to die so I’ll never go there — Peter Bevelin wrote a book with the same title. Bevelin’s book distills the wisdom from Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett’s quotes from their speeches, interviews, and annual meetings. The book is an extraordinary compendium to learn how to make better decisions in life, investing, and business.

In this multi-part series, I am going to share some insights from this book. These ideas would be focused on identifying anti-patterns — things that one should do to increase the odds of undesired outcomes. Learning the anti-patterns is a more robust form of knowledge acquisition than focusing on success patterns. Anti-patterns are those patterns which consistently lead to poor outcomes and thus need to be avoided.

These ideas are like cautionary tales. Following these anti-patterns gives one a head start on the path to failure — which of course no one wants. That’s another way of saying that if one avoids these anti-patterns, then it increases the likelihood of living a highly satisfying life.

[Read more…] about Special Report: 27 Ideas on What Doesn’t Work — Part Two

Learning the anti-patterns is a more robust form of knowledge acquisition than focusing on success patterns. Anti patterns are those patterns which consistently lead to undesired outcomes and thus need to be avoided.

Charlie Munger took this idea and packaged it into a witty phrase — All I want to know is where I’m going to die so I’ll never go there. That short sentence epitomizes Munger’s remarkable ability to eliminate folly, simplify things and boil down issues to their essence and get right to the point.

Inspired by Munger’s super quote, Peter Bevelin wrote a book with the same title. The book is a curated collection of Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett’s quotes from their speeches, interviews, and annual meetings. It’s an extraordinary manual to learn how to make better decisions in life, investing, and business.
[Read more…] about Special Report: 27 Ideas on What Doesn’t Work — Part One

One of my college professors who guided me during my final year BTech thesis often said —

If I ask you something and you don’t know the answer then you may look like a stupid for that moment. But if you don’t figure out the answer then you remain stupid forever.

At that time, his statement didn’t seem anything more than a witty remark. But as years have passed, I have slowly come to realize that it was a piece of deeply profound advice.

Being ignorant is okay. Everyone is ignorant about something or the other. However, once my ignorance is shown to me and then I don’t do anything about it, then it’s pure stupidity.

Humans have been in existence for hundreds of thousands of years. If you take the homo sapiens from 100,000 years back and compare his anatomy with that of a modern-day human, it’ll be pretty much the same. Even their brain structures wouldn’t be much different. But compare the progress mankind has made in terms of development and scientific know-how about nature’s secrets, the world we live in today is unrecognizable from the world a few hundred years back.

Sample this —

[Read more…] about Special Report: The Upside of Accepting Our Ignorance