My 14 day quarantine period just ended, I did have a few symptoms though I tested negative.
For the first time in many years I went more than a week with almost nil screen time. I had all the time to think during this period, this post summarizes some of the musings that kept my grey cells active. These cut across various aspects of life including investing, choosing your own path and a few misleading social narratives of the times we live in.
This blog is not a place for fairy tales. Not all of them are pleasant thoughts, there is no space for politically correct but practically useless views in my world view. Unless we see things for what they are, we are unlikely to figure out ways that can make our lives better. Politically correct bullshit has never gotten me anywhere, if anything it has held me back from making progress in a few aspects of life.
With this disclaimer, read on at your own risk.
The market gives and the market takes, everything is a cycle. A smart investor takes more much from the market than he gives away.
He who can fill his stomach with curd rice has no master. People cannot control you when you don’t give a damn about what they have to offer. Quoting from a famous Bollywood song of the late 80’s – “Tera pyaar hai ek sone ka pinjra o shahzaadi, mujhko apni jaan se pyaari hai apni azadi”
He who keeps his lungi always secured shall worry the least when the wind picks up pace. This is why I always keep the seat belt on when I am flying, semi-serious incidences of turbulence won’t have me hitting the ceiling.
Knowing is not the same as doing, quoting Buffett and Lynch does not make one a good investor. Take practitioners seriously, not professors and gyan givers. On social media everyone compounds their portfolio at 20% without trying too hard. Most B-school finance professors are very good at explaining what happened in 2008 but have no frigging clue about what is happening right now. If they did they’d be investing, not preaching theory to a bunch of even more clueless people.
Activity is different from progress. The corporate world thrives on activity since individual contributions cannot be quantified or evaluated easily. Smart people track progress and don’t care too much about activity, those who aren’t smart enough to do anything else become man managers in large corporations and perpetuate the activity bullshit to the best of their limited abilities. Spend a decade in a large bureaucratic organization and you will start hating what you see in the mirror.
The glass ceiling for women does exist but so does a glass floor. Cab driver, auto driver, construction worker, mining worker, security guard, soldier and any other profession where the working conditions are bad and there is physical danger involved – almost all of them exclusively have a male workforce. You will never hear of calls for equality in such professions, feminists want equality only when it benefits them, they want equal representation only in the sexy professions and in board seats. Some of the smartest women I know miss the forest for the trees when it comes to this holy cow of gender identity.
Gender matters big time, so do race, economic profile and where one is born. The underprivileged and the minorities in the US have a far better quality of life than most of the middle class in India. Equality is a mythical and utopian concept, so is gender neutrality. I wouldn’t send a man to do a woman’s job and vice versa. I wouldn’t send a temple priest to fight militants in Kashmir either. Nothing wrong in playing to one’s strengths and taking a backseat in other domains, that is when the world functions at its best.
Passive investing is a sensible way of investing but it does not give one bragging rights. Even if the return sheet tells me you are compounding at 15%, there is nothing special about not being stupid. All of your investing experience can be summarized in one sentence “buy the index and hope for the best”. Nothing bad about it but nothing great about it either. Don’t bullshit yourself that you are a successful investor.
Success can have different templates; most failures have eerie similarities. Most people fuck up in predictable ways and for obvious reasons.
The world does not care too much about fairness, it cares about winners and losers. Most men intuitively understand this and don’t complain about getting a bad deal, they just shut up and deal with the situation. There is a reason why there aren’t too many great philosophers or spiritual leaders who are women, it has nothing to with patriarchy and has everything to do with the philosophical outlook.
Equality of opportunity is not the same as equality of outcome. Equal opportunity means you get a fair chance to run the race, nobody guarantees you a good outcome. If you win, there is probably a prize waiting for you. If you lose, you go sulk in a corner and lick your wounds. Don’t bother telling the world your problems because nobody cares. What you feel you deserve is the least of anyone’s considerations in life. You are not special; you are not a unique snow flake. Equality of outcome doesn’t exist in any form anywhere, yet this is what the bulk of the discourse in the liberal circles is centered around. These folks aren’t stupid, they are just pretentious and self-serving.
Statistics do apply to individuals. You are not the outlier, no matter what your hind brain tells you. Take base rates seriously, by being numerate you are already beating most of the people around you.
Logic is boring, most people prefer entertainment to intellectual development. People respond to emotional appeals, not to boring logical appeals. TL DR does not work in investing; technical analysis calls for reading and pattern recognition too. There is no easy money to be made most of the time, a lot of first-time investors in India who started off post COVID in 2020 will learn this lesson over the next few years.
Clarity of thought comes from thinking; most people sleepwalk through life and rarely think deeply about anything. Auto-pilot mode is for cruising and not for the most critical phases when you need to pilot your own damn life.
Aviate, navigate and then communicate. Communication is not everything, contrary to what the corporate world trains us to believe. There is no replacement for taking action and getting stuff done, even at the risk of being wrong. Communication for the most part doesn’t solve anything other than nursing fragile egos and giving people the feeling that they are being heard. Stop caring so much about what people feel, instead focus on getting stuff done that can make lives better, even at the cost of people assuming you are an asshole.
We live in a time when most vices are amplified by social media platforms. Visual platforms like Instagram tend to skew the self-worth assessment of people in the worst possible manner. These platforms give a few people daily attention for free, some of them will end up thinking they are the next best thing to happen to India after Sunny Leone. A 6/10 behaves like an 8/10 and believes she deserves a 9/10. For some reason social media does not have the same effect on men, probably because they deal with rejection much more than women do.
For reasons stated in the preceding point, over the next decade or so urban India is about to wake up to a shit storm of spiking divorce rates, rising instances of single motherhood and a beginning of the breakdown of the traditional family system. Observe the Western world, more than 50% of the marriages end in divorce with women not only initiating the majority of these divorces but also taking 50% of the man’s assets. Twenty something guys of today are the first generation of Indian men who are dealing with women who are not only entitled and want equality based on convenience but also believe that men are trash. Poking holes in the current brand of western feminism is not the same as misogyny. One can be supportive of women, yet dislike the current brand of western feminism which encourages women to become entitled and shirk accountability for their own actions.
Some of this might sound too blunt and to some extent rude but let us revisit the central tenet of this blog – Focus on how the world actually is, not on how things are supposed to be.
You might not feel great about yourself but you will most likely accomplish much more in life with this mindset. I’d rather be an asshole who went out and did what he wanted to (and hopefully achieved something in the process) rather than be a nice but useless bloke who was just another cog in the wheel.
Imagine spending 30 years of your life doing all the things society expects you to do only to hear this in return “He was a good person but wasn’t much of a man”. I cannot think of a bigger waste of someone’s time, effort and loyalty.
Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men (2007)
