• Society is addicted to expectations, our emotional well-being is at risk if we always attach success to results
• Reflecting on his book, Think like a Monk, he prioritized and valued the shared effort put into it, you can’t control the result from there

• Lesson #2: You can’t always find joy and happiness but you can always find meaning and service

• “When you feel like you’re a part of the solution, the problem affects you less. When you’re trying to heal and help others, you heal yourself in the process.” – Jay Shetty

• There is a toxic positivity movement – everything is not always fine, solutions can require struggle

• Lesson #3: Remind yourself of the gifts brought by terrible situations (like Covid and quarantine)

• Jay reflects on his inability to travel and do various activities with his loved ones because of the pandemic. But during this period, he found that the absence of a busy life actually made his relationships deeper

• Lesson #4: We have to learn to celebrate people while they are alive

• Never opt out of an opportunity to say you love or miss your closest relationships – you’ll never regret it

• Always know where you stand with your loved ones

• Don’t let milestones dictate your outflow of love – don’t reserve personal communication

• Lesson #5: Look at how we are controlled by fear

• “If we’re controlled by fear, we’re in the mode of ignorance” – Jay Shetty
• Setting a goal alleviates the fear of failure; it helps you celebrate incremental success

• Lesson #6: Digital friendships can go deeper than you think

• Shared goals and passions can overpower boundaries set by physical distance

• Lesson #7: Anything can be done in 48 hours

• If you truly want something to happen, you will make it happen

• Lesson #8: There’s never a better time to learn than when you’re not sure what’s going on

• Therapy helps you make sense of your past and coaching helps you build your future

• Lesson #9: When you don’t get what you want, you get more of what you need

• When you’re too attached to what you want, you’ll never be open to what you need

• Lesson #10: Solitude is as necessary as community

• Energy preservation and internal solitude helps fuel your engagement in the community; they are not independent of each other

• Lesson #11: Invest in energy first, expertise second

• Energy is coachable, expertise will only get you so far

• Lesson #12: The mind has to be used by you for what you want to believe

• We can convince our minds to make the most of every situation
• If you can actively see the value in discomfort, you will maintain a much healthier mental state

Tim Ferriss: So time billionaires. What does that refer to?

Graham Duncan: I was listening to a guy introduced a speaker a while ago. And he was saying people don’t really understand the difference between billionaires and millionaires. He said a million seconds is like 11 days. A billion seconds is 31 years. And I remember that …

Tim Ferriss: Oh, shit. That’s a hell of a way to think about it.

Graham Duncan: Right?

Tim Ferriss: Wait. Can you say that one more time?

Graham Duncan: A million seconds is 11 days. A billion seconds is slightly over 31 years. And I was thinking about – Tyler Cowen has a thing about cultural billionaires –

Tim Ferriss: Marginal Revolution?

Graham Duncan: Yeah. In one of his books, he talks about cultural billionaires. I feel like in our culture, we’re so obsessed, as a culture, with money. And we deify dollar billionaires in a way that – it’d be nice to co-opt that term the way Tyler Cowen did with cultural billionaires. And I was thinking of time billionaires that when I see, sometimes, 20-year-olds – the thought I had was they probably have two billion seconds left. But they aren’t relating to themselves as time billionaires. And I was thinking about how if you could – what would Rupert Murdoch, who’s worth $20 billion – he’s 87 years old. What would he pay if he could take the next five years of someone’s 20-year-old healthy body, mind, etc.? And for that 20-year-old, how would they price it? Because I was thinking at various points of my career, I might have sold the next five years for something.

And over time, my pricing has gone vertical because the next five years, if I were to lose – and the key to this question is that you can’t sell the five at the end of your life. You gotta sell them right now. I don’t know how I’d price it because my kids are of a certain age that they’ll never be again. But I don’t know that I live every day that way. But I aspire to. So I was trying to capture – I heard Tim Urban on your podcast. And I started reading his stuff. And I find his writing style and the topics he is interested in just amazing. He has this concept of life calendar. And I bought his life calendar. He sells it as a poster. And what he does is he puts a week – he does a circle for each week. So he has 52 circles on the horizontal and then 90 rows so that you can see a 90-year life in weeks. And what’s startling about the picture – again, to this question of how long is a billion seconds – is how short it actually is.

1. The ability to empathize with people who disagree with you is one of the most underrated skills. Rather than asking, “Why would someone think that?” you’ll get farther asking, “What have they experienced in life that I haven’t that would cause them to think that?”

2. Peoples’ desire to have an opinion far exceeds the number of things that need to be opined on. “I don’t know” is a phrase that should be praised for its honesty, not belittled for its detachment.

3. Intelligence is great, but it’s easily muffled by four things: Ego, the inability to change your mind, the inability to communicate with others, and the unwillingness to compromise with a team.

4. Psychologist and economist Daniel Kahneman once said, “The idea that what you don’t see might refute everything you believe just doesn’t occur to us.” Take this seriously and you realize that few things matter more than being open-minded and surrounding yourself with people from different backgrounds and experiences.

5. Past success always seem easier than it was, because you now know how the story ends, and you can’t unremember what you know today, when trying to remember how you felt in the past.

6. Learning how to lose gracefully, without being ruined and while learning something new can be far more valuable than learning how to be right.

7. Your skill isn’t that important. What matters is your skill relative to your competitors. This is as obvious as it is overlooked – especially in investing, when you often don’t really know who your competitors are.

8. The coworkers I’ve gotten the best work done with are rarely the smartest or the most experienced, but the nicest and easiest to work with. Emotional intelligence can be so much more important than book intelligence. I wish they’d teach this in school.

9. There’s often a negative correlation between experience and humility. The more experience you gain, the more you see how less precision and more room for error is vital in a game where we overestimate skill and underestimate luck.

10. Most complicated things have a simple explanation. If you can’t understand something when you were the intended audience, the person who wrote it is either bad at communicating or intentionally deceptive.

11. Expectations can change faster than outcomes, so the successful businesses, investors and people are often in some state of, “Eh, whatever.”

12. The people who add the most to financial journalism are those who would be writing the same stuff even if no one were reading. They just love what they do, and passion is more powerful than a profit motive. This is true in many fields. The number of people on the Forbes Richest list who “were never in it for the money” is quite high.

1. Saying “I’ll be greedy when others are fearful” is much easier than actually doing it.

2. The gulf between a great company and a great investment can be extraordinary.

3. Markets go through at least one big pullback every year, and one massive one every decade. Get used to it. It’s just what they do.

4. There is virtually no accountability in the financial pundit arena. People who have been wrong about everything for years still draw crowds.

5. As Erik Falkenstein says: “In expert tennis, 80% of the points are won, while in amateur tennis, 80% are lost. The same is true for wrestling, chess, and investing: Beginners should focus on avoiding mistakes, experts on making great moves.”

6. There are tens of thousands of professional money managers. Statistically, a handful of them have been successful by pure chance. Which ones? I don’t know, but I bet a few are famous.

7. On that note, some investors who we call “legendary” have barely, if at all, beaten an index fund over their careers. On Wall Street, big wealth isn’t indicative of big returns.

8. During recessions, elections, and Federal Reserve policy meetings, people become unshakably certain about things they know nothing about.

9. The more comfortable an investment feels, the more likely you are to be slaughtered.

10. Time-saving tip: Instead of trading penny stocks, just light your money on fire. Same for leveraged ETFs.

11. Not a single person in the world knows what the market will do in the short run. End of story.

12. The analyst who talks about his mistakes is the guy you want to listen to. Avoid the guy who doesn’t – his are much bigger.

13. You don’t understand a big bank’s balance sheet. The people running the place and their accountants don’t, either.

14. There will be seven to 10 recessions over the next 50 years. Don’t act surprised when they come.

15. Thirty years ago, there was one hour of market TV per day. Today there’s upwards of 18 hours. What changed isn’t the volume of news, but the volume of drivel.

16. Warren Buffett’s best returns were achieved when markets were much less competitive. It’s doubtful anyone will ever match his 50-year record.

17. Most of what is taught about investing in school is theoretical nonsense. There are very few rich professors.

18. The more someone is on TV, the less likely his or her predictions are to come true. (U.C. Berkeley psychologist Phil Tetlock has data on this).

19. Related: Trust no one who is on CNBC more than twice a week.

20. The market doesn’t care how much you paid for a stock. Or your house. Or what you think is a “fair” price.

21. The majority of market news is not only useless, but also harmful to your financial health.

22. Professional investors have better information and faster computers than you do. You will never beat them short-term trading. Don’t even try.

23. How much experience a money manager has doesn’t tell you much. You can underperform the market for an entire career. And many have.

24. The decline of trading costs is one of the worst things to happen to investors, as it made frequent trading possible. High transaction costs used to cause people to think hard before they acted.

25. Professional investing is one of the hardest careers to succeed at, but it has low barriers to entry and requires no credentials. That creates legions of “experts” who have no idea what they are doing. People forget this because it doesn’t apply to many other fields.

26. Most IPOs will burn you. People with more information than you have want to sell. Think about that.

27. When someone mentions charts, moving averages, head-and-shoulders patterns, or resistance levels, walk away.

28. The phrase “double-dip recession” was mentioned 10.8 million times in 2010 and 2011, according to Google. It never came. There were virtually no mentions of “financial collapse” in 2006 and 2007. It did come.

29. The real interest rate on 20-year Treasuries is negative, and investors are plowing money into them. Fear can be a much stronger force than arithmetic.

30. The book Where Are the Customers’ Yachts? was written in 1940, and most still haven’t figured out that financial advisors don’t have their best interest at heart.

31. The low-cost index fund is one of the most useful financial inventions in history. Boring but beautiful.

32. The best investors in the world have more of an edge in psychology than in finance.

33. What markets do day to day is overwhelmingly driven by random chance. Ascribing explanations to short-term moves is like trying to explain lottery numbers.

34. For most, finding ways to save more money is more important than finding great investments.

35. If you have credit card debt and are thinking about investing in anything, stop. You will never beat 30% annual interest.

36. A large portion of share buybacks are just offsetting shares issued to management as compensation. Managers still tout the buybacks as “returning money to shareholders.”

37. The odds that at least one well-known company is insolvent and hiding behind fraudulent accounting are high.

38. Twenty years from now the S&P 500 (SNPINDEX:^GSPC) will look nothing like it does today. Companies die and new ones emerge.

39. Twelve years ago General Motors (NYSE:GM) was on top of the world and Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) was laughed at. A similar shift will occur over the next decade, but no one knows to what companies.

40. Most would be better off if they stopped obsessing about Congress, the Federal Reserve, and the president and focused on their own financial mismanagement.

41. For many, a house is a large liability masquerading as a safe asset.

42. The president has much less influence over the economy than people think.

43. However much money you think you’ll need for retirement, double it. Now you’re closer to reality.

44. The next recession is never like the last one.

45. Remember what Buffett says about progress: “First come the innovators, then come the imitators, then come the idiots.”

46. And what Mark Twain says about truth: “A lie can travel halfway around the world while truth is putting on its shoes.”

47. And what Marty Whitman says about information: “Rarely do more than three or four variables really count. Everything else is noise.”

48. The bigger a merger is, the higher the odds it will be a flop. CEOs love empire-building by overpaying for companies.

49. Investments that offer little upside and big downside outnumber those with the opposite characteristics at least 10-to-1.

50. The most boring companies – toothpaste, food, bolts – can make some of the best long-term investments. The most innovative, some of the worst.

• What I want to talk to you about today is the difference between gifts and choices. Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy – they’re given after all. Choices can be hard. You can seduce yourself with your gifts if you’re not careful, and if you do, it’ll probably be to the detriment of your choices.

• How will you use these gifts? And will you take pride in your gifts or pride in your choices?

Tomorrow, in a very real sense, your life – the life you author from scratch on your own – begins.

How will you use your gifts? What choices will you make?

Will inertia be your guide, or will you follow your passions?

Will you follow dogma, or will you be original?

Will you choose a life of ease, or a life of service and adventure?

Will you wilt under criticism, or will you follow your convictions?

Will you bluff it out when you’re wrong, or will you apologize?

Will you guard your heart against rejection, or will you act when you fall in love?

Will you play it safe, or will you be a little bit swashbuckling?

When it’s tough, will you give up, or will you be relentless?

Will you be a cynic, or will you be a builder?

Will you be clever at the expense of others, or will you be kind?

• I will hazard a prediction. When you are 80 years old, and in a quiet moment of reflection narrating for only yourself the most personal version of your life story, the telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made. In the end, we are our choices. Build yourself a great story. Thank you and good luck!

Link: https://youtu.be/UbpARgj6xk0

Prof. Sanjay Bakshi’s note/memo on the topic - How to build your own BRK memo

Charlie Munger says

“It is not given to human beings to have such talent that they can just know everything about everything all the time. But it is given to human beings who work hard at it – who look and sift the world for a mis-priced bet – that they can occasionally find one. And the wise ones bet heavily when the world offers them that opportunity. They bet big when they have odds. And the rest of the time, they don’t. It’s just that simple.”

“Experience tends to confirm a long-held notion that being prepared, on a few occasions in a lifetime, to act promptly in scale, in doing some simple and logical thing, will often dramatically improve the financial results of that lifetime. A few major opportunities, clearly recognisable as such, will usually come to one who continuously searches and waits, with a curious mind that loves diagnosis involving multiple variables. And then all that is required is a willingness to bet heavily when the odds are extremely favorable, using resources available as a result of prudence and patience in the past.”

What is it?

Intentionally limiting your diligence in order to avoid decision paralysis in a world where everything, if you dig deep enough, is more complicated than it seems.

Quoting Brent Beshore’s post - Investors and Operators - Lessons i’ve learned from both worlds:

All Businesses are loosely functioning disasters, and some are profitable despite it.

At 30,000 feet, the world is beautiful and orderly. On the ground, it’s chaotic and confusing. Nothing ever goes to plan. Surprises lurk around every corner. Things are constantly breaking. Someone is always upset. Mistakes are made daily. Expecting anything less is being out of touch with reality. And remember, just because you’re now aware of it doesn’t change reality. It was that way before, you just didn’t realize it.

“When I work I have no sunk costs. I like changing my mind. Some people really don’t like it but for me changing my mind is a thrill. It’s an indication that I’m learning something. So I have no sunk costs in the sense that I can walk away from an idea that I’ve worked on for a year if I can see a better idea. It’s a good attitude for a researcher. The main track that young researchers fall into is sunk costs. They get to work on a project that doesn’t work and that is not promising but they keep at it. I think too much persistence can be bad for you in the intellectual world.”

• Danny Kahneman

It turned out, though, that Mr. Iger had a fierce will under that gentlemanly exterior. Early on, he began getting up at 4 a.m. to outwork everyone else and he still does. He sets out his exercise clothes the night before, so he doesn’t have to turn on the lights in his closet and thus wake up his wife, Willow Bay, a former Estee Lauder model and broadcaster who is now dean of the USC Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism. He leaves out a coffee mug for Ms. Bay and warms up some milk for her coffee before he tackles the VersaClimber.

“I never viewed myself as exceptional,” Mr. Iger says over salmon and a glass of red wine at the Napa Rose restaurant in Disneyland. “And so whenever I got a job, I was relying on hard work more than anything and a level of enthusiasm and optimism. When I went to ABC Sports, everybody there went to Stanford or Dartmouth or Columbia.

“Ithaca College, O.K.? I didn’t have an inferiority complex but I knew I wasn’t one of them. I didn’t wear Gucci shoes. I didn’t wear Brooks Brothers clothes. I couldn’t afford any of that stuff, but I knew I had a work ethic that was prodigious. And what happened early on is people started relying on me because they knew if they asked me to get something done, including Roone Arledge” — the ABC executive — “I would get it done.

“So suddenly I realized, well, wait a minute. I may not be special in certain ways. But when it came to getting things done, I was special. And that’s actually driven me throughout, you know?”

Actually, Mr. Iger’s book is a primer on how much you can achieve if you keep your ego in check. In an era of brutish and ego-driven leadership in the White House, Silicon Valley and in many other countries around the world, Mr. Iger doesn’t lead with his ego or try to drive the other alphas out of the herd.

“You have to have an ability to subjugate your own ego,” he says. “It serves you well when you’re rising and then even when you have risen, there are going to be times when you just have to put that away.”

1. No company or investment strategy is proven until it’s survived a calamity.
2. Independence is one of the most under-appreciated assets. Relinquishing it should be done sparingly and with eyes wide open of its cost.
3. “Magic made them. Only math will save -them”.
4. Everyone wants crazy vision combined with corporate decorum. Rarely are those two things found in the same person.
5. Good products do not automatically create good businesses, especially if part of the product’s consumer appeal is that the business sells it for less than the cost of its production.
6. Every business has three main stakeholders: Customers, employees, and shareholders. You can ignore any one of those for a while, but eventually all three have to be cared for

“Sadly, many people spend their entire lives focusing on the wrong questions. They may pursue money, when they really want happiness. They may pursue the respect of people whose favor is really not worthy of being sought. So before you succumb to the temptation to immediately spring to work on the answer, always stop and first ask, “What’s the real question here?” Often the question that seems obvious may not be the question that leads to effective action.”

~ Edward B. Burger and Michael Starbird, The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking

Again, some things are really cynical, others are long observations on different jobs.

Before you start writing code…

• Spec First, Then Code
• Write Steps as Comments
• Gherkin Is Your Friend to Understand Expectations
• Design Patters Are Used to Name Solution, Not Find Them
• Thinking Data Flow Beats Patterns
• The Magic Number Seven, Plus Or Minus Two
• Cognitive Cost Is The Readability Killer
• Learn The Basics of Functional Programming

Testing Software

• Unit Tests Are Good, Integration Tests Are Gooder
• Testing Every Function Creates Dead Code
• Tests Make Better APIs
• Make Tests That You Know How To Run On The Command Line
• Good Languages Come With Tests

Documenting your code

• Documentation Is A Love Letter To Your Future Self
• The Function Documentation Is Its Contract
• If A Function Description Includes An “And”, It’s Wrong
• Good Languages Come With Integrated Documentation

Writing code

• Be Ready To Throw Your Code Away
• Future Thinking Is Future Trashing
• Don’t Use Booleans As Parameters
• Beware of Interface Changes
• It’s Better To Let The Application Crash Than Do Nothing
• If You Know How To Handle It, Handle It
• Types Say What Your Data Is
• If Your Data Has a Schema, Use a Structure
• Don’t Mess With Things Outside Your Project

More:

• https://blog.juliobiason.net/thoughts/things-i-learnt-the-hard-way/
• https://blog.juliobiason.net/books/things-i-learnt/

Selected excerpts:

That’s what I’m interested in talking about today. Because if I’ve learned one thing, it’s that technology doesn’t change who we are, it magnifies who we are, the good and the bad.

Our problems – in technology, in politics, wherever – are human problems. From the Garden of Eden to today, it’s our humanity that got us into this mess, and it’s our humanity that’s going to have to get us out.

If you want credit for the good, take responsibility for the bad

But whether you like it or not, what you build and what you create define who you are.

It feels a bit crazy that anyone should have to say this. But if you’ve built a chaos factory, you can’t dodge responsibility for the chaos. Taking responsibility means having the courage to think things through.

Graduates, at the very least, learn from these mistakes. If you want to take credit, first learn to take responsibility.

Be a builder

In other words, whatever you do with your life, be a builder.

You don’t have to start from scratch to build something monumental. And, conversely, the best founders – the ones whose creations last and whose reputations grow rather than shrink with passing time – they spend most of their time building, piece by piece.

Builders are comfortable in the belief that their life’s work will one day be bigger than them – bigger than any one person. They’re mindful that its effects will span generations. That’s not an accident. In a way, it’s the whole point.

Graduates, being a builder is about believing that you cannot possibly be the greatest cause on this Earth, because you aren’t built to last. It’s about making peace with the fact that you won’t be there for the end of the story.

You won’t be ready

Fourteen years ago, Steve stood on this stage and told your predecessors: “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.”

Here’s my corollary: “Your mentors may leave you prepared, but they can’t leave you ready.”

When the dust settled, all I knew was that I was going to have to be the best version of myself that I could be.

I knew that if you got out of bed every morning and set your watch by what other people expect or demand, it’ll drive you crazy.

So what was true then is true now. Don’t waste your time living someone else’s life. Don’t try to emulate the people who came before you to the exclusion of everything else, contorting into a shape that doesn’t fit.

It takes too much mental effort – effort that should be dedicated to creating and building. You’ll waste precious time trying to rewire your every thought, and, in the mean time, you won’t be fooling anybody.

Graduates, the fact is, when your time comes, and it will, you’ll never be ready.

But you’re not supposed to be. Find the hope in the unexpected. Find the courage in the challenge. Find your vision on the solitary road.

Don’t get distracted.

There are too many people who want credit without responsibility.

Too many who show up for the ribbon cutting without building anything worth a damn.

Be different. Leave something worthy.

And always remember that you can’t take it with you. You’re going to have to pass it on.

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, and I really wish somebody had told this to me.

All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But it’s like there is this gap. For the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good. It’s not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not that good.

But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you. A lot of people never get past that phase. They quit.

Everybody I know who does interesting, creative work they went through years where they had really good taste and they could tell that what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be. They knew it fell short. Everybody goes through that.

And if you are just starting out or if you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week or every month you know you’re going to finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you’re going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions.

I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It takes awhile. It’s gonna take you a while. It’s normal to take a while. You just have to fight your way through that.

— Ira Glass

Source: Ira Glass on Storytelling

Summed up, what I’ve learned from these people is to follow your own way, always. Figure out the right units of exploration, embrace strange intersections, and carefully consider what could go wrong. Rest when you need it, be dogged and aggressive when the situation calls for it, but just keep going. Do it all with respect for others and as much trail magic as you can muster.

In my new career teaching investing and investment fund entrepreneurship at Kase Learning, one of the most important things I teach is my story and the many, many lessons that can be learned from it.

I launched a tiny hedge fund with only $1 million under management in January 1999, running the entire business myself from my laptop on a rickety Ikea desk in a corner of my bedroom for the first five years. But I learned fast, worked around the clock, made some good decisions and, frankly, got lucky over the first dozen years, during which I nearly tripled my investors’ money in a flat market and grew to three hedge funds and two mutual funds with $200 million under management.

And then I screwed it up over the next seven years, seizing defeat from the jaws of victory. My funds chronically underperformed, which led to assets shrinking to $50 million and, eventually, the decision to close my funds last September.

You might think the single more important and valuable thing I teach during my Lessons from the Trenches investing bootcamp is how I achieved such success in my first dozen years.

But you’d be wrong. While there are of course many important lessons I teach about this early period in my investing career that will benefit those who seek to achieve similar success, I believe the most valuable thing I teach is what happened afterward.

Studying mistakes and failures

“Huh?” you might ask. “Why should I study mistakes and failures?”

Here’s why: If you want to learn anything difficult (investing, surgery, flying a plane, etc.), don’t just study success: Spend an equal amount of time studying mistakes and failures. As Charlie Munger says, “Invert, always invert” and “All I want to know is where I’m going to die so I never go there.” (I discussed this way of thinking in my commencement address two years ago at my alma mater, Eaglebrook; video here, text with appendiceshere.)

During my two years at Harvard Business School, I read ~300 case studies and pretty much every one featured a heroic protagonist, facing a difficult issue, but almost every time reaching the right decision and achieving great success. I can’t recall a single one in which the protagonist made wrong decisions and screwed it all up. It’s absolute negligence on the part of HBS (and, to be fair, pretty much every other business school I suspect) to teach success 99% of the time. That’s not how the world works — everyone makes mistakes and suffers setbacks. In addition, if you want to make good decisions, it’s critical to be able to rule out bad ones, which means you need to study them!

How to avoid a similar fate

After I finished teaching my personal tale of woe during the recent bootcamp, one of my students asked a wonderful, simple question: “What steps can I take to prevent this from happening to me?”

My quick answer was: “Don’t become successful.”

After the laughter subsided, I added: “And don’t go to Harvard … and graduate with high honors …twice!” (More laughter.)

But I was actually serious, as I explained:

I think being super successful educationally, and then being super successful in the first part of my investing career led to my downfall in many ways. Here are two:

First, an overabundance of hubris (going to Harvard tends to instill that) led me to launch my fund in January 1999 with almost no relevant experience — I had a good general business and entrepreneurial background, but hadn’t worked a day in the finance or investment industries.

I fancied myself a true value investor, following the principles of Warren Buffett and Munger, but I now see that I was little more than a late-’90s bull market genius. For example, I made six times my money in AOL stock in 1998, which led me to believe that I was God’s gift to investing. (I can’t tell you how many young investors today remind me exactly of myself back then!)

I shouldn’t have been managing my own money, much less anyone else’s, much less launching a hedge fund until I’d gotten some real experience in this apprenticeship-based business. But instead I took a shortcut.

While I was able to overcome my lack of experience for a number of years, I made some big mistakes, both as an investor and entrepreneur, which eventually caught up with me.

Second, nailing the internet bubble and then the housing bubble (which culminated in being featured in a “60 Minutes” segment in December 2008 that won an Emmy and CNBC calling me “The Prophet” filled me with hubris (which had become even worse after more than a decade of great success), which blinded me to risks and led to many bad decisions.

Perhaps the worst is that I thought I was a good macro prognosticator and market timer. Thus, instead of just focusing on finding a dozen or so cheap stocks, which is all I did in my early days, I instead formed the opinion that the market was ahead of itself and might plunge at any moment, as it had in 2008-09. Worse yet, I acted on this view, positioning my portfolio defensively, with lots of cash and a big short book, waiting for the market meltdown that never came. Needless to say, this was exactly the wrong positioning during this long, complacent bull market.

To succeed, you have to be better than ever before

The reason I call Kase Learning’s core program Lessons from the Trenches is that it’s a battle. This long bull market combined with the rise of indexing and the increasing sophistication of supercomputers has made the job of investors and fund managers much harder. So, to succeed, you have to be better than ever before: do even more in-depth research, do better analysis, be more patient and disciplined, etc.

Most importantly, you have to constantly be moving rapidly up the experience curve, studying both successes and failures. There are only two ways to get experience: learning from veterans (like me) or stumbling around on your own, making mistakes and getting scars on your back. Which do you prefer?

Original Published at Yahoo Finance

Some of these key life lessons include: 

1. Resolve all conflicts before you go

People carry so much baggage, unnecessarily, all through their life only wanting to drop it at the very end of their journey. The trick lies not in not having conflicts but in resolving them as soon as one can,

2. Simplicity is the truth of life

People stop eating indulgent food when they know they are going to go. The understanding that dawns on many people in their final days is that they should’ve lived a simple life. They regret that the most.

3. Filter out people’s bad traits

If you focus on the good qualities though, you spend that time getting to know them better or, maybe even, loving them.

4. Be willing to seek help from others

We must help others, but more importantly, have the courage to seek help when we’re in need. Every person in the world knows more than us in some respect. And their knowledge can help us, only if we’re open to it.

5. Find beauty in simple things

Pause to appreciate small things and find beauty in them. If minds are pre-occupied with “seemingly” more important things,  it is hard to find joy in small things.

6. Acceptance is liberation

Accept the situation so you are free to think what you want to do about it and how. Acceptance will liberate you and empower you.

7. Accepting everyone as the same makes service easier

The day you treat everyone the same is the day you breathe light and worry less about who might feel offended or not. Make your job easier.

8. If/When you find your purpose, do something about it

Take action on what truly matters.

9. Habits become values

Building good habits happens over time, with practice. “It’s like building a muscle; you have to keep at it everyday.”

10. Choose what you want to learn

The key lesson here is to be mindful of choosing what you deeply feel will be of value to you.

11. You don’t break ties with people; you break ties with the thought they produce

The divorce is with the thought and never with the person. To understand that is to unburden yourself from being bitter and revengeful.

12. 10 percent of what you earn should be kept aside for dharma

keep 10 percent of your income for goodwill.

/via @Project_Fuel (Source)