#090 – Warren Buffett & Michael Jordan

Good morning everyone,

Hope you’re having a great week!

Let’s jump in.

read online on my website 

read time 3 minutes 

#090 at a Glance:

• Quote: Befriending uncertainty.

• Podcast: The best of Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger.

• Story: The Power of Removing Mental Limitations.

• Interesting Phenomenon: Michael Jordan’s true superpower.

• Tweet: 6 habits to increase your IQ.

Quote I’ve been thinking about:

Podcast I listened to:

Warren Buffett & Charlie Munger: 100 Years of Financial Wisdom in 4 Hours

Last week, I listened to an epic 4-hour audio compilation of some of Warren Buffett’s and Charlie Munger’s best moments from Berkshire Hathaway Q&As.

Sensational.

These were a few of the most interesting notes that I jotted down:

• You don’t need a high IQ to win in value investing; you simply need to follow through with the courage of your convictions.

• The ‘obvious uncertainty’ is where you win.

• You don’t need to have lots of good ideas; you only need to have really good ideas occasionally.

• You need to find the opportunities that you understand and believe are mispriced.

• Focus on the factors that are knowable and important.

• The market is there to serve you, not to instruct you.

• The business of investing doesn’t require extraordinary intellect, it requires extraordinary discipline.

• Never risk what you have and need for what you don’t have and don’t need.

• To a man with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

• It’s not about the size of your circle of competence but about knowing where the perimeter is.

• You don’t have to be brilliant; just avoid the dumb, obvious mistakes.

• The formula never changes.

• Opportunity comes to the prepared mind.

• If you’re an investor, you’re looking at what the asset is going to do. If you’re a speculator, you’re primarily focusing on what the price of an asset is going to do independent of the underlying value.

• You need to be willing to turn down opportunities that you don’t fully understand.

• If you don’t know how to value a business, you don’t know how to value a stock.

• Difficult ≠ Valuable.

• The test of whether to pay dividends is whether you can continue to create more than $1 of value for every dollar that you retain.

• If you think that you’re going to find a good opportunity every week, you’re going to lose a lot of money.

Listen on Spotify.

[Podcast Length: 3 hours 59 minutes]

Story I’ve been thinking about:

The Power of Removing Mental Limitations 

“During a mathematics course at Columbia University, a student fell asleep and woke up to the sound of his classmates talking.

As the lesson ended, he noticed the lecturer had written two problems on the whiteboard.

He assumed these were homework assignments, so he copied them into his notepad to tackle later. When he first attempted the problems, he found them quite difficult.

However, he persevered, spending hours in the library gathering references and studying until he was able to solve one of the problems, though it was challenging.

To his surprise, the lecturer didn’t ask about the homework in the next class.

Curious, the student stood up and asked, "Doctor, why didn’t you ask about the assignment from the previous lecture?"

The lecturer replied, "Required? It wasn’t mandatory. I was simply presenting examples of mathematical problems that science and scientists had not yet solved."

Shocked, the student responded, "But I solved one of them in four papers!"

The solution he discovered was eventually credited to him and documented at Columbia University.

The four papers he wrote on the issue are still on display at the institution.”

There’s a huge lesson in there.

We mustn’t allow self-imposed limitations to dictate our desire or ability to succeed.

(h/t – Steve Gatena)

Interesting Phenomenon I came across:

Michael Jordan’s True Superpower

Last week, a great friend sent me this fascinating clip from Netflix’s The Last Dance documentary, which chronicles Michael Jordan’s basketball career, particularly his time with the Chicago Bulls and their 1997-98 championship season.

The clip was Mark Vancil, the author of Rare Air, revealing Michael Jordan’s true superpower: his ability to be fully present at all times.

This is what he said:

“People struggle to be present.

People go and sit in ashrams for 20 years in India trying to be present.

Do yoga, meditate, trying to get here, now.

Most people live in fear because we project the past into the future.

Michael was a mystic.

He was never anywhere else.

His gift was not that he could jump high, run fast, shoot a basketball.

His gift was that he was completely present – and that was the separator.

The big downfall of a lot of players who were otherwise gifted, was thinking about failure.

Michael didn’t allow what he couldn’t control to get inside his head.

He would say, ‘Why would I think about missing a shot that I haven’t taken yet?’”

This is quite remarkable given that you would struggle to find someone in the western world in the late 90s who had never heard the name ‘Michael Jordan’.

He was undoubtedly the most high-profile athlete on the planet, let alone in the NBA.

Constant noise, constant hype, constant spotlight.

Everyone watching his every move at all times – both on the court and off.

This is what I find truly inspiring about this: not only was he the highest profile player out of everyone that he was competing against, but he was also, at the same time, the most mentally present and engaged.

It would have been so easy (and probably natural) to have his mind frequently run elsewhere, occupied with other things.

Bad publicity, media scandals, brand deals, business opportunities, the list is endless.

And he wasn’t perfect by any stretch of the imagination.

But in the midst of all of that, MJ’s ability to remain fully present when he was on the court – to be truly ‘locked in' – is what set him apart from everyone else.

And that’s why Michael Jordan is Michael Jordan.

Most people in the world these days can’t even work on something important without checking instagram every 15 minutes.

There are levels to this game.

We’ve got a lot of work to do.

Tweet I liked:

6 Habits to Increase Your IQ

Habit 1 → Start actually listening

"Don’t just listen waiting to speak; be active while you’re listening. Really just tune out the voices in your head that will distract you from what is actually being said."

Habit 2 → Upgrade your vocabulary

"Vocabulary is huge. We think with words and the more nuanced your vocabulary is, the more you can think very, very precise thoughts."

Habit 3 → Have a peaceful place to work

"Create a strong intellectual environment for you to live in. That is so key. Have a place in your home that is quiet, still, where you feel at peace."

Habit 4 → Daydream more

"I encourage you to engage in daydreams. Daydreams are not a waste of time; they’re actually the precursor of every invention if you think about it. People think things up that never existed before, and that comes in thought; it comes in daydreams."

Habit 5 → Think for yourself

"So many of us are told every day what to think. We’re told by the media, academia, our employers. You need to be able to think for yourself if you’re ever going to be thinking at a higher level, a true genius level."

Habit 6 → Find your intellectual tribe

"There’s this resource called other people. They know things that you don’t know, and you know things that they don’t know. Get together with them, pool your intellectual resources. It’ll help you all grow and become more intelligent and knowledgeable."

Thanks for reading! Grateful for your support.

Stay hungry, stay humble, stay curious. ⚡

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