#140 – Investing Minds & Sydney Housing

Good morning everyone,

Hope you’re having a great week!

Here are 5 things I found interesting over the past few days.

A little longer than usual, so buckle up.

Let’s jump in.

read online on my website

read time 5 minutes

#140 – The Rundown:

• Quote: Success in the modern world.

• Podcast: Joe Aston x Doug Tynan.

• Article: How to succeed in MrBeast Production.

• Deep Dive: Sydney median house price hits $1.75m.

• Tweet: Momentum isn’t built, it’s borrowed.

Quote:

Podcast:

Joe Aston Interviews Doug Tynan

Doug Tynan is the Co-Founder & Chief Investment Officer of GCQ Funds Management, a Sydney-based global equities manager.

With ~20 years of industry experience, Doug is incredibly well-versed in listed markets and identifying exceptional opportunities in the world of investing.

These were the biggest takeaways I jotted down whilst listening to the episode, incredibly well conducted by Joe Aston of the AFR and Rampart:

• The top 4 lessons Doug has learned from Charlie Munger: 1) As an investor, you must understand accounting; 2) When you invest in a company, you’re investing in a slice of the industry; 3) Work strictly with checklists; 4) Understand psychology and your own biases.

• You must be consciously aware of your circle of competence and not stretch beyond it.

• Once you’ve solidified your investment checklists and those due diligence processes, your differentiator then becomes your ability to stick to them and source new ideas.

• When a stock gets to 90% of what you think it’s worth, sell.

• The difficulty is in maintaining your discipline and simplifying the complex.

• If you can’t explain something to others, you don’t really understand it.

• 70% of companies in global indices underperform the benchmark over a 5-year period. Therefore, your job is to filter out the 70%, stay fully invested, and you’re in the green (always sounds easy in theory).

What struck me most about Doug, apart from his investing acumen, was his clarity of thought.

The way he thinks through ideas and concepts is so clear and well-considered. No mental stone is left unturned.

When I was listening to him speak, I was reminded of a concept that I wrote about over 2 years ago regarding one of my favourite learnings from David Goggins: the mental garage.

If I were to visualise Doug’s mind, and the minds of most proficient investors, I see a clean, neatly stacked garage with shelves, labels, and everything correctly in its place.

An environment that is not only conducive to accurately recalling ‘old’ information, but one that has the capacity to effectively process new information as well.

Clarity of speech begins with clarity of thought, and one pattern that seems to be emerging of all the great investors whose content I consume is that they spend a lot of time thinking – yes – but they also spend a lot of time working on how to think.

As I continue to delve deeper into the investment world both personally and professionally, it is becoming increasingly apparent to me that arguably the biggest lever an investor can pull when it comes to performance is their decision-making process.

It may sound obvious, but so much of the job seems to come back to the ability of the individual/team to absorb new information via channels, process that information via frameworks, and act decisively on that information via investment decisions.

Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

[Duration: 1 hour 1 minute]

(P.S. I made a Spotify playlist with every podcast I’ve ever recommended. Hope they bring you as much value as they’ve brought me.)

Article:

How to Succeed in MrBeast Production

Over the weekend, I spent time reading ‘How to Succeed in MrBeast Production’, the internal memo written by Jimmy Donaldson (AKA MrBeast) to form part of the onboarding of new employees.

Quite an incredible insight into one of the most prolific and successful production teams in the world.

These were my favourite takeaways:

• “If you want the highest probability of success I beg you to learn why we do what we do at a deep level before you try to “fix” anything. We’ve done countless videos and invested hundreds of thousands of hours collectively building how we do things. I know it’s not perfect but we have a reason for how we do most stuff and it’s probably a decent one.”

• “The first minute of each video is the most important minute of each video.”

• “Anytime we do something that no other creator can do, that separates us in their mind and makes our videos more special to them. It changes how they see us and it does make them watch more videos and engage more with the brand.”

• “If you’re not growing, eventually the difficulties of the videos will outgrow you. Whether it be production, creative, camera, or editing I want you to be obsessed with Youtube. Get rid of Netflix and Hulu and watch tons of Youtube, it will without a doubt in my mind make you more successful here.”

• “I want less excuses in this company. Take ownership and don’t give your project a chance to fail.”

• “If you ever only work on one video during a day, you failed as a MrBeast employee that day.”

• “I want money spent to be shown on camera ideally. If you’re spending over $10,000 on something and it won’t be shown on camera, seriously think about it.”

• “The goal of our content is to excite me. That may sound weird to some of you, especially if you’re new but to me it’s what’s most important. If I'm not excited to get in front of that camera and film the video, it’s just simply not going to happen. I’m not fake and I will be authentic, that’s partly why the channel does so well. And if i’m not excited by the video, we’re fucked.”

• “This channel is my baby and I've given up my life for it. I’m so emotionally connected to it that it’s sad lol. But this is the one thing I will never compromise on, I have 0 issues throwing away a multi million dollar video if I don’t think it’s up to my standards and is good for the audience.”

• “That’s one of the secret weapons of MrBeast Productions, we aren't stuck in any old ways of thinking and you can literally turn anything into content. Good content can be anything, always have an open mind and never stop innovating.”

• “The longer people watch, the better a video will do. This is why I’m such a stickler about every single second of content. Hook people at the start of the video, transition them to an amazing story that they are invested in, have no dull moments, and then have a satisfying payoff at the end of the video with an abrupt ending.”

• “The video endings must always be abrupt to protect retention.”

• “This isn’t a bureaucratic corporate company. You don’t have to do something for 5 years to get a promotion, I hate the word promotion. The more responsibility, risk you help us navigate, and overall bullshit you deal with, the more you make. And if you want more of that we will gladly help train you to receive it haha. There is infinite room for you to grow here. This isn’t a stepping stone, this is your final destination. We will win and we are going to build something amazing.”

Check out the memo here.

Deep Dive:

Sydney Median House Price Hits $1.75m

I came across quite a jarring statistic on the radio last week: the median house price in Sydney has now cracked $1.75m.

Not average…median.

That number is up 2% for the quarter and 6.4% for the trailing 12-month period.

Since I haven’t been the most avid follower of the real estate market over the past few months, safe to say that this statistic came as quite a shock.

While some may seek to normalise this figure due to that old foe we know as inflation, that is not the whole story…

Australia’s CPI was ~3.4% for the year ending November 2025, with property prices well exceeding both the cost of goods & services as well as wage growth.

Given the proverbial horse I have in this race as a young Sydney-sider, I’ve been on a quest this week to unpack the economic reality of what this actually means for Aussies more broadly.

So, here’s what I came up with:

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the average weekly earnings for an employee in Australia is now $1,436.

$1,436 × 52 = $74,672 annualised pre-tax personal income.

Assuming a household of 2 primary income earners, that’s $149,344 pre-tax household income per year, or $119,979 after tax.

We’ll come back to that number in a minute, but first, let’s factor in the cost of a house.

For the purchase of a $1.75m residential property and (very generously) assuming a 14.3% deposit of $250,000, we are left with a $1.5m mortgage.

With a standard 30-year loan and assuming 6% interest per annum, that comes to mortgage repayments of $2,075 per week.

Now, let’s bring in the household income that we calculated earlier:

$119,979 ÷ 52 = $2,307 weekly after-tax household income.

Now, let’s subtract the weekly mortgage repayment:

$2,307 – $2,075 = $232 per week for the household to live on.

That’s $232 to cover all bills, groceries, transportation, medical expenses, school fees, clothes… (I think we already maxed out at bills).

***

In all seriousness though, I do find this quite alarming.

The obvious rebuttal to the exercise I’ve gone through above is that a family earning $119,979 after tax would (clearly) not be able to purchase a $1.75m home.

And you’re absolutely right.

Therein lies the problem:

An average household is no longer able to afford the median house price in the most established and populous city of one of the youngest and most geographically dispersed countries in the world.

That’s alarm bells for me.

There’s an economic disconnect that clearly needs to be solved.

Incredibly curious to hear as many opinions as possible on this:

What do you guys think about this issue/how does it make you feel?

***

Disclaimer: I’m not writing this to paint a bleak outlook of the world – I’m simply trying to get some clarity myself around the economic reality that most people my age, and in the city that I grew up in, are facing. After speaking to many people a lot smarter and more experienced than me about this topic, there are, as I have written about previously, 3 levers that young people can pull in order to get ahead. I believe in them wholeheartedly.

Tweet:

Momentum Isn’t Built, It’s Borrowed

Thanks for reading! Grateful for your support.

Stay hungry, stay humble, stay curious. ⚡

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See you in the next one,

Dimi

(P.S. the best ways to get in touch with me are via email or LinkedIn).