Above all else

The Life of Pi is a book (and movie) by Yann Martel, about a boy, the eponymous Pi, who escapes the sinking of his ship on a life raft, along with a tiger called Richard Parker (it's a long story), plus a bunch of other animals from the zoo that was being transported on the ship. In case you haven't read the book or watched the movie, and are thinking that this is going to be a feel-good tale about how boy and tiger become best of friends like Christopher Robin and Tigger, Pooh and the rest of the gang from the Hundred Acre Wood... it isn't. Through the harrowing and seemingly endless months that follow, Pi is compelled to navigate the perils of being cast adrift amid the open sea, while keeping constant vigil against the ever-present threat of the ravenous Richard Parker. They eventually settle into a wary and wobbly stalemate, as they survive violent storms, blistering heat, acute thirst and hunger, and even a deadly life-consuming atoll. Finally, the raft is washed ashor...

As someone who works in the financial industry, one of the most common questions I'm asked when I meet new people for the first time is "what investment should I make?" The other most common confession that follows is, "I'm a terrible investor!" And this even from friends who themselves work in the financial sector! Some of us are indeed better investors than others. A famous example is Warren Buffett. Some stats indicate that between 1965 and 2024 (the period of his leadership of Berkshire Hathaway), he had a compound annual return of 19.9% vs the US market S&P 500's 10.4%. Over those 60 years, he ended up with a total cumulative return of 5.5 million percent, compared with the S&P500's (already very impressive) return of 39 thousand percent! Still, even Warren Buffett doesn't outperform all the time. Most recently, in the Covid/post-Covid tech rally, he tended to underperform, sometimes significantly. And let's face it, the vast maj...

James Lawrence is known as "The Iron Cowboy". He is most famous for running an insane number of triathlons. I heard him share his experience at a recent event, and was intrigued enough to dig up and watch a documentary on him after that, called "50-50-50".  An Ironman triathlon comprises a consecutive 3.9km swim, 181km bicycle ride and 42.2 km run, vs an Olympic triathlon which is already a fairly fearsome 1.5 km swim, 40 km bicycle ride and 10 km run. The Olympic triathlon sounds like it might conceivably be do-able, but let's face it, the Ironman triathlon sounds ridiculous. One day, James decided that he was going to do the 50-50-50. What is 50-50-50?  50 Ironman triathlons, in the 50 different US states, on 50 consecutive days. WHAAT?!? James' friends told him that the world record for number of Ironman triathlons in a year was 20. You know, James, you just need to do 21 to break the record. And James' answer was, it's not about beating someone e...

There’s a glamorous bank advertisement being played on airplane entertainment systems these days, which depicts various industry titans, movers and shakers, who “don’t follow maps but draw them, and build what isn’t there”. And that they just call this “Tuesday”. The point is that to these business paragons, daring entrepreneurship is simply routine. I mean, I'm posting this on Saturday, 'cos Tuesdays are too busy ya know :D I’m no titan of industry. But it’s true that simply calling things “Tuesday” is what often works. As James Clear wrote in “Atomic Habits”, we don’t rise to the level of our goals; we fall to the level of our habits/systems. And it’s not possible to build habits or systems without actually putting them into practice. You can have all the SOPs and how-to-do-it books. But in the end, it takes jumping into the pool, day after day after day. No one is ever truly ready to be married. The only way to become readier, is to get going, and learn to love better an...

How often have you seen this: some kind of problem situation arises, and then the people outside the problem swiftly produce lots of insights about all the things that the people in place did wrong. Classic examples include shaking wise heads at the board and management of Kodak, which failed to respond to the rise of digital photography; Nokia and Research in Motion (Blackberry), which failed to address the threat of touchscreen smartphone competitors; and Blockbuster, which didn't anticipate the pivot from physical video rentals to online streaming. Or the financial crisis of 2008-2009, and the failure of banks, insurers and regulators to recognise the deadly cocktail of low interest rates, lax lending standards, conflicts of interest with ratings agencies, and more, and the "inevitable" crash that followed. Somehow we think that, if we had been there, we would have been the canary in the coal mine. We would have had the foresight to identify the risk. ...