Jawad Mian Profile picture
10 Oct, 15 tweets, 2 min read
1) As tennis demi-god Rafael Nadal's quest for a record-equalling 20th Grand Slam title continues, take a moment to reflect on his human side.

This is from a 2014 FT profile by John Carlin. ft.com/content/28ff29…
2) Rafa Nadal does not believe it. He never has and he never will. And that, he maintains, is the secret of his success.
3) What does he not believe?

“The acclaim, the success. That I am as good as people seem to think, or as the numbers say I am.”
4) Why doesn’t he believe it?

“Because the moment I did it would be all over. I’d be finished.”

Finished?

“Yes. Finished.”
5) Nadal credits humility as the recipe for success.

“Look, there are guys right at the very top who are super arrogant and are super sure of themselves. There isn’t only one way, clearly...”
6) “But my way is this: when you believe things are going to go your way just because you are who you are, because you are very good, that’s when you start to get careless, when you stop working hard, when you stop fighting for every point.”
7) “You lose your intensity, and while things may go well with you for a while, because you’ve built up a positive momentum, it won’t last.”
8) “You drop your guard when you stop having doubts about yourself. I’ve always had doubts. I’ve never believed that I am very good, nor do I believe it now.”
9) “I am prepared to compete well and I know that in the moments of maximum pressure I’ll respond the right way.

But never do I think I am going to go out and win because I am better than the other player. I’ve never felt that.”
10) If there is one thing of which Nadal is convinced, it is that he would not be where he is were it not for the influence of his remarkably close, traditionally patriarchal family clan.
11) Not only does he remain in Mallorca, he lives with his parents in a wing of a home he bought for them on the sea, 10 minutes’ drive from where he was born.
12) Fame and wealth have not devoured the man. He attributes his success as much to the person he was raised to be at home as to his training as a sportsman.
13) The duality in his person is strikingly apparent in the difference between the gladiatorial tennis player one sees grunting, battling epically for every point on court and the gentle, contemplative soul off it.
14) “If there is one thing I have learnt,” Nadal says, “it is to distinguish between Rafa and Rafael...”
15) “Rafa is the famous tennis player; Rafael, the name they call me at home, is the real one, who could have ended up doing something else altogether with his life and it would have made no difference.”

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More from @jsmian

8 Oct
1) The global macro seas are disarmingly clam for a stretch and then, without a glimpse of warning, can turn dangerously stormy.
2) The path to better returns therefore isn’t necessarily about trying to control the seas.

It’s rather about assuming the ebbs and flows are going to happen and they will inevitably require quite a lot of time and thought to address.
3) Anxiety makes us curious and curiosity leads to understanding. Our progress is painfully limited and imperfect, but it is genuine.
Read 11 tweets
12 Sep
1) If you could choose one person to learn from in the past 100 years, who would it be?

My choice is Bruce Lee. Watch this 1971 interview for his wisdom.

2) “All type of knowledge, ultimately means self-knowledge. But knowing is not enough, we must apply.”

Martial arts for Lee was a spiritual practice. It taught him how to be a human being and everything in life.
3) Martial arts is the art of expressing the human body in combative form.

But Lee did not believe in the concept of styles or systems of fighting. “Because of style,” he explains at one point, “people are separate.”
Read 11 tweets
11 Sep
1) It has been exactly nineteen years since the 9/11 attacks.

I suspect there’s not a single person who does not remember where they were, or what they were doing when they heard the news.
2) It was my first day of class at university in Canada. I was seventeen and far away from my family for the very first time.
3) I nervously left my room in the morning, worrying about getting lost looking for the building where I was meant to go for my history course.
Read 18 tweets
11 Sep
The latest issue of Stray Reflections has been published.

Since it’s been a year of lingering regrets for investors, we explain why regret persists in a bull market.

You only have two choices to do something about it.

stray-reflections.com/article/153/Wo…
After outlining the bullish case in April and May, next we turn to the reasons for our cautious tactical stance.

While Masa is in the news again as the “Nasdaq whale” there are good reasons why market weakness persists.

stray-reflections.com/article/154/Th…
Regretfully, we also reverse our long-standing optimism for peace in the Middle East. This seems paradoxical to the recent news of UAE-Israeli friendship.

We present a theological perspective in which to place contemporary events.
Read 5 tweets
6 Sep
1) The last in-person "The Most Interesting Dinner" I hosted was in San Francisco in February.

We ended the evening with a timely reminder from prof. Clay Christensen about life's impermanence.

Think about the metric by which your life will be judged. 👇
stray-reflections.com/article/56/Wha…
2) Professor Christensen was diagnosed with cancer and faced the possibility he'd die sooner than he planned. This gave him important insight about life.
3) He knew his ideas had a substantial impact on the business world. But confronted with the disease, that impact was uninteresting to him.
Read 12 tweets
4 Sep
1) Our first virtual Salon may not have had the delightful food and drinks of past dinners but it had the same distinctive style and ground rules (one chart, no social sharing, trolling or showing off). 👇 stray-reflections.com/article/148/Gl…
2) The most dangerous asset you can have in a portfolio is the 30-year Treasury…  

But so far, no one is worried because the last 10 years of QE didn’t create inflation.

But what if there is actually a change in monetary regime?
3) Pandemics have a way of shifting the course of history, and not always in a manner immediately evident.

We’ve crossed some chasm by directly giving money to people. stray-reflections.com/article/149/Cr…
Read 12 tweets

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