Very excited to share my conversation with @williamgreen72 about his own journey, resilience, studying Buddhism, Stoicism, the Kabbalah, and countless lessons from great investors. It was the perfect conversation to bookend the year.
@williamgreen72 “Investing is just a subset of worldly wisdom We're trying to figure out how to live, how to think better, what money actually means, what makes a rich and abundant life.”
“It's all about how you gain control over your mind. It's all an inside job.”
"You can see within investing this exquisite complexity of life, all of the ways in which we're living in this murky place, where we don't know much, and we can't tell what the future holds. And yet we somehow have to try to make decisions."
"To me, this whole idea of how you gain control over your mind, over your thoughts is really important. Because you could have all of the money in the world, if you’re full of envy and jealousy and a sense of your own lack, you can actually end up making your life hell."
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"There's no fixed definition of happiness or wellbeing. We're trying to help the person do some of that definition for themselves and realize that you're not just going to be able to sit down and take a brain zap and be done."
"I'm fascinated how complex systems change.
I'm interested in climate change for this reason as well. You have these stable chaotic systems. And then all of a sudden you change one little variable. Take a psychedelic. Change the right variables and the whole system can change."
"Your brain is mapping, meaning on top of the input. And the input is just photons hitting your eyeballs and air molecules vibrating into your ears and vibrating the little cells, the little hair cells in your ears. That's just sensory data coming in. Your brain is wrapping ...
"The reason why ambition feels like a dirty word is because it’s often mistaken for greed.
There’s always a point in which one’s desire to self-actualize (ambition) morphs into the desire to externally control (greed)." moretothat.com/the-many-world…
"William Blake once said, “You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.” You have to have your Worlds of Enough extend upward to realize this trend needs to be corrected. A minimalist is nothing more than a maximalist recovering from this epiphany."
"we can map the self-awareness required to course correct when recognizing that greed has taken over:"
“Almost nobody ever liked him. He ends up with more money than I did. So you can say he’s the success. But that’s not the way I look at it.”
Charlie Munger about Sumner Redstone.
Redstone's story is intense, impressive, and scary. It's the pursuit of winning above all else.
In 1979, he was dangling by from a hotel windowsill. A disgruntled employee at Boston’s Copley Plaza Hotel had set a fire. Redstone was trapped. The man in the room next to him died.
"I was enveloped in flames. The fire shot up my legs. I was being burned alive.”
“Determination is the key to survival. If I hadn’t learned that lesson before, I knew it well now.”
Redstone was rescued with third-degree burns. His mangled right hand would forever remind him of that night.
Investors value experience and awareness of the ups and downs of prior cycles. We intuitively look for meaning in the patterns of the past.
However, market analogies present a treacherous path and can distract us from doing the work with a beginner's mind.
Bill Miller took over his fund in 1990: “The economy was in recession, stocks were down, banks — our largest industry concentration — were failing, Saddam Hussein occupied Kuwait, and oil had spiked to about $40 per barrel. It was clearly a terrific time to invest.”
He was often a contrarian buyer: “If you want to boil down everything we do, it's this: The guy with the lowest average cost wins.”
“Systematic outperformance requires variant perception: One must believe something different from what the market believes, and one must be right."
Loved this story of a hauntingly beautiful transformation.
"Compared to other athletes, she doesn’t seem to be physically extraordinary. But the mental strength Alenka forged through overcoming hardship has given her an obvious edge."
h/t @tom_morganKCP onjustonebreath.com
"Our bodies are slightly less dense than water, so we float near the surface and need to kick to dive down. The deeper we go, the more the water above squeezes us. Pressure increases as does our density. Eventually, we sink like a stone. Gravity takes us — we’re in free fall."
"In many sports, 30-year-olds approach the ends of their careers. Freediving is different. Divers don’t just need strength and extraordinary breath-hold ability, but also calmness, maturity, and self-knowledge. Try too much, too soon, they are likely to burn out — or worse."