Book Summary (4/31) : The Joys of Compounding

Chapter 4 : Harnessing The Power Of Passion And Focus Through Deliberate Practice

Take up one idea. Make that one idea your life—think of it, dream of it, live on that idea. Let the brain, muscles, nerves, every part of your body, be full of that idea, and just leave every other idea alone. This is the way to success.—Swami Vivekananda

1. Your goal in life is to find out the people who need you the most, to find out the business that needs you the most, to find the project and the art that needs you the most. There is something out there just for you. —Naval Ravikant
2. When Bill Gates met Warren Buffett for the first time, their host at dinner, Gates’s mother, asked everyone around the table what they believed was the single most important factor in their success in life. Gates and Buffett gave the same one-word answer: “focus.” Both men agree that relentlessly focusing on one specific passion leads to achievement. And that means pushing aside other ideas and interests until a goal is reached.
3. Having the ability to focus on what is “important and knowable” is valuable in a world in which we are constantly bombarded with distracting and disparate ideas, information, and opinions. This has important implications for investors. Focus on those investments for which the microeconomics are going to dominate the outcome. This approach will allow you to call upon your accumulated experience in analysing companies and industries and to utilize the same to your advantage.
4. Fifty years ago, the best investors were the ones with an informational edge. Today, the best investors are the ones with a behavioural edge.Investing is a field in which success can flow from passively observing the world, reading, thinking, and doing nothing more than making an occasional telephone call.
5. It is great to be passionate in life, but it is wise to be so only for things that are under our control, or else we risk being dejected because of unfavourable outcomes.
6. Old too soon, wise too late. It is a sad irony that it often takes us a lifetime to learn to live in the moment. To just “be” in the moment. We put off “living happily ever after” for another year because we assume we have another year.They say life is a journey from B to D, that is, from birth to death. But what about the C that comes between B and D? It is choice. Our life is a matter of choices.
7. Every big decision we make in life usually involves some sort of a trade-off. At times, we have to accept small regrets to avoid large ones later.

Will Durant put it best when he said, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”