Joys Of Compounding: The Passionate Pursuit of Lifelong Learning

by Gautam Baid

(if you want to know someone’s priorities in life, observe what they do between Friday evening and Monday morning), their value system, how they live each day, how they handle success and failure, and many other important things that textbooks cannot teach you. You get to experience a gravitational pull toward higher qualities. It is better to be an average guy on a star team than a star on an average team. The former will be better for you in the long term; the latter is just an ego trip. For most of my professional and personal life, superior individuals made me feel uncomfortable. And so I would seek out people who made me feel like I fit in. This was clearly a wrong strategy. If you are the smartest person in the room, you are in the wrong room. It is wiser to be with better people and to be uncomfortable than to limit yourself to a mediocre circle just to feel comfortable. For instance, if it were not for the generous help and guidance of my smart investor friends and colleagues, then my personal portfolio would never have been able to perform as well as it did during the 2018–19 bear market in India. I give them a large part of the credit for my healthy portfolio returns to date and I hope to always keep learning from them throughout life. The people closest to you play an outsized role in your level of success or failure—so choose wisely. You are, after all, the average of the five people you associate with the most in your life. Deserved Trust Is Earned Of all form...

Priorities