Joys Of Compounding: The Passionate Pursuit of Lifelong Learning

by Gautam Baid

Inspectional reading.

Analytical reading.

Asking a book questions as you read makes you a better reader. But you must do more. You must attempt to answer the questions you are asking. While you could do this in your mind, Adler and Van Doren argue that it’s much easier to do this with a pencil in your hand. “The pencil,” they argue, “becomes the sign of your alertness while you read.”

Syntopical reading.

Syntopical reading, also known as comparative reading, involves reading many books on the same subject and then comparing and contrasting the ideas, insights, and arguments within them.

Reading can change this because a new book can make you aware of something incredible in an old book that you previously had not recognized. This is how knowledge compounds.

And if a book doesn’t interest you, you just abandon it to save time and move on to something more interesting. Reading multiple books simultaneously, quitting those that are not engaging, and constantly picking up new ones is the antifragile approach to self-education.

and CEO Naval Ravikant said, “I don’t know about you, but I have very poor attention. I skim. I speed read. I jump around. I could not tell you specific passages or quotes from books. At some deep level, you do absorb them and they become part of the threads of the tapestry of your psyche [emphasis added].”

The Matthew Effect in Knowledge Acquisition

The Matthew effect, in this context, refers to a person who has more expertise and thus has a larger knowledge base. This larger knowledge base allows that person to acquire greater expertise at a faster rate. So, the amount of useful insight that Buffett can draw from the same reading material would be quite high compared with most any other person, and again, Buffett would end up becoming smarter at a faster rate.

As you read increasingly more, your capacity to read and absorb more knowledge increases rapidly. During the initial days of inculcating my reading habit, I found it difficult to grasp the deep significance of many of the concepts in the books I read. Gradually, over time, I started discovering connections between the ideas that spread across different books. It is these connections that lead to the development of the “tapestry of the psyche,” which in turn deepens our understanding of the big ideas coming from the key disciplines. This deep understanding makes the brain more efficient and smarter and better able to make sense of new information.

Deep reading of the fundamentals enables us to understand the world for what it is. This is how we learn to reason from first principles.

First Principles Thinking

As to methods, there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring princ...

When you first start to study a field, it seems like you have to memorize a zillion things. You don’t. What you need is to identify the core principles—generally three to twelve of them—that govern the field. The million things you thought you had to memorize are simply various combinations of the core principles. —John Reed The best way to achieve wisdom is to learn the big ideas that underlie reality. … Even people ...

Five words separate the good from the great: flawless execution ...

First principles thinking is a way of saying, “Think like a scientist.” Scientists don’t assume anything.

Cartesian Doubt

In practice, you don’t have to simplify every problem down to the atomic level to get the benefits of first principles thinking. You just need to go one or two levels deeper than most people. Different solutions present themselves at different layers of abstraction.

Michelangelo was once asked by the pope about the secret of his genius, particularly with regards to the statue of David, one of the greatest sculpting masterpieces of all time. Michelangelo responded by saying, “David was always there in the marble. I just took away everything that was not David.” Nassim Taleb calls this “subtractive epistemology.”

The absence of evidence doesn’t qualify as the evidence of absence. In other words, just because all of the swans that have been observed to date are white, doesn’t prove that all swans are white. One small observation (i.e., spotting a black swan) can conclusively disprove the statement “all swans are white” but millions of observations can hardly confirm it. Thus, disconfirmation is more rigorous than confirmation.

Elon Musk once referred to knowledge as a semantic tree: “Make sure you understand the fundamental principles, i.e., the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang onto.”12 When you want to learn a new subject, first identify the fundamental principles and learn those in a clear and deep manner.

The Feynman Technique

The Feynman technique has four simple steps: 1. Pick and study a topic. 2. Take out a blank sheet of paper and write at the top the subject you want to learn. Write out what you know about the subject as if you were teaching it to someone who is unfamiliar with the topic—and not your smart adult friend but rather a ten-year-old child who can understand only basic concepts and relationships. 3. When you must use simple language that a child can understand, you force yourself to understand the concept at a deeper level and to simplify relationships and connections among ideas. If you struggle, you have a clear understanding of where you have gaps in knowledge. This is valuable feedback, because you have now discovered the edge of your mental capabilities. Knowing the limits of your knowledge is the dawning of wisdom. 4. Return to the source material, and then reread and relearn it. Repeat step 2 and compile information that will help you fill in those gaps in your understanding that you identified in step 3. Review and simplify further as necessary.

CHAPTER 3

OBTAINING WORLDLY WISDOM THROUGH A LATTICEWORK OF MENTAL MODELS

Study the science of art. Study the art of science. Develop your senses—especially learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else. —Leonardo da Vinci

Chinese proverb goes, “I forget what I hear; I remember what I see; I know what I do.”

One of Munger’s favorite authors is Herbert Simon, who gave him the idea of mental models. Simon wrote in his autobiography, Models of My Life:

Munger has adopted an approach to business and life that he refers to as worldly wisdom. Munger believes that by using a range of different models from many different disciplines—psychology, history, mathematics, physics, philosophy, biology, and so on—a person can use the combined output of the synthesis to produce something that has more value than the sum of its parts. Robert Hagstrom wrote a wonderful book on worldly wisdom entitled Investing: The Last Liberal Art, in which he states that “each discipline entwines with, and in the process strengthens, every other. From each discipline the thoughtful person draws significant mental models, the key ideas that combine to produce a cohesive understanding. Those who cultivate this broad view are well on their way to achieving worldly wisdom.”3

Worldly Wisdom

In Munger’s view, it is better to be worldly wise than to spend lots of time working with a single model that is precisely wrong. A multiple-model approach that is only approximately right will produce a far better outcome in anything that involves people or a social system. —Tren Griffin

polymath

“Man’s imperfect, limited-capacity brain easily drifts into working with what’s easily available to it, and the brain can’t use what it can’t remember or what it is blocked from recognizing because it’s heavily influenced by one or more psychological tendencies bearing strongly on it.”5

One of the advantages of a fellow like Buffett … is that he automatically thinks in terms of decision trees [emphasis added]. —Charlie Munger

find for myself that my first thought is never my best thought. My first thought is always someone else’s; it’s always what I’ve already heard about the subject, always the conventional wisdom. It’s only by concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, letting all the parts of my mind come into play, that I arrive at an original idea. By giving my brain a chance to make associations, draw connections, take me by surprise … You do your best thinking by slowing down and concentrating.12

Look at this generation, with all of its electronic devices and multitasking. I will confidently predict less success than Warren, who just focused on reading. If you want wisdom, you’ll get it sitting on your ass. That’s the way it comes. —Charlie Munger

Munger has often credited his success to having a long attention span, that is, his ability to stay focused for an extended period of time. Munger is able to block out the world when he is thinking, which has provided him a great advantage in solving problems and developing ideas.

In their book The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking, Dr. Edward B. Burger and Dr. Michael Starbird outline some practical ways for us to improve our thinking:

Understand deeply.

Any concept that you are trying to master is a combination of simple core ideas. Identify the core ideas and learn them deeply. This deeply ingrained knowledge base can serve as a meaningful springboard for more advanced learning and action in your field.

Be brutally honest with yourself. If you do not understand something, revisit the core concepts again and again. Remember that merely ...

Make mistakes. Mistakes highlight unforeseen opportunities as well as gaps in our understanding. And mistakes are great teachers. As Michael Jordan once said, “I’ve missed more than nine thousand shots in my career. I’ve lost almost three hundred games. Twenty-six times, I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” The takeaway is that we cannot come out with a correct solution on the first attempt. Start with a probable solution (hypothesis) and continue correcting the mistakes until you arrive at the right solution. Thomas Edison was famous for using this approach for his inventions. When he said that invention is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration, the perspiration was the process of incrementally making mistakes and learning from them to make t...

Raise questions. If you want to deepen your understanding, you need to raise questions. Do not be afraid to show your ignorance. If you do not understand, ask. The great philosopher Socrates would challenge his students, friends, and even enemies to make new discoveries by as...

Follow the flow of ideas. To truly understand a concept, discover how it evolved from simpler concepts. Recognizing that the present reality is a moment in a continuing evolution makes your understanding fit into a more coherent structure. You cannot discover eve...

Change. You need to shrug off a lifetime’s habit of accepting a relatively superficial level of understanding and start learning more deeply. You need to let go of the constraining forces in your life and let yourself fail on the road to success. You should question all of the issues you have taken for granted all those years. View every aspect of your world as a stream of insights and ideas.

Munger reserves a lot of time in his schedule for reading and has read hundreds of biographies. He explains why he does so: “I believe in the discipline of mastering the best that other people have ever figured out. I don’t believe in just sitting down and trying to dream it all up yourself. Nobody’s that smart.”

The Internet is the best school ever created. The best peers are on the Internet. The best books are on the Internet. The best teachers are on the Internet. The tools for learning are abundant. It’s the desire to learn that’s scarce. —Naval Ravikant

CHAPTER 4

HARNESSING THE POWER OF PASSION AND FOCUS THROUGH DELIBERATE PRACTICE