Things read - Week 13

Theory vs practice

No surprises here, but what's great is the way Jason Fried forms his arguments. His main thesis is that there are some things in life, such as business, that you only learn from doing. It's like muscle memory that you can only build by doing. I love it when he succinctly conveys his points with arguments like this: Never pick up a guitar? Go read 100 books on guitar. You'll still suck just as much.:D Link

Don't compete

Maybe I am a fan of Paras Chopra, but reading this felt like reading Paul Graham. His argument is that if people just did what they loved doing, instead of competing with each other, society as a whole would progress a lot faster. When we look at people winning on social media, we forget that our world is dominated by the winner-takes-all law and for us to win similar things is next to impossible. Our society plays games with us to keep us on our toes, to make us keep trying harder, so that it can continue to prosper (society is like an organism that thrives when there's healthy competition).

He suggests enjoying things that others have worked hard to achieve, such as reading great books and watching great movies, and focusing on things that fulfill your soul. A question that may come to mind is: if everyone did these easy things, who would be left to do the hard things and move society forward? However, he argues that greatness cannot be planned. Useful artifacts for society will still be produced, but with less anxiety and burnout. People will follow their curiosity and do things for the sake of doing them. In the process, they will fulfill their soul and create breakthroughs. Link

Searching for lost Spain

One of the most intriguing articles I read that captures curiosity is the one that delves deeper into the lost world of coexistence of Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Spain. Spain is a land of churches upon mosques upon churches. The central theme of the article is that Spain was a plural society for about 900 years, until the early 1600s when it ceased to be one. Spoiler alert: After the Catholic kings conquered the last Muslim kingdom - Granada - they gave Muslims and Jews an ultimatum to either convert to Christianity or leave Spain. Link

Index investing math

Indexing works because it captures the returns of the entire market cheaply. Active investors are collectively the rest of the market. They might buy more of one stock and less of another stock because they think one will do better than another. But the key is that all the active investors when combined own exactly the parts of market that index investors don't own.

Together, index investors and all the active investors own the entire market. So the average return of all active investors must be mathematically equal to the return of index investors before costs (if Active Investor 1 bets heavily on the winner (Stock B), they force Active Investor 2 to own less of it, balancing things out on average). Sure, maybe in a given year, the active might outperform the index but if we are talking in terms of couple of decades, the index investing isn't so bad. Link