Tourist and purist – that’s my main device to understand the sections of culture, that move culture forward. You have a purist, that’s like, I know the whole art history of everything, you can’t do this, this was done 20-times before you thought of it. Like, this is the pure institution. Then there’s the tourist, who’s bright-eyed, curiosity-driven, that has a lust for learning, and they support whatever.
The North Pole, South Pole and Everest, it’s mostly mental. I’m not physically more fit than other people doing the same stuff or other people trying to do the same stuff and failing. It’s a mental thing and it’s definitely about preparation. You need to be well prepared.
You were born into a world where most things were made by human consciousness. You may die in a world where nothing is made by human consciousness.
A universal law of economics says the moment something becomes free and ubiquitous, its position in the economic equation suddenly inverts. When nighttime electrical lighting was new and scarce, it was the poor who burned common candles. Later, when electricity became easily accessible and practically free, our preference flipped and candles at dinner became a sign of luxury.
I failed pretty hard at my first startup – it sucked! – and am doing pretty well on my second. The thing I wish someone told me during the first one is that no one else thinks about your failures as much as you do, and that as long as don’t psych yourself out you can try again.
Underpinning my philosophy of life is the truth that you come into this life with nothing and leave with nothing. It is the period in between that belongs to you. Learning begins at birth and ends with death. And in the interim, the journey is what you make of it. Some may contend it is destiny that determines your path and that you merely flow with it. I disagree with that premise. I believe you steer your own course.
Drive your future. That opportunity knocks on every door. It is for you to heed that knock. What determines success? Luck at being there at the right time? Partially, maybe, but beyond that, it is the ability to visualize, create opportunity and overcome the hard yards that follow.
– Harsh Mariwala, Harsh Realities – The Making Of Marico
Contrary to general belief, an artist is never ahead of his time but most people are far behind theirs.
The disadvantage of a mindset is that it can color and control our perception to the extent that an experienced specialist may be among the last to see what is really happening when events take a new and unexpected turn. When faced with a major paradigm shift, analysts who know the most about a subject have the most to unlearn. This seems to have happened before the reunification of Germany, for example. Some German specialists had to be prodded by their more generalist supervisors to accept the significance of the dramatic changes in progress toward reunification of East and West Germany.
As a young analyst, I always started by looking for really cheap stocks, and after concluding they were indeed underpriced, I then tried to convince myself that neither the businesses nor managements were bad enough to offset the statistical cheapness.
Having completed all the valuation work before even meeting the maragement, you can guess how strongly biased I was to conclude that they were at least acceptable! Today, I encourage our analysts to reverse that process: Find businesses and managements they’d be excited to own and then do the wark to see if the valuation is attractive.
If it isn’t attractive now, monitor the stock price so you are prepared to act when it is more attractive. It is really amazing to see over the course of our holding period, typically five to seven years, how much value a great maragement can add that never was incorporated in our model, and conversely, how much value a bad management can destroy.