Just to recall, my personal investment journey started in 1979, which means I have been at it for 4 decades.

I started training financial services people in 2002. That makes it almost 2 decades of training experience. Blogging is a little over a decade old.

I started running / cycling in 2009, which means I am a decade old at that too!

One thing that I have done most of course is eating and sleeping – almost 6 decades, and I guess I am best at that! Even there not sure about eating. I still eat what my Mind wants and not what my Intellect knows I should eat. This is proof that being at something for a long time is nice, but not really sufficient to be good at it.

Sheer luck that I met people much smarter than me – and they are too numerous to name – in my investment journey. Of course training as an accountant (and passing a few exams on the way), training as a legal guy (company procedures and legal procedures have to be learnt academically) and doing research helped in the journey. However, I do feel that if you spend 4 decades in any field you can’t lose. So the sheer power of compounding is enough to take you to some heights. However, remember that in 1979 “investing Rs. 100,000” would have been a joke for most of us. The starting salary for a CA was Rs. 12000 a YEAR. Yes, you read it right. When I passed CA in 1986, it was Rs. 30k a month.

Here some lessons….

1. You don’t need academic brilliance. You need diligence. In law and accounts you need to read a lot of shit. Tons of legal shit. That is boring, tiring, and painful. Even if you are helping a client fight a case in the Supreme Court. OMG it is boring 90% of the times.
2. Meeting smart/brilliant men was very useful. Ram Jethmalani is the first name that came to my mind. Professionally met the greatest illuminaries – and realized their razor sharp thinking was putting them ahead of the rest.
3. You don’t have to be special. I had no Godfathers, but I guess I had a lot of luck!
4. My CA training took me to the ITAT (Income tax appellate tribunal) and CLB (Company Law Board). Excellent experience – and was very useful later on in research!
5. If you are not so smart you at least need to show up at the lawyers office, court, bank meeting – chances are that you will be seen!
6. When I was doing tax and audit work I did not know that it would help me in talking to top lawyers. When I did law I did not know it would help me in equity research. When I did equity research (for a fee) I did not know that I would buy shares in 1998 (my own research) and would still be holding. Supreme Industries alone covers all my library costs, research costs, etc..
7. What you are and what you do is also governed by the number of shitty deals you avoided. Luck or skill I do not know, but I have “almost” done business with 10/12 businessmen who went to JAIL. God’s blessings I guess?
8. Criticism is difficult to handle. I have reached a stage where I don’t care, but it was not always like that.
9. Make more friends than enemies. Not sure how many of my enemies will read this, but bluntly I don’t care. Blunt? curt? arrogant? Not sure. I don’t have enough time for friends, why bother about enemies? Ha, financial freedom helps!
10. Have met/ trained/ spoken to more than 100,000 people for sure! Phew. This of course does not include those who have seen my videos.
11. Chose my clients smartly – no bad debt ever.
12. Played much much below my potential in the equity market – no great ability to take risk. Not sure if that is good or bad. Just stating a fact.
13. Excellent health and wealth choices. Same broker and same homeopath for the past 40 years.

What do I want to do better…?

1. Run more, Cycle more, do more charity work.
2. Get smarter with food choices..wish the push towards vegan is faster.
3. Read more – books, online, white papers…
4. Simplify my portfolio.
5. My equity portfolio depends on my alertness and friend circle, not sure how to handle that in the coming decade. Indexing perhaps?
6. Enjoying my blogging, hopefully will be doing it in 2030.

Will keep doing such “connecting the dots” posts – shows that I am nearer the end of my career, if not at the end. I hope to be actively training till the end of the coming decade. After all Retirement training is like wine – the older the better!