MONTHLY MULLING 💡
Seek Wealth, Not Money (a new article🎉) and A Masterclass From Jeff Bezos
Hi👋,
Tapan here.
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Happy Sunday y’all!
It has been a while, hasn’t it? I was planning on releasing the issue last week but life got in the way. But I bring good news. After a three-month slump, I have finally published a new article🎉
I talk about the connection between wealth and time. Let’s get started🚀
💭MULLING
💰 Seek Wealth, Not Money (Article - 6 mins)
I wanted to publish my thoughts on Naval’s tweetstorm for a while. Finally, last week I found some time to put my thoughts on a paper and this article is exactly that.
Money is essentially the social credit and debit of other people’s time. It is something that society has agreed to pay you for the amount of work you have done in the past or the work that is expected from you in the future in return for your time. It is only a means of exchange of wealth that we collectively as a civilization have agreed to accept.
While wealth on the other hand can even be money in the bank that is being reinvested into other assets. It can be a business. It can be a house that you have bought and is bringing rent money. A YouTube channel.
The purpose of wealth is freedom.
I discuss two ways to building wealth in the article.
Investing
Business or Side Income Source
If you want to build wealth, spend time on the supply side.
-Jack Butcher
If you have read the full article, I will love to hear your thoughts!👇🏼
👨🏼🏫 A Masterclass from Jeff Bezos by Shaun Trewin (Article - 6 mins)
Shaun summarises important lessons from Bezos’ shareholder letters over the years. If you haven’t read them, it’s a treasure chest of knowledge.
Here are the three important lessons from the article.
Decision Making:
Firstly, don’t use a one size fits all framework, remember decisions fall into Type 1 or Type 2 decisions.
Type 1 - Irreversible: These decisions should be made methodically, carefully, slowly, with great deliberation and consultation. If you walk through this door and don’t like what you see on the other side, you can’t get back to where you were before. Most decisions aren’t like this.
Type 2 - Consequential and Irreversible: These decisions are easily reversible, and you don’t have to live with the consequences for that long. These decisions should be made quickly by high judgment individuals or small groups.
Secondly, most decisions should probably be made with ~70% of the available information you wish you had. If you wait for 90% of the information in most cases, you are being too slow. If you are good at course correcting being wrong may be less costly than you think but being slow will be expensive for sure.
Types of Failures:
Again, there are two types.
Experimental Failure: This is the kind of failure you should be happy with, when you are developing a new product or service or experimenting in some way, and it doesn’t work, that’s okay. That’s a great failure. And you need to ensure that this failure is distinguished from operational failure.
Operational Failure: We’ve built hundreds of fulfillment centers at Amazon over the years, and we know how to do that. If we build a new fulfillment center and it’s a disaster that’s just bad execution. That’s not a good failure and that’s not acceptable.
To sustain experimentation, you need to attract the right people; innovative people will flee an organization if they can’t make decisions and take risks.
Regret Minimization:
When he was starting Amazon, Bezos tried to imagine himself on his 80th birthday looking back on his life and he knew at that point he wouldn’t regret having tried to participate in this thing called the internet – in fact, the thing he might have regretted is not trying at all. Most regrets are from omission, not commission. The interesting point about this is Bezos’ decision-making process, he explains what is famously now referred to as his regret minimization framework.
I believe in the power of wandering. All my best decisions in business and in life have been made with heart, intuition, and guts, not analysis. When you can make decisions with the analysis you should do so, but it turns out in life that your most important decisions are always made with instinct, intuition, taste, and heart.
Jeff Bezos
🌎 Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan (Video - 4 minutes)
I recently realized I have never shared this video in my newsletter which is unacceptable. Atit introduced me to this video and since then, I keep revisiting this video from time to time. The 3 minutes 30-second video will change your perspective in life.
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor, and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
🎙PODCASTS
💰 COLD BREW MONEY
🔢 #52 - Q2 Macro Update & What We’re Watching This Summer: As part of our recurring series every quarter, we review macros for Q2 21 | Episode Page
💭 #53 – Owning A Business vs. Trading Systems - CBM discusses the difference between buying a business versus trading systems | Episode Page
🏎 #54 – Economics of F1 with F1 Fanfiction - We discuss the economics of F1 racing with our friends at F1 Fan Fiction (check out their podcast!)| Episode Page
Finally, we have released our first CBM TOOL! It’s a Discounted Cash Flow calculator that allows you to value any asset. We have made it simple enough for anyone to follow it. Check it out and let us know what y’all think!
Tata👋🏼
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