#1 Pilot - Learnings from Kevin Kelly & Stan Druckenmiller
Inaugural episode of OMD Daily. Going through the 68 learnings from Kevin Kelly and Stanley Druckenmiller’s 2015 speech on his investing lessons, mistakes etc…
Listen on:
Episode Notes:
Kevin Kelly’s 68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice Notes:
"You are what you do. Not what you say, not what you believe, not how you vote, but what you spend your time on."
"Pros are just amateurs who know how to gracefully recover from their mistakes."
"Don’t be the best. Be the only."
"Rule of 3 in conversation. To get to the real reason, ask a person to go deeper than what they just said. Then again, and once more. The third time’s answer is close to the truth."
"Don’t take it personally when someone turns you down. Assume they are like you: busy, occupied, distracted. Try again later. It’s amazing how often a second try works."
"Promptness is a sign of respect."
"The more you are interested in others, the more interesting they find you. To be interesting, be interested."
"Show up. Keep showing up. Somebody successful said: 99% of success is just showing up."
"Friends are better than money. Almost anything money can do, friends can do better. In so many ways a friend with a boat is better than owning a boat."
"Anything real begins with the fiction of what could be. Imagination is therefore the most potent force in the universe, and a skill you can get better at. It’s the one skill in life that benefits from ignoring what everyone else knows."
"When crisis and disaster strike, don’t waste them. No problems, no progress."
"On vacation go to the most remote place on your itinerary first, bypassing the cities. You’ll maximize the shock of otherness in the remote, and then later you’ll welcome the familiar comforts of a city on the way back."
"If you desperately need a job, you are just another problem for a boss; if you can solve many of the problems the boss has right now, you are hired. To be hired, think like your boss."
"Art is in what you leave out."
"Experience is overrated. When hiring, hire for aptitude, train for skills. Most really amazing or great things are done by people doing them for the first time."
"A vacation + a disaster = an adventure."
"Following your bliss is a recipe for paralysis if you don’t know what you are passionate about. A better motto for most youth is “master something, anything”. Through mastery of one thing, you can drift towards extensions of that mastery that bring you more joy, and eventually discover where your bliss is."
"The universe is conspiring behind your back to make you a success. This will be much easier to do if you embrace this pronoia."
Stan Druckenmiller’s interview notes:
“Bulls make money, bears make money, pigs get slaughtered. I’m here to tell you I was a pig."
“I think diversification and all the stuff they’re teaching at business school today is probably the most misguided concept everywhere."
“Never, ever invest in the present…. You have to look to the future. If you invest in the present, you’re going to get run over."
“It’s liquidity that moves markets.” -> watch the FED and central banks.
Youth, inexperience and ready to charge in the bull market. Insane. CIO at 26.
“If you see it, you got to go for it because that’s a better bet than 90% of the other stuff you would add onto it.”
“I learned something incredibly valuable, and that is when you see it, to bet big.” - from Soros.
“I would say.. about 80% of the big, big money we made was in bear markets and equities…"
“… the problem is the longer rates stay at zero and the longer assets respond to that, the more egregious behaviour comes up."
“I bought $6bn worth of tech stocks, and in six weeks I had left Soros and I had lost $3 billion in that one play. I already knew that I wasn’t supposed to do that. I was just an emotional basket case and couldn’t help myself. So, maybe I learned not to do it again, but I already knew that.
“.. If you’re with one of the lazy people or one of the people that are just doing it for the money, you’re going to get run over by those people.”
Ken Langone funded the Home Depot guys… and was an early investor of Druckenmillers
https://focusedcompounding.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/311790380-Druckenmiller-Speech.pdf