I am sure everyone of you must have heard Steve Jobs’ commencement speech at Stanford University. If you have then please do. (link)
Well the whole speech was a brilliant piece of learning, but the most relevant part for today’s post is going to be, “Connecting the dots“.
Steve Jobs in his speech tells us how dropping out of the college actually changed his life.
This decision helped him to take classes which interest him and drop out of the uninterested ones. And one of such classes was Calligraphy class.
In that class he learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great.
While he was learning all this there was no hope that any of these things would ever matter to him later in life.
He just followed his intuition. Luckily for him, it all came back.
He applied his knowledge of calligraphy in forming the beautiful typography which the first Macintosh computer came with (We all know what happened after that).
In Investing
I had asked a question to one of the well-known investors of India, Basant Maheshwari.
My question was how to develop a mental model to understand that how to catch companies in their early stage of life before them becoming huge.
He said, “these things will come to you your own. You will have to take a leap of faith.” (link)
So you some how need to know.
I am not saying that take extreme risk and take a leap of faith. But this could surely be done with calculated risk.
This faith comes automatically. Don’t just go out and start betting.
I believe a person is best judge for themselves and you would know when to take such a leap.
You might be thinking, “what rubbish I am saying, how would one know?“
But sometimes you do know that the idea seems to be different than the ordinary and is embedded with the features you were always looking for.
I believe this faith is build up with experience which no book could teach you.
Faith does not mean putting your money and saying “I HAVE FAITH THAT THIS COMPANY WILL DOUBLE ITS REVENUES!!” It must be backed with a good rational.
You know when you have been investing only for few months and borrowed conviction of others it is not the faith which is acting.
Faith would build after you have put in the efforts for quite a long time.
Another Vantage Point
There is another perspective for Faith, which is similar to the above.
Faith could also be waiting on the sidelines in the hope of getting a good deal.
For example, Warren Buffett has been sitting on $137 billion in cash for a long time now.
He has faith in his style of investing and waits for the right opportunity to tune in.
Again, he has taken a leap of faith based on his style of investing after testing it out with years of practice, which helped him build such conviction on his strategy.
Inshort
You need to be little rational and be aware that if you have built up a conviction, whether is it due to some edge you have or just for the sake of it.
Like Steve Jobs said, you somehow have to trust that dots are going to connect in the way forward.