Reading and Thinking

A big earnings week ahead with both Tesla and Boeing reporting their Q1 results, the former today, the latter on Wednesday, and on Saturday 1st May there is the always interesting annual shareholders meeting for Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger's Berkshire Hathaway, another individual stock I added to my portfolio last year, and already up 21.49%.

Buffet and Munger are both known for the amount of time they spend reading, with Charlie Munger being quoted as saying:

"Warren and I do more reading and thinking and less doing than most people in business. We do that because we like that kind of a life. But we've turned that quirk into a positive outcome for ourselves. We both insist on a lot of time being available almost every day to just sit and think. That is very uncommon in American business. We read and think." 

They are not the only ones to espouse the importance of reading. Bill Gates reads one book a week, and Mark Cuban reads for three hours a day. Arthur Blank (owner of Atlanta's Falcons and United) reads for two hours a day, while Mark Zuckerberg gets through a book every two weeks. The claim by his brother that Elon Musk reads two books a day sounds far fetched, but it's likely that Tesla's CEO certainly reads a lot. All books are not equal of course, but the point is that successful people read prodigiously. 

Bill Gates makes a point of finishing all the books he starts reading, which is not something I can claim to do, but this article is worth a read, and you can credit the time spent towards your daily total!

My latest read is "The Joys of Compounding" by Gautam Baid which arrived on Saturday, and the reviews look good even if the price on Amazon is a little high. Shop around. 

In The Joys of Compounding: The Passionate Pursuit of Lifelong Learning, Gautam Baid integrates the wisdom, strategies, and thought processes of over 200 preeminent figures in history whose teachings have stood the test of time. Distilling generations of investment and life lessons and compiling it with his personal experiences into a comprehensive guide on value investing, Baid demonstrates their practical applications in the areas of business, investing, and decision making.

At 438 pages it's not a short book, but one of the benefits of working from home is the extra time available for reading.