abhishek

Mohnish Pabrai explains how studying airplane crashes completely changed his approach to investing: "The checklist is a very useful tool, and it's helped us in aviation a lot. Air travel has become extremely safe mainly because of the use of checklists by pilots. The aviation checklist came about from examining failures. When a plane crashed, the FAA would always go in and try to figure out why the crash happened." He details the surprisingly pragmatic mathematics behind FAA safety protocols: "They have a definition of what a human life is worth. It used to be around $10 million a few years back. When they see a plane crash, they try to figure out: if nothing was done, how many lives would be lost over the next 5, 10, 20 years? They multiply that by that $10 million number. Then they look at the cost of asking the industry to make changes to aircraft design. They will only make those changes if the cost is less than the projected loss. You don't want air travel to be so expensive that we cannot get on an airplane, and you don't want planes crashing all the time." Pabrai applied this exact "post-crash" analysis to the stock market: "I did the same thing when I developed a pre-investment checklist. I looked at great minds of investing who had made investments that didn't work, but where the reason why it wouldn't work may have been obvious before the investment was made. For example, Berkshire buying Dexter Shoes. The concept that low-cost foreign manufacturing may impact the moat should have been visible to Warren and Charlie." He reveals the surprising results of categorizing the greatest failures of the world's best investors: "I looked at many, many investments that had failed by great minds and recategorized them into different buckets. It was really interesting. The single greatest reason why investments failed was because the businesses were leveraged. The second reason was some misunderstanding of the nature of the moat."

ELON MUSK: "I tried to get a job at Netscape. I sent my resume, but I don't think they ever saw my resume & nobody responded. I tried hanging out in the lobby of Netscape to see if I could bump into someone, but I was too shy at talking to anyone. So, I started my own company."

The backup speech written for Nixon in case the Apollo 11 mission failed.

Steve Jobs: "Somebody taught me a long time ago a very valuable lesson, which is if you do the right things on the top line, the bottom line will follow. What they meant by that was, if you get the right strategy, if you have the right people, and if you have the right culture at your company, you'll do the right products." He breaks down exactly how this sequence of "right things" eventually guarantees financial success: "You'll do the right marketing, you'll do the right things logistically and in manufacturing and distribution. And if you do all those things right, the bottom line will follow. Yes, we obviously have plans about where we'd like to see the bottom line, but we are focusing most of our energy not on financial reengineering, because that's not what's been troubled at Apple." He closes by sharing exactly where his team focuses their energy instead: "We're focusing our energy on the right product strategies, the right market strategies, the right communication strategies, the right logistics and distribution strategies. The team is making very strong strides in these areas. You'll start to see some of this stuff appear over the next 90 to 120 days. So I'm actually really happy about this."

Steve Jobs on career:

Paul Graham:

Elon Musk believes that the most common mistake entrepreneurs make is treating praise as a reward rather than a trap. He has a very specific method for avoiding it: "In terms of advice, it's very important to actively seek out, and listen very carefully to, negative feedback. This is something that people tend to avoid because it's painful, but I think this is a very common mistake." He explains exactly how this plays out when founders test their ideas with the people closest to them: "When friends get a product, I say, 'Look, don't tell me what you like, tell me what you don't like.' Otherwise, your friend is not going to tell you what he doesn't like. He's going to say, 'Oh, I love this and that,' and leave out the 'this is the stuff I don't like' list because he wants to be your friend and doesn't want to offend you." His final rule for processing feedback is a total inversion of normal human instinct: "You really need to sort of coax negative feedback. People should just feel like positive feedback is like water off a duck's back. Really underweight that and overweight negative feedback."

8 reasons why you're not getting replies on your cold emails(& you don't realize it): 1. You're being too humble

Bookmark this thread and follow @abexshek If you found this helpful, repost the tweet below to help others!

8. You're following up once (or not at all). Most replies come on follow-up #2 or #3. A follow-up shows you care. Persistence without being annoying = more replies. Derek Sivers: