Happy Thursday folks!

Here is my favorite passage of the week, two quotes and book of the week with two important lessons to ponder on:

Passage of the Week:

Best selling author Sahil Bloom on the surfer mentality:

Two Quotes:

Book of the Week with 2 Important Lessons:

The book of the week is Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things by Adam Grant.

An actionable guide to elevate ourselves and achieve greater things, nurturing the ability to learn and instill character traits to unearth our hidden potential.

Everyone has hidden potential, and this book is about how we unlock it. There’s a widely held belief that greatness is mostly born not made. That leads us to celebrate gifted students in school, natural athletes in sports, and child prodigies in music. But you don’t have to be a wunderkind to accomplish great things. The goal of this book is to illuminate how we can all rise to achieve greater things.

The book is not about ambition. It’s about aspiration. Ambition is the outcome you want to attain. Aspiration is the person you hope to become. What counts is not how hard you work but how much you grow. And growth requires much more than a mindset, it begins with a set of skills that we normally overlook.

Here are two important lessons from the book:

1) Become A Creature of Discomfort:

Comfort in learning is a paradox. We can’t become truly comfortable with a skill until we’ve practiced it enough to master it. But practicing it before we master it is uncomfortable, so we often avoid it. Becoming a creature of discomfort can unlock hidden potential in many different types of learning. Summoning the nerve to face discomfort is a character skill – an especially important form of determination.

It takes three kinds of courage: to abandon your tried-and-true methods, to put yourself in the ring before you feel ready, and to make more mistakes than others make attempts.

Accelerating learning requires being brave enough to use our knowledge as we acquire it. We don’t need to get comfortable before we can practice our skills. Our comfort grows as we practice our skills.

When discomfort is a signal of progress, you don’t want to run away from it. You want to keep stumbling toward it to continue growing. As long as you’re willing to be a little uncomfortable, it’s never too late to learn. And that courage to learn can be contagious.

2) Getting Unstuck:

A rut is not a sign that you’ve tanked. A plateau is not a cue that you’ve peaked. They are signals that it may be time to turn around and find a new route. When you’re stuck, it’s usually because you’re heading in the wrong direction, you’re taking the wrong path, or you’re running out of fuel. Gaining momentum often involves backing up and navigating your way down a different road – even if it’s not the one you initially intended to travel.

To find our way, we need scaffolding in the form of some basic navigation tools. The bad news is that a perfect map won’t exist. The exact route hasn’t been plotted for us – there may not even be a road. We might have to pave our own way, figuring out the route as we go, one turn at a time.

The good news is that to start moving, we don’t actually need a map. All we need is a compass to gauge whether we’re heading in the right direction. Depending on the skill you’re trying to learn, you might discover a compass in a book, on the web, or in a conversation. As you take U-turns and detours, you’ll feel as if you’re going in circles. In the short run, a straight line brings faster progress. But in the long run, loops lead to the highest peaks.

Progress is rarely noticeable at a snapshot in time – it unfolds over extended periods of time. If you focus your attention on a specific difficult moment, it’s easy to feel stuck. It’s only when you look at your trajectory over the course of weeks, months, or years that you appreciate the distance you’ve traveled.

Book – I am currently reading:

How Not To Invest: The Ideas, Numbers, and Behaviors That Destroy Wealth - and How To Avoid Them by Barry Ritholtz. This book lays out the most common errors investors make. It shows you a few simple tools and models to help you make fewer of them, and to have the mistakes you do make be less expensive.