Recently, I read a book “The Holy Grail of Investing” by Tony Robbins, one of my unmet and highly respected mentors.
I’ve never seen and met him personally but I am touched by his contribution to society.
I have consumed most of his books, videos, and learning materials.
There are many interviews of alternative investment business titans in his recent book “The Holy Grail of Investing”.
All titans are experts in their particular business areas and most of them are not in limelight, and some of them are even not found normally in today’s social media.
They are committed and just doing their work, producing value to people, and people are making them billionaires.
One of the early lessons I’ve learned from Tony Robbins is that we have to see things as their real occurrence, not making them worse than as they are.
After reading “The Holy Grail of Investing” and especially the interview section from the investment titans, some of the nuggets that touched me are here.
We have to see things better than their original version because we deserve better.
We shouldn’t lie and exaggerate but we must demonstrate a clear vision, if there is no vision everything will die.
We have to make our vision a reality with perseverance, hard work, and risk taking.
We must make things the way we actually see them in our mind.
We shouldn’t be scared of any change, because change is beautiful and brings prosperity.
We should stop looking at the world from the eye of suspicion, negativity, and cynicism.
Future and some groundbreaking innovations
Elon Musk’s Neuralink is based on the use of thousands of small electrodes embedded in the brain to read neuron signals and transmit them to a computer.
This could be another milestone for humanity by restoring human vision and a possibility in restoring the vision even in blind people.
We can also restore the motor function of paralyzed patients including the treatment of neurological disorders in people suffering from Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease.
Dr. David Sinclair, PhD, an author of “Lifespan” and professor in Harvard University has already demonstrated that we can reverse aging in cells and restore our youth.
Sinclair’s lab reports that aging is no more due to mutations to the DNA but it is due to errors in the epigenetic instructions by some kind of mismatch.
We have the capacity to reboot these cells, remove their corrupted instruction files, and restore our proper function.
It is all about rejuvenating our body and preventing diseases from aging.
CRISPR is another groundbreaking technology that edits and modifies genes.
It can modify healthy T-cells from a donor and could attack cancer cells in patients.
Dr. Samarth Kulkarni, PhD, CEO of CRISPR Therapeutics says, “We’re going to do one-time procedures to change your genome, and hopefully you’re preventing disease or completely curing yourself of disease.”
Hermeus, a company dedicated to supersonic travel, is aiming for five times faster travel than commercial aircraft.
Supersonic travel means we can fly from Chicago to Doha in three hours.
We will fly at 90 thousand feet with the scene of curvature of the earth.
ICON, another company, is involved in 3D-printed homes.
These homes are created by a giant printer and look very nice and attractive, they will be resistant to wind, water, and mold.
How do we feel about 3D-printed homes to live in?
Helium is a company which is using the blockchain to build real communication networks.
They are working to build a 5G cellular network using the blockchain.
Impossible is a food company which is trying to save the planet by providing us only plant proteins.
We now know that plant protein is healthier and tastes better than animal protein.
Innovation in green energy
Sometimes we remain poor not only as an individual but as a nation even though a nation has huge natural resources potential.
There might be a lack of technology, capital, manpower, willpower or the combination of all.
There are many such examples in the world but one I found quite interesting is about the country Congo.
Congo has more cobalt mineral than the rest of the world combined but only one fifth of the Congo population has access to electricity.
I’ve spent quite a bit of time studying cobalt metal in graduate school so I was little interested in this natural resource.
As a fact, cobalt is so important that it is used in nearly every smartphone, tablet, laptop, and electric vehicle to give batteries stability.
It also keeps them away from overheating.
Apple and Tesla are making these products and both are trillion dollar companies.
Like many other resources including coal, cobalt is one of the non-renewable natural resources and consuming excess non-renewable resources is one reason for climate change.
If climate change is a global issue then polluting various countries through waste and emissions from coal mining or by other means doesn’t solve the problem.
All humans live in a global village now and global issues like pollution, climate change have no borders.
We must have a global shared responsibility to protect the planet.
One option for protecting the planet is through green energy technology.
Among many options for green energy technology, one of the cleanest sources of green energy is hydrogen.
When hydrogen burns the only byproduct produced is water vapor.
The only burden is its management like creating, storing, transporting, and leakage management during its transportation which are complex and very expensive.
These things cost a lot of money in comparison to coal management.
For example, hydrogen must be cooled to -253 degree celsius and highly pressurized at least ten thousand psi for its transportation.
Simon Hodson and Dr. Nansen Saleri, chairman and R&D chief from Omnis Energy, are on a mission for conversion of any hydrocarbon into net zero energy with no emissions and no waste.
Titans, their thought process, and success
Behind all of these groundbreaking innovations, there is capital as well as human investment.
Entrepreneurs, scientists, businessmen, and investors all work together as a cohort to make these innovations successful.
Peter Diamandis, a futurist and an author of “The Future is Faster than You Think” says, “technology is the force that converts scarcity into abundance, over and over again. With AI, we will see the first 3 person, billion dollar company in the next year.”
Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures says, “what you already know isn’t important but what is your rate of learning is what the world needs now.”
New knowledge and skills are always interdisciplinary, it’s all related and this correlation gives us a fresh perspective for new things.
Pretty soon, we will have AI to assist as a copilot in every profession.
David Sacks, an entrepreneur and AI and Crypto czar for President-elect Donald Trump says, “The history of innovation is that as we make humans more productive, it makes our species richer. It doesn’t put people out of work. We always find new things for them to do.”
Wil VanLoh, founder and CEO of Quantum Energy says, “Whatever advancement we achieve, World always looks for more people having self-awareness, humility, and great communication.
We are made to interact with other humans, getting connected to each other, and communicating with each other which are invaluable assets.”
Michael Rees, Co-President of Blue Owl Capital, says “it’s not about being the smartest person in the room, it’s about being a partner to the person on the other side of the table.”
Partnership is the end result of awareness, humility, and communication.
Warren Buffett, an investor and philanthropist, was once asked about what was his best investment in life in an interview and he surprised the whole audience by not saying the investment in Coca-Cola, what he said is, his best investment was the communication skill that he learned from Dale Carnegie.
Bill Ford, CEO of General Atlantic’s says, “Entrepreneurs are the most interesting people in the world. They see the world differently, they’ve been told about fifty times that their idea won’t work, but they somehow persevere and make it work.”
Entrepreneurs persevere and obsess with their vision, opportunity, and risk.
One of the keys to success, I found in the book “The Holy Grail of Investing” is, we need a model of life using both a value creation and management philosophy, and merge them together as a life goal.
We have to build a system centric mindset rather than a person-centric mindset to give more value to the society.
Barry Sternlicht, chairman and CEO of Starwood Capital says, “When I think about my dad, my worst day now is way better than his best day in his whole life, growing up in a war.”
Ramzi Musallam, CEO of Veritas Capital says, “We all have seen and visited many rural and poor areas of the world and this gives us the opportunity to see how others live and how to be more empathetic to many issues that we face across the globe.”
He further says, “We have to learn from failures, because if we don’t have failure muscles, it’s very difficult to succeed.
I’ ve seen hardships and gone through it so I understand what success means.”
One common skill great entrepreneurs possess is, they try to develop a product or service that could be transformative in people’s lives.
Sometimes, they don’t care about what people think, they just build the right things.
Eventually, people will come and join their product or service.
Nobody told Steve Jobs to make the Apple iPhone, nobody told Henry Ford to make affordable cars.
It’s all their obsession for the product they love to work with.
The only thing they do is make these products or services so simple, useful, and distribution friendly so that people make a great connection with the product or service.
At the end of the day, all great entrepreneurs have the same conclusion, success is the combination of compassion, passion, and consistency.
They love building what they love to do.
Michael Kim, founder of MBK Partners, in answering a question regarding business opportunity says, “There are 450 million driver’s licenses in China but only 270 million license plates. Issuance of license plates is slowing down even further as the government tries to control emissions.
There are 180 million drivers who are looking for cars.”
Michael further says, “there are differences to do business in America and Asia.
If you lay off your employees, you fail to manage both companies as well as people. You didn’t do your job nicely. You have to learn how to do better procurement and consolidation for value creation. There are ways you can do it without laying people off.”
He adds, “work-life balance is not appropriate, create work-life harmony. Harmonize work with our personal life so that there is mutual benefit.”
Conclusion
Many great entrepreneurs and investors agree with the notion that we have to view our work much like we view our lives.
We have to stick with our values in order to be happy and productive for a long time.
It’s very difficult to be happy if we are out of our values.
David Golub, CEO of Golub Capital says, “One of the games of life is to learn from other people’s mistakes as well as our own mistakes.
Mentors can be so valuable because they share with you wisdom that comes from decisions they wish they’d made differently.”
Yam Timsina, PhD, writes primarily on health basics, scientific progress, social upliftment, and value creation.