A teacher is a person who shapes character. School teachers taught me subjects, but they never built my overall character. My character is the result of the teachers I unknowingly chose. It was sheer luck that I found them at those stages of life. I have had many teachers or subject matter experts. Many of my teachers had opposing views on certain areas, giving me the privilege of choosing what I wanted.
Every child’s first teacher is their mother, and the second is their father. My mom, from the very beginning, taught me to be a nationalist. My father is a family man, honestly, something I am learning from him. I’ll write more about them in later blogs. After I started school, my school buddies became my teachers, about whom I have written extensively in my last blog, “The Chopsticks Quadrant.”
One day, Sahil shared a YouTube lecture by Vivek Bindra. This was about seven or eight years ago. I don’t remember the content, but I think it was about the Dholera SIR project. After that instance, I started watching his content on YouTube. He was the first person who got me interested in the world of business case studies. He has a lot of understandable case studies, enough to create a hunger for understanding how business people think. He is the one who taught me the ABCs of business vocabulary. At that time, everything was just a bouncer to me, but I kept going. I was often criticized by my mom and dad, but thankfully, they never stopped me from learning, and they still don’t. I am not promoting anyone though. Another YouTube channel I follow is Think School, which also creates business and geopolitics-related content.
After I graduated from school, within a year, the deadly virus entered the world. It created havoc in society and suddenly it seemed that mankind was near its end. By March, the stock markets had crashed, and, as they say, it was a bloodbath on D-Street. Governments around the world started giving stimulus packages. After April, the big bullish trend began to appear on the charts. At that time, I was preparing for the JEE exam, and one day I was watching the news and almost every market was exhibiting a greenish character. I kept learning about markets for the next one and a half years. I started consuming content on stocks, mutual funds, etc. After I joined university, the first book I bought was Ben Graham’s “The Intelligent Investor.” I was foolish to start with that as it was too difficult to understand. Then, I started buying stocks with my pocket money, but soon enough I realized that it was a very tough job and I was not fully prepared. Later, I discovered mutual funds and started investing in them. In the last few months, I have consumed a lot of content regarding the art of stock picking. I’ll write more about that journey in future blogs.
In 2022–2023, I heard the word ‘inflation’. Not that I didn’t know its meaning before, but now I was looking for a more technical understanding of why it occurs. Boom! Robert Kiyosaki guided me through that process of learning. I then read “Rich Dad Poor Dad,” “The Cash Flow Quadrant,” and consumed his YouTube content. He truly opened my eyes to different nuances of investing. Things I had been brainwashed about were now getting clearer. In my head, I started questioning every status quo. Plenty of times it made sense, and many times it didn’t. One thing Robert emphasizes is to look at a coin from the edge; it allows a person to learn about both sides. By the way, it would be very hard for politicians to create “vote banks” if everyone did this. In a sense, he made me realize the true purpose of the game “Monopoly.” Because of him, I also started reading about Trump.
All of this was aided by a teacher who taught me mathematics and physics in class 8. He has played a major role in my personality. He is the one who inspires me a lot. He is probably 80 now, but his sharpness is greater than that of people my age. Age is just a number for him. He truly taught me to romanticize numbers, especially ratios and proportions, which I think are very important in real life.
Not everything every teacher said was accepted by me just like that. I studied it, went to the other side, and agreed with what made sense. Back then, I didn’t know what tangible outcome I would get from learning these things and from people who would probably never meet me in my entire life, but it was worth it. The journey of learning hasn’t stopped, and I hope it never will.
Many other free resources on the internet are equally precious, but instead of me telling their names, the readers will find them anyway.
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