Today’s Article is inspired by someone I lost recently, Melissa ‘Missy’ Garnai:
Missy didn’t have a long resume. She didn’t have academic accolandes. And her longest career was being our babysitter for 13 years, then working with autistic children for the next two decades. Society rarely rewarded her for her kindness. In fact, many cruel people took her for granted. Missy purely lived to help other people, people who otherwise could not help themselves. She saw herself as the last line of defense for them, much like protection she wished she had as a child.
She had almost no money besides what the government and our family helped pay her for work, and yet she was more than willing to spend her last dollar to help brighten the day of a child with autism.
Missy made a massive impact on me because of her spirit. And her unconditional love for me; for the past 20 years of my life she has texted me literally just about every single month checking in on me; my dog, my love life, my family. She was one of my biggest cheerleaders. Today’s newsletter is a special one. Thank you for reading.
Her energy lives on forever, and has vastly improved my life. ❤️
If you are one of the lucky people who opened this, thank you.
I hope it changes your perspective on how to observe the people around you.
I hope it changes your perspective on how to observe the places around you.
I hope it changes your perspective on how to observe the details around you.
Some context
Other than my parents, Missy (who I called “Mip”) was the person most pivotal to my upbringing from a caretaker perspective.
She is sadly no longer with us.
Mip prayed for a miracle: the chance to have a second life.
But it was not Gd’s plan for her.
My response to her was as positive as I could make it.
But we both understood that probability was not on our side.
I FaceTimed her while she was in hospice.
Hours later, she passed away.
Before I come back to writing about Mip, I need to share another piece of the puzzle.
A theme that has been recurring in my life since her passing: “Listen to the universe.”
The concept is simple.
Listening to the universe means becoming aware of the quiet details.
The coincidences.
The people who appear at exactly the right time.
The ideas that keep returning.
The opportunities that feel strangely obvious once you notice them.
I’m only just starting to read it now, but I believe this is also the core theme of The Alchemist.
After Mip passed away, an insane number of coincidences began happening in my life.
Things that felt too obvious to ignore.
Things that felt “shown” to me in a way that pushed my path in the right direction.
I noticed that the more information I collected, the more experiences I had, and the more places I went in person, the more positive impact the universe seemed to have on my life.
And so I decided to take this idea to an extreme.
My month-long experiment
I conducted a little experiment over the past month.
The rules were simple:
No ordering food delivery.
Workout a ton.
Push myself every time.
Show up to workout classes four to six times a week.
Work a ton.
Wake up at 4 a.m. every day, work out and eat by 6 a.m., then grind through the entire day and evening.
And if somebody invited me somewhere, or I saw something happening that sounded even remotely interesting:
Go.
No overthinking it.
No deciding whether it was “my thing.”
No sitting at home because it was easier.
Just show up.
So far, that has included:
A sound bath on floating mattresses in a pool
An all-day wellness retreat with two of my buddies that started at 9 a.m. with a fitness class in 90-degree Florida heat, followed by a 130-foot waterslide
Pottery class, my first time ever
A singles event, which was embarrassing, but whatever
Two spin classes in cities different from where I live
Yoga on the beach, where the sunrise was glorious
A new style of Pilates using a Lagree machine, where I was probably the only dude who had ever signed up
Making more than 30 house and rap songs with Suno AI
Being gifted an entire DJ kit by a friend, then buying the speakers myself for absolutely no defensible reason
Charity event DOG FOAM PARTY where 20 dogs ran around as soap-blasted into the air
A second charity event in a barn, electric house music themed
The list goes on and on… I just said ‘yes’ to anything, and then I made sure I showed up.
The tagline for the experiment became:
“I’ll never know, if I never show.”
And amazingly, while I was doing all of this, something else happened.
I finally found my investment style.
And the fund started working.
Observation is not just a life strategy, it’s the investment strategy
Last week, I had about 35% of our fund invested.
On a ROIC basis, we beat the S&P 500 by roughly ~3%.
And on an ROTC basis, we beat it by roughly 1.25%, despite using less than half of the entire fund.
So that’s half the cash making double the profits.
This means very little unless done over decades.
I know that.
One week of performance is statistically useless.
I am not declaring victory over the S&P 500 because I had a good Friday.
But personally, on a relative basis, and because of the timing, it was momentous for me.
Not because of the return.
Because of how I made it.
I have found a reputable, scalable, deployment style that I feel can scale institutionally.
I had been accumulating deeply undervalued companies through rigorous underwriting using a form of custom earnings calculations that is inspired by all the best value investors.
For the first time in my life, I looked at the portfolio and realized:
I could buy these companies, disappear on vacation for ten years, and not spend the entire trip worrying that my money was going to vanish.
That is what I have been looking for.
I felt like I had taken almost no large-scale risk.
I had kept 65% of my money in cash.
And yet, somehow, I had outperformed more than half of investors.
While also taking less risk.
So we’re doing more of that - because this works.
I’m buying iconic companies at depressed, out-of-favor valuations.
Then I’m scaling into them slowly enough that I preserve plenty of cash for whatever opportunities the market brings me next.
And that last part has completely changed how I experience markets.
Every morning, I wake up and the market gives me a bunch of prices.
I don’t take advice from those prices.
I look at them as offers.
Sometimes Mr. Market shows up at my front door with something ridiculous.
“Hey, you know this incredible business you’ve wanted to own for 9 months…? Everyone hates it this week. Want it for 30% less?”
Sweetheart deal.
Thank you very much.
Other days, Mr. Market shows up with nothing.
That’s fine too.
Because the opportunity will come eventually.
Especially in a market like this, opportunities can appear constantly.
But that will not always be true.
You need a strategy that works when bargains are everywhere and when they are nowhere.
So I go slowly.
Take what the market gives you.
Nothing more.
And definitely nothing less.
The market isn’t the only place I’ve noticed hard work + patience + observation is the key:
The broader theme of my year, across investing, love and life, has become:
Listen to the universe.
I’ve had a frankly ridiculous number of coincidences over the past few months.
Some are tiny.
Some are hilarious.
Some have been so statistically strange that I’ve had trouble dismissing them.
And something changed around the time I lost my babysitter and friend, Mip.
Mip had an unusually powerful spirit.
She was goodness, kindness and caring personified.
She loved me, and I loved her.
Her death made me think more seriously about what any of this actually is.
There was a famous experiment, highly disputed for very good reasons, that claimed to detect a change in body weight at the moment of death.
People sometimes describe it as the experiment that “weighed the soul.”
I don’t pretend that experiment proves anything.
But the underlying question fascinates me.
Einstein gave us the relationship:
E = mc²
Mass and energy are related.
If you rearrange it:
m = E / c²
A tiny amount of mass corresponds to an enormous amount of energy.
That does not scientifically prove that a soul has mass, or that consciousness survives death.
I don’t know that.
Nobody does.
But I find the idea beautiful.
What if what we experience as spirit or consciousness is somehow connected to something deeper than the physical structure carrying it?
Energy does not simply disappear.
And when Mip died, I found myself imagining that whatever made her her (goodness, caring and love) went back to wherever it originally came from.
Back into the ether.
Back into the universe.
I can’t prove that.
But I can tell you something strange.
My life got better.
And it felt as though she was lending a helping hand.
Something changed
Over the weeks that followed her passing, I started experiencing an absurd amount of support from the universe.
Coincidences.
People.
Ideas.
Opportunities.
Stocks.
Everything started aligning in a strangely harmonious way.
Things showed up at exactly the right time.
You can explain every individual occurrence away.
That is the rational answer.
Maybe it was pattern recognition.
Maybe I was simply paying more attention.
Maybe changing my behavior changed the number of opportunities I encountered.
That is entirely possible.
Actually, it is guaranteed at least part of the explanation.
But it does not change the benefit.
Eventually, I stopped caring whether the mechanism was spiritual or statistical.
Because the practical lesson was identical:
Pay attention.
So this month, I decided to take that idea seriously.
Get into the real world.
Show up.
Observe.
Do not force an outcome.
“I’ll never know, if I never show.”
And it has helped basically everywhere.
Life.
Work.
Investing.
Fitness.
Mental clarity.
Confidence.
I feel like I’m moving forward without needing to know exactly where the road turns.
The only thing I’m focused on is observing, listening and acting when the signals become clear.
This mindset is how Warren Buffett invests.
He calls it, “waiting for your pitch.”
It is how South Park is written. They often cram the entire episode together the night before it airs, they procrastinate all week, then pump out the episode literally 24 hours before it’s due to studio for airing.
It is how Kobe practiced basketball.
Mamba spent 99.9% of his life preparing, while the world remembers the 0.1% of the time he spent on the court during a 48-minute game.
He was waiting for his moment far more often than he was capturing it.
The story is the same for many legends.
They worked hard.
They practiced.
They improved.
They observed.
And when they were fully prepared and their moment finally appeared, there was no question in their minds that they would capture it.
If it’s Missy, or just statistics, the Universe is talking
I’m not sure everything is predetermined.
We’ll save that one for another newsletter.
But I increasingly believe there are paths that fit each of us better than others.
And I think finding your route requires a strange combination of enormous effort, and enormous patience.
You have to listen.
You have to observe.
You have to prepare.
And then you have to wait.
Which is exactly how I now think about investing.
I cannot force the market to make an incredible company cheap.
I can spend hundreds of hours studying companies.
I can understand their businesses.
I can understand their balance sheets.
I can know exactly what I’m willing to pay.
I can keep cash available.
But I cannot command the market:
MAKE THIS STOCK CHEAP TOMORROW.
That is not my job.
My job is to be ready when it happens.
And maybe life works more like that than we admit.
You cannot manufacture every friendship.
You cannot manufacture love.
You cannot manufacture the perfect business opportunity.
You cannot manufacture the moment that changes your life.
You can increase your surface area for luck.
You can show up.
You can become better.
You can prepare obsessively.
But eventually, something outside your control has to meet you halfway.
The eye of the tiger
I’ve written before about what I call my eye of the tiger philosophy.
It is easy to confuse patience with passivity.
They are completely different.
I am not advocating sitting on your couch waiting for the universe to DoorDash you a meaningful life.
Quite the opposite.
I am advocating working twice as hard behind the scenes so that when your opportunity finally appears, you recognize it immediately.
Clear the vision in your head.
Know what you are looking for.
Prepare for it.
Then wait.
Like an eagle watching the water.
Most of the time, you do nothing.
Not because you are lazy.
Because there is not a fish worth diving for.
Then one appears.
And you f*cking go.
That is increasingly how I want to invest.
It is how I want to work.
Do not chase every opportunity.
Prepare yourself for the right ones.
Put yourself where interesting things can happen.
Pay attention when they do.
And when something truly obvious finally presents itself, do not hesitate because you have become addicted to waiting.
“I have been reading your post and find them interesting….”
Missy was an avid reader with you all.. she will be missed! Part of me still hopes that I’ll see ‘opened’ for this weeks edition in the email analytics next to her name!
