#Lite: Are you ready to be below average?

Eid Mubarak!

Hi guys,

Hope you are well. I’m doing okay, Alhamdulillah.

I write this at 9:56 pm on Sunday evening, not long after returning home from an Eid picnic. I’m tired, but generally feeling glad about how both Eids went this year.

During last year’s Eid-al-Fitr (after Ramadan 2021), I remember feeling super lonely and removed from any sort of celebrations. I even had classes and engagements on Eid day! And so I was really looking forward to Eid-al-Adha (the one they kill ram), for which I was planning to be in Nigeria.

Eid-al-Adha came, and while I was fortunate enough to be in Nigeria, every other member of my family had caught Covid-19, and we were all stuck isolating in the house. Not the most fun of celebrations, as you may imagine.

So yeah, Alhamdulillah.

I need to do some other things to prepare for the new week, so let’s keep it #Lite.

What I’m thinking about

I’m currently watching a Goldman Sachs interview with Howard Marks, billionaire co-Chairman of Oaktree Capital Management. Back in June of 2008, Howard invested over $10bn in the global markets at a time when the financial world was on fire. As it turned out, it was a reallyyy good time to buy.

Image from YouTube

As the financial world is again on fire, Howard’s advice and thoughts on the market are in high demand. Listening to the interview today, I heard something that struck me. He said something along the lines of,

‘Any decision you make in life to be above average puts you at the risk of being below average.’

Think about it.

If you were planning to ‘kill’ an exam, you might spend 40% of your time practicing the super hard exercises in the textbook. Should those difficult questions come out, you would probably be among the 5% that get them right.

But if the lecturer decides to repeat super easy questions from the note, then 90% of the class will get it right, and your lack of practice might lead you to make silly mistakes in the exam. So your intention of risking it all for an A+ might lead to getting a B- at best.

Similarly,

If you spend all your savings to start an IG business with the intention of making much more than your salary gives you, then maybe you might be fortunate, have 200+ sales per month, and start dragging with Lagos big girls. 🤑🤑

Or just maybe your supplier will run off with your stock, you lose all your life savings, and then your financial situation will be much worse than if you had just managed your salary savings.

I guess we never really know. But in line with the first example, for those willing to risk being below average by investing time reading the super difficult textbook questions for every exam, then it is only a matter of time before they face an exam where everybody else fails but their 100% is assured.

And so people with an outsized risk appetite will always enjoy an outsized level of success. It is what it is.

Are you ready to be below average?

** Jara content:

“Every fairy tale, it seems, concludes with the bland phrase ‘happily ever after.’ Yet every couple I have ever known would agree that nothing about marriage is forever happy. There are moments of bliss, to be sure, and lengthy spans of satisfied companionship.

Yet these come at no small effort, and the girl who reads such fiction dreaming her troubles will end ere she departs the altar is well advised to seek at once a rational woman to set her straight.”

-Catherine Gilbert Murdock, Princess Ben

Have a great week. ✨