Collection: Mohnish Pabrai - #141 'How I Manage My Time'
[Transcript]
AUDIENCE MEMBER 00:00
So my question is, it seems like investing really takes up a lot of your time and just like running your foundation and everything you do. How do you manage to balance your life in terms of family, personal time and everything else?
MOHNISH PABRAI 00:14
Okay well, that’s an easy one.
You know, my wife isn’t here but if she were here she would say he doesn’t work at all – (Laughter) – if you asked him what he does, she would say he does nothing because her perspective is she really sees me do nothing, quite frankly.
And my daughter is at the back, how do I – what do I do? How do I spend my time?
MOHNISH’S DAUGHTER 00:44
Sleep.
MOHNISH PABRAI 00:45
I sleep – (Laughter) – there you go. So I – In fact, just before I came here, I finished my afternoon nap. And so afternoon naps are good thing and so I’m wide-eyed and very cheery for all of you.
Yeah, so I actually, you know, investing is an activity that at least as defined by Buffett and Munger and such is not an act, is not something that has a lot of, you know, hyperactivity about it. It’s an activity requires a lot of reading and thinking which is fine and I enjoy that. So actually I don’t even think of it as work, I think of it as fun really just trying to understand the way things work, in the way the world works and so on.
So I think that if you focus on doing things that you love to do, then you won’t work a day in your life. And I think that should be the objective, I think the objective all of you should have is to focus on – now, you know for some of us, it’s hard to figure out what we are excited about, right?
I mean sometimes that’s not clear, it may not be clear in your ages what you're excited about. But you know, increased time on activities that energize you and decrease time on activities that don’t energize you.
And so for example, you know, one of the things that Buffett and Munger say is that if you spend time with people who are better than you, you will get better and if you spend time with people who are worse than you, you will get worse as the magnetic pull both ways.
So one simple thing to look at is if you look at your kind of close friends and who you spend time with, just ask the question, you know, are these people I really admire and look up to or is so-and-so someone who’s kind of pulling me down or has got some negative attributes and such. And so if you change your social networks to be more in terms of a crowd that is kind of interesting and ones that you look up to, that’s going to be helpful.
So I think these are just things that you got to feel out and figure out what you’re excited about, what you love doing and then take it from there.
(Source: https://youtu.be/bLjoL5zhBxA)
