Eudaimonia: Decoding excellence in Life & Investing

Diversify yourself, just how you diversify your investment portfolio. Range is good!

All our lives, we’ve been told that we should pick up a career, sport, or instrument when we’re little kids and stick to it until our last breath. As a kid, I was an athlete (played Basketball for my school for 10+ years), a classical singer (trained for 6 years), a classical dancer (trained both in Bharatnatyam and Kathak for 5+ years), painted with different art teachers (for several years) so I never fully understood this bizarre concept of specialization. I enjoyed the range of activities and always felt like a failure compared to other kids who could decide when they were 2 (ok, I’m exaggerating) what career path they wanted to pursue. Deep specialization is thrust upon most kids without allowing them the ‘sampling phase’ where the kid could potentially start thinking for themselves and discovering their own strengths.

Although I had that privilege, I never really realized how significant it was in shaping my journey. When you are thrust into a range of activities when young, one adopts a learner’s mindset. You learn to appreciate people’s skills and the effort they would’ve put to develop it, but more importantly, you know that if you dedicate time and effort into it-you too can learn it (i.e you start operating from a growth mindset vs a fixed mindset). Society often looks down on people who switch their careers/companies too often. We’re shamed for changing and evolving by our own friends and relatives who knew a different version of us from years ago. 

And then I came across a book by David Epstein: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World and it changed my perspective completely. A short excerpt: David Epstein examined the world's most successful athletes, artists, musicians, inventors, forecasters, and scientists. He discovered that in most fields--especially those that are complex and unpredictable--generalists, not specialists, are primed to excel. Generalists often find their path late, and they juggle many interests rather than focusing on one. They're also more creative, more agile, and able to make connections their more specialized peers can't see.

I’ve known my path broadly in life since I was 5 years old. I used to write in slam books (yes 90’s kid!) next to my dream profession: a businesswoman. I just wasn’t sure what I would build, so I built multiple unofficial businesses. I taught Zumba and Yoga, I sold sportswear, I sold artisan-made goods and clothes, I built a platform to rent designerwear (called HireUrDesire lol), participated in various pitch competitions (one at Oxford University where an investor walked up to our team after our pitch and told us he wanted to invest a quarter of a million dollars in 2010!), I was a club promoter in the UK hosting tons of events (getting handsomely paid to get people to party!) all before building my first fintech company that eventually got acquired by one of our largest customers back in 2016 (we were processing close to $30million USD in transaction volume per year and served half a million customers at that point!). All these businesses taught me so much about selling, investing, people, and life which I would’ve never learned had I not given myself the luxury to explore and keep building without listening to all the people around me who thought I was up to no good, basically. After my first big success, I took a corporate sabbatical to figure out if there was anything I was missing out on - and turns out I wasn’t so I got back to building as soon as I could! Now I’m full-time investing in startups & public markets and building businesses. 

Why this is my first post of The Eudaimonic Investor is because I want my readers to know that RANGE IS GOOD. It teaches you real-life skills. It makes you a better investor to be able to apply your learnings and experiences from different fields. Don’t build walls around you because society wants you to. Give yourself the space to jump into different opportunities so that you can unlock new possibilities. I’m not saying that you have to quit your job to do this, just don’t get entrapped by it. Just how you diversify your investments across different asset classes, diversify yourself. Find new experiences and build new skills, consciously. And this is what the theme of this newsletter is going to be - decoding excellence in life & investing. Eudaimonia is a term that was first used by Aristotle to mean a virtuous life lived in pursuit of excellence & that’s what we’ll discover in this journey together. 

I can’t wait to share all the exciting reads I have in store for you! Thank you for subscribing!

Shameless plug: I’ll be sharing detailed analysis of different asset classes in my portfolio (spanning from crypto to startups and specific public market stocks in India and the US) but that will be exclusively available to only the paid subscribers. :)