YouSaid · the spoken record

Vitaliy Katsenelson

lines on the record: 70
first: 2024-03-24
most recent: 2024-03-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“That is the concept that got me into Stoicism. That was like a, it's so simple. And I'm going to tell you what it is. And you're like, what? But it's so brilliant. And it basically says some things are up to us, some things aren't. I mean, that's the part where you say, oh, what's up is that? No, but then I'll just give a little bit contest to stoicism. So Stoicism, it's a 2,000 year old philosophy that came from ancient Greece. There were basically three kind of main Stoics. There was Marx Aurelius. He was an emperor of Rome, the most powerful person in that universe at that time. There was Seneca who was kind of the Renaissance man, I don't know, seven or ten centuries before Renaissance. And then there was a Pictetus. And the Pictus was a slave who was freed and then he became a”
2024-03-24 · We Study Billionaires · TIP617: Improve Your Investing Operating System w/ Vitaliy Katsenelson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It provides a leprosy system, basically. What Stoicism basically helped me to reduce the volatility of negative emotion. It allowed me to, when I go through life, to remove stress from it. And so now I look at life differently because of stoicism.”
2024-03-24 · We Study Billionaires · TIP617: Improve Your Investing Operating System w/ Vitaliy Katsenelson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Here is this. You want to kind of mindfully create categories and figure out how much time, what's more important to you, and then you look at your time, how do you spend your time? Because attention is really a currency of time, how you spend your time is basically tells you exactly what your priorities are.”
2024-03-24 · We Study Billionaires · TIP617: Improve Your Investing Operating System w/ Vitaliy Katsenelson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I favor quality over quantity, to have meaningful relationships. You can't, it's very difficult to have a lot of true friends just because friendship requires investment of time. And so what I do, I have a handful, very close friends with whom I talk all the time. I go for a walk in the park and I call them. But I know that there's a lot of, I have a lot of wonderful friends slash acquaintances. But I know there is just so much time and I can't have a deep relationship with them. So I have a handful of friends and that's how kind of I manage my friendships. My point is this. What I just described to you is prioritization of my life. And that is going to be different. It was different for me at different points in life as well. I mean, before I had kids, obviously kids were not part of that and studying was a big part of it. But the key.”
2024-03-24 · We Study Billionaires · TIP617: Improve Your Investing Operating System w/ Vitaliy Katsenelson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's how I think. If you think about writing, it's just basically focused thinking. For two hours a day, every morning I write, and that is my focused thinking time. So writing is right there next to investing. It's very important to me. And then I've been CEO of IMA. Now, this is a very important point. My company now at the point where I am not as much needed as much to run the company because I have a lot of people helping me. Ten years ago, when the company was much smaller, it was priority was higher where it is today. But now it's lower priority just not because I don't care about the company. It's just because I have so many capable people helping me to do this, freeing up time for me to focus on other things. And then finally, I have friendships. And again, when it comes to friendships, what I'm trying to do”
2024-03-24 · We Study Billionaires · TIP617: Improve Your Investing Operating System w/ Vitaliy Katsenelson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Cool. Okay, so he said, Dad, I want to move to Washington DC, and you'll be remembering the moments you had with your son when he was two years old, five years old, 15 years old. So I think when it comes to my kids, I'll be honest, I kind of approach from regret minimization perspective. I just want to make sure that I'm present and I'm there for them when they grow up. Because at some point they'll grow up and they won't need me. So that's when my family comes in. Second, then investing for me is very important because, I mean, I make clients hire, you know, basically come to us and say, Vitaly, here's my life savings. Don't screw it up. So it's incredible responsibility. Plus, I love doing this. And that truly gives me meaning. So I do have solo in a game when it comes to investing. Then I have writing. And writing to me, writing and investing, like sometimes you, it's very difficult to draw the line between writing and investing because I write a lot about investing.”
2024-03-24 · We Study Billionaires · TIP617: Improve Your Investing Operating System w/ Vitaliy Katsenelson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If I don't need well, if I'm not a good mental state, nothing else is going to matter. So I want to make sure that I exercise, I ate well, I get enough sleep. In relationships, by the way, are part of it too. So I kind of take care of the relationships right there. Then my family, and this is very important, your kids, some of your 16-year-old son, at some point he will be 22. And he'll tell you, dad, Kyle, where do you live?”
2024-03-24 · We Study Billionaires · TIP617: Improve Your Investing Operating System w/ Vitaliy Katsenelson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“CEO of IMA. I'm separated, writing, I can be an investor. I've been performing manager, CIO of IMA, and been CEO of IMA, and then friendships. You could argue that, well, friendships are not important to me. No, they are important to me. Don't get me wrong. But if you value everything the same, you value nothing. So you have to, this process of prioritization. And you want to make sure that every single thing there is that you don't run it into deficit. In other words, if I completely neglect my friends, then I'm going to pay for that at some point in time. And it's horrible. And relationships to me are important. But the reason I structured it this way, the reason I put myself first is because, you know, when they're on the airplane and they tell you in the case of emergency, first put a face mask on yourself. Well, if I don't get enough sleep.”
2024-03-24 · We Study Billionaires · TIP617: Improve Your Investing Operating System w/ Vitaliy Katsenelson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I struggle with this concept of work life balance because it's a balance, like when you think about the word balance, it kind of assumes there is a 50-50, there is some kind of, I think the way I look at it is that you want to mindfully look at your life and identify important elements in your life. And I'm going to give you an example going through and then prioritize those things. And knowing that, like, if you think about a big part of life is just dealing with constraints. It's like economics. You think about what economics is, it's just dealing with constraints. And so is dealing with life. And the biggest constraint in life is time. So the way I look at this, let me just kind of as an example, let me go through my life. The way I look at my life, I prioritize things like this, myself, family, investor, writer, then”
2024-03-24 · We Study Billionaires · TIP617: Improve Your Investing Operating System w/ Vitaliy Katsenelson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yeah, there are many different ways. You can meditate by focusing on just listening to sounds. Just go, say, try this. Go to the park or go outside, sit outside on the bench, and just start listening to sounds. First of all, I promise you're going to hear sounds you didn't know. You're going to hear highway three miles away. Like that sound is always there. You just never pay attention to that. You know, there's a many different ways to do this. You can focus on breathing, you can focus on the subject. looking at the subject some meditations are with your eyes open like they i mean i try to meditate listen to classical music as well there's a many different ways to meditate you need to find whatever works for you”
2024-03-24 · We Study Billionaires · TIP617: Improve Your Investing Operating System w/ Vitaliy Katsenelson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then YouTube has a lot of videos you can listen to and meditate to. The only thing that you're trying to do is the basic meditation is you sit down, you breathe, you're focused on your breath. And then just all you're trying to do is just focus on your breath and nothing else. And while you focus in your breath, those come to mind, oh, I'm on podcast. I should be probably focusing on the podcast, not on meditation. But anyway, so, but that's a, and then you observe this thought and you go back to breathing again.”
2024-03-24 · We Study Billionaires · TIP617: Improve Your Investing Operating System w/ Vitaliy Katsenelson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To repeat. So, if you find a comfortable share at home, link it to something. In other words, you can link it to something you do every day. You wake up in the morning, you brush your teeth, maybe the next thing you meditate. Or you come after work, you put yourself on away on the counter, maybe next time you meditate. Link it to something you do every single day. Also, I think this is the case where repeating it over and over again is more important than how long you meditate. If you start meditating three minutes a day and then gradually increasing everybody, I can promise you this one. Let's say not three minutes. Let's say one minute. Anybody can meditate for a minute. I can promise you. Anybody, you can meditate for a minute, for sure. And yourself is one minute and then you increase it to three to five to ten. And you do it every single day and you don't miss it. There are so many apps out there. There's a Sam Harris has an app waking up. There's another app called Calm.”
2024-03-24 · We Study Billionaires · TIP617: Improve Your Investing Operating System w/ Vitaliy Katsenelson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Meditation is kind of you start observing your thoughts. And I'll give you an example. I was driving somewhere a few years ago and I noticed that I'm very stressed about something and I started to think about it and realized what I'm stressed about. And the second I realized what it was, it's almost like you poke a balloon with a needle. It's kind of, he pokes the story and goes away. And that's what made me calmer. I think that is the kind of become mindful, be able to observe your own thoughts. And therefore that pain that comes with incessant thinking about that gives you, that's what causes you pain, that's what meditation helps you to do is. Now, how do you start meditation? Well, first you're trying to create a new habit. So when you try to create a new habit, what I suggest you do, try to remove all the obstacles. Make it as easy as possible. Make it something that's easy.”
2024-03-24 · We Study Billionaires · TIP617: Improve Your Investing Operating System w/ Vitaliy Katsenelson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You fail, and again, I use it in quote, in air quotes. When you fail, what you try to do, you try to observe the thought on which you failed. And this observation of thought makes you actually trains you to be mindful, to observe your thoughts, to observe your emotions. The reason it's important because I think that's what gives you, that's what makes you a common person. Because what happens to us We spend most of our time having this subconscious thought, always thinking about something, always worrying about something. And it's happening subconsciously, so we're not noticing it. Now once you train yourself, you know, observe your thoughts, it's almost like imagine like you have a desktop computer and main processor. And then you have another little computer that sits on its side desktop computer that analyzes what desktop computer is doing.”
2024-03-24 · We Study Billionaires · TIP617: Improve Your Investing Operating System w/ Vitaliy Katsenelson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Dispel kind of a few myths about the meditations first. Number one, I think one of the biggest myths is that because you meditate, you're going to be calmer. I think, like let's say you meditate for 20 minutes, I'm not sure how much benefit that 20 minutes in itself has, but it's the other side effect that makes you calmer as a person. And I'll get to that side effect in a second. You said something very interesting. You said you cannot think when you meditate. And I think this is the most this is probably the primary reason why most people don't meditate because they try meditate. They try not to think and they fail. Well, and when I say the word fail in quotes, that is the feature, not a bug. Like trying to sit and not to think is part of meditation and you failing, that's big part of it. Because what happens is this.”
2024-03-24 · We Study Billionaires · TIP617: Improve Your Investing Operating System w/ Vitaliy Katsenelson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's kind of interesting. I question your source's response a little bit, how honest it is. Because he wrote like three or four different investment books. And he's a billionaire, and I can promise you, you don't write books for money. I can tell you this as an author of several books. So he probably loves it a lot more than he's willing to admit. But I'm going to hedge my answer a little bit because if you look at they're probably around the same age as Buffett, more or less. And Buffett obviously loves what he's doing. Soros, he basically stopped managing money professionally. He may still supervise it a little bit. But he hurts other money managers, other people run the bulk of his money. So he probably also, so maybe that explains in part why he's no longer managing money.”
2024-03-24 · We Study Billionaires · TIP617: Improve Your Investing Operating System w/ Vitaliy Katsenelson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's very difficult to do this in the long run because what's going to happen if you're doing it just for money, you're going to be competing against people who are doing it for the love of it, who are doing it because the wake up in the morning, that's all they can think about. So you're going to be in a significant disadvantage in the long run if you're just doing it for money and eventually you will lose that game because there's a lot of people who are doing it as a hobby. I mean in the hobby they get paid for it. Like I do it I get paid for it, but I would do the same thing if I didn't get paid for it because I love investing.”
2024-03-24 · We Study Billionaires · TIP617: Improve Your Investing Operating System w/ Vitaliy Katsenelson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Go against their identity. Nevertheless, point number one. But number two, they're usually playing an infinite game. And what I mean by this is that the scar mechanic, you know, like when we go to car mechanic, there's usually a symmetry of information, right? The mechanic knows so much more about your car than you do. The reason we usually don't like going to car mechanics because we're always afraid to be ripped off. So when you go to car mechanics and says, you know what, your brakes, you can still use them for another year or two. Well, karmic knows so much more about those brakes than you do. And that person being honest with you creates a connection to that person. And therefore, in the long run, it's going to pay off. So anyway, this is just an example, but that's what to me that means having someone in a game, this alignment, that inner alignment you have with whatever you're doing.”
2024-03-24 · We Study Billionaires · TIP617: Improve Your Investing Operating System w/ Vitaliy Katsenelson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That you have this inner alignment with whatever you're doing. It's something that is so dear to you, it's so important to you that your sole focus is to be doing a great job. We've seen people that have soul in a game. I'll give you an example. You go to a restaurant and you have this waiter or waitress that gives you just absolutely incredible service. And that person is not really doing it because he's going to get tipped or he's going to get tipped, but does it because they want to make you feel good or you go to a mechanic and you know that mechanic will do whatever he has to make sure he does a good job for you because he cares about delivering value to you as a customer. What you find usually people that have soul in the game, first of all, their identity is perfectly aligned with what they're doing. In other words, if they do something that would diminish what they're doing, it's actually...”
2024-03-24 · We Study Billionaires · TIP617: Improve Your Investing Operating System w/ Vitaliy Katsenelson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Soul in Game is really just if one word can actually describe it very well alignment. Let's start with this kind of a basic layer of Solen game as a skin in a game. Okay, I'll give you a couple examples. Let's say a cook, you would expect that cook to eat his own cooking, right? That cook has skin in the game. He doesn't just benefit from selling his food to his patrons, but also if he sells poisonous food to his patrons, he'll wear the consequences. Imagine you're an engineer building a bridge and then when the first truck rolls over through the bridge, you are standing under the bridge. That means having skin in the game. So in other words, not just benefiting from the upside, but also suffering the consequences of the downside of your creation. So that's skin in the game. Soul in a game is the next iteration of that. And that iteration where”
2024-03-24 · We Study Billionaires · TIP617: Improve Your Investing Operating System w/ Vitaliy Katsenelson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT