Top Ten Lessons After Almost a Year

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:04)
Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, methods, stories, and of strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. You can learn more and stay up to date at investorfieldguide.com.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:24)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is a principal and portfolio manager at O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:47)
A future guest just told me every band has a song about being in a band, so today I will give you my version. I won't do this often and I only do it this week in case listenership drops due to the holiday. I didn't want any guest to have a smaller than normal audience.
I've now been doing this for almost one year and have learned a tremendous amount. Since the whole idea behind the show is to learn in public, I'm going to share a few of the lessons I've learned with you today. I'll shape it as a top 10 list, which ends with a fun story about my recent dinner with Warren Buffett. You'll notice that many of these are just good business and life lessons applied to something specific, in this case a podcast. I hope you can pull the essence of one or more of these things and change how you do things, especially if you create any sort of content as part of your job.
On to the list.
Lesson number one. Conversation is my new favorite way to learn. I love books and always will, but conversations are even more efficient and engaging. Talking with people who know their field deeply is the most fun thing in the world, and it is an underused method of learning. Lectures are too one-sided. Books often don't flow in the directions you want them to, but conversations are alive and interactive. I've been doing this very publicly on the podcast, but I've also been doing it more in private after realizing how powerful it can be. If you can commit to having conversations with new people where you tell them as little about yourself as possible, you'll be off to a good start. I don't mean that talking about yourself is bad. Not at all. Only that in each conversation, the time you spend talking about you is time that you aren't learning something new. The less your ego gets involved, the more you will learn. And I should know because I used to have a big ego. This means asking dumb questions, sometimes more than once. It means probing on the simplest parts of a person's field or knowledge. As everyone knows, it is fun to explain something you love to people that don't know as much about the topic and question as you do, but who are eager to learn. So it logically flows that you should want to be the less knowledgeable person in most conversations. Now, if everyone took this tact, things would be a mess. But I wouldn't worry too much about that. One side effect of learning to ask good and interesting questions is that you realize how rarely anyone asks you good or interesting questions.
An example of why it pays to remove your ego. A month ago, I didn't know anything about what a cryptocurrency token was. Now I can have a fairly in-depth conversation on the topic because I made small incremental improvements across 10 different conversations. In each of those conversations, I was the moron trying to get up to speed. The more times that you're willing to be the idiot, the faster you will learn. It's a pretty cool formula when you think about it. Ten times the idiot, one time the relative expert. They should teach you how to have a good conversation in elementary school.
Lesson number two. Preparation and careful listening are everything. The best editing for this podcast is done before the conversation starts and during the conversation itself.
Most of the episodes you hear are very lightly edited if at all. A majority aren't touched. The ones I have edited a bit were my fault. I didn't prepare well enough to be nimble and attentive in the conversation. What I've found is that the role of the person asking the questions is to create and sustain momentum. I have this visual of a rush of water running down a maze of tubes which have hatches that open and close. If the water hits a closed hatch, everything stops. My job is to anticipate by listening very carefully and get ahead of the water to open doors to keep the momentum going.