The Beauty Of Picking Less but Picking Winners

This time’s post is going to be short, because all I wanted to highlight in this post was how beautiful life is, in the matter that a few well-thought winning choices can make up for everything else that might go wrong otherwise.

The more actively you try to swap opportunities, investments, the more volatile you make the entire setup. Great returns in life are not made by having too many bets, they are made by having a few good bets.

A Nice Little Story About Fantasy Cricket

The year’s 2015, a while before fantasy cricket platforms like Dream11 became famous, the idea back then was simple, before each match, you select a team and score points based on how the players in your team did in the actual match, no money involved, and I loved it (The good old days when not everything had to be about money). Throughout the IPL season, one was allowed 100 swaps (Each swap meant you took one player out and put another player into your team).

I used to use around 4-5 swaps each match, filling my team with as many players from that day’s match as I could, as a result, my swaps were over in ~25 matches, a typical season has 56 matches. Guess how many points I ended up scoring after using as many players from each match? ~10000. At the same time, one of my friends who didn’t have that much time to sit down and select a team each day, chose a few good players from each team and stuck to them throughout the season, he was left with around 60 swaps at the end, and he scored ~15000 points.

How was that even possible? Simple. Great players are always great players, so you can bet on a few players to do the majority of the work for a team, if you select 2 good players and 7 average players, the 7 average players can drag the 2 great players down, and overall your team performance will take a hit.

It’s the same effect that you notice with people that have great companies in their investment portfolios and do not spend too much time actively seeking out swaps or trades, they usually end up making more money in the long run than the average active investor.

Great Careers are built on top of not many opportunities, but a few winning ones

Almost everyone I know, started their careers off with a salary that wasn’t the market rate it was downright exploitation, but how many stay that way? Probably very few, a few good opportunities change everything and give people a taste for what their careers were missing, along with making them a lot more money too.

That’s it, that’s the post, short and simple, and I hope I’ve been able to convey my message here. Take calculated bets, and put a bigger chunk of your eggs in the basket that will eventually outperform every other basket.