The Most Important Decision You Will Ever Make

After I had decided to quit my job in late 2010, we got to know that our second child was on the way. There was a momentary dilemma whether to go ahead with the decision to quit the job or not.

A new family member meant added responsibilities, that too in a period of high financial uncertainty. I had exhausted a large part of my savings to pay off my home loan to be able to quit that job, and now there would be an extra mouth to feed, apart from other expenses of a newborn.

“Quit your job!” was my wife Vidhi’s call. “We will see what happens only after we take this step. Worst, if nothing works out, we will sell our house and move back to a small town.”

I finally resigned in January 2011, and my son was born in May. He was a premature baby, and we had to spend a few days in the hospital. The bill took away six months of my savings. There was another momentary thought of going back to a job, as my work had not started to pay off yet.

“Don’t give up!” Vidhi advised. “We will see this through. Give it some more time.” That was it! She did not give up on my dreams, and so I did not give up as well.

“The biggest decision of your life will be who you choose to marry,” said Warren Buffett in a documentary. “There have been two turning points in my life,” he added, “One when I came out of the womb and one when I met Susie. What happened with me would not have happened without her.”

He addressed the topic during a 2017 conversation with Bill Gates at Columbia University, too –

You want to associate with people who are the kind of person you’d like to be. You’ll move in that direction. And the most important person by far in that respect is your spouse. I can’t overemphasize how important that is.

After spending 20 years with Vidhi, I too can’t overemphasize how lucky I’ve been having her as my partner for life. She has been my pillar of strength all these years, and the main reason that I am where I am and who I am today. And whenever I have hit bumps along the road, she has helped me get through.

So how big and overwhelming a deal is to pick the right spouse? Tim Urban writes in his blog Wait But Why –

…start by subtracting your age from 90. If you live a long life, that is about the number of years you are going to spend with your current or future life partner, give or take a few…And when you choose a life partner, you are choosing a lot of things, including your parenting partner, someone who will deeply influence your children, your eating companion for about 20,000 meals, your travel companion for about 100 vacations, your primary leisure time and retirement friend, your career therapist, and someone whose day you will hear about 18,000 times.

As a culture, we spend hours upon hours developing academic knowledge, building physical fitness, deciding where to go to college or learning about managing our money well. But we spend little time, if any, finding out how to make the most important decision of our lives. Because that is what it is.

Your choice of life partner will affect the quality of your life much more than where you go to college, what you do for a living or where you make your home. Choosing a good spouse is by far the most important thing in life to get right.

And the best way to get a good spouse, Charlie Munger advises, “is to deserve a good spouse.”

I recently announced admission to the January 2024 batch of my most comprehensive classroom course in Value Investing titled – Value Investing Blueprint.

This residential course is scheduled to be held from 11th to 14th January 2024, at the campus of Pune-based FLAME University. The last date to apply is 10th December, 2023.

Click here to read more and apply if you are interested in joining this course.

Since it’s a classroom course, seats are limited.

The course will take you through the entire process of practicing value investing to identify long term wealth creating stocks. This includes helping you:

• Create the right value investing mindset and build a behavioural framework to avoid biases and create the right investment thought process.
• Assess business quality – separating good from gruesome
• Analyze financial statements to find well-performing businesses
• Calculate intrinsic valuations using various methods
• Identify competitive moats and whether they are sustainable
• Build a portfolio of sound, wealth-creating businesses

Click here to read more and apply if you are interested in joining this course.

I have started work on a series of short videos – titled The Inner Game – to share my thoughts around investing, decision making, learning, and just the practice of trying to live a good life. You can watch them on my YouTube channel, including these recent ones –

You can also find these and all past sessions on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, and Amazon.

Hope you like these and find some value. Please let me know your feedback and/or suggestions for improvement. Thank you.

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Stay safe.

Regards, Vishal