November 30, 2006 – Time for the casual Friday blog again. This past week was the late great Bruce Lee’s birthday so I’m paying tribute to Bruce this Friday. Last November, Bosnia unveiled a lifesize bronzed likeness of martial arts legend Bruce Lee. In a country that has witnessed some of the most brutal ethnic clashes in recent history between Muslims, Serbs and Croats, Bruce Lee was chosen to symbolize unification of the three groups.
“We will always be Muslims, Serbs or Croats,” said Veselin Gatalo of the youth group Urban Movement Mostar. “But one thing we all have in common is Bruce Lee.”
Yeah, I don’t really get that comment either, but hey, if Bruce Lee can help Serbs, Croats, and Muslims work through their differences, then I’m all for the statue.
In a related story, according to the BBC News, “Bruce Lee is to be “resurrected” by computer technology to star in Dragon Warrior, the first time a dead actor will be re-created in a major movie role, according to US trade magazine Variety.
The $50m (£35m) film is being financed by South Korean film company ShinCine Communications, which acquired the rights to Lee’s likeness from his estate. The film company, headed by Chul Shin, is said to have been working on the project for the past four years.”
This film will either turn out to be phenomenal or just another really ill-conceived idea. Either way, I’m curious to view the completed project. As for the investment side, the rest of this blog was co-written by myself and my partner Kaeho.
So how does Bruce Lee make one a better investor? Bruce once said, “Don’t get set into one form. Adapt it and build your own, and let it grow. Be like water.”
Quite frankly, the structure I (J.S.) used in developing maalamalama patterned Bruce’s above comment very closely. I planted the seeds of maalamalama around 2002. Then, in 2003, I watered the seeds with a very simple bet I made with a friend who believed I couldn’t outperform the best money managers at my firm with my own portfolio. In April, 2006, I established the roots of maalamalama with a simple newsletter that I began as a “public service” to friends that constantly asked me for investment advice. Eventually, from the roots of that simple newsletter sprouted our branches, the online campus that became maalamalama.
The comment above wasn’t the only one that Bruce made in reference to the flexible qualities of water. He used to refer to water’s power all the time. Water is gentle enough to flow around an obstruction seamlessly but yet strong enough to grind a rock into sand over time. When I realized that my seven years of higher education and my additional seven years of corporate America at top investment firms did not enable me to build wealth, I realized it was due to the mistake of being “set into one form” – the theories and investment strategies set out by institutions of formal learning and corporate America.
So what did I do to correct this mistake?
I (J.S.) began by analyzing every single one of these strategies, dissecting them to a point where I saw no added value and no basis for continuing to adhere to them. Upon reaching this conclusion, I abandoned every single bit of my formal education and training, and began from scratch to adapt my diverse base of knowledge in martial arts, politics, public policy, governments, and business into my own investment strategies that for the most part, eschewed fundamental and technical screens. From that point, just as Bruce said, I was as flexible as water, developing and testing my strategies for five years, discarding what didn’t work and refining those strategies that yielded consistent and reproducable large returns.
Bruce was never a traditional martial artist in any sense. That’s what made him legendary. He took an accepted structure, broke it down to its individual parts, and pieced them back together in way that was a much greater whole than the sum of its parts. That’s how he created Jeet Kun Do. Bruce was not a traditionalist in his thinking either. He taught Westerners when his peers strictly forbade the practice, and instead, he chose to spread the wisdom and philosophies of martial arts to those who wanted to learn, rather than discriminate by race. In investing, I truly believe that if you are a traditionalist, you will never build considerable wealth with your portfolio.
To become a better investor, you must always have an unquenchable desire to learn more about how to adapt new technologies and new information into better systems of investing. You must have an unquenchable curiosity about the relationships between governments and corporations, between legislation and stock markets, between war and economies, and between manipulators of the economy and economic reactions to these manipulations.
Bruce’s limitless pursuit of perfection is what made him legendary. It is also said that Jet Li engaged in legendary training sessions, performing 1,000 front snap kicks and 1,000 round house kicks AFTER finishing 3 hour training sessions with his master. Even Zhang Ziyi, though not a martial artist (though she often portrays one in the movies), would not have had success in the movie industry without outworking everyone else. As a young child, she was handpicked for the most prestigious dance school in China more so for her natural beauty than her dance ability. Because others were naturally much more gifted than Ziyi, Ziyi stayed in the studio many hours after the rest of the students had already left, to further hone her skills and to practice on her own. The fact that she outworked her more talented peers led to her being handpicked to represent China on national dance tours. This gave her national exposure, and eventually she was “discovered” and became an actor.
While at one of the world’s largest investment firms, because I spent so much time figuring out how to invest my clients’ money, I was told on more than one occasion, that being a perfectionist would lead to failure. I was even told at levels less than $100,000 to “don’t even think about it”, just invest it in some mutual fund, and move on. However, I never learned how not to care about the fact that someone was placing their hard-earned money in my trust. “Being a perfectionist will lead to failure” when the end goal is to gather as many dollars, yen, yuan, pesos and so on from clients to invest. “Being a perfectionist will lead to failure” is very false when it comes to maximizing returns in an investment portfolio.
Remember Bruce’s advice to be flexible like water, and you will always constantly shift and create new investing strategies that will help you become a much better investor.
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J.S. Kim is the founder and Managing Director of maalamalama, a fiercely independent research, education and consulting firm that focuses on providing intelligent wealth preservation strategies.
