Austin Scholar #147: Three steps to learn anything
& my journey to becoming an expert investor
Hey, y'all!
This week from Austin Scholar...
Three steps to learn anything (& my journey to becoming an expert investor)
Scholar’s Sources: What I’ve been thinking about…
Happy new year! Since I just spent this last week spending time with family and relaxing, instead of my traditional update, I thought I’d show y’all my 2025 resolutions and goals.
Read 50 pages per day
Journal every day
Work out 4 times per week
Ice skate once per week
Reach 1,000 paid subscribers
Post 3 times per week on X
Three steps to learn anything (& my journey to becoming an expert investor)
As I discussed in my previous newsletter, I really liked Warren Buffett’s biography – his integrity stuck out to me. I’ve never really been interested in investing, despite the fact that my dad has tried to get me into it for eighteen years. I don’t know why, it just seemed kind of scary. But when I realized Warren spent all of his time reading and researching and thinking, I thought that maybe there’s something to investing after all. Between that and my dad's insistence that investing is in fact interesting, I thought that maybe I should get an investing-related internship this summer. But given that I know nothing, I figure I should spend some time learning before condemning myself to an entire summer.
One of the key life skills that Alpha teaches kids is how to “be an expert.” We learn that in today’s AI world, it is incredibly easy to become an expert in a field you’re interested in. So, as I dig into my new interest in investing, here's the path I'm taking to become an expert:
Step 1: Who are the existing experts?
Starting with Warren Buffett, Perplexity Pro gave me a list of investors like him, and a list of investors who were different from him. I then had it find me the set of books about these investors and their styles that I would need to read. This covers the traditional way the “old-schoolers” learned – my dad told me about how he would go to the library and check out all of the books about Warren Buffett and investing. And I like to read, so I’m sure I’ll read a bunch of these books. But for this project, instead of just sitting down and reading the books, I'm creating an AI-enhanced learning cycle for myself.
(Here are the results from my chat with Perplexity)
Step 2: Twitter/X
The first thing I did was to use Grok to create a list of accounts who were experts in Warren Buffett (and the other investors I found in the previous step). I put them all into my new “investing” list, which instantly creates a highly-curated daily feed of investing information (the very first post on my feed had two writings from Charlie Munger that I should read). I would prefer to spend an hour a day reading this list, but due to my class load I will probably only get to spend thirty minutes working through this incredibly dense, specific knowledge bank – I find it five times as dense as reading a book. And when the posts trend off investing topics, I use Twitter/X’s “mute” words to filter out all of the noise and political rants. Twitter can be a cesspool of junk and spam, unless you really take advantage of this mute feature.
Here’s mine:
I don’t recommend the “For You” page (it is so easy to get off-track), instead I recommend the “Following” page and the “discovery” feature you find at the bottom of a tweet you read (new accounts and information without the distraction).
Step 3: BrainLift
As I read this feed, I’m going to create my “BrainLift”, which is my structured knowledge repository of my expertise and insights (the term comes from Alpha). BrainLifts are important both to help me learn and to fill my brain with thoughts and facts, but they also are essential to feed to different AIs (LLMs) to help guide AIs to get the output I want.
Here’s how they work: