Book Review: Education of a Value Investor

The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment - Guy Spier

I pretty much devoured this book, after receiving it as a present for a talk I gave at Google.  It is very much a book about Guy's self journey, and not too terribly much about value investing.  Instead, value investing acted as a catalyst in Guy's life to transform himself (in my opinion) to a much better human.  It is a very open and honest account, which I really appreciated.

There were many good sections of the book, but my favorite had to do with Guy's thank you letters, which I've been emulating over the past six months or so.  He began sending out many of these a week, one of which led to him Meeting Mohnish Pabrai--I'll let him summarize it for himself:

That meal with Mohnish altered the trajectory of my life--even more, perhaps, than my subsequent lunch with Warren Buffett.  If I hadn't bothered to thank Mohnish, many great things that have happened since our first dinner might never have occurred.  I didn't understand this at the time, but I now see that every letter I wrote was an invitation for serendipity to strike.  To many people, it might seem like a waste of time.  But I couldn't win the lottery without a ticket, and these tickets were almost free.  In a sense, this is a value investing approach to life: pick up something cheap that may one day prove to be precious.