Hi! I’m Dan Dzombak. (Pronunciation: “Da-Zom-Back” – Easy!)
I’m a writer and investor based in New York City. I started writing at The Motley Fool through its Analyst Development Program in 2008 which focuses on setting investors on the path to investment mastery. I have continued on that path ever since, working every day to learn and improve myself.
If you are reading this, you are an investor. Each of us make daily decisions about how we invest our capital, time, focus, and energy, and some of the strategies we use are better than others. This blog chronicles the ideas, mental models, strategies, and best practices that investors can use to effectively achieve their goals and live a successful life.
What is Success?
Success for me is Long Term Sustainable Happiness, which is not a destination but a way living the journey of life.
I pursue that every day by continuously learning, maintaining good habits, and focusing on my long term goals.
Training
The goal of my learning is to become smarter every day, compounding knowledge and combining ideas to build a large breadth of knowledge to draw upon. As Warren Buffett’s partner Charlie Munger put it:
“I believe in the discipline of mastering the best that other people have ever figured out. I don’t believe in just sitting there and trying to dream it up all yourself. Nobody’s that smart.”
“Worldly wisdom is mostly very, very simple. There are a relatively small number of disciplines and a relatively small number of truly big ideas. And it’s a lot of fun to figure it out. Even better, the fun never stops. Furthermore, there’s a lot of money in it, as I can testify from my own personal experience. ….. The rewards are awesome…It’ll help you in business. It’ll help you in law. It’ll help you in life. And it’ll help you in love… It makes you better able to serve others, it makes you better able to serve yourself, and it makes life more fun.”
The other part of my learning practice is to study the mistakes of others and understand the sources of human misjudgement, so that I may avoid them.
As George Soros has said, “I think that my conceptual framework, which basically emphasizes the importance of misconceptions, makes me extremely critical of my own decisions. I know that I am bound to be wrong, and therefore am more likely to correct my own mistakes.”
This blog will be an ongoing look at rationality, psychology, literature, sources of human misjudgment, economics, complex adaptive systems, failures, mistakes, biology, sociology, and philosophy.
Investing
Investing has always fascinated me. I work every day to learn and deliberately practice investing with a goal of compounding capital at the highest rate possible while keeping a margin of safety.
I write about my ideas, learning, and processes on this blog.