Mohnish Pabrai: Another Valuable Lesson I Learned From Warren And Charlie

During this Q&A session with the students at JNV Lucknow, Mohnish Pabrai discussed another valuable lesson he learned from Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger. Here’s an excerpt from the session:

Pabrai: I think that my view on Dakshana is that it has worked a lot better than I ever thought it would work.

So I’m actually quite surprised that it did work as well. If you think about it I’m not in India, I’m usually in Texas wearing shorts, and I’m not running Dakshana.

And so I had to rely on other people, and what ended up happening is that we ended up with a really good team. And we also ended up with… now we have a lot of alums, Dakshana alums, who have joined us.

They have joined the faculty, they’ve joined in management, and so on. So that’s actually worked out very well.

But one of the things I learned… so I have two gurus Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger. One of the things I learned from them which kind of took me a long time to actually figure this out, is that if you want to do well in life then what you should avoid doing is looking back.

And you should try to focus on looking forward.

So what I mean by that is, now let’s say if someone takes the IIT entrance exam. Let’s say they get really good rank. Rank 50 in India, their top rank. They did really well.

Okay, they really should not spend a lot of time thinking about that. What they should look at is what is my next target. Don’t look back and say oh I’ve done so well this is great whatever.

Don’t do that. Look at the next target and then the next target and keep going.

You can watch the entire discussion here: