The Age of Ichiro
2200 hits in a decade. Only one other person had cleared 2,000 in ANY ten year stretch. Ichiro had hit the 2000 mark by year nine. No one else, in the history of the sport, came close. And this is on top of the fact that Ichiro came to the MLB several years late. While other greats had already cemented themselves in the game by their early 20s, Ichiro only had his first season when he was 27. He came in late, and had a lot of ground to cover. And so he got to work, consistently hitting over 200 for every single season in that ten year stretch. By the time he retired, he was in the elite club of the 3000 hitters. Even Babe Ruth wasn’t in that club. Ichiro Suzuki is an anomaly in the game of baseball. An anomaly in American sports as a whole. This is a person who was at the top of a major sport like Major League Baseball. And yet didn’t know who Tom Brady is. A man who needed his dog’s permission to do things. A man who humidified his bat. And yet, despite all odds, he did it.
Most people find success by doing what nobody them is doing. And Ichiro did something that no one else before him had done. He did three things well. First, he stayed in shape for his entire career. Remember that he came to the sport at 27, and retired 18 years later. To play for that long, you have to be in tip top shape all through. Age is a bitch. The second thing was that he was a generalist. He could hit anything and everything. Look at the statistics, and you realize that whichever zone you examined, Ichiro was near the top, if not the top. The third, was that he was fast. Really fast. That meant that whether it was an infield hit or not, he was going to be faster than the opposition. Most other players get to the top of the game by doing some spectacular things. Home runs. Hat-tricks. A-hole-in-one. Ichiro was never spectacular. His was a relatively ordinary game. But he was extraordinary in these ordinary things. And that, in the long run, made for one of the most mind bending careers of anyone in any sport.
Invisible Billionaires
“It’s someone who quietly sold a stake in a business for $250 million in the 90s, and invested it well.” That’s the profile of a billionaire you’d never be able to find, according to the Forbes executive who oversees the indexing of billionaires. And while some of you might think that $250 million is a lot (it is), these kinds of deals happen all the time in wall street. All. The. Time. But they go under the radar. Mostly because the media likes a big headline, and a billion dollar deal leads to a lot more eyeballs that a couple hundred million. It’s partly because the selling party might have wanted the deal to be kept under wraps. And you know what simple investment could have easily converted that amount to a billion today? Put the money in an S&P 500 index, and don’t touch it again. You’d be worth $2.5 billion today.
And here’s the thing. Unless they want to be seen, they won’t. By virtue of spreading their investments, they likely own less that 4-5% of any one business. This is the threshold past which a company must disclose him/her as significant shareholder. Anything less, and your name doesn’t need to appear anywhere. Why do they do this? Because they don’t want to be sued by greedy family members and friends. They don’t want to have to worry about the safety of their children. They don’t want the public scrutiny that most billionaires are subject to. They are all but invisible to family and a few friends. And that’s how they like it. If you’ve read the millionaire next door, you know that this very possible. A lot of German billionaires got their wealth during the Third Reich. They are more likely than most to conceal their wealth. Hard to believe, but some people prefer private comforts to public spectacles.
Lessons from the Senseis
When the young man thought about how he came up, he realized that the two senseis had done something spectacular for him. The young man didn’t know what hunger was. He had never gone hungry in his life. There was always something to eat in the house and outside it. Was it the kind of food he would have wanted to eat? No. Not always. But there was food. Always. He didn’t know what walking barefoot felt like, other than the occasional barefoot walk around his home. There were always shoes he could wear. Were they the shoes he would have wanted in the ideal circumstance? No. But there were shoes. Always. He didn’t know what getting chased from school because fees hadn’t been paid felt like. Would he have wanted it to happen, just so that he could have had a premature mid-term, especially in high school? Kind of. But it never happened. School fees was always paid. The young man got congratulated by the senseis whenever he did something commendable. But that was about it. Because he was expected to do commendable things. Would he have wanted to get presents? To be celebrated? Yes. But by doing this, the senseis - whether they knew it or not - had internalized into the young man a schema of doing things well, not because of external factors, but because it was what was expected of him.
And then there were the simple things the senseis did well. An important one being that the senseis were that were always present. And by being present, the young man knew that he always had someone watching over him. When the young man was a child, whenever he took a trip, either one was there with him. Either one would take days off to go with the young man. And the young man took note of that. This allowed the young man to just be. He wasn’t afraid of the world, because he knew he was taken care of. And he carries this way of being to this day. They also allowed the young man to be involved in their lives. The young man knew where the senseis called work. He spent a lot of time in those places. One became a fixture of his childhood. The place where the female sensei called work. It was a fulcrum. A column of his early childhood. The place where his love for tea developed, because she always had tea somewhere. A place where he developed his curiosity, because this sensei allowed him to run riot, so long as it was away from her work. And so long as he came back in time.
Deep Simplicity
Jose Mourinho, in 2010, won the champions league by by using the most boring tactics ever. Fundamental to his tactics was the simple policy of defending your goal as hard as you can. Everything else was built on top of this rule. You can’t lose of the other team doesn’t score. Its a relatively simple rule. It was frustratingly bland. But it was frustratingly effective. He’s one of the most decorated coaches ever. His nemesis, Pep Guardiola, builds his teams around another simple rule. Keep. The. Ball. The other team has slimmer chances of scoring if they rarely have the ball. Everything else is built on top of this simple rule. There are rarely howlers in a Manchester City game. Just a bunch of passes that end up in mostly tap in goals. But effective as hell. Warren Buffet says his main advantage is his ability to read financial statements. These are 100+ pages of a company’s finances. Boring as hell. But his rule is that he has to first understand a company. If he doesn’t, he stays away. And even after missing the entire internet wave, he’s still one of the richest people in the world.