Airline Protocols For Investing and Corporate Decisions

Having been an active investor for numerous years, I have accumulated many lessons from my investment losses and following the publicized losses of other investors. Many people want to run from their losers, hide and forget. However, my belief is that losses provide valuable lessons in which we paid a large tuition, so I want to make sure they are not repeated. Human nature being what it is, we tend to repeat the same mistakes over and over. This post is not intended to provide psychological counseling but to present you with a tool which may dramatically improve your investment and corporate decisions. I propose that investors and businessman take a few hours with pen and yellow pad and look at all their investment losses and bad corporate decisions and examine what happened. List out all the problems and reasons things did not work out. After a few hours you have a great start to a checklist similar to what airline pilots use. Just as a pilot would not take off without checking each item on his checklist, you will now use your checklist before making an investment decision guided with the lessons from the past. Hopefully, this will prevent our natural tendencies to make the same mistakes over and over again. The list should continue to grow as you progress with your career and remember events that will pop into your mind. I have been using a list similar to this for about two years and its been a fantastic tool. I have linked you to an article which describes how another contrarian investor uses his list. Let me know your thoughts and good luck. The Article