Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
· Alan Waxman
[00:00:00] S1: I actually did a presentation to our entire firm on personal organization systems, because I think as an investor, as a business person, the scarcest thing you have is time. And one of the most important skill sets is your dynamic prioritization of that time on the highest impact things. So we always talk about return on time. And what my personal organization system does – I call it the brain – is I literally try to get the way my brain is structured on one sheet of paper. So all my important priorities, people, businesses, investment themes. I made changes over time based on what's needed for me, because my job changes every year, because I have to evolve. I try to get my brain on paper and it allows me to dynamically prioritize where the highest return on my time is. That's number one. And the second thing it allows me to do is I capture, so that I never have loose ends. I try to always follow up on everything, be proactive about things. I just think proactive is a key thing. It's very clear what my top five strategic priorities, all the tactical stuff, and I'm constantly looking at it, updating it. And I do it all by hand. because for me, I have to actually put pen on paper. Once my sheet fills up of all my tactical stuff, the small stuff I have to do, I start a new sheet and then I write, literally, it all again. It takes me like an hour. I generally do it on a Sunday and there's never a time I actually go through that process on a Sunday where I don't connect two or three dots or think of a new idea. That's my left brain. And that's why on the second sheet, which I can't remember if I should...
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Alan Waxman
[00:00:00] S0: Yeah, we get the right brain, right? [00:00:00] S1: And then on my right brain sheet, which is the second page, which is all my creative ideas, themes, business building ideas, people, better leadership, just whatever comes to mind, thinking about the current moment. I literally start thinking about why are we here, how did we get here? That's kind of how I started to really dive into history and I just write stuff down and I track it and I've done that for 25 years. So I have all my right brain thoughts over 25 years, and what happens is I'll go back and I'll look at them every year. At the end of the year, I go back and read all my right brain thoughts and sometimes there are ideas that I have from 10 years ago, from 15 years ago that surface today and become relevant today. So I try to get my left brain on the first page, my right brain on the second and then I try to get them working together. And again, it just helps me see things. I wanted just to clear my thinking, so I can try to see the world not only for what it looks like today, what it's been, but also where it might go, and how can Sixth Street be part of that.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Alan Waxman
[00:00:00] S0: One of the things that stuck out to me seeing the actual sheet – I'm thinking about the left brain sheet where there's different boxes. I'm curious what the different boxes are. And one of the things that I found very powerful was that one of the segments is a list of people to call. It was a crazy list, it was a shitload of people and then tons of strikeouts. And when you run out of space, you then copy it to another page. But you also copy over all the stuff that is lower turnover, I guess I would call it. And that act is a big part of just embedding it in your brain. [00:00:00] S1: The process of that. So looking is part of it, but the best ideas come out of actually the process when I'm writing it all down. [00:00:00] S0: Physically writing. So what are the other segments of that first page? So there's a list of people to call. There's like five or six boxes, I can't remember what they are. What are those boxes?
· Alan Waxman
[00:00:00] S1: I think I told you this last time. We have everyone in our firm do a personal business plan. My personal business plan at the end of the year, I've done for 25-30 years. It takes me three weeks to do my personal business plan. And that's why I said to you last time, we spend all this time evaluating companies – do they have a business plan or not? And then most people – do you have a business plan for yourself? They don't have one. That's why we make everyone in our firm do personal business plans. But from that personal business plan I do at the end of the year, I get a lot of clarity just from reading, going back to stuff I wrote. What are my top five priorities of how I can drive the most impact to our firm, our investors? What is the absolute, complete clarity on what those five things are? And I have a box for each of those five things. So that's five boxes on each of those things. Then I have high priorities because again, those have a different cadence to them. Everything has a different cadence which is why I think you have to see everything together. The boxes on the page change every year. Just like our themes, every year, change. Everything has to change every year because it goes back to adapting, because the world's always changing so quickly. If you're not adapting yourself, then you're going to get lost in this world. So I'll have my five strategic priorities of my time. I'll have people I really want to focus on. Those could be internal, external. I also have on there my health because despite drinking this, I think about it, because I actually think I have to be healthy to be able to do my job.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Alan Waxman
[00:00:00] S0: What would be an example of something that gets written down in health? [00:00:00] S1: I've got on there vitamin D. I'm very focused on vitamin D. I've got my left hip. I had an old soccer injury, so I'm focused on left hip mobility. [00:00:00] S0: But it's something you just see every day, and it's just this constant. [00:00:00] S1: I see it every day. Yeah, everything. There's different things. It's also the personal side, so I keep balance. It is an intention system, but it's also a return on time system and an ability to dynamically prioritize. You talk to younger people who are just coming up through the business. Even some older people still don't know how to prioritize their time. It's really hard to do because you literally could spend all your time on one thing. So how to manage your time and just being able to see that in your brain or in the matrix, that's kind of how I think about it. [00:00:00] S0: Another thing that, the last time we talked, really stuck in my head was – I just turned 40, and we were talking about the opportunity you had from age 40 to 50, which got me wondering about 20 to 30 and 30 to 40. If you think back on the major eras of building and managing a life's work and a career tied to specific ages, what have you learned?
· Alan Waxman
[00:00:00] S1: 20 to 30 for me was education. Learning just as much as I could. Asking as many dumb questions as possible. 20 to 30, you think you know stuff but if you haven't been through cycles or made a lot of mistakes and seen other people make mistakes and seen people make good decisions and good long-term decisions, short-term decisions, you don't really know anything when you're 20 to 30. 30 to 40, you're incredibly ambitious. You're still learning but you're trying to prove yourself. I started Sixth Street with my partners when I was 33 or 34, so I didn't know what I didn't know. I mean, I knew a lot but it's like, you're going through that but you haven't made enough mistakes yet to like refine everything. And you get to 40 or 50, and 40 or 50 is like, if you've spent time learning and continued to learn, you've made enough mistakes, you really know who you are at that point, know who you are as an investor and how you approach things, it's prime time. You get to 50 and then you're trying to really focus on being a mentor, developing the next generation and just trying to provide that voice in the room, not only in terms of investing but also leadership, management and really just trying to be a teacher to your team, but also a learner, because I still learn a lot from them. But 40 to 50, that's go time.