One Spreadsheet at a Time
Recalling a teaching moment I had with my daughter Hannah, in which I got to share my love of spreadsheets and their usefulness.
You can listen to a professional narration of this article below:
On Monday my 14-year old Hannah asked me to teach her how to use Google Sheets. She is working on the budgeting project in her entrepreneurship class. This was one of the top five moments for me in 2020. Usually when kids come to me with homework, I feel slightly terrified. I was not a good student in school, and now I am paying a price for it. Algebra or geometry I can usually conquer with logic and trial and error. Economics or business law I can help with after an easy dive into my memory bank. (No, I don’t draw supply and demand curves at work all day long). For biology questions, however, I refer the kids to Khan Academy or to their mother unit.
But spreadsheets, I spend several hours a day living in them. For every company we analyze we build in-depth models in Excel (very similar to Google Sheets). I love spreadsheets. I am fascinated by how powerful that tool is. I read somewhere that in the ’80s companies hired people with knowledge of spreadsheets, just as today they hire C++ or Java programmers. Fast-forward a few decades and today the ability to manipulate a spreadsheet falls into the same column as mastering the use of a calculator.
Hannah and I will be finishing her spreadsheet project this weekend. I am really looking forward to it. I never thought teaching spreadsheets to my daughter would evoke so many positive emotions. Maybe she’ll get turned on to spreadsheets and then decide to be an investor like me? Okay, I am taking a deep breath… one Google Sheet at a time. But a father can dream.
Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 4
When my father talks about classical music you’ll never hear him say that he doesn’t like this composer or that piece; he’ll say instead, “I don’t understand it.” I always thought he was just being humble. Despite all his achievements as a scientist and an artist, he is an incredibly humble person; but there is more to his statement than just modesty. I am generalizing, but classical music often is more complex than pop music. This complexity means that are a lot of themes (stories) going on in the music; they are like underground currents that you don’t find unless you swim in the river for a while. Though we can instantly fall in love with some pieces, many require us to work – we need to listen to them more than once to hear them, to “understand.”
I remember many moons ago I bought a used CD of La Boheme. I don’t think I knew anything about that opera (my parents were not big into opera), but it had Pavarotti on the cover, so I bought it. I listened to it a few times, thinking to myself, how could anybody possibly like this opera. Now it is one of my favorite operas.
When my brother Alex and I were in Sydney in November (2012) we went to a concert in the famous Sydney Opera House. We were in luck: it was a “Russian night” (no, not so-called because Alex and I were in attendance). The famous Russian conductor (and pianist) Vladimir Ashkenazy was conducting music by Russian composers: Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4 and Rachmaninoff’s Concerto No. 4. After the concert I talked to my father, and I told him than I did not care for Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4. To which he replied that it was his favorite symphony. The next day we went walking on the beach in Sydney, and I made a point to listen again to that symphony. On the second or third listen, I fell in love with that piece. After I came home to Denver I had my son listen to that symphony, and predictably, he at first hated it, but now he loves it!
So today I want to share with you Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 4.
Click here to listen
By the way, I’ve listened to Rachmaninoff’s Concerto No. 4 probably two dozen times over the last fifteen years, and I still don’t “understand” it.
Vitaliy Katsenelson is the CEO at IMA, a value investing firm in Denver. He has written two books on investing, which were published by John Wiley & Sons and have been translated into eight languages. Soul in the Game: The Art of a Meaningful Life (Harriman House, 2022) is his first non-investing book. You can get unpublished bonus chapters by forwarding your purchase receipt to bonus@soulinthegame.net.
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