I recently read The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race by Walter Isaacson, the bestselling author of Steve Jobs. The book started at the story of Jennifer Doudna and expanded onto the potential applications of gene editing and what that technology could potentially mean for the human race. I highly recommend the book.

My key take-aways are as follows:

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Curiosity-driven motives lead to unusual discoveries

The word “curiosity” appeared more than 30 times in the book. It reminds me of the principle that I always think about, “If you don’t have passion, you cannot win.”

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I re-read the copy of the book that I bought four years ago, when I was learning about investing at the Yale Endowment. My new takeaways are as follows.

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Dare to be great

Human beings are a social species. To survive, we are inclined to huddle together and to imitate each other. For most investors, they care so much about how other people see them that they dare not say anything different or do anything new. If they do, they risk their job security, professional status, and social networks. Those behavioral inclinations are simply a natural part of us, and they are difficult to overcome – just like a software cannot debug itself. Most investors are conventional and do not have the ability to be different. Successful investors are unconventional, and so they are rare.

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“Culture eats strategy for lunch”

2020 laid bare the truth in that saying. To manage a pandemic, it is not about whether a country has the strategy, the money, or the technology to handle the virus; it is about the culture of its people.

My wife and I were in Beijing during the outbreak. The news broke out during dinner time on January 20, 2020. Within an hour or two of that news, as we left restaurant that night, some people were already wearing masks. By the second day, some 20% to 50% people we saw in Beijing and Shanghai were wearing masks. Mask wearing — it was a culture.

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