Heres how Ive started.....I look at investors I admire and try to see what they see....Most people criticize following a GURU but they have years of experience so I see that they are catching fish then that means i should be fishing over by where they are fishing. Maybe If i can re-create their work i can catch some fish too.

Ive only been doing this for a few years and I agree I cant keep re-working others work but they have taught me where to look. And how to approach things....

GGP, Is my larges success(so far..maybe there will be more maybe not), Im very fond of talking about it. Ill admit there was a large amount of trust that Ackman could get it right, but I listened to his reasoning.....taught my self basic measures of how to value real estate...how to measure the value of their malls...Then I had to go and learn about Bankruptcy and how those laws affect different classes of the capital structure and with some guidance from PSH presentations and Reading Real estate blogs and picking up books on Bankruptcy laws and going to University websites and reading on laws and reading lawers blogs who write about these things...and reading documents in courts...I have my own PACER account. I managed to sort out that Bill Ackman knows what hes talking about and acting in a maner that was consistent with the same part of the capital structure that I could get my hands on.

So...now I have this knowledge and experience that I had to build up that will stay with me for the rest of my life (or at least until my mind stays healthy) all because I saw a fisherman catching fish and realized that he may be on to something but I need to teach myself all these tools to make sure that I know he knows what hes talking about and not trying to fool me.

And Its hard work, I worked 2 jobs basically when ggp was on the skids. I had my Computer programmer job by day and went home, ran, made a bowl of pasta and sat reading all these things till 2-3 in the morning...my friends went out to the bars and watched sports and whatever show on tv and I did none of that....or a lot less.

You see what they are doing and you just tell yourself what ever it takes to get to that level. I literally keep a little piece of paper in my wallete that says "whatever it takes"...and you put work in to it and every day you become smarter and smarter and soon you become much smarter than all the rest of the other people out there,thats a paraphrase of Charlie Munger Quote, (and theyre good people who deserve decent living wages)..and soon your brain is able to fire that neuron and make that connection.