Two annual reports a week
Forty reports in. The honest scoreboard — including the unflattering bits.
A friend dared me into it last June. Two ARs a week, handwritten one-pagers, no skipping. About forty reports in, here’s the honest scoreboard.
Most ARs are written for nobody. They are written at regulators, around investors, and despite the CEO. You can feel the committee in the prose. A few — Berkshire’s letters, some of the better mid-cap Indian outfits — are written to a reader. Those ones change how you think.
One page is the right constraint. It forces you to throw away what you can’t summarise. What you can’t summarise, you don’t understand yet. The page is the test.
Compounding is real for habits, too. The first ten reports were slow. By the thirtieth I could tell, inside twenty pages, whether the rest was worth the evening. That isn’t a finance skill. That’s what reading does.
I’m going to keep going.