Value Investing Workshop in Chennai, Bengaluru, Mumbai: Before we begin, a quick personal note. I’m bringing my full-day offline Value Investing Workshop to three cities this September. I run it in each city just once a year, so this is your window for 2026.Chennai — Sunday, 6th SeptemberBengaluru — Sunday, 20th SeptemberMumbai — Sunday, 27th SeptemberEach is a full day, 10 AM to 5 PM, kept to a small room of around 40 people so I can actually get to your questions. It’s a day on the principles, frameworks, and mental habits of sensible value investing, no tips, no jargon, just the thinking that helps ordinary investors build wealth slowly and stay calm through every market. Whether you’ve never bought a stock or have been at it for years, you’ll leave able to do the work yourself.The early-bird seats have now filled. The next 20 seats in each city are still open at discounted prices. Once those go, the price steps up, and once a city’s room is full, that’s it until next year.Click here for details and registration.Now, on to today’s letter.The Almanack of Good Life is where I share all that I am reading and reflecting upon about living a good life. In this age of constant information overload, I’ve found immense value in taking time to pause and reflect upon meaningful insights about life. This newsletter is my way of sharing that journey with you.The Usefulness of UselessnessI recently read about Zhuangzi, a Chinese philosopher who lived around 3000 years ago, the same time as Confucius. While Confucius wrote about duty and doing things properly, Zhuangzi wrote stories of butterflies, cooks, and trees. And most of these stories were designed to dismantle whatever the reader was sure of.If you have read the Panchatantra and Jataka Tales that taught through animal fables in India, or the paradoxes the Upanishads contained, you’ll recognise the style. Zhuangzi used simple stories, not sermons, to deliver wisdom.One of his most well-loved stories is about a tree that survives precisely because it’s “good for nothing.”A carpenter is travelling with his apprentice when they pass an enormous, ancient oak tree. It is so massive that its shade could shelter a herd of thousand oxen. Its lowest branches were eighty feet from the ground.Now, while crowds gather to admire it, the carpenter doesn’t even slow down.His apprentice, confused, catches up and asks why he didn’t stop to look at such a magnificent tree. “It’s worthless,” the carpenter says. “Build a boat from it, and it sinks. Build a coffin, and it rots fast. Build a tool, and it breaks. It has no use at all, and that’s why it’s still standing, and why it got to grow this old and this big.”That night, the tree visits the carpenter in a dream, and says, “What are you comparing me with? To your useful trees? But the cherry, the pear, and the orange — as soon as their fruit ripens, they’re stripped and torn down by the very abundance that made them valuable. It’s their very usefulness that kills them early. I’ve spent a lifetime training myself to be good for nothing. And it’s been of tremendous use to me. If I had been useful, do you think I would have been allowed to grow this big? You, a worthless man about to die, how do you know I’m a useless tree?”I smiled when I read that story for the first time, and now I think about that tree every time I catch myself justifying a Sunday afternoon.It also explained a few old report cards. I was called “useless” more than once growing up… by a teacher for staring out of the window instead of copying notes, and by an elder for reading comics when I should have been “doing something productive.” Forty-odd years later, it turns out “useless” might have been the most accurate thing anyone ever wrote about me. Zhuangzi would probably say I was just slowly training for this.Anyway, think about how we live our lives most of the time. There’s always some kind of self-interrogation going on in the background.What did I get out of that? Did that book actually teach me anything, or was it just enjoyable? Is this hobby going anywhere? Should I be monetising this? What’s the ROI on that hour?We’ve turned hobbies into “side hustles” and skills we can sermonise to the world about. Even something as simple as rest is now called “recovery,” as if its only worth is what it prepares you to produce next.Even the act of reading hasn’t escaped this. Charlie Munger said that he never knew a wise person who didn’t read all the time. Somewhere along the way, we’ve turned it into another metric. People now count books per year, screenshot highlighted passages for LinkedIn (I’ve done that!), and scan every page for an “edge.” Munger read because he loved ideas, the way some people love long walks. We have taken the joy out of his sentence and have left only the discipline.Hobbies, rest, reading… one by one, we’ve found a way to put each of them to work. In short, by other people’s measuring stick, we’ve slowly made uselessness something we now have to apologise for.The tree parable suggests something else altogether. The orange tree’s usefulness is exactly what gets it cut down early. The oak’s total lack of usefulness is what let it become 500 years old and enormous enough to shelter a thousand oxen. Being valuable to everyone else, it turns out, is paid for out of your own lifespan.Now, there’s a second half to this story that Zhuangzi tells, and you must know it before you take the first half too literally.His disciples, having just seen a tree saved by its uselessness, stay overnight at a friend’s house. The host tells a servant to kill a goose for dinner. “Which one?” the servant asks, “The one that can honk, or the one that can’t?” “The one that can’t,” says the host, and kills the ‘useless’ one. The disciples turn to Zhuangzi, half-joking, “The tree survived because it was useless, and the goose died because it was useless. So where exactly do you stand?”Zhuangzi laughs and says he’d place himself somewhere between usefulness and uselessness, a position, he admits, that still isn’t quite the real answer, but close enough to get by.I don’t think the point is to “be useless on purpose.” I think the point is subtler and a bit more difficult to act on. A life where every single hour has to explain itself is a life that’s constantly volunteering itself to be cut down. Somebody’s always going to find a use for the useful parts (hardest working people getting more tasks at office is an example). That’s sort of the whole problem.So maybe keep one part of your time that doesn’t have to explain itself. It could be a walk that isn’t going anywhere in particular, or a book you can’t point to any benefit from, except that you liked it. And don’t do it because uselessness is virtuous or some secret productivity hack in disguise. Do it because that’s the one part of you nobody else gets to make a case for cutting down.Two Books. One Purpose. A Better Life.“Template on how to lead a happier and fuller life.”—Ramesh Damani, Member, BSE“Teaches you how to think, judge, and behave…”—Arnold V. D. Berg, Century Mgt.Click here to buy The Long GameClick here to buy SketchbookClick here to buy the combo (The Long Game + Sketchbook)Notes to MyselfThe next time you catch yourself justifying how you spent an hour, stop and ask why the hour needs a defence in the first place. Not every part of your day owes anyone, including you, an explanation.***Take a walk this week with no destination and no fitness app tracking it. Let your feet decide the route. You are allowed to just move, without the movement being converted into a number.***Pick one hobby you’ve been thinking of turning into a side income, and do it badly, on purpose, for no reason other than that you enjoy it. Some things are allowed to stay small.Quotes I am Reflecting OnThose who are wise won’t be busy, and those who are too busy can’t be wise.– Lin YutangOne of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.– Bertrand RussellRest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer’s day, watching the clouds float across the sky, is hardly a waste of time.– John LubbockThat’s all from me for today.Let me know your thoughts on this issue of The Almanack of Good Life newsletter, and ways I can improve it. Also, if you have ideas or resources you think I can share in future letters, please email them to me at vishal[at]safalniveshak[dot]com.If you know someone who may benefit from today’s post, please share it with them.Thank you for your time and attention.Be useless, sometime.~ VishalThe post The Usefulness of Uselessness appeared first on Safal Niveshak.