Big Mistakes, a book about costly blunders committed by Wall Street investors, makes this much clear: for author Michael Batnick, school was a terrible place to go for an education. 

Batnick does deliver on the subtitle’s promise: “The Best Investors and Their Worst Investments,” with details on the worst trades by, for example, Benjamin Graham, Jack Bogle, and even Mark Twain, who I learned was as bad at investing as he was good at writing. 

The author seems to have a soft spot for those who own up to their failures, and for many of these investors the mistakes served as opportunities to learn. The Warren Buffett chapter tells the story of his disastrous purchase of Dexter shoes, resulting in a loss to Berkshire Hathaway of around six billion US dollars. Batnick savors Buffett’s candid admission: “I clearly made a mistake in paying what I did for Dexter in 1993. Furthermore, I compounded that mistake in a huge way by using Berkshire shares in payment.”

But Batnick’s last chapter’s the most compelling, as it describes his own prodigal path from unemployable college dropout to widely-read finance blogger, podcast host, author, and Director of Research at Ritholtz Wealth Management.

Although he eventually earned a college degree, his was a stock picker’s education. For over a year, he tethered himself to his day-trading terminal, shorted Netflix, bought and sold 3X-levered ETFs, timed the market, experienced evisceration by fees, lost all hope, gained it back with a lucky win, etc.

Batnick describes with endearing self-awareness the all-inclusive methodology he was employing at that time: “I’ve tried putting all the macro pieces together like John Maynard Keynes and I’ve tried valuing companies on the micro level like Benjamin Graham. I’ve been overconfident. I’ve anchored to my purchase price. I’ve cut my winners short and let my losers run. I made a lifetime of mistakes and was fortunate enough to do them in a small window of time.”

This was a real education in the trenches, and he learned that trying to beat the market, for most mortals, is a fool’s game. And now, employing wit and candor that has earned him a substantial reader- and listenership, he delivers a message many hunger for: investors can scratch their trading itch with a very small proportion of their savings and let the majority of it grow in passive indexed fashion. More simply: make small mistakes and learn from them.

In the spirit of Batnick’s book, I’ll confess here that as a school leader I made many mistakes in a short period of time as well. I failed to call out poor performance; I failed to praise excellence. I sometimes over-valued efficiency and I belabored other decisions unnecessarily. Not to excuse any of this, but I’m not sure I’d believe a school leader who counted themselves innocent of these mistakes.

And such errors are unavoidable when you’re trying to make school a place where real learning happens, and not just a purgatory the Michael Batnicks and Huck Finns have to endure until they are free to educate themselves on the Street or the river.