If you're looking to get into this business, it's just try to be a

synthesis and not a reductionist and what I mean by that is take different

learnings from your life and apply them to the narratives you hear about a company and start looking at what might be an outcome of a business performance.

It takes some time. It takes like three years to get a feedback loop on how good you are.

I'm Mary Long and that's Osset Sharma a senior analyst at the fool who works on our

stock advisor portfolio.

This weekend we're spending some time with a couple of the analysts you hear from regularly

on Motley Full Money so that you can get to know them even better.

I caught up with Osset recently to learn more about how he

went from writing poetry and reading esoteric novels to becoming a foolish analyst.

We also discuss what he gained from being broke,

his initial thoughts on Amazon,

and lessons learned from early tries at entrepreneurship.

Also, we'd love to hear about your own investing journey.

Send us a note or a voice recording at podcasts at fool.com, that's

podcast with an S at fool.com, to tell us about how you got to be the investor you are today.

Ausset, I'm glad that I get some time to chat with you about the path that you took to wind up where you are today because you've alluded to me many times that it was a long and winding road, but I don't actually myself know what that road looks like.

So let's zoom out.

Tell us about this road.

How did you wind up in a role as an investment analyst?

Mary, it's a great question for anyone who's in this industry because I think there's nothing in the middle there are straight paths to being someone who makes investment choices and then there's the other type which is like these long

paths that are very circuitous and go in unexpected direction so I'll start

...