Solving Life: Mastering Decision Making With Investment Wisdom

A Father's Advice Using Investment Principles

What if the principles that guide the world’s leading investors could unlock the most invaluable investment of all—your life? Every decision you make shapes your future. Yet, life—like investing—is governed by randomness, uncertainty, and constraints beyond our control. Just as elite investors navigate volatile markets to optimise returns, we, too, must navigate life's complexities to maximise our potential.

This book introduces the Cheap Options strategy—a powerful decision-making framework, using high upside, low downside investment principles to help you manage risk, capitalise on opportunity, and make choices that lead to extraordinary outcomes. Rooted in decision theory, behavioural psychology, and a father's advice to his sons, Solving Life teaches you how to back-solve from your ultimate goals, master life's inevitable trade-offs, and optimise the only portfolio that truly matters: your own future.

Pavlin Kumchev is a Managing Director at Brigade Capital, a leading global investment manager. His career spans two decades at the world's preeminent financial institutions, including Morgan Stanley, Blackstone, and Carlyle, across diverse markets and economies.Born behind the Iron Curtain, the author has experienced extreme contrasts-from economic scarcity to navigating high-stakes investments around the world. He has travelled to over 50 countries across six continents and lived in four of them, gaining insights from diverse cultures, challenges, and opportunities.Educated at Colgate University in the U.S. and the INSEAD Business School in France and Singapore, Kumchev combines investment expertise, psychological insights, and lived experience into a transformative approach to decision-making.