I constantly see people rise in life who are not the smartest – sometimes not even the most diligent. But they are learning machines; they go to bed every night a little wiser than when they got up. And, boy, does that habit help, particularly when you have a long run ahead of you.
What good is envy? It’s the one sin you can’t have any fun at.
Wall Street has too much wealth and political power.
Here’s one truth that perhaps your typical investment counselor would disagree with: if you’re comfortably rich and someone else is getting richer faster than you by, for example, investing in risky stocks, so what?! Someone will always be getting richer faster than you. This is not a tragedy.
I never allow myself to have an opinion on anything that I don’t know the other side’s argument better than they do.
We have to have a special insight, or we’ll put it in the ‘too tough’ basket. All of you have to look for a special area of competency and focus on that.
The number one idea is to view a stock as an ownership of the business and to judge the staying quality of the business in terms of its competitive advantage. Look for more value in terms of discounted future cash-flow than you are paying for. Move only when you have an advantage.
If you took our top fifteen decisions out, we’d have a pretty average record. It wasn’t hyperactivity, but a hell of a lot of patience. You stuck to your principles and when opportunities came along, you pounced on them with vigor.
I think the idea that the hedge fund manager gets lower taxes than the taxi driver or the physics professor is insane. The legislators who leave that policy in place are derelict in their duties to be rational and fair. There are plenty of them in both political parties. It’s totally outrageous.
It’s stupid the way people extrapolate the past – and not slightly stupid, but massively stupid.
In business we often find that the winning system goes almost ridiculously far in maximizing and or minimizing one or a few variables – like the discount warehouses of Costco.
Hard work and honesty, if you keep at it, will get you almost anything.
The harder you work, the more confidence you get. But you may be working hard on something that is false.
In fact I’ve probably never seen such a wide moat.
It’s waiting that helps you as an investor, and a lot of people just can’t stand to wait. If you didn’t get the deferred-gratification gene, you’ve got to work very hard to overcome that.
Avoid working directly under somebody you don’t admire and don’t want to be like.
Whoever makes you smarter a little earlier in life makes you better.
The more hard lessons you can learn vicariously rather than through your own hard experience, the better.
To the man with only a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
The only way to win is to work, work, work, work, and hope to have a few insights.