Technically, zuihitsu are longer reflections than what I tend to collect. But, the general idea is right. Here’s this month’s installment. If you want the complete set, please download the fortune file.
- Trading one asset class is blind trading.
- An avalanche starts with a single snowflake, but which one?
- Lawyers: When the law is not on your side, argue facts. If facts are not on your side, argue the law. If you have neither, pound the table and yell.
- Either discipline or regret.
- Ist der Holocaust ein Irrweg oder eine Spiegelung unseres selbst? Or, Is the Holocaust an aberration, or a reflection of ourselves?
- Technical analysis is visual confirmation bias.
- Sometimes the best move is to sit on the sidelines.
- Consistently catch part of a move and scale your position.
- The best way to raise the price of something is to say that you would never sell it.
- Art is just money on walls.
- Answer to no one. Retain complete control.
- Biographies are blueprints.
- Relationships run everything.
- Find information asymmetries, and keep them to yourself.
- The only exit strategy is death.
- Be liquid and buy during recessions.
- Don’t get distracted by meaningless tripe. Don’t fight for prizes not worth winning. Follow through, get it done, learn to pick locks and walk long distances. Be strong, be smart, bring your toothbrush, be kind, work hard, be beautiful.
- As long as the world is turning and spinning, we’re gonna be dizzy, and we’re gonna make mistakes.—Mel Brooks
- When everyone is trying to give others a taste of their own medicine all the time, everything ends up tasting like shit.
- Guessing at unpredictable outcomes develops brain power, if you check to see when you are right and guess why when you were wrong.
- It isn’t bull or bear. There’s just one side. If you are a bull or a bear, you ain’t on it.
- Seeing the moment coming is easy. It’s the waiting for it to come, acting, then waiting for the next moment to act, that is hard.
- When times get hard, people sell what they must, not what they want to sell.
- Most people die at 25 and aren’t buried until they’re 75.—Benjamin Franklin
- Talented people are found, not hired as needed.
- Taste is rare.
- Befriend the best.
- People want information, not direction.
- Passion, purpose and discipline.
- Eliminate low performers to establish standards.
- Create an environment where excellence is expected.
- People judge based on performance, so focus on outcomes.
- Be the first to leave.
- Quality over feelings.
- Be of service, not self-absorbed. Money follows being of service.
- Relationships last longer than money.
- Do not attempt to fathom the inscrutable workings of Providence.
- The revolution will never take place in a place where everyone knows each other.
- The person kicking down a door doesn’t get to choose who walks through it.
- Deviations from the mean don’t last and tend to balance.
- Corrections are not steady state.
- When everyone agrees something is going to happen, something else will.
- To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire, and where they make a desert, they call it peace.—Tacitus
- Nothing changes sentiment like price.
- Leave the severed head as a warning to the others.
- A dealmaker primarily trades in reputation.
- Be first, be smart or cheat. Being first is easiest.
- The wider the smiles the bigger the lies.
- There are a lot of dumb whores, but very few smart prudes.
- You might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backwards.—Thurber
- A life oriented toward leisure is, in the end, a life oriented to death, the ultimate leisure.
- Make a commitment to finishing things.
- No complexity without compensation.
- Awareness is how we learn to keep ourselves company.—Geneen Roth
- Discovery is fueled by messes.
- We are each born with an acre of interior life to cultivate. What does yours look like?
- Be likeable.
- …you can safely assume you have created God in your own image, when it turns out that God hates all the same people as you do.—Tom, the priest, quoted in Bird by Bird by Ann Lamott
- People know their pain but often do not know what will relieve it.
- Life is a dream. Interesting lives are vivid and continuous.
- ABDCE: action, background, development, climax and ending.
- Strength can’t be faked. You can either lift it or you can’t.
- If you have an idea or goal, aligned people who will help to achieve it, and some suitable catalyst, you might be able to effect change.
- …a total unwillingness to cooperate is what’s necessary to be an artist – not for perverse reasons, but to protect your vision.—Joni Mitchell
- Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health.—C.G. Jung
- There’s no difference, really, between the popular madness in general and the kind that requires medical treatment except that the individual suffers from a disease and the masses are afflicted by false opinions.—Seneca
- What you do in life simultaneously doesn’t matter and also is the only thing that matters.
- Competing for status is radicalizing, particularly online.
- Trading well means either: 1) cutting losers quickly and moving on to the next trade, or 2) finding hidden value and waiting for the market to recognize it.
- Commit to finding the truth. But, you don’t need to commit to sharing it.
- Comfort zones are dream killers.
- To be engrossed by something outside of ourselves is a powerful antidote for the rational mind.
- Never, ever, think about something else when you should be thinking about the power of incentives.—Charlie Munger
- The second mouse gets the cheese.
- If something is broken and you can’t figure out why, try breaking it more.
- High-grading does not imply homogeneity. Your opinion is simply not best-in-class.
- A verbal threat is the most authentic certificate of impotence.
- Sense springs from nonsense.
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