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The information you have is not the information you want. Theinformation you want is not the information you need. Theinformation you need is not the information you can obtain. Theinformation you can obtain costs more than you want to pay.
The word 'risk' derives from the early Italian risicare, whichmeans 'to dare'. In this sense, risk is a choice rather than afate.
Our lives teem with numbers, but we sometimes forget that numbersare only tools. They have no soul; they may indeed becomefetishes.
Game theory says that the true source of uncertainty lies in theintentions of others.
Time matters most when decisions are irreversible. And yet manyirreversible decisions must be made on the basis of incompleteinformation.
Life is a collection of similarities rather than identities; nosingle observation is a perfect example of generality.
The essence of risk management lies in maximizing the areas wherewe have some control over the outcome while minimizing the areaswhere we have absolutely no control.
Fear of harm ought to be proportional not merely to the gravity ofthe harm, but also to the probability of the event.
The revolutionary idea that defines the boundary between moderntimes and the past is the mastery of risk: the notion that thefuture is more than a whim of the gods and that men and women arenot passive before nature.
It is when we are unaware of what could go wrong that we have toworry.
Scientific method seeks to understand things as they are, whilealchemy seeks to bring about a desired state of affairs. To put itanother way, the primary objective of science is truth — that ofalchemy, operational success.
I start from the position that every human endeavor is flawed: ifwe were to discard everything that is flawed there would benothing left. We must therefore make the most of what we have. Themeaning of life consists of the flaws in one's conceptions andwhat one does about them.
What we are cannot possibly correspond to what we think we are,but there is a two-way interplay between the two concepts. As wemake our way in the world our sense of self evolves. Therelationship between what we think we are and what we are inreality is the key to happiness.
Equilibrium itself has rarely been observed in real life — marketprices have a notorious habit of fluctuating.
A happy person isn't someone who's happy all the time. It'ssomeone who effortlessly interprets events in such a way that theydon't lose their innate peace.
If you're not willing to do a wholesale, 24/7, 100 percent swapwith who that person is, then there is no point in being jealous.
Earn with your mind, not your time.
The more desire I have for something to work out a certain way,the less likely I am to see the truth.
The three big ones in life are wealth, health, and happiness. Wepursue them in that order, but their importance is reverse.
Escape competition through authenticity.
If you have nothing in your life, but you have at least one personthat loves you unconditionally, it'll do wonders for yourself-esteem.
Tension is who you think you should be. Relaxation is who you are.
Japanese fashion certainly shows that cultural behavior is not anexpression of eternal national characteristics passed down fromgeneration to generation in an unbroken line. American fashioncame to Japan in the hands of social misfits hungry for change andbusiness success. It then blended with local customs andpractices.
The Ametora tradition will not stand still, but will continue tobe shaped by the passage of time.
Distinguishing social consensus from truth is really importantbecause they're not the same.
We need to evangelize technological progress with every word andaction. To recognize that the purpose of technology is totranscend our limits and to motivate everything we do with thissense of purpose. To take the winnings from our web apps and putthem toward Mars.
Progress is abstraction.
You cannot automate something until you've done it manually manytimes.
We have to start talking more about our values than ourvaluations.
I have found that failure is a far better teacher than success.
I believe it is almost as important for a man to be able toexpress his views as to have them.
The simple truth is that there are no 'sure things' in the market.
You don't see any Fifth Avenue mansions built by bears.
Two and two still make four and no one has ever invented a way ofgetting something for nothing.
The stock market is people. It is people trying to read thefuture.
Only as you do know yourself can your brain serve you as a sharpand efficient tool. Know your own failings, passions, andprejudices so you can separate them from what you see.
Don't try to buy at the bottom and sell at the top. It can't bedone except by liars.
The stock market is the thermometer and not the fever.
During my eighty-seven years I have witnessed technologicalrevolutions. But none has done away with the need for character.
Some people become depressed at the scale of the universe, becauseit makes them feel insignificant. Other people are relieved tofeel insignificant, which is even worse. But, in any case, thoseare mistakes. Feeling insignificant because the universe is largehas exactly the same logic as feeling inadequate for not being acow. The universe is not there to overwhelm us; it is our home,and our resource. The bigger the better.
All fiction that does not violate the laws of physics is fact.
Like every other destruction of optimism, whether in a wholecivilisation or in a single individual, these must have beenunspeakable catastrophes for those who had dared to expectprogress. For if any of those earlier experiments in optimism hadsucceeded, our species would be exploring the stars by now, andyou and I would be immortal.
An unproblematic state is a state without creative thought. Itsother name is death.
Without error-correction all information processing, and hence allknowledge-creation, is necessarily bounded. Error-correction isthe beginning of infinity.
It is a mistake to conceive of choice and decision-making as aprocess of selecting from existing options according to a fixedformula. That omits the most important element of decision-making,namely the creation of new options.
Base metals can be transmuted into gold by stars, and byintelligent beings who understand the processes that power stars,but by nothing else in the universe.
Good political institutions are those that make it as easy aspossible to detect whether a ruler or policy is a mistake, and toremove rulers or policies without violence when they are.
Objective knowledge is indeed possible: it comes from within. Itbegins as conjecture, and is then corrected by repeated cycles ofcriticism, including comparison with the evidence.
Privacy is the foundation of free societies.
Audit is backward-looking, and creating a complete picture of acompany's financial health by looking at periodic financialstatements is like turning a hamburger into a cow.
Bitcoin or other digital currency isn't saved in a file somewhere;it's represented by transactions recorded in a blockchain—kind oflike a global spreadsheet or ledger.
Technological innovation is more driven by excess, exuberance, andirrationality than by cost-benefit analyses, rational calculation,and careful and deliberate planning.
Given that markets and technological systems are too complex anddynamic to fully quantify, top-down centralization is often doomedto fail, because information is more often distributed from thebottom up and at the edges of the system.
There is still a tendency to regard any existing governmentintervention as desirable, to attribute all evils to the market,and to evaluate new proposals for government control in theirideal form, as they might work if run by able, disinterested menfree from the pressure of special interest groups.
The power to do good is also the power to do harm; those whocontrol the power today may not tomorrow; and, more important,what one man regards as good, another may regard as harm.
Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentionsof those who create it.
A major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that itgives people what they want instead of what a particular groupthinks they ought to want.
History only suggests that capitalism is a necessary condition forpolitical freedom. Clearly it is not a sufficient condition.
The role of government just considered is to do something that themarket cannot do for itself, namely, to determine, arbitrate, andenforce the rules of the game.
It is a mark of the political freedom of a capitalist society thatmen can openly advocate and work for socialism.
The nineteenth-century liberal regarded an extension of freedom asthe most effective way to promote welfare and equality; thetwentieth-century liberal regards welfare and equality as eitherprerequisites of or alternatives to freedom.
The great tragedy of the drive to centralization, as of the driveto extend the scope of government in general, is that it is mostlyled by men of goodwill who will be the first to rue itsconsequences.
In all those cases, in accordance with the theme of this book,increases in economic freedom have gone hand in hand withincreases in political and civil freedom and have led to increasedprosperity; competitive capitalism and freedom have beeninseparable.
No system of government, no economic system, no currency, and noempire lasts forever, yet almost everyone is surprised and ruinedwhen they fail.
History has shown that we shouldn't rely on governments to protectus financially. On the contrary, we should expect most governmentsto abuse their privileged positions as the creators and users ofmoney and credit for the same reasons that you might commit thoseabuses if you were in their shoes.
Debt eats equity but central banks can feed debt by printing moneyinstead.
As I studied history, I saw that it typically transpires viarelatively well-defined life cycles, like those of organisms, thatevolve as each generation transitions to the next.
Taoism teaches that it is of paramount importance to live inharmony with the laws of nature.
All that matters is that you are making something you love, to thebest of your ability, here and now.
If you have an idea you're excited about and you don't bring it tolife, it's not uncommon for the idea to find its voice throughanother maker. This isn't because the other artist stole youridea, but because the idea's time has come.
Living life as an artist is a practice. You are either engaging inthe practice or you're not. It makes no sense to say you're notgood at it. It's like saying, 'I'm not good at being a monk.' Wetend to think of the artist's work as the output. The real work ofthe artist is a way of being in the world.
Look for what you notice but no one else sees.
We're not playing to win, we're playing to play. And ultimately,playing is fun. Perfectionism gets in the way of fun. A moreskillful goal might be to find comfort in the process.
Zoom in and obsess. Zoom out and observe. We get to choose.
In terms of priority, inspiration comes first. You come next. Theaudience comes last.
Turning something from an idea into a reality can make it seemsmaller. It changes from unearthly to earthly. The imagination hasno limits. The physical world does. The work exists in both.
As artists, we seek to restore our childlike perception: a moreinnocent state of wonder and appreciation not tethered to utilityor survival.
Retirement meant that you were spending the money you had savedup; independence meant that all you were spending was just theinterest on your money. It was as if your contribution to societywere complete, and you had fulfilled your debt to this world andcould now peacefully live off the proceeds of your work until theend of time.
The main power struggle was basically between the business guysand the developers over profits for themselves versus tools tohelp others, greed versus altruism. This played out as a debateover whether to structure Ethereum as a traditional for-profitstart-up or a decentralized network.
DeFi is unique relative to the traditional financial systembecause it is permissionless, open access, global, composable, andtransparent. No longer are centralized institutions needed forbasic financial actions.
Given it costs no more to provide services to a customer with $100or $100 million in assets, we believe that DeFi will replace allmeaningful centralized financial infrastructure in the future.
DeFi is fundamentally a competitive marketplace of decentralizedfinancial applications that function as various financial'primitives' such as exchange, save, lend, and tokenize.
The tycoons of social media have to stop pretending that they'refriendly nerd gods building a better world and admit they're justtobacco farmers in T-shirts selling an addictive product tochildren. Because, let's face it, checking your "likes" is the newsmoking.
Digital minimalism: a philosophy of technology use in which youfocus your online time on a small number of carefully selected andoptimized activities that strongly support things you value, andthen happily miss out on everything else.
Simply put, humans are not wired to be constantly wired.
Solitude deprivation: a state in which you spend close to zerotime alone with your own thoughts and free from input from otherminds.
The urge to check Twitter or refresh Reddit becomes a nervoustwitch that shatters uninterrupted time into shards too small tosupport the presence necessary for an intentional life.
Digital minimalism definitively does not reject the innovations ofthe internet age, but instead rejects the way so many peoplecurrently engage with these tools.
Where we want to be cautious is when the sound of a voice or a cupof coffee with a friend is replaced with 'likes' on a post.
The world clings to its old mental picture of the stock marketbecause it's comforting; because it's so hard to draw a picture ofwhat has replaced it; and because the few people able to draw itfor you have no interest in doing so.
When something becomes obvious to you, you immediately thinksurely someone else is doing this.
Shining a light creates shadows.
Every systemic market injustice arose from some loophole in aregulation created to correct some prior injustice.
The best way to manage people, he thought, was to convince themthat you were good for their careers. He further believed that theonly way to get people to believe that you were good for theircareers was actually to be good for their careers.
It was like a broken slot machine in the casino that pays offevery time. It would keep paying off until someone said somethingabout it; but no one who played the slot machine had any interestin pointing out that it was broken.
The U.S. stock market was now a class system, rooted in speed, ofhaves and have-nots. The haves paid for nanoseconds; the have-notshad no idea that a nanosecond had value.
Heroes are heroes because they are heroic in behavior, not becausethey won or lost.
Reality is far more vicious than Russian roulette. First, itdelivers the fatal bullet rather infrequently, like a revolverthat would have hundreds, even thousands of chambers instead ofsix. After a few dozen tries, one forgets about the existence of abullet, under a numbing false sense of security.
Probability is not a mere computation of odds on the dice or morecomplicated variants; it is the acceptance of the lack ofcertainty in our knowledge and the development of methods fordealing with our ignorance.
Those who were unlucky in life in spite of their skills wouldeventually rise. The lucky fool might have benefited from someluck in life; over the longer run he would slowly converge to thestate of a less-lucky idiot.
No matter how sophisticated our choices, how good we are atdominating the odds, randomness will have the last word.
A mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but inlight of the information available until that point.
Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild successis attributable to variance.
My lesson from Soros is to start every meeting at my boutique byconvincing everyone that we are a bunch of idiots who know nothingand are mistake-prone, but happen to be endowed with the rareprivilege of knowing it.
When things go our way we reject the lack of certainty.
We favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated,and the tangible; we scorn the abstract.
The epiphany I had in my career in randomness came when Iunderstood that I was not intelligent enough, nor strong enough,to even try to fight my emotions.
There's no point in looking for hundred-dollar bills in thestreet. Why? Because, were there any hundred-dollar bills, someonewould already have picked them up.
One portfolio is better than another one when it offers highermean return for a given level of volatility—or a lower volatilityfor a given level of return.
A smart investor should understand where he has an edge and investonly in those opportunities.
A lot of times, the question is harder than the answer, and if youcan properly phrase the question, then the answer is the easypart.
We'd also find that fraudsters were kind of lazy, right? They wantto do just the least amount of work. So we just kind of hoped topush them off onto our competitors.
If the team hadn't closed that one hundred million, there would beno SpaceX, no LinkedIn, and no Tesla.
As hire As. Bs hire Cs.
Don't follow your passion, follow your talent. Determine what youare good at (early), and commit to becoming great at it. You don'thave to love it, just don't hate it. If practice takes you fromgood to great, the recognition and compensation you will commandwill make you start to love it.
People who received a great deal of attention for their looks at ayoung age are more likely to opt for cosmetic procedures whenolder. It's the same in business.
Failure and invention are inseparable twins. To invent you have toexperiment, and if you know in advance that it's going to work,it's not an experiment.
Expect that a certain amount of failure is out of your control,and recognize you may need to endure it or move on.
The ultimate gift, in our digital age, is a CEO who has thestorytelling talent to capture the imagination of the marketswhile surrounding themselves with people who can show incrementalprogress against that vision each day.
It is conventional wisdom that Steve Jobs put 'a dent in theuniverse.' No, he didn't. People who get up every morning, gettheir kids dressed, get them to school, and have an irrationalpassion for their kids' well-being, dent the universe.
Luxury is irrational, which makes it the best business in theworld. In 2016 Estée Lauder was worth more than the world'slargest communications firm, WPP. Richemont, owner of Cartier andVan Cleef & Arpels, was worth more than T-Mobile. LVMH commandsmore value than Goldman Sachs.
It seems impossible until it isn't.
When people asked Sam for his time, they assumed they'd posed ayes or no question, and the noises Sam made always sounded morelike 'yes' than like 'no.' They didn't know that inside Sam's mindwas a dial, with zero on one end and one hundred on the other. Allhe had done, when he said yes, was to assign some non-zeroprobability to the proposed use of his time.
A guy from Blackstone, the world's biggest private investmentfirm, called Sam to say that he thought a valuation of $20 billionwas too high—and that Blackstone would invest at a valuation of$15 billion. 'Sam said, If you think it is too high, I'll let youshort a billion of our stock at a valuation of twenty billion.'
Effective altruism never got its emotional charge from the placesthat charged ordinary philanthropy. What mattered was the math.
That's it for crypto explanations for the moment, as that's aboutall that Sam Bankman-Fried knew about crypto, or for that matterneeded to know, to trade billions of dollars' worth of it.
Don't walk into a place like you wanna buy it, walk in like youown it.
I believe the truth is only offensive when we're lying.
I have a lot of proof that the world is conspiring to make mehappy.
We cannot fully appreciate the light without the shadows. We haveto be thrown off balance to find our footing. It's better to jumpthan fall. And here I am.
We all have scars, we gonna have more. Rather than struggleagainst time and waste it, let's dance with time and redeem it.Cause we don't live longer when we try not to die. We live longerwhen we are too busy living.
I never wrote things down to remember; I always wrote things downso I could forget.
I'm not perfect; no, I step in shit all the time and recognize itwhen I do. I've just learned how to scrape it off my boots andcarry on.
Persist, pivot, or concede. It's up to us, our choice every time.
Sometimes which choice you make is not as important as making achoice and committing to it.
Don't create imaginary constraints. Who are we to think we don'tdeserve these fortunes when they're in our grasp? Who are we tothink we haven't earned them? If we stay and process withinourselves, in the joy of the doing, we will never choke at thefinish line.
There are many ways to win at hardball, and every winner has hisown style of play.
Hardball leaders think of themselves as being in a perpetualturnaround. Even if the company is already successful, theycontinue to try to make it better, to find new sources ofcompetitive advantage, answer new threats, serve new markets, orsolve whatever new challenges arise.
Hardball players have an intellectual toughness that enables themto face facts and see reality. They are always dissatisfied withthe status quo, no matter how fine things may seem, and they havethe will to catalyze change. They're tough, but they're notbullies.
Make all efforts fast, focused, and fundamental. Every projectundertaken in a turnaround should deliver payback—demonstrable andquantifiable—in twelve to eighteen months.
I think we need more math majors who don't become mathematicians.More math major doctors, more math major high school teachers,more math major CEOs, more math major senators. But we won't getthere unless we dump the stereotype that math is only worthwhilefor kid geniuses.
A basic rule of mathematical life: if the universe hands you ahard problem, try to solve an easier one instead, and hope thesimple version is close enough to the original problem that theuniverse doesn't object.
Knowing mathematics is like wearing a pair of X-ray specs thatreveal hidden structures underneath the messy and chaotic surfaceof the world.
Working an integral or performing a linear regression is somethinga computer can do quite effectively. Understanding whether theresult makes sense—or deciding whether the method is the right oneto use in the first place—requires a guiding human hand. A mathcourse that fails to do so is essentially training the student tobe a very slow, buggy version of Microsoft Excel.
Dividing one number by another is mere computation; knowing whatto divide by what is mathematics.
Improbable things happen a lot.
A mathematician is always asking, 'What assumptions are youmaking? And are they justified?'
One of the most painful parts of teaching mathematics is seeingstudents damaged by the cult of the genius. The genius cult tellsstudents it's not worth doing mathematics unless you're the bestat mathematics, because those special few are the only ones whosecontributions matter.
If gambling is exciting, you're doing it wrong.
Genius is a thing that happens, not a kind of person.
Silicon Valley has always been equal parts egghead libertarianismand acid-tinged hippie romanticism. For the libertarians theInternet was great because it had few rules and no governance. Forthe hippies, the Internet promised free expression and ademocratization of ideas.
They thought they'd make revenues from people making purchases.But they discovered people were less interested in shopping on theservice than communicating. And they didn't know how to charge forcommunications.
Netscape did not originate the obsession with platforms, but itwould provide the template.
The inventors of JavaScript never intended for someone to buildGmail, or Facebook or Bitcoin wallets on top of it. We don't knowwhat people will build on top of Ethereum, but the idea is thatthey will be decentralized and unstoppable applications.
Ethereum isn't only a network for its digital currency, ether.It's meant to be the base layer for developers to build whateverapplication they can dream of, including issuing their own coin.
Ethereum wasn't just another Bitcoin project. It was the mostambitious cryptocurrency project since Bitcoin.
Proof-of-work is aimed at deterring attacks or spam in a networkby requiring the users of the service to do some work, so that itwould be economically inviable to create useless or maliciousdata.
Your body is not a temple, it's an amusement park. Enjoy the ride.
Do we really want to travel in hermetically sealed popemobilesthrough the rural provinces of France, Mexico and the Far East,eating only in Hard Rock Cafes and McDonalds? Or do we want to eatwithout fear, tearing into the local stew, the humble taqueria'smystery meat, the sincerely offered gift of a lightly grilled fishhead? I know what I want. I want it all. I want to try everythingonce.
No one understands and appreciates the American Dream of hard workleading to material rewards better than a non-American.
Skills can be taught. Character you either have or you don't have.
Don't lie about it. You made a mistake. Admit it and move on. Justdon't do it again. Ever.
Good food is very often, even most often, simple food.
Assume the worst. About everybody. But don't let this poisonedoutlook affect your job performance. Let it all roll off yourback. Ignore it. Be amused by what you see and suspect.
I've long believed that good food, good eating, is all about risk.Whether we're talking about unpasteurized Stilton, raw oysters orworking for organized crime 'associates,' food, for me, has alwaysbeen an adventure.
Garlic is divine. Avoid at all costs that vile spew you seerotting in oil in screwtop jars. Too lazy to peel fresh? You don'tdeserve to eat garlic.
It's been an adventure. We took some casualties over the years.Things got broken. Things got lost. But I wouldn't have missed itfor the world.
Those who know don't tell and those who tell don't know.
The men on the trading floor may not have been to school, but theyhave Ph.D.'s in man's ignorance.
He was blessed with an unconventional mind, which overcame hisconventional middle-class upbringing.
I thought instead of a good rule for survival on Wall Street:Never agree to anything proposed on someone else's boat or you'llregret it in the morning.
The first thing you learn on the trading floor is that when largenumbers of people are after the same commodity, be it a stock, abond, or a job, the commodity quickly becomes overvalued.
If there was a single lesson I took away from Salomon Brothers, itis that rarely do all parties win. The nature of the game is zerosum.
Risk, I had learned, was a commodity in itself.
A study by the Bank for International Settlements, whichsystematically examines the experience of 34 countries over thepast 40 years, finds that rapid debt growth is the single bestleading indicator of financial crises.
In the abstract, life is a mixture of chance and choice. Chancecan be thought of as the cards you are dealt in life. Choice ishow you play them.
Life is like reading a novel or running a marathon. It's not somuch about reaching a goal but rather about the journey itself andthe experiences along the way.
To beat the market, focus on investments well within yourknowledge and ability to evaluate, your 'circle of competence.' Besure your information is current, accurate, and essentiallycomplete. Finally, don't bet on an investment unless you candemonstrate by logic, and if appropriate by track record, that youhave an edge.
This phenomenon has been called the wisdom of crowds. But likemost simplifications, this has a flip side. I call the flip sideto the wisdom of crowds the lunacy of lemmings.
Work with the smartest people you can, hopefully smarter than you.Be persistent, don't give up easily. Be guided by beauty. It canbe the way a company runs, or the way an experiment comes out, orthe way a theorem comes out, but there's a sense of beauty whensomething is working well, almost an aesthetic to it.
We're right 50.75 percent of the time, but we're 100 percent right50.75 percent of the time. You can make billions that way.
Simons and his team are among the most secretive traders WallStreet has encountered, loath to drop even a hint of how they'dconquered financial markets, lest a competitor seize on any clue.
Scientists and mathematicians are trained to dig below the surfaceof the chaotic, natural world to search for unexpected simplicity,structure, and even beauty.
Any time you hear financial experts talking about how the marketwent up because of such and such—remember it's all nonsense.
It's one thing to have good ideas, it's another to recognize whenothers do.
Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of thehuman freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set ofcircumstances, to choose one's own way.
When we are no longer able to change a situation, we arechallenged to change ourselves.
But there was no need to be ashamed of tears, for tears borewitness that a man had the greatest of courage, the courage tosuffer.
In some ways suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment itfinds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.
So live as if you were living already for the second time and asif you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to actnow!
No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honestywhether in a similar situation he might not have done the same.
Skepticism and pessimism aren't synonymous. Skepticism calls forpessimism when optimism is excessive. But it also calls foroptimism when pessimism is excessive.
The three stages of a bull market: the first stage, when only afew unusually perceptive people believe things will get better;the second stage, when most investors realize that improvement isactually taking place; and the third stage, when everyoneconcludes things will get better forever.
The superior investor is mature, rational, analytical, objectiveand unemotional.
There are three ingredients for success—aggressiveness, timing andskill—and if you have enough aggressiveness at the right time, youdon't need that much skill.
Like so many other things in the investment world that might betried on the basis of certitude and precision, waiting for thebottom to start buying is a great example of folly. So iftargeting the bottom is wrong, when should you buy? The answer'ssimple: when price is below intrinsic value.
It follows that risk is high when investors feel risk is low. Andrisk compensation is at a minimum just when risk is at a maximum,meaning risk compensation is most needed. So much for the rationalinvestor.
The safest and most rewarding time to buy usually comes wheneveryone is convinced there's no hope.
In investing, there is nothing that always works, since theenvironment is always changing, and investors' efforts to respondto the environment cause it to change further.
Success doesn't lie in being right, but rather in being more rightthan others. One doesn't have to be right in order to besuccessful: just less wrong than others.
The brain highlights what it imagines as patterns; it disregardscontradictory information. Human nature yearns to see order andhierarchy in the world. It will invent it where it cannot find it.
For a complex natural shape, dimension is relative. It varies withthe observer. The same object can have more than one dimension,depending on how you measure it.
Stock prices are not independent. Today's action can, at leastslightly, affect tomorrow's action. The standard model is, again,wrong.
The Efficient Market Hypothesis is no more than that, ahypothesis. Many a grand theory has died under the onslaught ofreal data.
A key point in my work: randomness has more than one state, orform. One is the most familiar and manageable form of chance,which I call mild. It is the randomness of a coin toss, the staticof a badly tuned radio.
At the opposite extreme is what I call wild randomness. This isfar more irregular, more unpredictable. It is the variation of theCornish coastline—savage promontories, craggy rocks, andunexpectedly calm bays. The fluctuation from one value to the nextis limitless and frightening.
Capitalism works only when institutions are forced to absorb theconsequences of the risks that they take on. When banks can pocketthe upside while spreading the cost of their failures, failure isalmost certain.
All new markets are inefficient at first.
Let specialists obsess about minutiae. Soros's motto was 'Investfirst, investigate later.'
Because they mark all their assets to market and live in constantfear of margin calls from their brokers, hedge funds generallymonitor risk better and recognize setbacks faster than rivals.
Every evening I would close my eyes in a quiet place in myapartment. I would visualize the opening and walk myself throughthe day and imagine the different emotional states the marketwould go through. Then when you get there, you are ready for it.You have been there before.
I like to say, 'Experience is what you got when you didn't getwhat you wanted.'
There are old investors, and there are bold investors, but thereare no old bold investors.
Investment success doesn't come from 'buying good things,' butrather from 'buying things well.'
'Prices are too high' is far from synonymous with 'the next movewill be downward.' Things can be overpriced and stay that way fora long time, or become far more so.
Being too far ahead of your time is indistinguishable from beingwrong.
There's a big difference between probability and outcome. Probablethings fail to happen—and improbable things happen—all the time.
We have to practice defensive investing, since many of theoutcomes are likely to go against us.
Investing is a popularity contest, and the most dangerous thing isto buy something at the peak of its popularity.
Here's the key to understanding risk: it's largely a matter ofopinion.
There's only one way to describe most investors: trend followers.Superior investors are the exact opposite.
Narratives are major vectors of rapid change in culture, inzeitgeist, and in economic behavior.
We need to incorporate the contagion of narratives into economictheory. Otherwise, we remain blind to a very real, very palpable,very important mechanism for economic change, as well as a crucialelement for economic forecasting.
Trying to understand major economic events by looking only at dataon changes in economic aggregates, such as gross domestic product,wage rates, interest rates, and tax rates, runs the risk ofmissing the underlying motivations for change.
Rumor is the ancient Latin word for contagious narrative.
A network state is a social network with a moral innovation, asense of national consciousness, a recognized founder, a capacityfor collective action, an in-person level of civility, anintegrated cryptocurrency, a consensual government limited by asocial smart contract, an archipelago of crowdfunded physicalterritories, a virtual capital, and an on-chain census that provesa large enough population, income, and real-estate footprint toattain a measure of diplomatic recognition.
The short version is that if a tech company is about technologicalinnovation first, and company culture second, a startup society isthe reverse. It's about community culture first, and technologicalinnovation second.
The libertarian cycle starts with a group of ideologicallibertarians that end up building a bureaucratic state.
The mere existence of successful parallel systems in Taiwan, HongKong, and especially Singapore is what drove Deng Xiaoping toadopt capitalism.
The River is a sprawling ecosystem of like-minded people thatincludes everyone from low-stakes poker pros just trying to grindout a living to crypto kings and venture-capital billionaires. Itis a way of thinking and a mode of life.
Treat other people as intelligent and capable of reasonablestrategic behavior. The world is dynamic, and although people maynot be strictly rational, they're usually smart about adapting totheir situation and achieving the things that matter most to them.Play the long game.
Successful risk-takers take a raise-or-fold attitude toward life.They abhor mediocrity and they know when to quit.
A bet is a tax on bullshit.
In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broadsubject matter area) who didn't read all the time — none, zero.
Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when youwoke up.
How to find a good spouse? The best single way is to deserve agood spouse.
Acquire worldly wisdom and adjust your behavior accordingly. Ifyour new behavior gives you a little temporary unpopularity withyour peer group, then to hell with them.
It takes character to sit with all that cash and to do nothing. Ididn't get to where I am by going after mediocre opportunities.
The best armour of old age is a well spent life perfecting it.
I think that, every time you see the word EBITDA, you shouldsubstitute the words 'bullshit earnings.'
It's the work on your desk. Do well with what you already have andmore will come in.
It is the nature of the venture-capital game that most attempts atdiscovery fail, but a very few succeed at such a scale that theymore than make up for everything else. That extreme ratio ofsuccess and failure is the power law that drives the VC business,all of Silicon Valley, the wider tech sector, and, by extension,the world.
You succeed in venture capital by backing the right deals, not byhaggling over valuations.
Investors who focus on currencies, bonds, and stock marketsgenerally assume a normal distribution of price changes: valuesjiggle up and down, but extreme moves are unusual.
Thiel had the guts to act on his understanding of the power law bybetting big at the right moments. Because only a handful ofstartups would grow exponentially, there was no point gettingexcited about opportunities that seemed merely solid; in venture,the median investment was a failure.
Through an evolutionary process of trial, failure, and occasionalbreakthroughs, the group may advance faster than the individual.
As Bastiat understood, a very low rate of interest may benefit therich, who have access to credit, more than the poor.
When interest rates are pushed too low, credit takes off and badinvestments ('malinvestment') abound.
The most encompassing view of interest is contained in the notionof interest as the 'time value of money'.
If you're not failing, you're not pushing your limits, and ifyou're not pushing your limits, you're not maximizing yourpotential.
I learned that if you work hard and creatively, you can have justabout anything you want, but not everything you want. Maturity isthe ability to reject good alternatives in order to pursue evenbetter ones.
Look for people who have lots of great questions. Smart people arethe ones who ask the most thoughtful questions, as opposed tothinking they have all the answers. Great questions are a muchbetter indicator of future success than great answers.
The happiest people discover their own nature and match their lifeto it.
Having the basics—a good bed to sleep in, good relationships, goodfood, and good sex—is most important, and those things don't getmuch better when you have a lot of money or much worse when youhave less.
Listening to uninformed people is worse than having no answers atall.
I just want to be right—I don't care if the right answer comesfrom me.
Every time you confront something painful, you are at apotentially important juncture in your life—you have theopportunity to choose healthy and painful truth or unhealthy butcomfortable delusion.
If you can't successfully do something, don't think you can tellothers how it should be done.
I saw that to do exceptionally well you have to push your limitsand that, if you push your limits, you will crash and it will hurta lot. You will think you have failed—but that won't be trueunless you give up.
Because our educational system is hung up on precision, the art ofbeing good at approximations is insufficiently valued. Thisimpedes conceptual thinking.
Hobbies are what the smartest people spend time on when theyaren't constrained by near-term financial goals. I like to saythat what the smartest people do on the weekends is what everyoneelse will do during the week in ten years.
We wanted flying cars, instead we got Zoom.
In these systems, money and power flow to the network center, tocompanies that own the networks, and away from users anddevelopers at the network edges.
The real potential in using blockchains is to build betternetworks, and therefore a better internet.
The nature of the game as it is played is such that the publicshould realize that the truth cannot be told by the few who know.
There is nothing like losing all you have in the world forteaching you what not to do. And when you know what not to do inorder not to lose money, you begin to learn what to do in order towin.
The sucker has always tried to get something for nothing, and theappeal in all booms is always frankly to the gambling instinctaroused by cupidity and spurred by a pervasive prosperity.
A man cannot be convinced against his own convictions, but he canbe talked into a state of uncertainty and indecision, which iseven worse, for that means that he cannot trade with confidenceand comfort.
That is about all I have learned—to study general conditions, totake a position and stick to it.
A stock operator has to fight a lot of expensive enemies withinhimself.
Men who can both be right and sit tight are uncommon. I found itone of the hardest things to learn. But it is only after a stockoperator has firmly grasped this that he can make big money.
I am the prodigal son every time I search for unconditional lovewhere it cannot be found.
Resentment and gratitude cannot coexist, since resentment blocksthe perception and experience of life as a gift.
The question is not 'How am I to find God?' but 'How am I to letmyself be found by him?'
Here the mystery of life is unveiled: I am loved so much that I amleft free to leave home. The blessing is there from the beginning.
God's vision is not that of a stereotypical landowner but ratherthat of an all-giving and forgiving father who does not measureout his love to his children according to how well they behave.
Champions behave like champions before they're champions; theyhave a winning standard of performance before they are winners.
A good leader is always learning. The great leaders start learningyoung and continue until their last breath.
For me the starting point for everything—before strategy, tactics,theories, managing, organizing, philosophy, methodology, talent,or experience—is work ethic.
Here's a good question to write on a Post-it Note and put on yourdesk: 'What assets do we have right now that we're not takingadvantage of?'
Others follow you based on the quality of your actions rather thanthe magnitude of your declarations.
Constructive criticism is a powerful instrument essential forimproving performance. Positive support can be equally productive.Used together by a skilled leader they become the key to maximumresults.
The culture precedes positive results. It doesn't get tacked on asan afterthought on your way to the victory stand.
Like water, many decent individuals will seek lower ground if leftto their own inclinations.
Brevity is confidence. Length is fear.
Never in the history of humanity have we vomited more words inmore places with more velocity.
If there is one thing you take away from this book, it is this:learn to identify and trumpet ONE thing you want people to know.And do it in ONE strong sentence. Or no one will ever remember it.
Write—then go back and kill at least half the words. It winds upsharper every time.
To dare a thought is to risk being wrong.
Incomes will become more unequal within jurisdictions and moreequal between them.
The basic causes of change are precisely those that are notsubject to conscious control.
Governments will ultimately have little choice but to treatpopulations in territories they serve more like customers, andless in the way that organized criminals treat the victims of ashakedown racket.
The cybereconomy, rather than China, could well be the greatesteconomic phenomenon of the next thirty years.
The idea of property emerged as an inevitable consequence offarming.
Other things being equal, the more widely dispersed keytechnologies are, the more widely dispersed power will be, and thesmaller the optimum scale of government.
When technology is mobile, and transactions occur in cyberspace,as they increasingly will do, governments will no longer be ableto charge more for their services than they are worth to thepeople who pay for them.
Faster than all but a few now imagine, microprocessing willsubvert and destroy the nation-state, creating new forms of socialorganization in the process.
The most important causes of change are not to be found inpolitical manifestos or in the pronouncements of dead economists,but in the hidden factors that alter the boundaries where power isexercised. Often, subtle changes in climate, topography, microbes,and technology alter the logic of violence.
For superforecasters, beliefs are hypotheses to be tested, nottreasures to be guarded.
For scientists, not knowing is exciting. It's an opportunity todiscover; the more that is unknown, the greater the opportunity.
Consensus is not always good; disagreement not always bad. If youdo happen to agree, don't take that agreement—in itself—as proofthat you are right. Never stop doubting.
If you have to plan for a future beyond the forecasting horizon,plan for surprise. That means planning for adaptability andresilience.
It was the absence of doubt—and scientific rigor—that mademedicine unscientific and caused it to stagnate for so long.
What makes a decision great is not that it has a great outcome. Agreat decision is the result of a good process, and that processmust include an attempt to accurately represent our own state ofknowledge. That state of knowledge, in turn, is some variation of'I'm not sure.'
In most of our decisions, we are not betting against anotherperson. Rather, we are betting against all the future versions ofourselves that we are not choosing.
Improving decision quality is about increasing our chances of goodoutcomes, not guaranteeing them.
Thinking in bets starts with recognizing that there are exactlytwo things that determine how our lives turn out: the quality ofour decisions and luck. Learning to recognize the differencebetween the two is what thinking in bets is all about.
Despite the popular wisdom that we achieve success throughpositive visualization, it turns out that incorporating negativevisualization makes us more likely to achieve our goals.
The secret is to make peace with walking around in a world wherewe recognize that we are not sure and that's okay.
Even research communities of highly intelligent and well-meaningindividuals can fall prey to confirmation bias, as IQ ispositively correlated with the number of reasons people find tosupport their own side in an argument.
Outcomes don't tell us what's our fault and what isn't, what weshould take credit for and what we shouldn't. Unlike in chess, wecan't simply work backward from the quality of the outcome todetermine the quality of our beliefs or decisions.
Truthseeking, the desire to know the truth regardless of whetherthe truth aligns with the beliefs we currently hold, is notnaturally supported by the way we process information. Instead ofaltering our beliefs to fit new information, we do the opposite,altering our interpretation of that information to fit ourbeliefs.
Chess, for all its strategic complexity, isn't a great model fordecision-making in life, where most of our decisions involvehidden information and a much greater influence of luck.
The rich get the assets, the poor get the debt, and then the poorhave to pay their whole salary to the rich every year just to livein a house. The rich use that money to buy the rest of the assetsfrom the middle class and then the problem gets worse every year.
The best job a concert pianist can get nowadays is trader forCitibank. It pays very well.
I'd believed it when the teachers back at school had told me:study hard and do well in your exams and you will get a good job.
The more someone understands about finance, the likelier it isthat they will have difficulty understanding cryptocurrency.
Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.
The cost of a thing is the amount of life which must be exchangedfor it.
Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.
I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advancesconfidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to livethe life which he has imagined, he will meet with a successunexpected in common hours.
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, tofront only the essential facts of life, and see if I could notlearn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discoverthat I had not lived.
I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. Tobe in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome anddissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion thatwas so companionable as solitude.
However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it andcall it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorestwhen you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even inparadise.
You can't ever reach perfection, but you can believe in anasymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving.
Human knowledge is never contained in one person. It grows fromthe relationships we create between each other and the world, andstill it is never complete.
There is a moment, a cusp, when the sum of gathered experience isworn down by the details of living. We are never so wise as whenwe live in this moment.
Even if I'm dying, until I actually die, I am still living.
Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical,reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on itsinability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope,fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving,suffering, virtue.
I began to realize that coming in such close contact with my ownmortality had changed both nothing and everything. Before mycancer was diagnosed, I knew that someday I would die, but Ididn't know when. After the diagnosis, I knew that someday I woulddie, but I didn't know when. But now I knew it acutely.
Lucy and I both felt that life wasn't about avoiding suffering.
The main message of Jesus, I believed, is that mercy trumpsjustice every time.
Before operating on a patient's brain, I realized, I must firstunderstand his mind: his identity, his values, what makes his lifeworth living, and what devastation makes it reasonable to let thatlife end.
Every moment in business happens only once. The next Bill Gateswill not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or SergeyBrin won't make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerbergwon't create a social network. If you are copying these guys, youaren't learning from them.
The best entrepreneurs know this: every great business is builtaround a secret that's hidden from the outside. A great company isa conspiracy to change the world; when you share your secret, therecipient becomes a fellow conspirator.
All happy companies are different: each one earns a monopoly bysolving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: theyfailed to escape competition.
What important truth do very few people agree with you on?
The most valuable businesses of coming decades will be built byentrepreneurs who seek to empower people rather than try to makethem obsolete.
Monopoly is the condition of every successful business.
In the most dysfunctional organizations, signaling that work isbeing done becomes a better strategy for career advancement thanactually doing work.
If your goal is to never make a mistake in your life, youshouldn't look for secrets. The prospect of being lonely butright—dedicating your life to something that no one else believesin—is already hard. The prospect of being lonely and wrong can beunbearable.
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The information you have is not theinformation you want. The informationyou want is not the information youneed. The information you need is notthe information you can obtain. Theinformation you can obtain costs morethan you want to pay.
The word 'risk' derives from the earlyItalian risicare, which means 'todare'. In this sense, risk is a choicerather than a fate.
Our lives teem with numbers, but wesometimes forget that numbers are onlytools. They have no soul; they mayindeed become fetishes.
Game theory says that the true sourceof uncertainty lies in the intentionsof others.
Time matters most when decisions areirreversible. And yet manyirreversible decisions must be made onthe basis of incomplete information.
Life is a collection of similaritiesrather than identities; no singleobservation is a perfect example ofgenerality.
The essence of risk management lies inmaximizing the areas where we havesome control over the outcome whileminimizing the areas where we haveabsolutely no control.
Fear of harm ought to be proportionalnot merely to the gravity of the harm,but also to the probability of theevent.
The revolutionary idea that definesthe boundary between modern times andthe past is the mastery of risk: thenotion that the future is more than awhim of the gods and that men andwomen are not passive before nature.
It is when we are unaware of whatcould go wrong that we have to worry.
Scientific method seeks to understandthings as they are, while alchemyseeks to bring about a desired stateof affairs. To put it another way, theprimary objective of science is truth— that of alchemy, operationalsuccess.
I start from the position that everyhuman endeavor is flawed: if we wereto discard everything that is flawedthere would be nothing left. We musttherefore make the most of what wehave. The meaning of life consists ofthe flaws in one's conceptions andwhat one does about them.
What we are cannot possibly correspondto what we think we are, but there isa two-way interplay between the twoconcepts. As we make our way in theworld our sense of self evolves. Therelationship between what we think weare and what we are in reality is thekey to happiness.
Equilibrium itself has rarely beenobserved in real life — market priceshave a notorious habit of fluctuating.
A happy person isn't someone who'shappy all the time. It's someone whoeffortlessly interprets events in sucha way that they don't lose theirinnate peace.
If you're not willing to do awholesale, 24/7, 100 percent swap withwho that person is, then there is nopoint in being jealous.
Earn with your mind, not your time.
The more desire I have for somethingto work out a certain way, the lesslikely I am to see the truth.
The three big ones in life are wealth,health, and happiness. We pursue themin that order, but their importance isreverse.
Escape competition throughauthenticity.
If you have nothing in your life, butyou have at least one person thatloves you unconditionally, it'll dowonders for your self-esteem.
Tension is who you think you shouldbe. Relaxation is who you are.
Japanese fashion certainly shows thatcultural behavior is not an expressionof eternal national characteristicspassed down from generation togeneration in an unbroken line.American fashion came to Japan in thehands of social misfits hungry forchange and business success. It thenblended with local customs andpractices.
The Ametora tradition will not standstill, but will continue to be shapedby the passage of time.
Distinguishing social consensus fromtruth is really important becausethey're not the same.
We need to evangelize technologicalprogress with every word and action.To recognize that the purpose oftechnology is to transcend our limitsand to motivate everything we do withthis sense of purpose. To take thewinnings from our web apps and putthem toward Mars.
Progress is abstraction.
You cannot automate something untilyou've done it manually many times.
We have to start talking more aboutour values than our valuations.
I have found that failure is a farbetter teacher than success.
I believe it is almost as importantfor a man to be able to express hisviews as to have them.
The simple truth is that there are no'sure things' in the market.
You don't see any Fifth Avenuemansions built by bears.
Two and two still make four and no onehas ever invented a way of gettingsomething for nothing.
The stock market is people. It ispeople trying to read the future.
Only as you do know yourself can yourbrain serve you as a sharp andefficient tool. Know your ownfailings, passions, and prejudices soyou can separate them from what yousee.
Don't try to buy at the bottom andsell at the top. It can't be doneexcept by liars.
The stock market is the thermometerand not the fever.
During my eighty-seven years I havewitnessed technological revolutions.But none has done away with the needfor character.
Some people become depressed at thescale of the universe, because itmakes them feel insignificant. Otherpeople are relieved to feelinsignificant, which is even worse.But, in any case, those are mistakes.Feeling insignificant because theuniverse is large has exactly the samelogic as feeling inadequate for notbeing a cow. The universe is not thereto overwhelm us; it is our home, andour resource. The bigger the better.
All fiction that does not violate thelaws of physics is fact.
Like every other destruction ofoptimism, whether in a wholecivilisation or in a singleindividual, these must have beenunspeakable catastrophes for those whohad dared to expect progress. For ifany of those earlier experiments inoptimism had succeeded, our specieswould be exploring the stars by now,and you and I would be immortal.
An unproblematic state is a statewithout creative thought. Its othername is death.
Without error-correction allinformation processing, and hence allknowledge-creation, is necessarilybounded. Error-correction is thebeginning of infinity.
It is a mistake to conceive of choiceand decision-making as a process ofselecting from existing optionsaccording to a fixed formula. Thatomits the most important element ofdecision-making, namely the creationof new options.
Base metals can be transmuted intogold by stars, and by intelligentbeings who understand the processesthat power stars, but by nothing elsein the universe.
Good political institutions are thosethat make it as easy as possible todetect whether a ruler or policy is amistake, and to remove rulers orpolicies without violence when theyare.
Objective knowledge is indeedpossible: it comes from within. Itbegins as conjecture, and is thencorrected by repeated cycles ofcriticism, including comparison withthe evidence.
Privacy is the foundation of freesocieties.
Audit is backward-looking, andcreating a complete picture of acompany's financial health by lookingat periodic financial statements islike turning a hamburger into a cow.
Bitcoin or other digital currencyisn't saved in a file somewhere; it'srepresented by transactions recordedin a blockchain—kind of like a globalspreadsheet or ledger.
Technological innovation is moredriven by excess, exuberance, andirrationality than by cost-benefitanalyses, rational calculation, andcareful and deliberate planning.
Given that markets and technologicalsystems are too complex and dynamic tofully quantify, top-downcentralization is often doomed tofail, because information is moreoften distributed from the bottom upand at the edges of the system.
There is still a tendency to regardany existing government interventionas desirable, to attribute all evilsto the market, and to evaluate newproposals for government control intheir ideal form, as they might workif run by able, disinterested men freefrom the pressure of special interestgroups.
The power to do good is also the powerto do harm; those who control thepower today may not tomorrow; and,more important, what one man regardsas good, another may regard as harm.
Concentrated power is not renderedharmless by the good intentions ofthose who create it.
A major source of objection to a freeeconomy is precisely that it givespeople what they want instead of whata particular group thinks they oughtto want.
History only suggests that capitalismis a necessary condition for politicalfreedom. Clearly it is not asufficient condition.
The role of government just consideredis to do something that the marketcannot do for itself, namely, todetermine, arbitrate, and enforce therules of the game.
It is a mark of the political freedomof a capitalist society that men canopenly advocate and work forsocialism.
The nineteenth-century liberalregarded an extension of freedom asthe most effective way to promotewelfare and equality; thetwentieth-century liberal regardswelfare and equality as eitherprerequisites of or alternatives tofreedom.
The great tragedy of the drive tocentralization, as of the drive toextend the scope of government ingeneral, is that it is mostly led bymen of goodwill who will be the firstto rue its consequences.
In all those cases, in accordance withthe theme of this book, increases ineconomic freedom have gone hand inhand with increases in political andcivil freedom and have led toincreased prosperity; competitivecapitalism and freedom have beeninseparable.
No system of government, no economicsystem, no currency, and no empirelasts forever, yet almost everyone issurprised and ruined when they fail.
History has shown that we shouldn'trely on governments to protect usfinancially. On the contrary, weshould expect most governments toabuse their privileged positions asthe creators and users of money andcredit for the same reasons that youmight commit those abuses if you werein their shoes.
Debt eats equity but central banks canfeed debt by printing money instead.
As I studied history, I saw that ittypically transpires via relativelywell-defined life cycles, like thoseof organisms, that evolve as eachgeneration transitions to the next.
Taoism teaches that it is of paramountimportance to live in harmony with thelaws of nature.
All that matters is that you aremaking something you love, to the bestof your ability, here and now.
If you have an idea you're excitedabout and you don't bring it to life,it's not uncommon for the idea to findits voice through another maker. Thisisn't because the other artist stoleyour idea, but because the idea's timehas come.
Living life as an artist is apractice. You are either engaging inthe practice or you're not. It makesno sense to say you're not good at it.It's like saying, 'I'm not good atbeing a monk.' We tend to think of theartist's work as the output. The realwork of the artist is a way of beingin the world.
Look for what you notice but no oneelse sees.
We're not playing to win, we'replaying to play. And ultimately,playing is fun. Perfectionism gets inthe way of fun. A more skillful goalmight be to find comfort in theprocess.
Zoom in and obsess. Zoom out andobserve. We get to choose.
In terms of priority, inspirationcomes first. You come next. Theaudience comes last.
Turning something from an idea into areality can make it seem smaller. Itchanges from unearthly to earthly. Theimagination has no limits. Thephysical world does. The work existsin both.
As artists, we seek to restore ourchildlike perception: a more innocentstate of wonder and appreciation nottethered to utility or survival.
Retirement meant that you werespending the money you had saved up;independence meant that all you werespending was just the interest on yourmoney. It was as if your contributionto society were complete, and you hadfulfilled your debt to this world andcould now peacefully live off theproceeds of your work until the end oftime.
The main power struggle was basicallybetween the business guys and thedevelopers over profits for themselvesversus tools to help others, greedversus altruism. This played out as adebate over whether to structureEthereum as a traditional for-profitstart-up or a decentralized network.
DeFi is unique relative to thetraditional financial system becauseit is permissionless, open access,global, composable, and transparent.No longer are centralized institutionsneeded for basic financial actions.
Given it costs no more to provideservices to a customer with $100 or$100 million in assets, we believethat DeFi will replace all meaningfulcentralized financial infrastructurein the future.
DeFi is fundamentally a competitivemarketplace of decentralized financialapplications that function as variousfinancial 'primitives' such asexchange, save, lend, and tokenize.
The tycoons of social media have tostop pretending that they're friendlynerd gods building a better world andadmit they're just tobacco farmers inT-shirts selling an addictive productto children. Because, let's face it,checking your "likes" is the newsmoking.
Digital minimalism: a philosophy oftechnology use in which you focus youronline time on a small number ofcarefully selected and optimizedactivities that strongly supportthings you value, and then happilymiss out on everything else.
Simply put, humans are not wired to beconstantly wired.
Solitude deprivation: a state in whichyou spend close to zero time alonewith your own thoughts and free frominput from other minds.
The urge to check Twitter or refreshReddit becomes a nervous twitch thatshatters uninterrupted time intoshards too small to support thepresence necessary for an intentionallife.
Digital minimalism definitively doesnot reject the innovations of theinternet age, but instead rejects theway so many people currently engagewith these tools.
Where we want to be cautious is whenthe sound of a voice or a cup ofcoffee with a friend is replaced with'likes' on a post.
The world clings to its old mentalpicture of the stock market becauseit's comforting; because it's so hardto draw a picture of what has replacedit; and because the few people able todraw it for you have no interest indoing so.
When something becomes obvious to you,you immediately think surely someoneelse is doing this.
Shining a light creates shadows.
Every systemic market injustice arosefrom some loophole in a regulationcreated to correct some priorinjustice.
The best way to manage people, hethought, was to convince them that youwere good for their careers. Hefurther believed that the only way toget people to believe that you weregood for their careers was actually tobe good for their careers.
It was like a broken slot machine inthe casino that pays off every time.It would keep paying off until someonesaid something about it; but no onewho played the slot machine had anyinterest in pointing out that it wasbroken.
The U.S. stock market was now a classsystem, rooted in speed, of haves andhave-nots. The haves paid fornanoseconds; the have-nots had no ideathat a nanosecond had value.
Heroes are heroes because they areheroic in behavior, not because theywon or lost.
Reality is far more vicious thanRussian roulette. First, it deliversthe fatal bullet rather infrequently,like a revolver that would havehundreds, even thousands of chambersinstead of six. After a few dozentries, one forgets about the existenceof a bullet, under a numbing falsesense of security.
Probability is not a mere computationof odds on the dice or morecomplicated variants; it is theacceptance of the lack of certainty inour knowledge and the development ofmethods for dealing with ourignorance.
Those who were unlucky in life inspite of their skills would eventuallyrise. The lucky fool might havebenefited from some luck in life; overthe longer run he would slowlyconverge to the state of a less-luckyidiot.
No matter how sophisticated ourchoices, how good we are at dominatingthe odds, randomness will have thelast word.
A mistake is not something to bedetermined after the fact, but inlight of the information availableuntil that point.
Mild success can be explainable byskills and labor. Wild success isattributable to variance.
My lesson from Soros is to start everymeeting at my boutique by convincingeveryone that we are a bunch of idiotswho know nothing and aremistake-prone, but happen to beendowed with the rare privilege ofknowing it.
When things go our way we reject thelack of certainty.
We favor the visible, the embedded,the personal, the narrated, and thetangible; we scorn the abstract.
The epiphany I had in my career inrandomness came when I understood thatI was not intelligent enough, norstrong enough, to even try to fight myemotions.
There's no point in looking forhundred-dollar bills in the street.Why? Because, were there anyhundred-dollar bills, someone wouldalready have picked them up.
One portfolio is better than anotherone when it offers higher mean returnfor a given level of volatility—or alower volatility for a given level ofreturn.
A smart investor should understandwhere he has an edge and invest onlyin those opportunities.
A lot of times, the question is harderthan the answer, and if you canproperly phrase the question, then theanswer is the easy part.
We'd also find that fraudsters werekind of lazy, right? They want to dojust the least amount of work. So wejust kind of hoped to push them offonto our competitors.
If the team hadn't closed that onehundred million, there would be noSpaceX, no LinkedIn, and no Tesla.
As hire As. Bs hire Cs.
Don't follow your passion, follow yourtalent. Determine what you are good at(early), and commit to becoming greatat it. You don't have to love it, justdon't hate it. If practice takes youfrom good to great, the recognitionand compensation you will command willmake you start to love it.
People who received a great deal ofattention for their looks at a youngage are more likely to opt forcosmetic procedures when older. It'sthe same in business.
Failure and invention are inseparabletwins. To invent you have toexperiment, and if you know in advancethat it's going to work, it's not anexperiment.
Expect that a certain amount offailure is out of your control, andrecognize you may need to endure it ormove on.
The ultimate gift, in our digital age,is a CEO who has the storytellingtalent to capture the imagination ofthe markets while surroundingthemselves with people who can showincremental progress against thatvision each day.
It is conventional wisdom that SteveJobs put 'a dent in the universe.' No,he didn't. People who get up everymorning, get their kids dressed, getthem to school, and have an irrationalpassion for their kids' well-being,dent the universe.
Luxury is irrational, which makes itthe best business in the world. In2016 Estée Lauder was worth more thanthe world's largest communicationsfirm, WPP. Richemont, owner of Cartierand Van Cleef & Arpels, was worth morethan T-Mobile. LVMH commands morevalue than Goldman Sachs.
It seems impossible until it isn't.
When people asked Sam for his time,they assumed they'd posed a yes or noquestion, and the noises Sam madealways sounded more like 'yes' thanlike 'no.' They didn't know thatinside Sam's mind was a dial, withzero on one end and one hundred on theother. All he had done, when he saidyes, was to assign some non-zeroprobability to the proposed use of histime.
A guy from Blackstone, the world'sbiggest private investment firm,called Sam to say that he thought avaluation of $20 billion was toohigh—and that Blackstone would investat a valuation of $15 billion. 'Samsaid, If you think it is too high,I'll let you short a billion of ourstock at a valuation of twentybillion.'
Effective altruism never got itsemotional charge from the places thatcharged ordinary philanthropy. Whatmattered was the math.
That's it for crypto explanations forthe moment, as that's about all thatSam Bankman-Fried knew about crypto,or for that matter needed to know, totrade billions of dollars' worth ofit.
Don't walk into a place like you wannabuy it, walk in like you own it.
I believe the truth is only offensivewhen we're lying.
I have a lot of proof that the worldis conspiring to make me happy.
We cannot fully appreciate the lightwithout the shadows. We have to bethrown off balance to find ourfooting. It's better to jump thanfall. And here I am.
We all have scars, we gonna have more.Rather than struggle against time andwaste it, let's dance with time andredeem it. Cause we don't live longerwhen we try not to die. We live longerwhen we are too busy living.
I never wrote things down to remember;I always wrote things down so I couldforget.
I'm not perfect; no, I step in shitall the time and recognize it when Ido. I've just learned how to scrape itoff my boots and carry on.
Persist, pivot, or concede. It's up tous, our choice every time.
Sometimes which choice you make is notas important as making a choice andcommitting to it.
Don't create imaginary constraints.Who are we to think we don't deservethese fortunes when they're in ourgrasp? Who are we to think we haven'tearned them? If we stay and processwithin ourselves, in the joy of thedoing, we will never choke at thefinish line.
There are many ways to win athardball, and every winner has his ownstyle of play.
Hardball leaders think of themselvesas being in a perpetual turnaround.Even if the company is alreadysuccessful, they continue to try tomake it better, to find new sources ofcompetitive advantage, answer newthreats, serve new markets, or solvewhatever new challenges arise.
Hardball players have an intellectualtoughness that enables them to facefacts and see reality. They are alwaysdissatisfied with the status quo, nomatter how fine things may seem, andthey have the will to catalyze change.They're tough, but they're notbullies.
Make all efforts fast, focused, andfundamental. Every project undertakenin a turnaround should deliverpayback—demonstrable andquantifiable—in twelve to eighteenmonths.
I think we need more math majors whodon't become mathematicians. More mathmajor doctors, more math major highschool teachers, more math major CEOs,more math major senators. But we won'tget there unless we dump thestereotype that math is onlyworthwhile for kid geniuses.
A basic rule of mathematical life: ifthe universe hands you a hard problem,try to solve an easier one instead,and hope the simple version is closeenough to the original problem thatthe universe doesn't object.
Knowing mathematics is like wearing apair of X-ray specs that reveal hiddenstructures underneath the messy andchaotic surface of the world.
Working an integral or performing alinear regression is something acomputer can do quite effectively.Understanding whether the result makessense—or deciding whether the methodis the right one to use in the firstplace—requires a guiding human hand. Amath course that fails to do so isessentially training the student to bea very slow, buggy version ofMicrosoft Excel.
Dividing one number by another is merecomputation; knowing what to divide bywhat is mathematics.
Improbable things happen a lot.
A mathematician is always asking,'What assumptions are you making? Andare they justified?'
One of the most painful parts ofteaching mathematics is seeingstudents damaged by the cult of thegenius. The genius cult tells studentsit's not worth doing mathematicsunless you're the best at mathematics,because those special few are the onlyones whose contributions matter.
If gambling is exciting, you're doingit wrong.
Genius is a thing that happens, not akind of person.
Silicon Valley has always been equalparts egghead libertarianism andacid-tinged hippie romanticism. Forthe libertarians the Internet wasgreat because it had few rules and nogovernance. For the hippies, theInternet promised free expression anda democratization of ideas.
They thought they'd make revenues frompeople making purchases. But theydiscovered people were less interestedin shopping on the service thancommunicating. And they didn't knowhow to charge for communications.
Netscape did not originate theobsession with platforms, but it wouldprovide the template.
The inventors of JavaScript neverintended for someone to build Gmail,or Facebook or Bitcoin wallets on topof it. We don't know what people willbuild on top of Ethereum, but the ideais that they will be decentralized andunstoppable applications.
Ethereum isn't only a network for itsdigital currency, ether. It's meant tobe the base layer for developers tobuild whatever application they candream of, including issuing their owncoin.
Ethereum wasn't just another Bitcoinproject. It was the most ambitiouscryptocurrency project since Bitcoin.
Proof-of-work is aimed at deterringattacks or spam in a network byrequiring the users of the service todo some work, so that it would beeconomically inviable to createuseless or malicious data.
Your body is not a temple, it's anamusement park. Enjoy the ride.
Do we really want to travel inhermetically sealed popemobilesthrough the rural provinces of France,Mexico and the Far East, eating onlyin Hard Rock Cafes and McDonalds? Ordo we want to eat without fear,tearing into the local stew, thehumble taqueria's mystery meat, thesincerely offered gift of a lightlygrilled fish head? I know what I want.I want it all. I want to tryeverything once.
No one understands and appreciates theAmerican Dream of hard work leading tomaterial rewards better than anon-American.
Skills can be taught. Character youeither have or you don't have.
Don't lie about it. You made amistake. Admit it and move on. Justdon't do it again. Ever.
Good food is very often, even mostoften, simple food.
Assume the worst. About everybody. Butdon't let this poisoned outlook affectyour job performance. Let it all rolloff your back. Ignore it. Be amused bywhat you see and suspect.
I've long believed that good food,good eating, is all about risk.Whether we're talking aboutunpasteurized Stilton, raw oysters orworking for organized crime'associates,' food, for me, has alwaysbeen an adventure.
Garlic is divine. Avoid at all coststhat vile spew you see rotting in oilin screwtop jars. Too lazy to peelfresh? You don't deserve to eatgarlic.
It's been an adventure. We took somecasualties over the years. Things gotbroken. Things got lost. But Iwouldn't have missed it for the world.
Those who know don't tell and thosewho tell don't know.
The men on the trading floor may nothave been to school, but they havePh.D.'s in man's ignorance.
He was blessed with an unconventionalmind, which overcame his conventionalmiddle-class upbringing.
I thought instead of a good rule forsurvival on Wall Street: Never agreeto anything proposed on someone else'sboat or you'll regret it in themorning.
The first thing you learn on thetrading floor is that when largenumbers of people are after the samecommodity, be it a stock, a bond, or ajob, the commodity quickly becomesovervalued.
If there was a single lesson I tookaway from Salomon Brothers, it is thatrarely do all parties win. The natureof the game is zero sum.
Risk, I had learned, was a commodityin itself.
A study by the Bank for InternationalSettlements, which systematicallyexamines the experience of 34countries over the past 40 years,finds that rapid debt growth is thesingle best leading indicator offinancial crises.
In the abstract, life is a mixture ofchance and choice. Chance can bethought of as the cards you are dealtin life. Choice is how you play them.
Life is like reading a novel orrunning a marathon. It's not so muchabout reaching a goal but rather aboutthe journey itself and the experiencesalong the way.
To beat the market, focus oninvestments well within your knowledgeand ability to evaluate, your 'circleof competence.' Be sure yourinformation is current, accurate, andessentially complete. Finally, don'tbet on an investment unless you candemonstrate by logic, and ifappropriate by track record, that youhave an edge.
This phenomenon has been called thewisdom of crowds. But like mostsimplifications, this has a flip side.I call the flip side to the wisdom ofcrowds the lunacy of lemmings.
Work with the smartest people you can,hopefully smarter than you. Bepersistent, don't give up easily. Beguided by beauty. It can be the way acompany runs, or the way an experimentcomes out, or the way a theorem comesout, but there's a sense of beautywhen something is working well, almostan aesthetic to it.
We're right 50.75 percent of the time,but we're 100 percent right 50.75percent of the time. You can makebillions that way.
Simons and his team are among the mostsecretive traders Wall Street hasencountered, loath to drop even a hintof how they'd conquered financialmarkets, lest a competitor seize onany clue.
Scientists and mathematicians aretrained to dig below the surface ofthe chaotic, natural world to searchfor unexpected simplicity, structure,and even beauty.
Any time you hear financial expertstalking about how the market went upbecause of such and such—remember it'sall nonsense.
It's one thing to have good ideas,it's another to recognize when othersdo.
Everything can be taken from a man butone thing: the last of the humanfreedoms—to choose one's attitude inany given set of circumstances, tochoose one's own way.
When we are no longer able to change asituation, we are challenged to changeourselves.
But there was no need to be ashamed oftears, for tears bore witness that aman had the greatest of courage, thecourage to suffer.
In some ways suffering ceases to besuffering at the moment it finds ameaning, such as the meaning of asacrifice.
So live as if you were living alreadyfor the second time and as if you hadacted the first time as wrongly as youare about to act now!
No man should judge unless he askshimself in absolute honesty whether ina similar situation he might not havedone the same.
Skepticism and pessimism aren'tsynonymous. Skepticism calls forpessimism when optimism is excessive.But it also calls for optimism whenpessimism is excessive.
The three stages of a bull market: thefirst stage, when only a few unusuallyperceptive people believe things willget better; the second stage, whenmost investors realize thatimprovement is actually taking place;and the third stage, when everyoneconcludes things will get betterforever.
The superior investor is mature,rational, analytical, objective andunemotional.
There are three ingredients forsuccess—aggressiveness, timing andskill—and if you have enoughaggressiveness at the right time, youdon't need that much skill.
Like so many other things in theinvestment world that might be triedon the basis of certitude andprecision, waiting for the bottom tostart buying is a great example offolly. So if targeting the bottom iswrong, when should you buy? Theanswer's simple: when price is belowintrinsic value.
It follows that risk is high wheninvestors feel risk is low. And riskcompensation is at a minimum just whenrisk is at a maximum, meaning riskcompensation is most needed. So muchfor the rational investor.
The safest and most rewarding time tobuy usually comes when everyone isconvinced there's no hope.
In investing, there is nothing thatalways works, since the environment isalways changing, and investors'efforts to respond to the environmentcause it to change further.
Success doesn't lie in being right,but rather in being more right thanothers. One doesn't have to be rightin order to be successful: just lesswrong than others.
The brain highlights what it imaginesas patterns; it disregardscontradictory information. Humannature yearns to see order andhierarchy in the world. It will inventit where it cannot find it.
For a complex natural shape, dimensionis relative. It varies with theobserver. The same object can havemore than one dimension, depending onhow you measure it.
Stock prices are not independent.Today's action can, at least slightly,affect tomorrow's action. The standardmodel is, again, wrong.
The Efficient Market Hypothesis is nomore than that, a hypothesis. Many agrand theory has died under theonslaught of real data.
A key point in my work: randomness hasmore than one state, or form. One isthe most familiar and manageable formof chance, which I call mild. It isthe randomness of a coin toss, thestatic of a badly tuned radio.
At the opposite extreme is what I callwild randomness. This is far moreirregular, more unpredictable. It isthe variation of the Cornishcoastline—savage promontories, craggyrocks, and unexpectedly calm bays. Thefluctuation from one value to the nextis limitless and frightening.
Capitalism works only wheninstitutions are forced to absorb theconsequences of the risks that theytake on. When banks can pocket theupside while spreading the cost oftheir failures, failure is almostcertain.
All new markets are inefficient atfirst.
Let specialists obsess about minutiae.Soros's motto was 'Invest first,investigate later.'
Because they mark all their assets tomarket and live in constant fear ofmargin calls from their brokers, hedgefunds generally monitor risk betterand recognize setbacks faster thanrivals.
Every evening I would close my eyes ina quiet place in my apartment. I wouldvisualize the opening and walk myselfthrough the day and imagine thedifferent emotional states the marketwould go through. Then when you getthere, you are ready for it. You havebeen there before.
I like to say, 'Experience is what yougot when you didn't get what youwanted.'
There are old investors, and there arebold investors, but there are no oldbold investors.
Investment success doesn't come from'buying good things,' but rather from'buying things well.'
'Prices are too high' is far fromsynonymous with 'the next move will bedownward.' Things can be overpricedand stay that way for a long time, orbecome far more so.
Being too far ahead of your time isindistinguishable from being wrong.
There's a big difference betweenprobability and outcome. Probablethings fail to happen—and improbablethings happen—all the time.
We have to practice defensiveinvesting, since many of the outcomesare likely to go against us.
Investing is a popularity contest, andthe most dangerous thing is to buysomething at the peak of itspopularity.
Here's the key to understanding risk:it's largely a matter of opinion.
There's only one way to describe mostinvestors: trend followers. Superiorinvestors are the exact opposite.
Narratives are major vectors of rapidchange in culture, in zeitgeist, andin economic behavior.
We need to incorporate the contagionof narratives into economic theory.Otherwise, we remain blind to a veryreal, very palpable, very importantmechanism for economic change, as wellas a crucial element for economicforecasting.
Trying to understand major economicevents by looking only at data onchanges in economic aggregates, suchas gross domestic product, wage rates,interest rates, and tax rates, runsthe risk of missing the underlyingmotivations for change.
Rumor is the ancient Latin word forcontagious narrative.
A network state is a social networkwith a moral innovation, a sense ofnational consciousness, a recognizedfounder, a capacity for collectiveaction, an in-person level ofcivility, an integratedcryptocurrency, a consensualgovernment limited by a social smartcontract, an archipelago ofcrowdfunded physical territories, avirtual capital, and an on-chaincensus that proves a large enoughpopulation, income, and real-estatefootprint to attain a measure ofdiplomatic recognition.
The short version is that if a techcompany is about technologicalinnovation first, and company culturesecond, a startup society is thereverse. It's about community culturefirst, and technological innovationsecond.
The libertarian cycle starts with agroup of ideological libertarians thatend up building a bureaucratic state.
The mere existence of successfulparallel systems in Taiwan, Hong Kong,and especially Singapore is what droveDeng Xiaoping to adopt capitalism.
The River is a sprawling ecosystem oflike-minded people that includeseveryone from low-stakes poker prosjust trying to grind out a living tocrypto kings and venture-capitalbillionaires. It is a way of thinkingand a mode of life.
Treat other people as intelligent andcapable of reasonable strategicbehavior. The world is dynamic, andalthough people may not be strictlyrational, they're usually smart aboutadapting to their situation andachieving the things that matter mostto them. Play the long game.
Successful risk-takers take araise-or-fold attitude toward life.They abhor mediocrity and they knowwhen to quit.
A bet is a tax on bullshit.
In my whole life, I have known no wisepeople (over a broad subject matterarea) who didn't read all the time —none, zero.
Spend each day trying to be a littlewiser than you were when you woke up.
How to find a good spouse? The bestsingle way is to deserve a goodspouse.
Acquire worldly wisdom and adjust yourbehavior accordingly. If your newbehavior gives you a little temporaryunpopularity with your peer group,then to hell with them.
It takes character to sit with allthat cash and to do nothing. I didn'tget to where I am by going aftermediocre opportunities.
The best armour of old age is a wellspent life perfecting it.
I think that, every time you see theword EBITDA, you should substitute thewords 'bullshit earnings.'
It's the work on your desk. Do wellwith what you already have and morewill come in.
It is the nature of theventure-capital game that mostattempts at discovery fail, but a veryfew succeed at such a scale that theymore than make up for everything else.That extreme ratio of success andfailure is the power law that drivesthe VC business, all of SiliconValley, the wider tech sector, and, byextension, the world.
You succeed in venture capital bybacking the right deals, not byhaggling over valuations.
Investors who focus on currencies,bonds, and stock markets generallyassume a normal distribution of pricechanges: values jiggle up and down,but extreme moves are unusual.
Thiel had the guts to act on hisunderstanding of the power law bybetting big at the right moments.Because only a handful of startupswould grow exponentially, there was nopoint getting excited aboutopportunities that seemed merelysolid; in venture, the medianinvestment was a failure.
Through an evolutionary process oftrial, failure, and occasionalbreakthroughs, the group may advancefaster than the individual.
As Bastiat understood, a very low rateof interest may benefit the rich, whohave access to credit, more than thepoor.
When interest rates are pushed toolow, credit takes off and badinvestments ('malinvestment') abound.
The most encompassing view of interestis contained in the notion of interestas the 'time value of money'.
If you're not failing, you're notpushing your limits, and if you're notpushing your limits, you're notmaximizing your potential.
I learned that if you work hard andcreatively, you can have just aboutanything you want, but not everythingyou want. Maturity is the ability toreject good alternatives in order topursue even better ones.
Look for people who have lots of greatquestions. Smart people are the oneswho ask the most thoughtful questions,as opposed to thinking they have allthe answers. Great questions are amuch better indicator of futuresuccess than great answers.
The happiest people discover their ownnature and match their life to it.
Having the basics—a good bed to sleepin, good relationships, good food, andgood sex—is most important, and thosethings don't get much better when youhave a lot of money or much worse whenyou have less.
Listening to uninformed people isworse than having no answers at all.
I just want to be right—I don't careif the right answer comes from me.
Every time you confront somethingpainful, you are at a potentiallyimportant juncture in your life—youhave the opportunity to choose healthyand painful truth or unhealthy butcomfortable delusion.
If you can't successfully dosomething, don't think you can tellothers how it should be done.
I saw that to do exceptionally wellyou have to push your limits and that,if you push your limits, you willcrash and it will hurt a lot. You willthink you have failed—but that won'tbe true unless you give up.
Because our educational system is hungup on precision, the art of being goodat approximations is insufficientlyvalued. This impedes conceptualthinking.
Hobbies are what the smartest peoplespend time on when they aren'tconstrained by near-term financialgoals. I like to say that what thesmartest people do on the weekends iswhat everyone else will do during theweek in ten years.
We wanted flying cars, instead we gotZoom.
In these systems, money and power flowto the network center, to companiesthat own the networks, and away fromusers and developers at the networkedges.
The real potential in usingblockchains is to build betternetworks, and therefore a betterinternet.
The nature of the game as it is playedis such that the public should realizethat the truth cannot be told by thefew who know.
There is nothing like losing all youhave in the world for teaching youwhat not to do. And when you know whatnot to do in order not to lose money,you begin to learn what to do in orderto win.
The sucker has always tried to getsomething for nothing, and the appealin all booms is always frankly to thegambling instinct aroused by cupidityand spurred by a pervasive prosperity.
A man cannot be convinced against hisown convictions, but he can be talkedinto a state of uncertainty andindecision, which is even worse, forthat means that he cannot trade withconfidence and comfort.
That is about all I have learned—tostudy general conditions, to take aposition and stick to it.
A stock operator has to fight a lot ofexpensive enemies within himself.
Men who can both be right and sittight are uncommon. I found it one ofthe hardest things to learn. But it isonly after a stock operator has firmlygrasped this that he can make bigmoney.
I am the prodigal son every time Isearch for unconditional love where itcannot be found.
Resentment and gratitude cannotcoexist, since resentment blocks theperception and experience of life as agift.
The question is not 'How am I to findGod?' but 'How am I to let myself befound by him?'
Here the mystery of life is unveiled:I am loved so much that I am left freeto leave home. The blessing is therefrom the beginning.
God's vision is not that of astereotypical landowner but ratherthat of an all-giving and forgivingfather who does not measure out hislove to his children according to howwell they behave.
Champions behave like champions beforethey're champions; they have a winningstandard of performance before theyare winners.
A good leader is always learning. Thegreat leaders start learning young andcontinue until their last breath.
For me the starting point foreverything—before strategy, tactics,theories, managing, organizing,philosophy, methodology, talent, orexperience—is work ethic.
Here's a good question to write on aPost-it Note and put on your desk:'What assets do we have right now thatwe're not taking advantage of?'
Others follow you based on the qualityof your actions rather than themagnitude of your declarations.
Constructive criticism is a powerfulinstrument essential for improvingperformance. Positive support can beequally productive. Used together by askilled leader they become the key tomaximum results.
The culture precedes positive results.It doesn't get tacked on as anafterthought on your way to thevictory stand.
Like water, many decent individualswill seek lower ground if left totheir own inclinations.
Brevity is confidence. Length is fear.
Never in the history of humanity havewe vomited more words in more placeswith more velocity.
If there is one thing you take awayfrom this book, it is this: learn toidentify and trumpet ONE thing youwant people to know. And do it in ONEstrong sentence. Or no one will everremember it.
Write—then go back and kill at leasthalf the words. It winds up sharperevery time.
To dare a thought is to risk beingwrong.
Incomes will become more unequalwithin jurisdictions and more equalbetween them.
The basic causes of change areprecisely those that are not subjectto conscious control.
Governments will ultimately havelittle choice but to treat populationsin territories they serve more likecustomers, and less in the way thatorganized criminals treat the victimsof a shakedown racket.
The cybereconomy, rather than China,could well be the greatest economicphenomenon of the next thirty years.
The idea of property emerged as aninevitable consequence of farming.
Other things being equal, the morewidely dispersed key technologies are,the more widely dispersed power willbe, and the smaller the optimum scaleof government.
When technology is mobile, andtransactions occur in cyberspace, asthey increasingly will do, governmentswill no longer be able to charge morefor their services than they are worthto the people who pay for them.
Faster than all but a few now imagine,microprocessing will subvert anddestroy the nation-state, creating newforms of social organization in theprocess.
The most important causes of changeare not to be found in politicalmanifestos or in the pronouncements ofdead economists, but in the hiddenfactors that alter the boundarieswhere power is exercised. Often,subtle changes in climate, topography,microbes, and technology alter thelogic of violence.
For superforecasters, beliefs arehypotheses to be tested, not treasuresto be guarded.
For scientists, not knowing isexciting. It's an opportunity todiscover; the more that is unknown,the greater the opportunity.
Consensus is not always good;disagreement not always bad. If you dohappen to agree, don't take thatagreement—in itself—as proof that youare right. Never stop doubting.
If you have to plan for a futurebeyond the forecasting horizon, planfor surprise. That means planning foradaptability and resilience.
It was the absence of doubt—andscientific rigor—that made medicineunscientific and caused it to stagnatefor so long.
What makes a decision great is notthat it has a great outcome. A greatdecision is the result of a goodprocess, and that process must includean attempt to accurately represent ourown state of knowledge. That state ofknowledge, in turn, is some variationof 'I'm not sure.'
In most of our decisions, we are notbetting against another person.Rather, we are betting against all thefuture versions of ourselves that weare not choosing.
Improving decision quality is aboutincreasing our chances of goodoutcomes, not guaranteeing them.
Thinking in bets starts withrecognizing that there are exactly twothings that determine how our livesturn out: the quality of our decisionsand luck. Learning to recognize thedifference between the two is whatthinking in bets is all about.
Despite the popular wisdom that weachieve success through positivevisualization, it turns out thatincorporating negative visualizationmakes us more likely to achieve ourgoals.
The secret is to make peace withwalking around in a world where werecognize that we are not sure andthat's okay.
Even research communities of highlyintelligent and well-meaningindividuals can fall prey toconfirmation bias, as IQ is positivelycorrelated with the number of reasonspeople find to support their own sidein an argument.
Outcomes don't tell us what's ourfault and what isn't, what we shouldtake credit for and what we shouldn't.Unlike in chess, we can't simply workbackward from the quality of theoutcome to determine the quality ofour beliefs or decisions.
Truthseeking, the desire to know thetruth regardless of whether the truthaligns with the beliefs we currentlyhold, is not naturally supported bythe way we process information.Instead of altering our beliefs to fitnew information, we do the opposite,altering our interpretation of thatinformation to fit our beliefs.
Chess, for all its strategiccomplexity, isn't a great model fordecision-making in life, where most ofour decisions involve hiddeninformation and a much greaterinfluence of luck.
The rich get the assets, the poor getthe debt, and then the poor have topay their whole salary to the richevery year just to live in a house.The rich use that money to buy therest of the assets from the middleclass and then the problem gets worseevery year.
The best job a concert pianist can getnowadays is trader for Citibank. Itpays very well.
I'd believed it when the teachers backat school had told me: study hard anddo well in your exams and you will geta good job.
The more someone understands aboutfinance, the likelier it is that theywill have difficulty understandingcryptocurrency.
Our life is frittered away by detail.Simplify, simplify.
The cost of a thing is the amount oflife which must be exchanged for it.
Rather than love, than money, thanfame, give me truth.
I learned this, at least, by myexperiment: that if one advancesconfidently in the direction of hisdreams, and endeavors to live the lifewhich he has imagined, he will meetwith a success unexpected in commonhours.
I went to the woods because I wishedto live deliberately, to front onlythe essential facts of life, and seeif I could not learn what it had toteach, and not, when I came to die,discover that I had not lived.
I find it wholesome to be alone thegreater part of the time. To be incompany, even with the best, is soonwearisome and dissipating. I love tobe alone. I never found the companionthat was so companionable as solitude.
However mean your life is, meet it andlive it; do not shun it and call ithard names. It is not so bad as youare. It looks poorest when you arerichest. The fault-finder will findfaults even in paradise.
You can't ever reach perfection, butyou can believe in an asymptote towardwhich you are ceaselessly striving.
Human knowledge is never contained inone person. It grows from therelationships we create between eachother and the world, and still it isnever complete.
There is a moment, a cusp, when thesum of gathered experience is worndown by the details of living. We arenever so wise as when we live in thismoment.
Even if I'm dying, until I actuallydie, I am still living.
Science may provide the most usefulway to organize empirical,reproducible data, but its power to doso is predicated on its inability tograsp the most central aspects ofhuman life: hope, fear, love, hate,beauty, envy, honor, weakness,striving, suffering, virtue.
I began to realize that coming in suchclose contact with my own mortalityhad changed both nothing andeverything. Before my cancer wasdiagnosed, I knew that someday I woulddie, but I didn't know when. After thediagnosis, I knew that someday I woulddie, but I didn't know when. But now Iknew it acutely.
Lucy and I both felt that life wasn'tabout avoiding suffering.
The main message of Jesus, I believed,is that mercy trumps justice everytime.
Before operating on a patient's brain,I realized, I must first understandhis mind: his identity, his values,what makes his life worth living, andwhat devastation makes it reasonableto let that life end.
Every moment in business happens onlyonce. The next Bill Gates will notbuild an operating system. The nextLarry Page or Sergey Brin won't make asearch engine. And the next MarkZuckerberg won't create a socialnetwork. If you are copying theseguys, you aren't learning from them.
The best entrepreneurs know this:every great business is built around asecret that's hidden from the outside.A great company is a conspiracy tochange the world; when you share yoursecret, the recipient becomes a fellowconspirator.
All happy companies are different:each one earns a monopoly by solving aunique problem. All failed companiesare the same: they failed to escapecompetition.
What important truth do very fewpeople agree with you on?
The most valuable businesses of comingdecades will be built by entrepreneurswho seek to empower people rather thantry to make them obsolete.
Monopoly is the condition of everysuccessful business.
In the most dysfunctionalorganizations, signaling that work isbeing done becomes a better strategyfor career advancement than actuallydoing work.
If your goal is to never make amistake in your life, you shouldn'tlook for secrets. The prospect ofbeing lonely but right—dedicating yourlife to something that no one elsebelieves in—is already hard. Theprospect of being lonely and wrong canbe unbearable.