Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I wanted to write about the transformative power of small acts of kindness. An old man falls in the street, you stop and make sure he's OK. Or even smaller acts than that, though - buying someone a cup of coffee, telling them their hair looks nice - sometimes you don't realise the transformative effect on people. I wanted to celebrate that.
What about the rat race in the first place? Is it worthwhile? Or are you just buying into someone else's definition of success? Only you can decide that, and you'll have to decide it over and over and over. But if you think it's a rat race, before you drop out, take a deep breath. Maybe you picked the wrong job. Try again. And then try again.
I kept on buying records and listening to them. Finally, I was able to hear the relationship between the jazz improvisers' solos and the underlying structure that it's based on, the chord progression. That was pretty easy to do in the swing era, y'know, when jazz was, like, pop music, you know. It had made the charts and everything like that.
2009 was one of the busiest, most insane, stressful periods in my entire career. I was raising a bunch of money, buying a bunch of Twitter. I saw my friend fired as CEO of Twitter. Uber was growing like a weed. As these companies get bigger and bigger, there's more and more friction. Being public was the last thing I wanted to do at the time.
I take my daughter to the San Mateo farmers market every Saturday morning, and despite repeated advice to the contrary, I usually do it on an empty stomach. Bad mistake. I wind up buying far more produce than our small family can eat within a week, which means I'm constantly trying to figure out ways to pack more vegetables into a single meal.
If a magazine proudly labels itself 'The Economist,' you would expect that publication to understand the economic burdens of today's youth. But when a tone-deaf writer at the magazine tweets an article asking 'Why aren't millennials buying diamonds,' it pretty much sums up how oblivious some can be in matters they're supposed to be experts in.
If I'm reading a script, and I'm not buying it, I need to be able to relate to the character on some level, and they need to have more than one dimension. I need to have an idea of what this guy's thinking about when he's taking a shower not on camera. And if I can't picture him taking a shower and getting dressed, then he's not a real person.
The investor has a right to expect good results to flow from a consistent and courageous application of the principle of buying after the market has declined substantially and selling after it has had a spectacular rise. But he cannot expect to reduce this principle to a simple and foolproof formula, with profits guaranteed and no anxious periods.
While we were saying all these things about taking care of our fellow men, we were flying around, eating meat, buying things, driving a car, having two homes. Then we realized that we of course are a huge part of the problem, in fact, we were part of the problem. Greta could not get around that, and it made her upset... She told us we had to change.
Buying a share of a good business is better than buying a share of a bad business. One way to do this is to purchase a business that can invest its own money at high rates of return rather than purchasing a business that can only invest at lower ones. In other words, businesses that earn a high return on capital are better than businesses that earn a low return on capital.
If you know how to value businesses, it's crazy to own 50 stocks or 40 stocks or 30 stocks, probably because there aren't that many wonderful businesses understandable to a single human being in all likelihood. To forego buying more of some super-wonderful business and instead put your money into #30 or #35 on your list of attractiveness just strikes Charlie and me as madness.
I can understand that an audience, buying a ticket to see a picture of mine, wants to see something funny because they feel confident that at least I have a fighting chance to make a funny film when I make a film, whereas if I make a dramatic film there's one chance in a thousand that it's really going to come out great, so I understand how they feel about that and they're completely right.
It is crucial to have a strategy in place before problems hit, precisely because no one can accurately predict the future direction of the stock market or economy. Value investing, the strategy of buying stocks at an appreciable discount from the value of the underlying businesses, is one strategy that provides a road map to successfully navigate not only through good times but also through turmoil.
