Intelligent Quotes

“So you have to figure out what your own aptitudes are. If you play games where other people have the aptitudes and you don’t, you’re going to lose. And that’s as close to certain as any prediction you can make. You have to figure out where you’ve got an edge. And you’ve got to play within your own circle of competence.”

“Invert, always invert”

“In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter) who didn’t read all the time—none, zero. You’d be amazed how much Warren reads—and at how much I read. My children laugh at me. They think I’m a book with a couple of legs sticking out.”

“Addiction can happen to any of us through a subtle process where the bonds of degradation are too light to be felt until when they are too strong to be broken.”

“The great defect of scale, of course, which makes the game interesting, so that the big people don’t always win—is that as you get big, you get the bureaucracy.”

“If you always tell people why, they’ll understand it better, they’ll consider it more important, and they’ll be more likely to comply. Even if they don’t understand your reason, they’ll be more likely to comply.”

“It is paradoxical and disturbing to us that economists have long praised foolish spending as a necessary ingredient of a successful economy.”

“If you don’t get elementary probability into your repertoire, you go through a long life like a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest.”

“You’re much more likely to do well if you start out to do something feasible instead of something that isn’t feasible. Isn’t that perfectly obvious?”

“I think track records are very important, If you start early trying to have a perfect one in some simple thing like honesty, you’re well on your way to success in this world.”

“You don’t need to take the last dollar.”

“I’m afraid that’s the way it [reality] is. If there are twenty factors and they interact some, you’ll have to learn to handle it—because that’s the way the world is. But you won’t find it that hard if you go at it Darwin-like, step by step with curious persistence. You’ll be amazed at how good you can get.”

“Mankind invented a system to cope with the fact that we are so intrinsically lousy at manipulating numbers. It’s called the graph.”

“If you want to change behaviors, you have to change motivations.”

“Biological creatures ordinarily prefer effort minimization in routine activities and don’t like removals of long-enjoyed benefits.”

“If you have competence, you pretty much know its boundaries already. To ask the question [of whether you are past the boundary] is to answer it.”

“Just as animals flourish in niches, people who specialize in the business world—and get very good because they specialize—frequently find good economics that they wouldn’t get any other way.”

“I am a biography nut myself. And I think when you’re trying to teach the great concepts that work, it helps to tie them into the lives and personalities of the people who developed them. I think you learn economics better if you make Adam Smith your friend. That sounds funny, making friends among the eminent dead, but if you go through life making friends with the eminent dead who had the right ideas, I think it will work better for you in life and work better in education. It’s way better than just giving the basic concepts.”

“At Harvard Business School, the great quantitative thing that bonds the first-year class together is what they call decision tree theory. All they do is take high school algebra and apply it to real-life problems. And the students love it. They’re amazed to find that high school algebra works in life.”

“As usual in human affairs, what determines the behavior are incentives for the decision-maker, and getting the incentives right is a very, very important lesson.”

“I find it quite useful to think of a free market economy—partly free market economy—as sort of the equivalent of an ecosystem. Just as animals flourish in niches, people who specialize in some narrow niche can do very well.”

“Our game is recognize a big idea when it comes along, when one doesn’t come along very often. Opportunity comes to the prepared mind.”

“Ideology does some strange things and distorts cognition terribly. If you get a lot of heavy ideology young, and then you start expressing it, you are really locking your brain into a very unfortunate pattern. And you are going to distort your general cognition.”

“The way to win is to work, work, work, work and hope to have a few insights. And you’re probably not going to be smart enough to find thousands in a lifetime. And when you get a few, you really load up. It’s just that simple.”

“The life of Darwin demonstrates how a turtle may outrun a hare, aided by extreme objectivity, which helps the objective person end up like the only player without a blindfold in a game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey.”

“Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up. Discharge your duties faithfully and well. Step by step you get ahead, but not necessarily in fast spurts. But you build discipline by preparing for fast spurts. Slug it out one inch at a time, day by day, and at the end of the day—if you live long enough—like most people, you will get out of life what you deserve.”

“Take a simple idea and take it seriously.”

“Choose clients as you would friends.”

“Capitalism works best when there is trust in the system.”

“If you took our top fifteen decisions out, we”d have a pretty average record. It wasn’t hyperactivity, but a hell of a lot of patience. You stuck to your principles and when opportunities came along, you pounced on them with vigor.”

“Trying to minimize taxes too much is one of the great standard causes of really dumb mistakes.”

“In business we often find that the winning system goes almost ridiculously far in maximizing and/or minimizing one or a few variables—like the discount warehourses of Costco.”

“Part of what you must learn is how to handle mistakes and new facts that change the odds. Life, in part, is like a poker game, wherein you have to learn to quit sometimes when holding a much-loved hand.”