The telling of jokes is an art of its own, and it always rises from some emotional threat. The best jokes are dangerous, and dangerous because they are in some way truthful.
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Sewage
If you put a spoonful of wine in a barrel of sewage, you get sewage. If you put a spoonful of sewage in a barrel of wine, you get sewage.
Creating Wealth
Wealth is created… primarily by knowledge and cooperation: networks of people arrange matter into improbable but useful configurations and combine the fruits of their ingenuity and labor. The corollary is that we can figure out how to make more wealth.
– Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now
Illusions Make Us Feel Good
The nature of illusion is that it’s designed to make you feel good. About yourself, about your country, about where you’re going – in that sense it functions like a drug. Those who question that illusion are challenged not so much for the veracity of what they say, but for puncturing those feelings.
Don’t Get Off The Train
When you’re right about something, don’t get off the train…I think it might have been Peter Lynch who talked about that — that human tendency to want to, you know, sell your winner — pulling the flowers and watering the weeds.
Run The Marathon To Its Entirety
We had lived a life of austerity and become masters of our habits rather than slaves of our greed. We owed it to our families, youngsters in the company, the industry, society and finally, to ourselves to run this marathon to its entirety.
The Frontier Never Closes
It can sometimes feel that all the exciting things have already happened, that the frontier is closed, that we’re at the end of technological history and there’s nothing left to do but maintain what already exists. This is just a failure of imagination. In fact, the opposite is true. We’re surrounding by rotting incumbents that will all need to be replaced by new technologies. Let’s get on it.
Investing Is Identifying Mispricings
Success in gambling doesn’t go to those who pick winners, but to those with the ability to identify superior propositions. The goal is to find situations where the odds are generous to one side or the other, whether favorite or underdog. In other words, a mispricing. It’s exactly the same in investing. People often say to me, ‘XYZ is a great company with a bright future, so I bought the stock.’
They’re picking a favorite but ignoring the proposition. The former alone isn’t enough; they should consider the latter as well…. While in investing we generally aren’t offered explicit odds, the attractiveness of the proposition is established by the price of the asset, the ratio of the potential payoff to the amount risked, and what we perceive to be the chance of winning versus losing.