When it comes to coming up with ideas, it’s paralysing when you have too many options to choose from. When you have too much, ideas get complicated. They get watered down, and you overspend instead of think. That’s why we believe constraints are creativity’s best friend.
Because they make you think.
If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading, or do things worth writing.
A great deal of strategy work is trying to figure out what is going on. Not just deciding what to do, but the more fundamental problem of comprehending the situation.
This is not a field where one writes a Principia and it holds up for 200 years. This is not a field where one paints a painting that will be looked at for centuries…This is a field where one does one’s work and it’s obsolete in ten years, and really will not be usable in another ten to twenty years.
Your first impulse should always be to find the evidence that disconfirms your most cherished beliefs and those of others. That is true science.
– Robert Greene, The Laws Of Human Nature
There’s a certain irony in that we will — we would — do the best, over decades, if we operated in a market where people operated very foolishly. And the more people respond to short term events and exaggerated things or anything that causes people to get wildly enthusiastic or wildly depressed, actually, is what allows people to make lots of money in securities.
Why should I search for some tiny, unimportant, hard-to-find new stupidity in my own field when some large, important, easy-to-find stupidity was just over the fence in the other fellow’s professional territory?
A platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it, exceeds the value of the company that creates it. Then it’s a platform.
Skepticism and pessimism aren’t synonymous. Skepticism calls for pessimism when optimism is excessive. But it also calls for optimism when pessimism is excessive.