I tell my kids, what is the difference between a hero and a coward? What is the difference between being yellow and being brave? No difference. Only what you do. They both feel the same. They both fear dying and getting hurt. The man who is yellow refuses to face up to what he’s got to face. The hero is more disciplined and he fights those feelings off and he does what he has to do. But they both feel the same, the hero and the coward. People who watch you judge you on what you do, not how you feel.
It’s the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.
– Tom Stoppard, Arcadia
The things that everybody feels good about are likely to be the things that are high priced and the things that everybody feels bad about are likely to be low priced, so if you could find a stock that nobody thinks this company could ever have a good day, maybe there’s a chance that it could produce some favourable surprises and make you a lot of money.
We make money from favourable surprises, and if the positive conviction is so high, then by definition there can never be a favourable surprise.
When art critics get together they talk about form and structure and meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine.
You can turn any investment into a bad deal by paying too much. What you can’t do is turn something into a good deal by paying little.
It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science.
If you’re going to do anything new or different in the world, it is going to be misunderstood. Sometimes by well-meaning critics. Sometimes by self-interested critics. You’ll get all kinds. And it’s okay. It’s all part of the process. The only way to avoid criticism altogether is to be completely conventional in everything you do. So how do you respond the the criticism?… What’s the right thing to do? Well, I think the first thing you do is you ask: Are the critics right? You listen. You ask are they right? Or even if they’re not completely right, is there some piece of it that’s right that you can be inspired by? And then if you decide, by the way, that the answer is no—that you believe you have conviction that what you’re doing is the right course—then no force in the world should be able to move you. You should have a deep keel. But if you decide that there is something, then you should change.