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Invert. Always invert. Turn a situation or problem upside down. Look at it backward. What happens if all our plans go wrong? Where don’t we want to go, and how do you get there? Instead of looking for success, make a list of how to fail instead – through sloth, envy, resentment, self-pity, entitlement, all the mental habits of self-defeat. Avoid these qualities and you will succeed. Tell me where I’m going to die, that is, so I don’t go there…In other words, if you want to help India, the question you should ask is not, ‘How can I help India?’ It’s, ‘What is doing the worst damage in India?

– Charlie Munger

The single biggest factor that differentiates multi-billion dollar companies is a scalable advantage in customer acquisition costs.

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If you are a great person, why would you want to work for someone whom you can’t learn anything from? The best managers are great individual contributors who never, ever want to be a manager but decide they have to be a manager because no one is going to be able to do as good a job as them.

– Steve Jobs

The problem in deciding whether a scientific result or a new “innovation” is a breakthrough, that is, the opposite of noise, is that one needs to see all aspects of the idea—and there is always some opacity that time, and only time, can dissipate.

– Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile

If you want to succeed in the world, you don’t have to be much cleverer than other people. You just have to be one day earlier.

– Leo Szilard

He is a great man who uses earthenware dishes as if they were silver; but he is equally great who uses silver as if it were earthenware. It is the sign of an unstable mind not to be able to endure riches.

– Seneca

While enthusiasm may be necessary for great accomplishments elsewhere, on Wall Street it almost invariably leads to disaster.

– Benjamin Graham

People are often asking me what’s going to happen next in science that’s important, and of course, the whole point is that if it’s important, it’s something we didn’t expect. All the really important things come as a big surprise.

– Freeman Dyson

When I got back here in 1997, I was looking for more room, and I found an archive of old Macs and other stuff. I said, 'Get it away!' and I shipped all that shit off to Stanford. If you look backward in this business, you'll be crushed. You have to look forward.

– Steve Jobs