Principles: Life and Work
Rate it:
Open Preview
Started reading October 7, 2017
1%
Flag icon
Whatever success I’ve had in life has had more to do with my knowing how to deal with my not knowing than anything I know.
1%
Flag icon
Principles are fundamental truths that serve as the foundations for behavior that gets you what you want out of life. They can be applied again and again in similar situations to help you achieve your goals.
1%
Flag icon
Because we each have our own goals and our own natures, each of us must choose our own principles to match them. While it isn’t necessarily a bad thing to use others’ principles, adopting principles without giving them much thought can expose you to the risk of acting in ways inconsistent with your goals and your nature.
1%
Flag icon
People who have shared values and principles get along. People who don’t will suffer through constant misunderstandings and conflicts.
1%
Flag icon
learned principles that would prevent me from making the same sort of mistakes again, and changed and improved, which allowed me to imagine and go after even more audacious goals and do that rapidly and repeatedly for a long time.
1%
Flag icon
I believe that the key to success lies in knowing how to both strive for a lot and fail well.
1%
Flag icon
To make money in the markets, one needs to be an independent thinker who bets against the consensus and is right.
2%
Flag icon
My painful mistakes shifted me from having a perspective of “I know I’m right” to having one of “How do I know I’m right?”
2%
Flag icon
We believe that thoughtful, unemotional disagreement by independent thinkers can be converted into believability-weighted decision making that is smarter and more effective than the sum of its parts.
3%
Flag icon
I never understood what doing well in school would get me other than my mother’s approval.
3%
Flag icon
I’ve always been an independent thinker inclined to take risks in search of rewards—not just in the markets, but in most everything.
3%
Flag icon
I also feared boredom and mediocrity much more than I feared failure. For me, great is better than terrible, and terrible is better than mediocre, because terrible at least gives life flavor.
3%
Flag icon
That fall, I started at a local college, C. W. Post. I got in on probation because of my C average in high school. But unlike high school, I loved college because I could learn about things that interested me, not because I had to, so I got great grades. I also loved living away from home and having independence.
4%
Flag icon
In the spring of 1971, I graduated college with a nearly perfect grade point average, which got me into Harvard Business School.
4%
Flag icon
I’ve repeatedly seen policymakers deliver such assurances immediately before currency devaluations, so I learned not to believe government policymakers when they assure you that they won’t let a currency devaluation happen.
4%
Flag icon
I realized, was due to my being surprised by something that hadn’t happened in my lifetime, though it had happened many times before.
4%
Flag icon
The lesson? When everybody thinks the same thing—such as what a sure bet the Nifty 50 is—it is almost certainly reflected in the price, and betting on it is probably going to be a mistake.
5%
Flag icon
it taught me the importance of risk controls, because I never wanted to experience that pain again.
5%
Flag icon
For example, as a joke that now seems pretty stupid, I hired a stripper to drop her cloak while I was lecturing at a whiteboard at the California Grain & Feed Association’s annual convention. I also punched my boss in the face. Not surprisingly, I was fired.
5%
Flag icon
Song Yangyu
make sure u are useful 😀
5%
Flag icon
To me it all looked like a beautiful machine with logical cause-effect relationships.
5%
Flag icon
I will explain this approach in Economic and Investment Principles.
5%
Flag icon
It’s senseless to have making money as your goal as money has no intrinsic value—
6%
Flag icon
In the late 1970s, I began sending my observations about the markets to clients via telex. The genesis of these Daily Observations (“Grains and Oilseeds,” “Livestock and Meats,” “Economy and Financial Markets”) was pretty simple: While our primary business was in managing risk exposures, our clients also called to pick my brain about the markets. Taking those calls became time-consuming, so I decided it would be more efficient to write down my thoughts every day so others could understand my logic and help improve it.
6%
Flag icon
Song Yangyu
How principles genesis
6%
Flag icon
Around this time, McDonald’s had conceived of a new product, the Chicken McNugget, but they were reluctant to bring it to market because of their concern that chicken prices might rise and squeeze their profit margins. Chicken producers like Lane wouldn’t agree to sell to them at a fixed price because they were worried that their costs would go up and they would be squeezed.
6%
Flag icon
My ability to visualize these complex machines gave us a competitive edge against those who were shooting from the hip, and eventually changed the way these industries operated.