More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Before I begin telling you what I think,
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.
stage in my life in which I want to help others be successful rather than to be more successful myself.
Principles are fundamental truths that serve as the foundations for behavior that gets you what you want out of life.
own goals and our own natures,
I mean being able to experience painful failures that provide big learnings without failing badly enough to get knocked out of the game.
At the time, I couldn’t imagine ever laughing again. Now when I think of her I smile.
strong character, which I assume came from living through the Great Depression and fighting in both World War II and the Korean War.
John F. Kennedy, an intelligent, charismatic man who painted vivid pictures of changing the world for the better—exploring outer space, achieving equal rights, and eliminating poverty.
feared boredom and mediocrity much more than I feared failure.
renege
plummet.
Money as we’d known it—a claim check to get gold—no longer existed.
pandemonium.
“You better make sense of what happened to other people in other times and other places because if you don’t you won’t know if these things can happen to you and, if they do, you won’t know how to deal with them.”
Instead we were given actual case studies to read and analyze. Then we gathered in groups to thrash out what we would do if we were in the shoes of the people in those situations. This was my kind of school!
quadrupling
soared,
depreciated
defaulted.
Nifty 50
Watergate scandal
If I make any money from those trips, that’s just icing on the cake.
While making money was good, having meaningful work and meaningful relationships was far better.
money has no intrinsic value—its value comes from what it can buy, and it can’t buy everything.
research and reflect
Having greatly reduced its price risk, McDonald’s introduced the McNugget in 1983. I felt great about helping make that happen.
exacerbated
volatility
By early 1980, silver had gone to nearly $50,
in March 1980, silver crashed back down below $11.
respected his intellect and values, so I convinced him we should conquer that world together.
gold (which performs well in accelerating inflation) and bonds (which perform well in deflationary depressions).
like cash, which would lose value in an inflation environment, or stocks, which would crash in a depression.
Mexico defaulted on its debt.
totally confident in a totally incorrect view.
In retrospect, the mistakes that led to my crash seemed embarrassingly obvious.
had failed to recognize the lessons of history.
humility I needed to balance my aggressiveness.
“I’m right” to asking myself “How do I know I’m right?”
engaging them in thoughtful disagreement,
words, I just want to be right—I don’t care if the right answer comes from me.
Seek out the smartest people who disagreed with me so I could try to understand their reasoning.
Know when not to have an opinion.
not an autocracy in which I lead and others follow, and not a democracy in which everyone’s vote is equal—but a meritocracy that encourages thoughtful disagreements and explores and weighs people’s opinions in proportion to their merits.
taught me a lot about how people think.
muster
wrote down the criteria I used to make my decision.
I would then teach the computer. We helped each other.
Rather than argue about our conclusions, my partners and I would argue about our different decision-making criteria.
