The Education of a Value Investor Quotes

“People will always stop you doing the right thing if it’s unconventional.”
― Guy Spier, The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment

“We like to think that we change our environment, but the truth is that it changes us. So we have to be extraordinarily careful to choose the right environment—to work with, and even socialize with, the right people. Ideally, we should stick close to people who are better than us so that we can become more like them.”
― Guy Spier, The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment

“Books are a priceless source of wisdom. But people are the ultimate teachers, and there may be lessons that we can only learn from observing them or being in their presence.”
― Guy Spier, The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment

“This became my own goal: not to be Warren Buffett, but to become a more authentic version of myself. As he had taught me, the path to true success is through authenticity.”
― Guy Spier, The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment

“when your consciousness or mental attitude shifts, remarkable things begin to happen. That shift is the ultimate business tool and life tool.”
― Guy Spier, The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment

“But I think it’s important to discuss just how easy it is for any of us to get caught up in things that might seem unthinkable—to get sucked into the wrong environment and make moral compromises that can tarnish us terribly. We like to think that we change our environment, but the truth is that it changes us. So we have to be extraordinarily careful to choose the right environment—to work with, and even socialize with, the right people. Ideally, we should stick close to people who are better than us so that we can become more like them.”
― Guy Spier, The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment

“our environment is much stronger than our intellect. Remarkably few investors—either amateur or professional—truly understand this critical point.”
― Guy Spier, The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment

“Warren Buffett, quoting Henry Ford, often talks about the importance of keeping all your eggs in one basket, then watching that basket very carefully. One thing that appalled me and that I’d seen too many times was the Wall Street practice of having many eggs in many baskets. Even the most reputable mutual fund companies have a practice of selling multiple funds. The ones that do well are those that then get the marketing dollars and raise more money from investors. The ones that do poorly are either shut down or merged into the better-performing funds. In the process, the failures are buried as if they’d never existed while”
― Guy Spier, The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment

“so often, we focus our analytical efforts in the wrong direction and miss something vital. So it’s crucial to be open to the possibility that we might be mistaken. During”
― Guy Spier, The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment

“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and 2 minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently.”
― Guy Spier, The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment

“As I've come to discover, investing is about much more than money. So as your wealth grows, I hope you will also come to realize that the money is largely irrelevant. And what you will want to do with the bulk of your wealth is give it back to society.”
― Guy Spier, The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment

“The world breaks everyone and afterward some are strong at the broken places.”
― Guy Spier, The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment

“I was driven in large part by what Warren Buffett calls “the outer scorecard”—that need for public approval and recognition, which can so easily lead us in the wrong direction. This is a dangerous weakness for an investor, since the crowd is governed by irrational fear and greed rather than by calm analysis. I would argue that this kind of privileged academic environment is largely designed to measure people by an external scorecard: winning other people’s approval was what really counted.”
― Guy Spier, The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment

“tiny differences matter in investing—a pursuit where small structural changes can add up to big differences in returns over time. Long-term compounding is an investor’s best friend, so why get in its way? There’s a huge benefit to getting these seemingly minor details”
― Guy Spier, The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment

“The psychologist Roy Baumeister has shown that willpower is a limited resource, so we have to be careful not to deplete it.”
― Guy Spier, The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood.”
― Guy Spier, The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment

“A goal that seems impossible in one instant can become entirely possible in the next if only you are willing to devote every ounce of your mind, body, and soul to reach it.”
― Guy Spier, The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment

“The very institutions that we have established to teach us to think independently often close our minds in potentially damaging ways.”
― Guy Spier, The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment

“Part of the problem is that a finely trained but rarefied academic mind can be damaging to your long-term success.”
― Guy Spier, The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment

“Through ambition, greed, arrogance, or naïveté, many bright, hard-working people have strayed into gray areas.”
― Guy Spier, The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment

“Buffett and Munger joke that envy is the only one of the seven deadly sins that isn’t any fun. “Envy is crazy,” remarks Munger. “It’s 100 percent destructive. . . . If you get those things out of your life early, life works a lot better.”
― Guy Spier, The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment

“Hang out with people better than you, and you cannot help but improve.”
― Guy Spier, The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment

“Plato, Not Prozac! Applying Eternal Wisdom to Everyday Problems.”
― Guy Spier, The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment

“Nothing, nothing at all, matters as much as bringing the right people into your life. They will teach you everything you need to know.”
― Guy Spier, The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment

“TED talk by Nicholas Christakis”
― Guy Spier, The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment

“Indeed, the best way to learn is to surround yourself with the right people.”
― Guy Spier, The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment

“The point is that I want to invest in companies that control their own destiny, not in companies that have their destiny determined by forces beyond their control.”
― Guy Spier, The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment

“Checklist Item: Is this company providing a win-win for its entire ecosystem?”
― Guy Spier, The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment

“While some investments fail quickly, this one failed slowly—and that can be far more damaging to an investment portfolio because these slow losers suck up an enormous amount of your mental energy over an extended period of time.”
― Guy Spier, The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment

“Life is messy, and we all go through trying times. But it’s important to recognize that senior management—like the rest of us—can be derailed by this kind of personal turmoil”
― Guy Spier, The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment