Inspirational Quotes
Albert Einstein, Michael Jordan, Abraham Lincoln, oh my… Take it from the legends. They know their stuff.
Give Smart
“We make a living by what we get, we make a life by what we give. ”
“No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another.”
“The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have too much; it is whether we
provide enough for those who have too little.”
“It is more difficult to give money away intelligently than to earn it in the first place.”
“It takes a noble person to plant a seed for a tree that will one day provide shade to those whom he may never meet. ”
“It is every man’s obligation to put back into the world at least the equivalent of what he takes out of it.”
“Success cannot be measured solely—or even primarily— in monetary terms, nor in terms of the amount of power one my exercise over others, nor in the illusory fame of inevitable transitory public notice. But, it can be measured in our contributions to building a better world, in helping our fellow man, and in raising children who themselves become loving human beings and good citizens. Success, in short, can be measured not in what we attain for ourselves, but in what we contribute to our society.”
Failing, Not
“It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all. ”
“I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
“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 better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the area, whose face is married by dust and sweat and blood, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement. And who at, the worst, if he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid sounds who knew neither victory nor defeat.”
“Don’t be afraid of failing. You never know what you’re gonna lose out by not trying. ”
“Yet there will be failures. But if we rule out failure, we rule out success. Determination makes the difference.”
Finding Happiness
“The truth is, we don’t get our rathers in life either. All of us are pulled along by Fate, or the logos as the Stoics would call it, as well as by Fortune. Sometimes they line up with what we want, sometimes they don’t. That’s why amor fati is the right attitude. We have to embrace it. We have to accept the little facts of life. Bland indifference is a start, but cheerful whistling is even better.”
“I, not events, have the power to make me happy or unhappy today. I can choose which it shall be.
Yesterday is dead, tomorrow hasn’t arrived yet. I have just one day, today, and I’m going to be happy in it. ”
“It depends on what you mean by financial freedom. If financial freedom is viewed as the freedom to buy anything you want and to sit around relaxing, you’ve set yourself up for an unsatisfying life. If financial freedom is defined as the freedom to spend your days doing what you’re passionate about, you’re likely to be far happier.”
“Happiness; we don’t know what it means, how to measure it, or how to reach it, but we know extremely well how to avoid unhappiness. ”
“Happiness is that state when nothing is missing. When nothing is missing, your mind shuts down and your mind stops running into the future or into the past to regret something or to plan something. In that absence for a moment, you have internal silence. When you have internal silence, then you are content and you are happy.”
History Lessons
“In every age ‘the good old days’ were a myth. No one ever thought they were good at the time. For every age has consisted of crises that seemed intolerable to the people who lived through them.”
“Human nature will not change. In any future great national trial, compared with the men of this, we shall have as weak and as strong, as silly and as wise, as bad and as good. Let us, therefore, study the incidents in this as philosophy to learn wisdom from and none of them as wrongs to be avenged.”
“Facts alone are never enough. Facts rarely if ever have any soul. In writing or trying to understand history one may have all manner of “data” and miss the truth. It can be like the old piano teacher’s lament to her student, ‘I hear all the notes, but I hear no music.’”
Your Brain On Money
“Investing should be more like watching paint dry or watching grass grow. If you want excitement, take $800 and go to Las Vegas. ”
“They think intelligence is about noticing things that are relevant (detecting patterns); in a complex world, intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant (avoiding false patterns).”
“Now is always the hardest time to invest. ”
“Markets are irrational, and our backward-looking, pattern seeking lizard brains push us to lose money. Investors who let the lizard brain make financial decisions tend to buy at market tops and sell at market lows. Because our instincts are exactly out of sync with financial opportunity, markets can be mean.
However, it is the very irrationality of markets that
provides the opportunities to make sweet profits. Financial success is based on using emotional intelligence to shackle the lizard brain. Fortunately, EQ can be increased by diligence, introspection, and discipline. Therefore, any investor willing to work to understand and tame the lizard brain can transform mean markets into money and satisfaction.”
“We have no control over outcomes, but we can control the process. Of course, outcomes matter, but by focusing our attention on the process we maximize our chances of good outcomes. ”
“Even the most analytical thinkers are predictably irrational; the really smart ones acknowledge and address their irrationalities.”
“The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.”
“Nothing defines humans better than their willingness to do irrational things in the pursuit of phenomenally unlikely payoffs.”
“To invest successfully over a lifetime does not require a stratospheric IQ, unusual business insights, or inside information. What’s needed is a sound intellectual framework for making decisions and the ability to keep emotions from corroding that framework.”
“The stock market is filled with individuals who know the price of everything, but the value of nothing.”
“It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this. ”
“It’s hard to believe that you need a license to go fishing but can buy triple inverse ETFs on your own free will.”
“There’s a big difference between probability and outcome. Probable things fail to happen, and improbable things happen all the time. That’s one of the most important things you can know about investment risk.”
“The dice have no memory. The coin can’t recall the last toss. And the stock market doesn’t care about your investment history.”
Past, Present, and The Now
“… the meeting of two eternities, the past and future… is precisely the present moment. ”
“It’s being here now that’s important. There’s no past and there’s no future. Time is a very misleading thing. All there is ever, is the now. We can gain experience from the past, but we can’t relive it; and we can hope for the future, but we don’t know if there is one.”
“Experience is what you got when you didn’t get what you wanted. ”
“Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future. ”
“The longest-lived and those who will die soonest lose the same thing. The present is all that they can give up, since that is all you have, and what you do not have, you cannot lose.”
“Everything is more beautiful because we’re doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now, and we will never be here again.”
“Remember then: there is only one time that is important—Now! It is the most important time because it is the only time when we have any power. ”
“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”
“All that is important is this one moment in movement. Make the moment important, vital, and worth living. Do not let it slip away unnoticed and unused.”
“I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is. ”
“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
“You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you’ll escape one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.”
“There is actually nothing but this moment. No one has ever gone back in time, and no one has ever been able to successfully predict the future in any way that matters. Literally, the only thing that exists is this exact point where you are in space at the exact time you happen to be here.”
To Grit With Grace
“Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t – you’re right.”
“I hated every minute of training, but I said, ‘Don’t quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.’ ”
“The best way out is always through”
“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor.
Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover. ”
“In our interior experience as individuals, as in the public forum of our shared experience as a culture, our courage lives in the same room as our fear—it is in troubled times, in despairing times, that we find out who we are and what we are capable of. ”
“Meanest dog you’ll ever meet -
It ain’t the hound dog in the street.
He bares his teeth and tears your skin
But brother, that’s the worst of him.
The dog you really got to dread
Is the one that howls inside your head.
It’s him whose howling drives men mad
And a mind to its undoing.”
“If we’re willing to give that space for grace, if we’re willing to follow the principles that we believe will most likely lead to the greatest outcome for all, even though it looks like in the short-term it may not lead to a good outcome for anyone…in the end, someone, something shows up to carry us across the gap from what we can logically see as possible into the outcome we desire that would could not achieve via our own means.”
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
“…If you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line—maybe she’s not usually like this; maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of her husband, who’s dying of bone cancer, or maybe this lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicles department who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a nightmarish red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness.
It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the starts—compassion, love, the subsurface unity of all things.”
For A Dose of Inspiration
Uncertainty is the Thing
“To trace something unknown back to something known is alleviating, soothing, gratifying and gives moreover a feeling of power. Danger, disquiet, anxiety attend the unknown- the first instinct is to eliminate these distressing states. First principle: any explanation is better than none... The cause-creating drive is thus conditioned and excited by the feeling of fear...”
“…you realize that the tail-end consequences –the low probability, high-impact events –are all that matter. In investing, the average consequences of risk make up most of the daily news headlines. But the tail-end consequences of risk –like pandemics, and depressions –are what make the pages of history books. They’re really all that matter. They’re all you should focus on. We spent the last decade debating whether economic risk meant the Federal Reserve set interest rates at 0.25% or 0.5%. Then 36 million people lost their jobs in two months because of a virus. It’s absurd.
Tail-end events are all that matter.”
“CERTAINTY, n. A state of clarity and predictability in economic and geopolitical affairs that all investors say is indispensable — even though it doesn’t exist, never has, and never will.”
“All successful investing is a battle between one’s need for certainty and one’s tolerance for ambiguity. The emotional capacity to function under uncertainty is both the key to capturing equity returns and a critical test of one’s emotional maturity. The more certainty you need, the more you’ll allocate your portfolio towards bonds, and the lower your lifetime total return will be. The more ambiguity you can tolerate, the more you’ll trust your fortune to equities—even, and especially, when you have no idea why they’re doing what they’re doing—and the higher your lifetime return will be.”
“What does Greece mean to you? “To trace something unknown back to something known is alleviating, soothing, gratifying and gives moreover a feeling of power. Danger, disquiet, anxiety attend the unknown - the first instinct is to eliminate these distressing states. First principle: any explanation is better than none... The cause-creating drive is thus conditioned and excited by the feeling of fear...” Friedrich Nietzsche” Any explanation is better than none.” And the simpler, it seems in the investment game, the better. “The markets went up because oil went down,” we are told, except when it went up there was another reason for the movement of the markets. We all intuitively know that things are far more complicated than that. But as\ Nietzsche noted, dealing with the unknown can be disturbing, so we look for the simple explanation. “Ah,” we tell ourselves, “I know why that happened.” With an explanation firmly in hand, we now feel we know something. And the behavioral psychologists note that this state actually releases chemicals in our brains that make us feel good. We become literally addicted to the simple explanation. The fact that what we “know” (the explanation for the unknowable) is irrelevant or even wrong is not important to the chemical release. And thus we look for reasons.”
“We spend our lives trying to anchor our transience in some illusion of permanence and stability. We lay plans, we make vows, we backbone the flow of uncertainty with habits and routines that lull us with the comforting dream of predictability and control, only to find ourselves again and again bent at the knees with surrender to forces and events vastly larger than us. In those moments, kneeling in a pool of the unknown, the heart breaks open and allows life — life itself, not the simulacrum of life that comes from control — to rush in.”
“The idea that what lies in front of us is a dark hole of uncertainty can be so intimidating, it’s easier to believe the opposite — that we can see the future, and that its path is logical and predictable. No belief in history is as commonly held, and no belief is as consistently wrong.”
Investing Wisdom
“Investors are always searching for good ideas, when what they need are good habits. Only procedures that you repeat and follow until they become automatic will enable you to invest steadily over the long run.”
“The most important quality for an investor is temperament, not intellect.”
“I will tell you how to become rich. Close the doors. Be fearful when others are greedy. Be greedy when others are fearful.”
“An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.”
“In investing, what is comfortable is rarely profitable.”
“The biggest risk of all is not taking one.”
“It’s not how much money you make, but how much money you keep, how hard it works for you, and how many generations you keep it for.”
“Investing should be more like watching paint dry or watching grass grow. If you want excitement, take $800 and go to Las Vegas.”
“The four most dangerous words in investing are, it’s different this time.”
“You get recessions, you have stock market declines. If you don’t understand that’s going to happen, then you’re not ready, you won’t do well in the markets.”
Podcast Paeans
Season 1
“All of us have a responsibility to not be a bystander. To not be a witness to the things that are happening in our world that we might be able to impact.”
“If we’re willing to give that space for grace…someone shows up to carry us across the gap from what we can logically see as possible to the outcome we desire that we could not achieve via our own means.”
“No matter how successful I get, I’m not gonna F it up for my dad, and I’m not gonna F it up for my wife and children.”
“I don’t really know what happened, but I woke up 14 months later and it was okay for me to live…I gave myself permission to live more fully. My heart has a big scar on it, but I learned how to live with the scar.”
“People have sides you don’t know. My faith in humanity was tested, but I still believe in the betterment of man.”
“I figured, there’s got to be a side door into the sphere of professional creativity…I have to generate a system, some other way, some me-specific way, to enter this creative realm.”
“Being human is a challenge…I wouldn’t be where I am had a lot of people not cared about me, helped me, supported me. Now, I get to do the same thing for others.”
“That really started the impact journey. Impact of being hit, physically; impact of being absolutely broke; and impact of realizing that there are always solutions.”
Season 2
“Once you go through a trauma, you know what’s important, and you know what’s not important. You cut a lot of the crap out and you concentrate on what’s important. I don’t want it to happen to everybody, but trauma is actually a good thing. It took me forever to get over it, but I came out a better person. ”
“You really can design the life you want. Don’t hold back out of fear. If you love something, and you think you have the ability to run a business, you have the stamina, you have the life support, do it.”
“The idea that once you achieve a certain level of success you can stand still is a fantasy. Things are constantly changing. The people who stand still eventually get left behind.”
“I have an acronym, whoever’s filling your MUG. MUG stands for Mother Earth, Universe, or God. I think whoever pours your mug sometimes whispers to you, and sometimes it screams...Change can happen. I don’t think you need a radical event. But I do think you need to be able to hear the whispers.”
“It sounds so cliche to say, You don’t know how strong you are until you have to be strong, but the fact is, when you’re not struggling to pay bills, or trying to find creative ways to make money, you don’t have to be strong. It’s when you’re really down and out that you have to think outside the box.”