Eating Buffett Quotes

On traditional economic theory: We do not play chess as if we were a grandmaster, invest as if we were Warren Buffett, or cook like an Iron Chef. It is more likely we cook like Warren Buffett, who loves to eat at Dairy Queen.

Naval’s Laws The below is Naval’s response to the question “Are there any quotes you live by or think of often?” These are gold. Take the time necessary to digest them. “These aren’t all quotes from others. Many are maxims that I’ve carved for myself.” Be present above all else. Desire is suffering (Buddha). Anger is a hot coal that you hold in your hand while waiting to throw it at someone else (Buddhist saying). If you can’t see yourself working with someone for life, don’t work with them for a day. Reading (learning) is the ultimate meta-skill and can be traded for anything else. All the real benefits in life come from compound interest. Earn with your mind, not your time. 99% of all effort is wasted. Total honesty at all times. It’s almost always possible to be honest and positive. Praise specifically, criticize generally (Warren Buffett). Truth is that which has predictive power. Watch every thought. (Always ask, “Why am I having this thought?”) All greatness comes from suffering. Love is given, not received. Enlightenment is the space between your thoughts (Eckhart Tolle). Mathematics is the language of nature. Every moment has to be complete in and of itself. A Few of Naval’s Tweets that are Too Good to Leave Out “What you choose to work on, and who you choose to work with, are far more important than how hard you work.” “Free education is abundant, all over the Internet. It’s the desire to learn that’s scarce.” “If you eat, invest, and think according to what the ‘news’ advocates, you’ll end up nutritionally, financially, and morally bankrupt.” “We waste our time with short-term thinking and busywork. Warren Buffett spends a year deciding and a day acting. That act lasts decades.” “The guns aren’t new. The violence isn’t new. The connected cameras are new, and that changes everything.” “You get paid for being right first, and to be first, you can’t wait for consensus.” “My one repeated learning in life: ‘There are no adults.’ Everyone’s making it up as they go along. Figure it out yourself, and do it.” “A busy mind accelerates the passage of subjective time.

Jimmy Buffett broke into Margaritaville, and I knew that was where I wanted to be. If wishes were fishes, beggars would eat.

Don’t think you can outsmart the market,” he said. “Very few people should be active investors.” The keys to success, he said, are to refrain from buying and selling at precisely the wrong times – as most investors wind up doing – and to avoid the high trading fees that eat up profits. What most people should want is a cross-section of industry that will do well over time. So in the end, the best route for most of us “is to buy a low-cost index fund and to buy it over time.

the smaller hedge funds tend to do better performance-wise than the large funds. Their management fees are not enough to keep the doors open so they have to make good returns and take those incentive fees, creating a sort of Darwinian eat-what-they-cook situation. And it is just easier to invest a tiny fund (again, just ask Warren Buffett).

Warren Buffett, one of the richest men in the world, was once asked his secret of success. He replied, “Simple. I just say no to everything that is not absolutely vital to me at the moment.

We were playing a story game Bucky had invented called the Last Supper. It consisted of allowing those evil, avenging creatures of God—horseflies—to light on the exposed skin of your arm or leg and take a bite. At that point, you make up an epitaph, which you deliver to the horsefly as he eats his last meal, and then you flatten the little bastard. The speeches are voted on by those in attendance, and the best speech wins a bottle of wine.

Many economists now openly praise monopolies as a more enlightened form of capitalism. Robert Atkinson and Michael Lind wrote a book titled Big Is Beautiful. They write, “In the abstract universe of Econ 101, monopolies and oligopolies are always bad because they distort prices… . In the real world, things are not so simple.” And to enlighten us, they continue, “Academic economics includes a well-developed literature about imperfect markets. But it is reserved for advanced students,” and these lessons are unavailable to the poor, benighted souls who don't have PhDs.15 It is ironic that the champions of monopolies are essentially aligning themselves with neo-Marxist economists who think that in capitalism the big inevitably eat the small. As the eminent Polish economist Michał Kalecki wrote, “Monopoly appears to be deeply rooted in the nature of the capitalist system: free competition, as an assumption, may be useful in the first stage of certain investigations, but as a description of the normal stage of capitalist economy it is merely a myth.”16 Kalecki would have felt at home in Omaha and Silicon Valley. Buffett and Thiel's views on competition capture the contradictions of capitalism. Thiel's idea that innovation comes only from large monopolies ignores his own personal history at PayPal. He was David creating a startup from nothing and competing against financial Goliaths.