Investor Happy Quotes

The power of "can't": The word "can't" makes strong people weak, blinds people who can see, saddens happy people, turns brave people into cowards, robs a genius of their brilliance, causes rich people to think poorly, and limits the achievements of that great person living inside us all.

So smile when you read a headline that says “Investors lose as market falls.” Edit it in your mind to “Disinvestors lose as market falls—but investors gain.” Though writers often forget this truism, there is a buyer for every seller and what hurts one necessarily helps the other. (As they say in golf matches: “Every putt makes someone happy.”)

Specific knowledge is found much more by pursuing your innate talents, your genuine curiosity, and your passion. It’s not by going to school for whatever is the hottest job; it’s not by going into whatever field investors say is the hottest.

A compassionate leader always feel motivated to bring happiness and relieve the suffering of customers, investors, suppliers, employees, government and the communities.

We are not merely spectators of the world but investors in it,

No business has ever failed with happy customers. You are selling happiness.

Once he felt “completely secure” about his financial future, no amount of money he could earn would make any difference to him. “I’m the richest guy in the world because I’m content with what I have,” says Van Den Berg. “I feel wealthier not because I have more money but because I’ve got health, good friendships, I’ve got a great family. Prosperity takes all of these things into consideration: health, wealth, happiness, peace of mind. That’s what a prosperous person is, not just a lot of money. That doesn’t mean anything.

The most common reaction of the human mind to achievement is not satisfaction, but craving for more. Humans are always on the lookout for something better, bigger, tastier. When humankind possesses enormous new powers, and when the threat of famine, plague and war is finally lifted, what will we do with ourselves? What will the scientists, investors, bankers and presidents do all day? Write poetry? Success breeds ambition, and our recent achievements are now pushing humankind to set itself even more daring goals. Having secured unprecedented levels of prosperity, health and harmony, and given our past record and our current values, humanity’s next targets are likely to be immortality, happiness and divinity. Having reduced mortality from starvation, disease and violence, we will now aim to overcome old age and even death itself. Having saved people from abject misery, we will now aim to make them positively happy. And having raised humanity above the beastly level of survival struggles, we will now aim to upgrade humans into gods, and turn Homo sapiens into Homo deus.

Most non-European empires of the early modern era were established by great conquerors such as Nurhaci and Nader Shah, or by bureaucratic and military elites as in the Qing and Ottoman empires. Financing wars through taxes and plunder (without making fine distinctions between the two), they owed little to credit systems, and they cared even less about the interests of bankers and investors. In Europe, on the other hand, kings and generals gradually adopted the mercantile way of thinking, until merchants and bankers became the ruling elite. The European conquest of the world was increasingly financed through credit rather than taxes, and was increasingly directed by capitalists whose main ambition was to receive maximum returns on their investments. The empires built by bankers and merchants in frock coats and top hats defeated the empires built by kings and noblemen in gold clothes and shining armour. The mercantile empires were simply much shrewder in financing their conquests. Nobody wants to pay taxes, but everyone is happy to invest.

The real nemesis of the modern economy is ecological collapse. Both scientific progress and economic growth take place within a brittle biosphere, and as they gather steam, so the shock waves destabilise the ecology. In order to provide every person in the world with the same standard of living as affluent Americans, we would need a few more planets – but we only have this one. If progress and growth do end up destroying the ecosystem, the cost will be dear not merely to vampires, foxes and rabbits, but also to Sapiens. An ecological meltdown will cause economic ruin, political turmoil, a fall in human standards of living, and it might threaten the very existence of human civilisation. We could lessen the danger by slowing down the pace of progress and growth. If this year investors expect to get a 6 per cent return on their portfolios, in ten years they will be satisfied with a 3 per cent return, in twenty years only 1 per cent, and in thirty years the economy will stop growing and we’ll be happy with what we’ve already got. Yet the creed of growth firmly objects to such a heretical idea. Instead, it suggests we should run even faster. If our discoveries destabilise the ecosystem and threaten humanity, then we should discover something to protect ourselves. If the ozone layer dwindles and exposes us to skin cancer, we should invent better sunscreen and better cancer treatments, thereby also promoting the growth of new sunscreen factories and cancer centres. If all the new industries pollute the atmosphere and the oceans, causing global warming and mass extinctions, then we should build for ourselves virtual worlds and hi-tech sanctuaries that will provide us with all the good things in life even if the planet is as hot, dreary and polluted as hell.

Instead of trotting out the usual bland platitudes about the secrets of success and happiness, he provided an inspired illustration of how to apply the principle of inversion. He gave the students a series of “prescriptions for guaranteed misery in life,” recommending that they should be unreliable, avoid compromise, harbor resentments, seek revenge, indulge in envy, “ingest chemicals,” become addicted to alcohol, neglect to “learn vicariously from the good and bad experience of others,” cling defiantly to their existing beliefs, and “stay down” when struck by the “first, second, or third severe reverse in the battle of life.

Google had a built-in disadvantage in the social networking sweepstakes. It was happy to gather information about the intricate web of personal and professional connections known as the “social graph” (a term favored by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg) and integrate that data as signals in its search engine. But the basic premise of social networking—that a personal recommendation from a friend was more valuable than all of human wisdom, as represented by Google Search—was viewed with horror at Google. Page and Brin had started Google on the premise that the algorithm would provide the only answer. Yet there was evidence to the contrary. One day a Googler, Joe Kraus, was looking for an anniversary gift for his wife. He typed “Sixth Wedding Anniversary Gift Ideas” into Google, but beyond learning that the traditional gift involved either candy or iron, he didn’t see anything creative or inspired. So he decided to change his status message on Google Talk, a line of text seen by his contacts who used Gmail, to “Need ideas for sixth anniversary gift—candy ideas anyone?” Within a few hours, he got several amazing suggestions, including one from a colleague in Europe who pointed him to an artist and baker whose medium was cake and candy. (It turned out that Marissa Mayer was an investor in the company.) It was a sobering revelation for Kraus that sometimes your friends could trump algorithmic search.

First, when all investors were doing the same thing, he would actively seek to do the opposite. The word stockbrokers use for this approach is contrarian. Everyone wants to be one, but no one is, for the sad reason that most investors are scared of looking foolish. Investors do not fear losing money as much as they fear solitude, by which I mean taking risks that others avoid. When they are caught losing money alone, they have no excuse for their mistake, and most investors, like most people, need excuses. They are, strangely enough, happy to stand on the edge of a precipice as long as they are joined by a few thousand others. But when a market is widely regarded to be in a bad way, even if the problems are illusory, many investors get out. A good example of this was the crisis at the U.S. Farm Credit Corporation. It looked for a moment as if Farm Credit might go bankrupt. Investors stampeded out of Farm Credit bonds because having been warned of the possibility of accident, they couldn’t be seen in the vicinity without endangering their reputations. In an age when failure isn’t allowed, when the U.S. government had rescued firms as remote from the national interest as Chrysler and the Continental Illinois Bank, there was no chance the government would allow the Farm Credit bank to default. The thought of not bailing out an eighty-billion-dollar institution that lent money to America’s distressed farmers was absurd. Institutional investors knew this. That is the point. The people selling Farm Credit bonds for less than they were worth weren’t necessarily stupid. They simply could not be seen holding them. Since Alexander wasn’t constrained by appearances, he sought to exploit people who were.

Putting it all together, fluctuations in attitudes and behavior combine to make the stock market the ultimate pendulum. In my 47 full calendar years in the investment business, starting with 1970, the annual returns on the S&P 500 have swung from plus 37% to minus 37%. Averaging out good years and bad years, the long-run return is usually stated as 10% or so. Everyone’s been happy with that typical performance and would love more of the same. But remember, a swinging pendulum may be at its midpoint “on average,” but it actually spends very little time there. The same is true of financial market performance. Here’s a fun question (and a good illustration): for how many of the 47 years from 1970 through 2016 was the annual return on the S&P 500 within 2% of “normal”—that is, between 8% and 12%? I expected the answer to be “not that often,” but I was surprised to learn that it had happened only three times! It also surprised me to learn that the return had been more than 20 percentage points away from “normal”—either up more than 30% or down more than 10%—more than one-quarter of the time: 13 out of the last 47 years. So one thing that can be said with total conviction about stock market performance is that the average certainly isn’t the norm. Market fluctuations of this magnitude aren’t nearly fully explained by the changing fortunes of companies, industries or economies. They’re largely attributable to the mood swings of investors. Lastly, the times when return is at the extremes aren’t randomly distributed over the years. Rather they’re clustered, due to the fact that investors’ psychological swings tend to persist for a while—to paraphrase Herb Stein, they tend to continue until they stop. Most of those 13 extreme up or down years were within a year or two of another year of similarly extreme performance in the same direction.

Today I address professionals, business leaders and researchers on how they can contribute with innovative ideas to achieve these ten pillars. These are as follows: 1) A nation where the rural and urban divide has reduced to a thin line. 2) A nation where there is equitable distribution and adequate access to energy and quality water. 3) A nation where agriculture, industry and the service sector work together in symphony. 4) A nation where education with value systems is not denied to any meritorious candidates because of societal or economic discrimination. 5) A nation which is the best destination for the most talented scholars, scientists and investors. 6) A nation where the best of healthcare is available to all. 7) A nation where the governance is responsive, transparent and corruption free. 8) A nation where poverty has been totally eradicated, illiteracy removed and crimes against women and children are absent and no one in the society feels alienated. 9) A nation that is prosperous, healthy, secure, peaceful and happy and follows a sustainable growth path. 10) A nation that is one of the best places to live in and is proud of its leadership.

Now there is an attempt to reverse the history, to go back to the happy days when the principles of economic rationalism briefly reigned, gravely demonstrating that people have no rights beyond what they can gain in the labor market. And since now the injunction to "go somewhere else" won't work, the choices are narrowed to the workhouse prison or starvation, as a matter of natural law, which reveals that any attempt to help the poor only harms them—the poor, that is; the rich are miraculously helped thereby, as when state power intervenes to bail our investors after the collapse of the highly-toured Mexican "economic miracle," or to save failing banks and industries, or to bar Japan from American markets to allow domestic corporations to reconstruct the steel, automotive, and electronics industry in the 1980s (amidst impressive rhetoric about free markets by the most protectionist administration in the postwar era and its acolytes). And far more; this is the merest icing on the cake. But the rest are subject to the iron principles of economic rationalism, now sometimes called "tough love" by those who allocate the benefits.

An investor may want an asset to achieve its full potential, but the investor doesn’t particularly care whether that kid is happy while they do it. A caring parent, on the other hand, balances an interest in a child’s future achievement with the child’s present wellbeing. If the changes in childhood over the past decades have really been made “with the interests of all children in mind,” as the Harley Avenue letter said, then they should, at the very least, not be actively making children unhappier. Evidence, however, suggests that even this small hope is in vain.

On a trip to Korea, Thiel’s corporate credit card was declined as he tried to purchase a return ticket home. The investors he had met with were only too happy to furnish a first-class plane ticket—which they did on the spot. “They were excited beyond belief,” Thiel remembered. “The next day, they called up our law firm and asked, ‘What’s the bank account we need to send the money to?’ ” The crazed nature of it all confirmed Thiel’s suspicions about the market. “I remember thinking to myself that it felt like things couldn’t get much crazier, and that we really had to close the money quickly because the window might not last forever,” he said. The final $100 million figure actually disappointed some on the team. Confinity and X.com had secured verbal commitments for double that amount, and some on the team had wanted to hold out for the remaining funding or push for a billion-dollar valuation. Thiel disagreed, urging Selby and others on the financing team to turn handshakes into actual checks, to get term sheets signed, and have deposits confirmed. “Peter kicked everyone’s asses to get that funding round done,” David Sacks remembered. Many Confinity employees—who had seen Thiel at his toughest—rarely remember him this insistent. “If we don’t get this money raised,” Howery recalled Thiel saying, “the whole company could blow up.

The happiness of those who want to be popular depends on others; the happiness of those who seek pleasure fluctuates with moods outside their control; but the happiness of the wise grows out of their own free acts.

More importantly, the value of wealth is relative to what you need. Say you and I have the same net worth. And say you’re a better investor than me. I can earn 8% annual returns and you can earn 12% annual returns. But I’m more efficient with my money. Let’s say I need half as much money to be happy while your lifestyle compounds as fast as your assets. I’m better off than you are, despite being a worse investor. I’m getting more benefit from my investments despite lower returns.

This is also a great tactic if negotiations ever stall—revisit the things both parties agree upon and remind the seller of more of those things that may not have been discussed for a while. For example, if things have come to a standstill in the negotiation, you might say: Investor: “I know we haven’t yet agreed on price, but I think we’re pretty close here. Remember, we’re happy to take the house as-is— you don’t have to clean out the basement or the garage. And our title company is happy to come here to your house to sign all the paperwork, just to make everything more convenient. My offer of $90,000 really is my top number, but I want you to be confident you are getting a great deal, so I’ll give up some of my profit and go to $91,500. Can we close on that?

Then you need to evaluate all the key relationships surrounding the business. Would you keep all your existing customers? Are you happy with your investors/bank? Are your vendors supporting you properly? Are your advisors — accountants, lawyers, consultants, and coaches — the best for the size of the organization and future plans? The toughest decisions to make are when the company has outgrown some of these relationships and you need to make changes.

Seventy-five percent of success is predicted by your optimism level, your social support, and (perhaps most of all for entrepreneurs) your ability to see stress as a challenge instead of as a threat, according to Shawn Achor in a fabulous TED talk called “The Happy Secret to Better Work.

On March 31, 2016, Securities and Exchange Commission chair Mary Jo White said this to the students of Stanford Law School: Nearly all venture valuations are highly subjective. But, one must wonder whether the publicity and pressure to achieve the unicorn benchmark is analogous to that felt by public companies to meet projections they make to the market with the attendant risk of financial reporting problems. And, yes that remains a problem. We continue to see instances of public companies and their senior executives manipulating their accounting to meet various expectations and projections.1 We have reached a point in the world of technology startups where the fervor for building a company with a billion-dollar valuation — the elusive startup unicorn — is overshadowing the creation of real value. It is not the first time we have been here; the world of startups and venture capital has always run in cycles, from optimistic zeal to caution to post-catastrophe introspection and back again. But perhaps it is time that entrepreneurs and investors alike begin waking up to the fact that the “valuation-at-all-costs” model, with its relentless pressure, remote odds of success, and human cost, is not only unsustainable but bad business. At this point in the current cycle, the radically overvalued startup appears to be headed for the endangered species list. That is a good thing. While billion-dollar behemoths will always exist, and the high-wire act of chasing scale while also chasing the cash to fund that scale will occasionally produce a solid company, there are other ways to build a business. There are better ways to build a business.

As the celebrated investor Warren Buffett once said, "Price is what you pay. Value is what you get." We would add one more line: "If you do your homework." In business deals, most buyers and sellers have a singular focus on price — and price is hard to avoid. Negotiations ideally produce numbers that both sides can be happy with. But getting to the right price in any deal involves understanding what business assets are truly worth and then structuring a deal around financing and tax realities, which can be quite surprising to those who fail to plan.

Only those who will be sellers of equities in the near future should be happy at seeing stocks rise. Prospective purchasers should much prefer sinking prices.

In David Copperfield, Charles Dickens’s character Wilkins Micawber pronounced a now-famous law: Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.

Groupon is a study of the hazards of pursuing scale and valuation at all costs. In 2010, Forbes called it the “fastest growing company ever” after its founders raised $135 million in funding, giving Groupon a valuation of more than $1 billion after just 17 months.5 The company turned down a $6 billion acquisition offer from Google and went public in 2011 with one of the biggest IPOs since Google’s in 2004.6 It was one of the original unicorns. However, the business model had serious problems. Groupon sometimes sold so many Daily Deals that participating businesses were overwhelmed . . . even crippled. Other businesses accused Groupon of strong-arming them to sign up for Daily Deals. Customers started to view the group discount (the company’s bread and butter) as a sign that a participating business was desperate. Businesses stopped signing up. Journalists suggested that Groupon was prioritizing customer acquisition over retention — growth over value — and that it had gone public before it had a solid, proven business model.7 Groupon is still a player, with just over $3 billion in annual revenue in 2015. But its stock has fallen from $26 a share to about $4 today, and it has withdrawn from many international markets. Also revealing is that the company is suing IBM for patent infringement, something that will not create customer value.8 Many promising startups have paid the price for rushing to scale. We can see clues to potential future failures in the recent “down rounds” (stock purchases priced at a lower valuation than those of previous investors) hitting companies like Foursquare, Gilt Group, Jet, Jawbone, and Technorati. In their rush to build scale, executives and founders search for shortcuts to sustainable, long-term revenue growth.

Some businesses take a unique approach to this. Footwear brand Toms, already beloved thanks to its renowned blend of “social purpose” and product, forgoes splashy celebrity marketing campaigns. Instead, they engage and elevate real customers. During the summer of 2016, Toms engaged more than 3.5 million people in a single day using what they call tribe power. The company tapped into its army of social media followers for its annual One Day Without Shoes initiative to gather millions of Love Notes on social media. However, Toms U.K. marketing manager Sheela Thandasseri explained that their tribe’s Love Notes are not relegated to one day. “Our customers create social content all the time showing them gifting Toms or wearing them on their wedding day, and they tag us because they want us to be part of it.”2 Toms uses customer experience management platform Sprinklr to aggregate interactions on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Toms then engages in a deep analysis of the data generated by its tribe, learning what customers relish and dislike about its products, stores, and salespeople so they can optimize their Complete Product Experience (CPE). That is an aggressive, all-in approach that extracts as much data as possible from every customer interaction in order to see patterns and craft experiences. Your approach might differ based on factors ranging from budget limitations to privacy concerns. But I can attest that earning love does not necessarily require cutting-edge technology or huge expenditures. What it does require is a commitment to delivering the building blocks of lovability that I reviewed in the previous chapter. Lovability begins with a mindset that makes it a priority. The building blocks are feelings — hope, confidence, fun. If you stack them up over and over again, eventually you will turn those feelings into a tower of meaningful benefits for everyone with a stake in your business, including owners, investors, employees, and customers. Now let’s look more closely at those benefits and the groups they affect.

When Craig Newmark launched what would become Craigslist back in 1995, not only did he not have outside funding, he did not even have a business plan. I do not recommend that, but he succeeded by creating something he cared about — an email distribution list in and around San Francisco — and posted it online. When it grew into a classified ad monster, investors pressured him to take their money. The company refused, waiting until 2004 to sell a 28.4 percent share to eBay. Craigslist Inc. has since bought back that share and continued to do things their way.9 As far back as 2006, the company’s president and chief executive Jim Buckmaster told reporters he was not interested in selling out, preferring to focus on helping users find apartments, jobs, and dates rather than on maximizing profit.10 When you only answer to yourself, you can concentrate on building value your way.

Investment markets follow a pendulum-like swing: • between euphoria and depression, • between celebrating positive developments and obsessing over negatives, and thus • between overpriced and underpriced. This oscillation is one of the most dependable features of the investment world, and investor psychology seems to spend much more time at the extremes than it does at a “happy medium.

When there's a sale on eggs or chicken, we're happy- but when the stock market gets cheaper, we think it's bad. (Long-term investors should love when the market drops: You can buy more shares for the same price.)p97

Company founders and rich investors are often happy to chat about their business acumen and charitable activities, but asking questions about their wealth triggers defensive instincts.

What other investors are you talking to?” You NEVER want to share other investors’ names until those investors have wired their money. At that point, share away. I’d say something like: “I’m managing a lot of conversations right now, and as we get deeper, I’m happy to share that with you!

In Robert Noyce’s office there hung a black-and-white photo that showed a jovial crew of young scientists offering a champagne toast to the smiling William Shockley. The picture was taken on November 1, 1956, a few hours after the news of Shockley’s Nobel Prize had reached Palo Alto. By the time that happy picture was taken, however, Shockley Semiconductor Laboratories was a chaotic and thoroughly unhappy place. For all his technical expertise, Shockley had proven to be an inexpert manager. He was continually shifting his researchers from one job to another; he couldn’t seem to make up his mind what, if anything, the company was trying to produce. “There was a group that worked for Shockley that was pretty unhappy,” Noyce recalled many years later. “And that group went to Beckman and said, hey, this isn’t working. . . . About that time, Shockley got his Nobel Prize. And Beckman was sort of between the devil and the deep blue sea. He couldn’t fire Shockley, who had just gotten this great international honor, but he had to change the management or else everyone else would leave.” In the end, Beckman stuck with Shockley—and paid a huge price. Confused and frustrated, eight of the young scientists, including Noyce, Moore, and Hoerni, decided to look for another place to work. That first group—Shockley called them “the traitorous eight”—turned out to be pioneers, for they established a pattern that has been followed time and again in Silicon Valley ever since. They decided to offer themselves as a team to whichever employer made the best offer. Word of this unusual proposal reached an investment banker in New York, who offered a counterproposal: Instead of working for somebody else, the eight scientists should start their own firm. The banker knew of an investor who would provide the backing—the Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corporation, which had been looking hard for an entrée to the transistor business. A deal was struck. Each of the eight young scientists put up $500 in earnest money, the corporate angel put up all the rest, and early in 1957 the Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation opened for business, a mile or so down the road from Shockley’s operation.

But guess what happened. Once salaries became public information, the media regularly ran special stories ranking CEOs by pay. Rather than suppressing the executive perks, the publicity had CEOs in America comparing their pay with that of everyone else. In response, executives’ salaries skyrocketed. The trend was further “helped” by compensation consulting firms (scathingly dubbed “Ratchet, Ratchet, and Bingo” by the investor Warren Buffett) that advised their CEO clients to demand outrageous raises. The result? Now the average CEO makes about 369 times as much as the average worker—about three times the salary before executive compensation went public. Keeping that in mind, I had a few questions for the executive I met with. “What would happen,” I ventured, “if the information in your salary database became known throughout the company?” The executive looked at me with alarm. “We could get over a lot of things here—insider trading, financial scandals, and the like—but if everyone knew everyone else’s salary, it would be a true catastrophe. All but the highest-paid individual would feel underpaid—and I wouldn’t be surprised if they went out and looked for another job.” Isn’t this odd? It has been shown repeatedly that the link between amount of salary and happiness is not as strong as one would expect it to be

Did you learn, in all your research, that I am an investor in Redner Industries? That I have access to all its experiments?” “Oh fuck,” Isaiah said from across the pit. “And did you ever learn,” Micah went on, “what Danika did for Redner Industries?” Bryce still crawled backward up the stairs. There was nowhere to go, though. “She did part-time security work.” “Is that how she sanitized it for you?” He smirked. “Danika tracked down the people that Redner wanted her to find. People who didn’t want to be found. Including a group of Ophion rebels who had been experimenting with a formula for synthetic magic—to assist in the humans’ treachery. They’d dug into long-forgotten history and learned that the kristallos demons’ venom nullified magic—our magic. So these clever rebels decided to look into why, isolating the proteins that were targeted by that venom. The source of magic. Redner’s human spies tipped him off, and out Danika went to bring in the research—and the people behind it.” Bryce gasped for breath, still slowly crawling upward. No one spoke in the conference room as she said, “The Asteri don’t approve of synthetic magic. How did Redner even get away with doing the research on it?” Hunt shook. She was buying herself time. Micah seemed all too happy to indulge her. “Because Redner knew the Asteri would shut down any synthetic magic research, that I would shut their experiments down, they spun synth experiments as a drug for healing. Redner invited me to invest. The earliest trials were a success: with it, humans could heal faster than with any medwitch or Fae power. But later trials did not go according to plan. Vanir, we learned, went out of their minds when given it. And humans who took too much synth … well. Danika used her security clearance to steal footage of the trials—and I suspect she left it for you, didn’t she?” Burning Solas. Up and up, Bryce crawled along the stairs, fingers scrabbling over those ancient, precious books. “How did she learn what you were really up to?” “She always stuck her nose where it didn’t belong. Always wanting to protect the meek.

What distinguishes the way a caring family or state institution treats a child from the way an investor would, if they’re both primarily concerned with the child’s future success? An investor may want an asset to achieve its full potential, but the investor doesn’t particularly care whether that kid is happy while they do it. A caring parent, on the other hand, balances an interest in a child’s future achievement with the child’s present wellbeing.

In the financial world, complexity may suggest sophistication – but it is usually a ruse to bamboozle and fleece investors.

They used my name and permit to grow the weed and earn money to repay their debts and compensate their investors. To keep my girlfriend. To take her. I am uncertain if any of them have ever spent a minute in jail for any of these activities. Adam proudly showcases his new motorcycles on Instagram, posing on a hill above Barcelona. He also displays his brand new electric camper van, which they use to travel and transport drugs across Europe and Iberia, as well as his gigantic marijuana cultivation located in Portugal. People like Ruan and Martina admire his public images. I came across a picture of Ruan and Martina together in Berlin, where their mother Fernanda visited them. Martina became member of the Evil Eye Cult, and the custom made mafia group in Spain, which used her as a pawn in their porn and drug-related activities. She now operates as their representative in Berlin. Martina and I have lost the ability to genuinely smile. Her social media posts only show disinterest or a malicious demeanor. ‘A boot stomping on a human face.’ In a picture with her brother and mother, she puts on a forced fake “good vibe” and “happy” smile, revealing her flawless teeth and the subtle lines of aging. With each passing day, she bears a greater resemblance to her rich and so happy mother, the bad person. As far as I know, none of these individuals have faced consequences for their actions, such as having their teeth broken. As I had. Innocently. Taking care of business and their lives. With love. I find this to be incredibly unjust. In the 21st century. In Europe. On planet Earth. By non-EU criminals. “Matando – ganando” – “killing and gaining” like there were no Laws at all. Nowadays, you can observe Sabrina flaunting her fake lips and altered face, just like Martina her enhanced breasts. Guess who was paying for it? It seems that both girls now sustain themselves through their bodies and drug involvement, to this day, influencing criminals to gain friends in harming Tomas and having a lavish lifestyle filled with fun and mischief. Making a living. Enjoying Spain. Enjoying Life. My money. My tears. This is the situation as it stands. I was wondering what Salvador Dali was trying to tell me. I stood in front of the Lincoln portrait for a long time, but I couldn't grasp the point or the moral behind it. I can listen to Abraham Lincoln and ‘trust people. To see. If I can trust them.’ But he ultimately suffered a tragic fate, with his life being taken. (Got his head popped.) I believe there may have also been a female or two involved in that situation, too, possibly leading to his guards being let down. While he was watching: Acting performances, he was facing a: Stage. Theater. It is disheartening, considering he was a good person. Like Jesus, John Lennon and so on. Shows a pattern Machiavelli was talking about. Some individuals are too bright for those in darkness; they feel compelled to suppress those brighter minds simply because they think and act differently. Popping their heads. Reptilian lower brain-based culture, the concept of the Evil Eye, Homo erectus. He couldn't even stand up properly when I was shouting at him, urging him to stand up from the stairs. ‘Homo seditus reptilis.’ But what else was there in the Lincoln image that I didn't see? What was Dali trying to convey or express or tell me? Besides the fact that the woman is in his mind, on his mind, in the image, exactly, his head got popped open. Perhaps because he was focusing on a woman, trusting her for a split second, or turning his head away for a moment.

But Silicon Valley has a dark side. To be sure, there are plenty of shiny, happy people working in tech. But this is also a world where wealth is distributed unevenly and benefits accrue mostly to investors and founders, who have rigged the game in their favor.

What they don’t realize is this is because of the inadvertent Coffee Can style of investing that they adopt in real estate as against the trading style in their stock portfolios, i.e. when it comes to real estate, investors are happy to buy and hold for long periods of time. As a result, they end up holding their properties through thick and thin, which is why they are able to see an appreciation in the value. In contrast, in equity, investors typically end up buying at the peak, trade frequently and then exiting at the bottom. The harshness of most investors’ experience of the stock market versus their happier experience in real estate is, therefore, in part self-inflicted rather than being due to the underlying nature of these asset classes.

Once these basic needs are met, quality of life has less to do with buying happiness and more to do with individual attitudes.

The economy is growing, and the economic reports are positive. Corporate earnings are rising and beating expectations. The media carry only good news. Securities markets strengthen. Investors grow increasingly confident and optimistic. Risk is perceived as being scarce and benign. Investors think of risk-bearing as a sure route to profit. Greed motivates behavior. Demand for investment opportunities exceeds supply. Asset prices rise beyond intrinsic value. Capital markets are wide open, making it easy to raise money or roll over debt. Defaults are few. Skepticism is low and faith is high, meaning risky deals can be done. No one can imagine things going wrong. No favorable development seems improbable. Everyone assumes things will get better forever. Investors ignore the possibility of loss and worry only about missing opportunities, No one can think of a reason to sell, and no one is forced to sell. Buyers outnumber sellers. Investors would be happy to buy if the market dips. Prices reach new highs. Media celebrate this exciting event. Investors become euphoric and carefree. Security holders marvel at their own intelligence; perhaps they buy more. Those who’ve remained on the sidelines feel remorse; thus they capitulate and buy. Prospective returns are low (or negative). Risk is high. Investors should forget about missing opportunity and worry only about losing money. This is the time for caution!

The mood swings of the securities markets resemble the movement of a pendulum. Although the midpoint of its arc best describes the location of the pendulum “on average,” it actually spends very little of its time there. Instead, it is almost always swinging toward or away from the extremes of its arc. But whenever the pendulum is near either extreme, it is inevitable that it will move back toward the midpoint sooner or later. In fact, it is the movement toward an extreme itself that supplies the energy for the swing back. Investment markets make the same pendulum-like swing: between euphoria and depression, between celebrating positive developments and obsessing over negatives, and thus between being overpriced and underpriced. This oscillation is one of the most dependable features of the investment world, and investor psychology seems to spend much more time at the extremes than it does at a “happy medium.

Happiness will always be a far-fetched dream if you can not be happy with the cup of tea you have had this evening. Happiness will always be unattainable if you forget to cherish all the mistakes you have made all these years. Happiness will always be a mile ahead of you if you keep running after it. There are around 1 billion people in the world who live with less than 1 dollar per day. To them, tea is a luxury. How many cups of beverages do you take on a typical day? Warren Buffet made 15 colossal mistakes that could ruin his investor career. He made over a thousand mistakes that could hinder him from being what he is right now. He accepted all the mistakes, took lessons from each of them, and successfully built his billion-dollar empire. Happiness is he didn't fail because he failed numerous times.

Do Things That Don’t Scale” taught me the importance of the ‘dirty work’ startups have to accomplish in the early days, like focusing on a deliberately narrow market to test the product or going out of their way to acquire users, and make them happy with insane attention-to-detail as if they’re a consultant with only one client. These are just three of the 174 essays currently on Paul’s site. There are a few resources that summarize the content or present a “Top 10,” but at this stage I think the best move is to read the above blogs and a few other articles where the title catches your eye.

What is this place? Why is this place? Who approved it? Are the investors happy? The stockholders? Was this cosmic behavior expected? Am I supposed to take it seriously? How can I? I’ve watched goldfish make babies, and ants execute earwigs. I’ve seen a fly deliver live young while having its head eaten by a mantis. And I had a golden retriever that behaved like one.

The happiness of those who want to be popular depends on others; the happiness of those who seek pleasure fluctuates with moods outside their control; but the happiness of the wise grows out of their own free acts. —Marcus Aurelius

Nobody likes recessions, but as our experience proves, they don’t have to destroy the foundations for long-term growth you’ve laid. The key is to stay calm while everyone else is panicking. Remember, as I’ve said, recessions are temporary. Good times will return eventually. As a leader, you have to think about the recovery and what your organization will need to perform. Don’t cut all of your growth investments just to get the best possible shareholder returns. Do everything you can not to cut them, delivering returns that are good enough to keep investors reasonably happy. By taking control of the downturn in this way, you can maintain all of the investments you’ve made in your business up to that point, and keep your ability to perform over the long-term intact.

There was one company—I think it was eMoneyMail—that shut down the company at a conference basically saying that the Internet is not a safe place to conduct transactions. They had 25 percent fraud. So for every $4.00 changing hands in the system, $1.00 was stolen. And it was all coming out of their pocket. They said, "We lost a ton of money," and they just quit. Then, people like Citibank and other large financial institutions that also competed with us that understood the fraud thing very well—they knew from many years of practice that this was going to become a big problem—didn't really approach it with the same happy abandon that we did. We started with this, "Fraud is going to kill us. What can we do to save ourselves?" They started from, "We have no fraud. How can we build this and not let any more fraud in?" Which is the wrong position to start because you are limiting your users, and new users learning about a new system really don't want to be restricted. Livingston: Why do you think they thought that way? Levchin: I think there's a very strong power of default where, to them, certain behavior to solve a particular problem is well understood. There are people that make careers out of risk management in big banks. They know that what you do is this and you don't do that. The other part, I think, is that a lot of them are public companies. We didn't go public until we had the fraud thing figured out. Somebody like Citibank or anyone with a substantial public visibility announcing that they are suddenly bleeding out $10 million a month in fraud would send serious shocks through the investor base. But I think, even if they did that, it's likely they wouldn't have been successful because—we had talked to a lot of them both as a potential acquirer and as partnership potential—none of them had actually ever gone to the sort of stuff that we did for our anti-fraud work. The default of how you do these things is very powerful, if you've been in the industry for a long time. So we were sort of beneficiaries of our naïveté. We thought, "We don't know how to do this; let's just invent it.

China was already a substantial investor in Italy, with a Chinese chemical company buying Pirelli, and Huawei buying mobile phone operator Wind.129 As China specialist François Godement points out, previous Italian governments were happy to sign a series of science and technology cooperation agreements that were ‘essentially a carbon copy’ of the priorities laid out in Made in China 2025, Beijing’s blueprint for becoming the world’s dominant technological power.

Most investors would perform better if they thought more and did less. One of the best hacks in the investment field is learning to be happy doing nothing.