Peter Kaufman Quotes

St. Peter:  “Who is knocking at my gate?” Voice: “It is I.” St. Peter: “Go away, we don’t need any more school teachers here!

Every statistician knows that a large, relevant sample size is their best friend. What are the three largest, most relevant sample sizes for identifying universal principles? Bucket number one is inorganic systems, which are 13.7 billion years in size. It’s all the laws of math and physics, the entire physical universe. Bucket number two is organic systems, 3.5 billion years of biology on Earth. And bucket number three is human history, you can pick your own number, I picked 20,000 years of recorded human behavior. Those are the three largest sample sizes we can access and the most relevant.” —Peter Kaufman

If you could see the world the way I see it, you’d understand why I behave the way I do.

Poor Charlie’s Almanack by Charlie Munger, compiled by Peter D Kaufman3 The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari by Robin Sharma4 Letters from a Stoic by Seneca5 Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman6 Mastery by Robert Greene7 Meditations by Marcus Aurelius8 12 Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson9 The Obstacle Is the Way

Not only does Buffett, much like Cato, stay in the arena with no plan to ever leave. He does so joyously and while providing good results for those who will trust him patiently.

I guess I don't so much mind being old, as I mind being fat and old. I should have no objection to go over the same life from it's beginning to the end: requesting only the advantage authors have, of correcting in a second edition the faults of the first. Life's Tragedy is that we get old too soon and wise too late. When you're finished changing you're finished.

In particular, I remember the central message of the talk on Simon Marks (of retailer Marks and Spencer): 'Find out what you're best at and keep pounding away at it.' This, of course, has always been Charlie's basic approach to life.

Take a simple idea and take it seriously.

Ben Franklin once said I cannot conceive otherwise than that He, the Infinite Father, expects or requires no worship or praise from us, but that He is even infinitely above it."I

Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One," and "An Edict by the King of Prussia.

He had arranged for the old Larson Boat Works to make us an "aquaplane," a heavy wooden affair we stood on as he towed it behind the boat. He would make sharp turns to see if we could hold on, and the only way to avoid the disgrace of a fall was to keep shifting weight to compensate for the extreme angles.

His favorite educational tools were the Morality Tale, in which someone faced an ethical problem and chose the correct path, and the Downward Spiral Tale, in which someone made the wrong choice and suffered an inevitable series of catastrophic personal and professional losses.His

Charlie has a desire to understand exactly what makes things happen. He wants to get to the bottom of everything, whether it's something of serious interest to him or not. Anything that comes to his attention, he wants to know more about it and understand it and figure out what makes it tick.

The title Message from My Father comes from the author's surmise that his father must have been communicating his expectations through coded messages. "It's possible that my father had a code so subtle that I didn't know of its existence," he writes.Anyone

If you would persuade, appeal to interest and not to reason".

Leslie Schwab was born in Bend, Oregon. After service in the Air Cadet Corps during World War II, he returned to Oregon and bought OK Rubber Welders, a small tire shop that he turned from a $32,000-a-year business into one generating $150,000 annually. In the 1950s, Schwab began expanding his business throughout the Pacific Northwest. Through innovations such as profit sharing, "supermarket" product selection, and independence from the tire manufacturing companies, the company now operates over three hundred stores with sales exceeding $l billion annually.

Non-luxury goods: same as second factor cited above, i.e., the higher price conveys information assumed to be correct by the consumer, that the higher price connotes higher value. This can especially apply to industrial goods where high reliability is an important factor.

You've got a complex system, and it spews out a lot of wonderful numbers that enable you to measure some factors. But there are other factors that are terribly important, [yet] there's no precise numbering you can put to these factors. You know they're important, but you don't have the numbers. well, practically everybody (1) overweighs the stuff that can be numbered because it yields to the statistical techniques they're taught in academia and(1) Doesn't mix in the hard-to-measure stuff that may be more important.

I have names for Mankiw’s approach, grabbing whatever you need without attribution. Sometimes I call it "take what you wish," and sometimes I call it "Kiplingism." And when I call it Kiplingism, I'm reminding you of Kipling's stanza of poetry', which went something like this: "When Homer smote his blooming lyre, he'd heard men sing by land and sea, and what he thought he might require, he went and took, the same as me.

It is not always recognized that, to function best morality should sometimes appear unfair, like most worldly outcomes. The craving for perfect fairness causes a lot of terrible problems in system function. Some systems should be made deliberately unfair to individuals because they'll be fairer on average for all of us.

I frequently cite the example of having your career over, in the Navy, if your ship goes aground, even if it wasn't your fault. I say the lack of justice for the one guy that wasn't at fault is way more than made up by a greater justice for everybody when every captain of a ship always sweats blood to make sure the ship doesn't go aground. Tolerating a little unfairness to some to get a greater fairness for all is a model I recommend to all of you. But again, I wouldn't put it in your assigned college work if you want to be graded well, particularly in a modern law school wherein there is usually an over-love of fairness-seeking process.

before. I think the game of competitive life often requires maximizing the experience of the people who have the most aptitude and the most determination as learning machines. And if you want the very highest reaches of human achievement, that's where you have to go. You do not want to choose a brain surgeon for your child by drawing straws to select one of fifty applicants, all of whom take turns doing procedures.

And once we get into microeconomics, we get into the concept of advantages of scale. Now we're getting closer to investment analysis- because in terms of which businesses succeed and which businesses fail, advantages of scale are ungodly important.

CBS provides an interesting example of another rule of psychology-namely, Pavlovian association. If people tell you what you really don't want to hear-what's unpleasant-there is an almost automatic reaction of antipathy. You have to train yourself out of it. It isn't foredestined that you have to be this way. But you will tend to be this way if you don't think about it.

A rightly famous Caltech engineering professor, exhibiting more insight than tact, once expressed his version of this idea as follows: "The principal job of an academic administration is to keep the people who don't matter from interfering with the work of the people that do.

Slug it out one inch at a time, day by day. At the end of the day-if you live long enough-most people get what they deserve.

One of the key elements to successful investing is having the right] temperament-most people are too fretful; they worry too much. Success means being very patient, but aggressive when it's time.

Our investment style has been given a name-focus investing-which implies ten holdings, not one hundred or four hundred. The idea that it is hard to find good investments. So concentrate in a few, seems to me to be an obviously good idea. But ninety-eight percent of the investment world doesn't think this way. It's been good for us-and you-that we've done this.What's funny is that most big investment organizations don't think like this. They hire lots of people, evaluate Merck vs. Pfizer and every stock in the S&P 500, and think they can beat the market. You can't do it.

A poet, philosopher, rhetorician, and humorist, Cicero was also one of Rome's great orators. Cicero viewed public service to be a Roman citizen’s highest duty. He defended those unjustly accused by dictatorial leaders and brought down corrupt governments.

Johnson spoke well when he said that life is hard enough to swallow without squeezing in the bitter rind of resentment.

What I say is that McDonald's is one of our most admirable institutions. Then, as signs of shock come to surrounding faces, I explain that McDonald's, providing first jobs to millions of teenagers, many troubled, over the years, has successfully taught most of them the one lesson they most need: to show up reliably for responsible work. Then I usually go on to say that if the elite campuses were as successful as McDonald's in teaching sensibly, we would have a better world.

combinations.Obviously, you have to know accounting. It's the language of practical business life. It was a very useful thing to deliver to civilization. I've heard it came to civilization through Venice, which, of course, was once the great commercial power in the Mediterranean. However, double-entry bookkeeping was a hell of an invention.And it's not that hard to understand. But you have to know enough about it to understand its limitations-because although accounting is the starting place, it's only a crude approximation

Keynes said, "It's not bringing in the new ideas that's so hard. It's getting rid of the old ones." And Einstein said it better, attributing his mental success to "curiosity, concentration, perseverance, and self-criticism.

Extreme success is likely to be caused by some combination of the following factors: A) Extreme maximization or minimization of one or two variables. Example,Costco or our furniture and appliance store. B) Adding success factors so that a bigger combination drives success, often in nonlinear fashion, as one is reminded by the concept of breakpoint and the concept of critical mass in physics. Often results are not linear.

Economics has been a very favorable place to be if you're in academia. Economics was always more multidisciplinary than the rest of soft science. It just reached out and grabbed things as it needed to.

The big general objection to economics was the one early described by Alfred North Whitehead when he spoke of the fatal unconnectedness of academic disciplines, wherein each professor didn't even know the models of the other disciplines, much less try to synthesize those disciplines with his own. I think there's a modern name for this approach that Whitehead didn't like, and that name is "bonkers." This is a perfectly crazy way to behave. Yet economics, like much else in academia. is too insular. The

So why is Boltzmann's constant now named for Boltzmann? Well, the answer is that Boltzmann derived that constant from basic physics in a more fundamental way than the poor forgotten fellow who found the constant in the first place in some less fundamental way. The ethos of hard science is so strong in favor of reductionism to the more fundamental body of knowledge that you can wash the discoverer right out of history when somebody else handles his discovery in a more fundamental way. I think that is correct. I think Boltzmann's constant should be named for Boltzmann.

But once you try to put a lot of false precision into a complex system like economics, the errors can compound to the point where they're worse than those of the McKinsey partner when he was incompetently advising the Washington Post. So, economics should emulate physics' basic ethos, but its search for precision in physics-like formulas is almost always wrong in economics.

You've got all the tools. And you've got to have one more trick. You've got to use those tools checklist-style because you'll miss a lot if you just hope that the right tool is going to pop up unaided whenever you need it.

training. To find the best educational narrow-scale model, we have to look not at unthreatened schools of education and the like, too much driven by our two counterproductive psychological tendencies and other bad influences, but, instead, look where incentives for effective education are strongest and results are most closely measured. This leads us to a logical place: the hugely successful education now mandatory for pilots.

First, the concept of "all needed skills" lets us recognize that we don't have to raise everyone's skill in celestial mechanics to that of Laplace and also ask everyone to achieve a similar skill level in all other knowledge. Instead, it turns out that the truly big ideas in each discipline, learned only in essence, carry most of the freight. And they are not so numerous, nor are their interactions so complex, that a large and multidisciplinary understanding is impossible for many, given large amounts of talent and time.

For instance, both psychology mastery and accounting mastery should be required as outcomes in legal education. Yet, in many elite places, even today, there are no such requirements. Often,

Many markets get down to two or three big competitors or five or six. And in some of those markets, nobody makes any money to speak of. But in others, everybody does very well.Over the years, we've tried to figure out why the competition in some markets gets sort of rational from the investor's point of view so that the shareholders do well, while in other markets there's destructive competition that destroys shareholder wealth.f

it's rather interesting because one of the greatest economists of the world is a substantial shareholder in Berkshire Hathaway and has been from the very early days after Buffett was in control. His textbook always taught that the stock market was perfectly efficient and that nobody could beat it.But his own money went into Berkshire and made him wealthy. So, like Pascal in his famous wager, he hedged his bet.The iron rule of life is that only twenty percent of the people can be in the top fifth Is the stock market so efficient that people can't beat it? Well, the efficient market theory is obviously roughly right-meaning that markets are quite efficient and it's quite hard for anybody to beat the market by significant margins as a stock picker by just being intelligent and working in a disciplined way.Indeed, the average result has to be the average result. By definition, everybody can't beat the market.

There is an old two-part rule that often works wonders in business, science, and elsewhere: (1) Take a simple, basic idea and (2) take it very seriously. You will note that, compared with much current practice in soft science, the fundamental organizing ethos of hard science is more severe.

Well, Cook didn't want to tell 'em that he was doing it in the hope it would prevent scurvy-because they might mutiny and take over the ship if they thought that he was taking them on a voyage so long that scurvy was likely. So here's what he did: Officers ate at one place where the men could observe them. And for a long time, he served sauerkraut to the officers, but not to the men. And, then, finally, Captain Cook said, "Well, the men can have it one day a week."In due course, he had the whole crew eating sauerkraut.

It's very, very important to create human systems that are hard to cheat. Otherwise, you're ruining your civilization because these big incentives will create incentive-caused bias and people will rationalize that bad behavior is OK.Then,

The Value of a Spouse At age 26, Walt Disney was already the head of a successful cartoon studio in Hollywood, California. But business was less than rosy for the young cartoonist, because his principal property, Oswald the Rabbit, had just been wrested from his control by his financial backers. "Mrs. Disney and I were coming back from New York on the train and I had to have something I could tell them," He recalled. "I have lost Oswald, but I had this mouse in the back of my head..." Walt’s new creation was a little mouse in red velvet pants named "Mortimer." 'Walt's wife, Lillian, felt that was too pompous a name for such a cute character and suggested "Mickey'' instead.

The human mind is not constructed so that it works well without having reasons. You've got to hang reality on a theoretical structure with reasons. That's the way it hangs together in usable form so that you're an effective thinker. And to teach doctrines-either with no reasons or with poorly explained reasons?! That's wrong!

I'm telling you to do-which is to take all the main models from psychology and use them as a checklist in reviewing outcomes in complex systems. No pilot takes off without going through his checklist: A, B, C, D​And no bridge player who needs two extra tricks plays a hand without going down his checklist and figuring out how to do it. But these psychology professors think they're so smart that they don't need a checklist. But they aren't that smart. Almost nobody is. Or, maybe, nobody is.If they used a checklist, they'd realize the Milgram experiment harnesses six psychological principles, at least-not three. All they'd have to do is to go down the checklist to see [the ones that they missed.Similarly, without this system of getting the main models and using them together in a multi-modular way, you'll screw up time after time after time, too.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." What Franklin is here indicating, in part, is that Inconsistency-Avoidance Tendency makes it much easier to prevent a habit than to change it.

The proper antidote to creating Persian Messenger Syndrome and its bad effects, like those at CBS, is to develop, through exercise of will, a habit of welcoming bad news. At Berkshire, there is a common injunction: "Always tell us the bad news promptly. It is only the good news that can wait." It also helps to be so wise and informed that people fear not telling you bad news because you are so likely to get it elsewhere.

Where denial is used to make dying easier, the conduct meets almost no criticism. Who would begrudge a fellow man such help at such a time? But some people hope to leave life hewing to the iron prescription, "It is not necessary to hope in order to persevere." And there is something admirable in anyone able to do this.

Therefore, we are going to start something like an autocatalytic reaction in chemistry, precisely the sort of multifactor-triggered lollapalooza effect we need. The logistics and the distribution strategy of our business will be simple. There are only two practical ways to sell our beverage: (1) as syrup to fountains and restaurants and (2) as a complete carbonated-water product in containers. Wanting lollapalooza results, we will naturally do it both ways.

About three centuries before the birth of Christ, Demosthenes, the most famous Greek orator, said. "What a man wishes, that also will he believe." Demosthenes, parsed out, was thus saying that man displays not only Simple, Pain-Avoiding Psychological Denial but also an excess of optimism even when he is already doing well. The Greek orator was clearly right about an excess of optimism being the normal human condition, even when pain or the threat of pain is absent.

A rough rule in life is that an organization foolish in one way in dealing with a complex system is all too likely to be foolish in another. So the wisdom of foundation donations may need as much improvement as investment practices of foundations.

The prudential rule is that underlying the old Warner & Swasey advertisement for machine tools: "The man who needs a new machine tool and hasn't bought it is already paying for it." 'The Warner & Swasey rule also applies, I believe, to thinking tools. If you don't have the right thinking tools, you, and the people you seek to help, are already suffering from your easily removable ignorance.

The next thing most like living one's life over again seems to be a recollection of that life, and to make that recollection as durable as possible by putting it down in writing." - Benjamin Franklin

Throughout his life, a wise man engages in practice of all his useful, rarely used skills, many of them outside his discipline, as a sort of duty to his better self. If he reduces the number of skills, he practices and, therefore, the number of skills he retains, he will naturally drift into error from man with a hammer tendency. His learning capacity will also shrink as he creates gaps in the latticework of theory he needs as a framework for understanding new experience. It is also essential for a thinking man to assemble his skills into a checklist that he routinely uses. Any other mode of operation will cause him to miss much that is important.

truth is hard to assimilate in any mind when opposed by interest

In substance, an LBO fund is a better way of buying equivalents of marketable equities on margin, and the debt could prove disastrous if future marketable equity performance is bad.

Well, an unthreatened man, thinking of nothing in particular, is not being prompted to remove doubt through rushing to some decision. As we shall see later when we get to Social-Proof Tendency and Stress-Influence Tendency, what usually triggers Doubt-Avoidance Tendency is some combination of (l) puzzlement and (Z) stress. And both of these factors naturally occur in facing religious issues.Thus, the natural state of most men is in some form of religion. And this is what we observe.

In social proof, it is not only action by others that misleads but also their inaction. In the presence of doubt, inaction by others becomes social proof that inaction is the right course. Thus, the inaction of a great many bystanders led to the death of Kitty Genovese in a famous incident much discussed in introductory psychology courses.

But not many scientists would have done what Pavlov next did.And that was to spend the rest of his long life giving stress-induced nervous breakdowns to dogs, after which he would try to reverse the break downs, all the while keeping careful experimental records. He found (1) that he could classify dogs so as to predict how easily a particular dog would breakdown (2) that the dogs hardest to break down were also the hardest to return to their pre breakdown state; (3) that any dog could be broken down; and (4) that he couldn't reverse a breakdown except by reimposing stress. Now, practically everyone is revolted by such experimental treatment of man's friend, the dog. Moreover, Pavlov was Russian and did his last work under the Communists. And maybe those facts account for the present extreme, widespread ignorance of Pavlov's last work. The two Freudian psychiatrists with whom I tried many years ago to discuss this work had never heard of it. And the dean of a major medical school actually asked me, several years ago, if any of Pavlov's experiments were "repeatable" in experiments of other researchers. Obviously, Pavlov is now a sort of forgotten hero in medical science.

How many insights do you need? Well, I'd argue that you don't need many in a lifetime. If you look at Berkshire Hathaway and all of its accumulated billions, the top ten insights account for most of it. And that's with a very brilliant man warren’s a lot more able than I am and very disciplined- devoting his lifetime to it. I don't mean to say that he's only had ten insights.I'm just saying that most of the money came from ten insights.So

You're much more likely to do well if you start out to do something feasible instead of something that isn't feasible. Isn't that perfectly obvious?And the Berkshire system is not "bonkers." It's so damned elementary that even bright people are going to have limited, really valuable insights in a very competitive world when they're fighting against other very bright, hardworking people. And it makes sense to load up on the very few good insights you have instead of pretending to know everything about everything at all times.

man.There are huge advantages for an individual to get into a position where you make a few great investments and just sit on your ass: You're paying less to brokers. You're listening to less nonsense. And if it works, the governmental tax system gives you an extra one, two, or three percentage points per annum compounded.

Graham had a very academic personality. I knew him. He was a lot like Adam Smith-very preoccupied, very brilliant. He even looked like an academic. And he was a good one. And Graham, without ever really trying to maximize the gaining of wealth, died rich-even though he was always generous and spent thirty years teaching at Columbia and authored or coauthored the best textbooks in his field.So I would argue that academia has a lot to teach about worldly wisdom and that the best academic values really work.

Never, ever, think about something else when you should be thinking about the power of incentives.

Few people can list a lot of bad habits that they have eliminated, and some people cannot identify even one of these. Instead, practically everyone has a great many bad habits he has long maintained despite their being known as bad. Given this situation, it is not too much in many cases to appraise early-formed habits as destiny.

Under such circumstances, the salesman is often able to maximize his advantage, particularly when government is the purchaser.Wise employers, therefore, try to oppose reciprocate-favor tendencies of employees engaged in purchasing. The simplest antidote works best:Don't let them accept any favors from vendors. Sam Walton agreed with this idea of absolute prohibition. He wouldn't let purchasing agents accept so much as a hot dog from a vendor.

Let us start by exploring the consequences of our simplifying "no- brainer" decision that we must rely on a strong trademark. This conclusion automatically leads to an understanding of the essence of our business in proper elementary academic terms. We can see from the introductory course in psychology that, in essence, we are going into the business of creating and maintaining conditioned reflexes. The "Coca-Cola" trade name and trade dress will act as the stimuli, and the purchase and ingestion of our beverage will be the desired responses.The

unsound.Broadscale problems, by definition, cross many academic disciplines.

On the personal level a man should try to face the two simple facts: (1) fixable but unfixed bad performance is bad character and tends to create more of itself, causing more damage to the excuse giver with each tolerated instance, and (2) in demanding places, like athletic teams and General Electric, you are almost sure to be discarded in due course if you keep giving excuses instead of behaving as you should.

I once heard of a child-teaching method so effective that the child remembered the learning experience over fifty years later. The child later became Dean of the USC School of Music and then related to me what his father said when he saw his child taking candy from the stock of his employer with the excuse that he intended to replace it later. The father said, "Son, it would be better for you to simply take all you want and call yourself a thief every time you do it" The best antidote to folly from an excess of self-regard is to force yourself to be more objective when you are thinking about yourself, your family and friends, your property, and the value of your past and future activity.This

Your mistaken professors were too much influenced by "rational man" models of human behavior from economics and too little by "foolish man" models from psychology and real-world experience. "Crowd folly," the tendency of humans, under some circumstances, to resemble lemmings, explains much foolish thinking of brilliant men and much foolish behavior-like investment management practices of many foundations represented here today.

What this accounting saga constitutes is one more sad example of evil rewarded dying hard, as a great many people conclude that something can't be evil if they are profiting from it. "Pleasure is the greatest incentive to evil." -Plato The

Charlie's redundancy in expressions and examples is purposeful: for the kind of deep "fluency" he advocates, he knows that repetition is the heart of instruction.A

hard."I think a good litmus test of the mental and moral quality at any large institution [with significant derivatives exposure] would be to ask them, "Do you really understand your derivatives book?" Anyone who says yes is either crazy or lying.

used to play poker, when I was young, with a guy who made a substantial living doing nothing but bet harness races. Now, harness racing is a relatively inefficient market. You don't have the depth of intelligence betting on harness races that you do on regular races. What my poker pal would do was to think about harness races as his main profession. And he would bet only occasionally when he saw some mispriced bet available. And by doing that, after paying the full handle to the house-which I presume was around seventeen percent-he made a substantial living.If you stop to think about it, a pari-mutuel system is a market.

As one factor, Graham had this concept of value to a private owner-what the whole enterprise would sell for if it were available. And that was calculable in many cases. Then, if you could take the stock price and multiply it by the number of shares and get something that was one-third or less of sellout value, he would say that you've got a lot of edge going for you. Even with an elderly alcoholic running a stodgy business, this significant excess of real value per share working for you means that all kinds of good things can happen to you.

It is, of course, irritating that extra care in thinking is not all good but also introduces extra error. But most good things have undesired "side effects," and thinking is no exception. The best defense is that of the best physicists, who systematically criticize themselves to an extreme degree, using a mindset described by Nobel laureate Richard Feynman as follows: "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you're the easiest person to fool.

Generally, I tend to prefer over direct foreign investment Berkshire's practice of participating in foreign economies through the likes of Coca-Cola and Gillette.

Life, in part, is like a poker game wherein you have to learn to quit sometimes when holding a much-loved hand.And

And he taught it in a very clever way-because instead of just pounding it in, he told it to me in a way that required a slight mental reach. And I had to make the reach myself in order to get the idea that I should behave like Grant McFadyen. And because I had to reach for it, he figured I'd hold it better. And, indeed, I've held it all the way through until today-through all of these decades. That's a very clever teaching method.There, again, we're talking about elementary psychology. It's elementary literature. Good literature makes the reader reach a little for understanding. Then, it works better. You hold it better. It's the commitment and consistency tendency. If you've reached for it, the idea's pounded in better. Good literature makes the reader reach a line for understanding. If you've reached for it, the idea's pounded in better.As

It's enormously helpful when you're serving clients or otherwise trying to persuade someone in a good cause to come up with a little humorous example. The ability to do that is a knack.

In high school football, for example, a paraplegic or quadriplegic will inevitably be created occasionally. And who with deep pockets can the injured person best sue other than the helmet manufacturer? Then everyone feels sorry, the injuries are horrible, and the case is dangerous for the manufacturer... I think big, rich corporations are seldom wise to make football helmets in the kind of a civilization we're in.

Look at Berkshire Hathaway. I call it the ultimate didactic enterprise. Warren's never going to spend any money. He's going to give it all back to society. He's just building a platform so people will listen to his notions. Needless to say, they're very good notions. And the platform's not so bad either. But you could argue that Warren and I are academics in our own way.

Heavy ideology is one of the most extreme distorters of human cognition.

Now there are huge implications from the fact that the human mind is put together this way. One implication is that people who create things like cash registers, which make dishonest behavior hard to accomplish, are some of the effective saints of our civilization because, as Skinner so well knew, bad behavior is intensely habit-forming when it is rewarded.

Around the time of Caesar, there was a European tribe that, when the assembly horn blew, always killed the last warrior to reach his assigned place, and no one enjoyed fighting this tribe. And George Washington hanged farm-boy deserters forty feet high as an example to others who might contemplate desertion.

As I have shared the observation of life with Warren Buffett over decades, I have heard him wisely say on several occasions: "It is not greed that drives the world, but envy." And, because this is roughly right, one would expect a vast coverage of envy/jealousy in psychology textbooks. But no such vast coverage existed when I read my three textbooks. Indeed, the very words "envy" and "jealousy" were often absent from indexes.

Similarly, it is not from mere chance that military bands play such impressive music. That kind of music, appearing in mere association with military service, helps to attract soldiers and keep them in the army. Most armies have learned to use mere association in this successful way.

In Poor Richard's Almanac Franklin counseled: "Keep your eyes wide open before marriage and half shut thereafter." Perhaps this "eyes-half-shut" solution is about right, but I favor a tougher prescription: "See it like it is and love anyway.

line.You ought to have an internal compass. So there should be all kinds of things you won't do even though they're perfectly legal. That the way we try to operate."I don't think we deserve a lot of credit for that because we early understood that we'd make more money that way. And since we understood it so well, I'm not sure that we're entitled to credit for such morality as we have.

When perfectly reputable people say options shouldn't be expensed, it's outrageous.A stock option is both an expense and dilution to argue anything else is insane.

We try more to profit from always remembering the obvious than from grasping the esoteric. It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.

Charlie also helped the family by working to earn his own spending money and thus learned first-hand the value of financial independence.

Charlie had a tendency to be abrupt, which was often interpreted as rudeness. Actually', Charlie was just in a hurry and customary pleasantries of the classroom were of little concern to him.

With many new responsibilities, Charlie worked hard at his law practice. Even so, his earnings were unsatisfactory to him as they were based on a combination of billable hours and seniority.