The Wisdom Wall

“There were so many businesses in the last decade that were good businesses with a good product that customers loved. And let's say their natural growth rate was 50% per year. Just throwing that out there. But a lot of VCs are like, oh, we're going to give you a billion dollars, but I need you to grow 200% per year. And…”

“if you are a pundit in the financial industry or an analyst or an economist, whatever word you want to use, If you tell people what they want to hear, you can be wrong for a long time without any penalty, because what you are doing, you're giving your clients exactly what they want, which is the reduction of…”

“Happiness is always a five minute emotion. Happiness never hits you for more than a couple minutes at a time.”

“Anything over, I would say in the tens of millions of dollars, it's not going to change your lifestyle that much. It's really not going to change that much. Maybe let's say a hundred million, anything over a hundred. By and large, you're living in the same houses, driving the same cars.”

“whenever you have spoiled children, it's usually not because the children had a big material life. It's because the parents, maybe without even knowing it, taught their kids that you should judge other people by how much money they have, not how much wisdom they have or how helpful they can be or their morals or…”

“One that seems very harmless and innocent is the spend money on experiences. I think it's bad for two reasons. One, a lot of times the experience that you want is what will make a good Instagram picture. That's especially true for young people. And you're not doing it for the experience. You're doing it for the…”

“What actually matters in investing is not what the highest returns that you can earn are in any given year. It's what returns that you can sustain for the longest period of time. And I think the dirtiest secret in investing is that average returns sustained for an above average period of time leads to magic, leads to…”

“And I think if there is a structural advantage to private markets advantage over public, it tends to be that the lack of liquidity is forcing a good level of behavior that I think is a wonderful thing.”

“And I think a lot of fund managers, when they get into problems with their investor base, with their LPs, it's because they have given their LPs, their investors, a false definition, a false sense of what the risks are going to take. You might have a fund manager that says, Look, we're investing within this certain…”

“Look, I have experienced, and will experience again in the future, the market falling 50%. Do I view that in, for me personally, as a risk? I don't know if I would put that in the category of risk, because I expect it to happen. If I expect it to happen, it's not risk. It's just the normal run-of-the-mill behavior of…”

“Patrick said the phrase that he would use to describe their personality is not driven by It's not ambitious. It's tortured. They wake up every morning tortured that they are not more successful, bigger, richer than they are. And I think that's true for virtually all these people, Musk, Bezos, Gates, all these people, I…”

“So the idea that investing and money Is more akin to like your taste in music where nobody's right or wrong. Everyone's just has a different view of what's good and what's bad. It's hard to grasp that in a field like finance where it's taught as a math-based field where people are looking for the quote unquote, the…”

“If you're writing for an audience of one, yourself, then you're naturally going to do your best work. Writing for yourself is really fun, and I think it shows in the writing. Writing for other people is work, and that shows in the writing.”

“The decisions that people had made and were continued to make just, you could not explain through the normal field of finance. It wasn't in those books, but you could find it. You could find the explanations for what was going on in a psychology textbook and in a history textbook, in a sociology textbook, people have…”

“I think 90% of virality, if your article does really well and it's gone, you know, doing well on social media, 90% of virality is luck. The other 10%, like it needs to be good, but you can write something that is very good that doesn't take off because virality is when one person retweets it and then it got seen by…”

“In finance, you can be someone who has no education, no background, no experience, And vastly outperform someone who has the best education, the best background, the best experience, which doesn't happen in any other field.”

“I think the more important explanation though, is that that happens because what matters in finance is not what you know. It's not your IQ or your intelligence. It's just how you behave. That's the most important. It's not the only thing that's important, but the most important part of finance is your relationship with…”

“What's difficult in finance is that the kind of personality that makes you a billionaire hedge fund manager is not the kind of personality that is likely to say, okay, that's enough.”

“Paying off your mortgage is ridiculous, but I actually think it's a wonderful thing for people who can do if you can do it. Just to give yourself that added sense of stability and safety and know that no one can touch your house.”

“Most bad financial decisions happen when you follow the strategy that is right for somebody else, but not for you.”

“the more debt you have, the narrower the range of outcomes you can endure in life. Very simple, very elementary in that sense. That's how I think about wealth. The more wealth you have, the wider the channel becomes of the range of outcomes that you can endure.”

“viewing it as not saving money, as idle money, as not delayed gratification, but viewing it as purchasing independence that I gained pleasure from today. It's not delayed gratification. If I save money, I benefit from that right now because I have a higher sense in my body of being more independent than I was before.”

“That's the seed of all innovation, is people waking up and saying, not enough. We need bigger, better. That's great. But the individual level, it puts you on a hamster wheel forever.”

“So much of this is be careful who you socialize with, because they will absolutely indisputably set your expectations.”

“Having that big house makes it easier to host your friends. But the realization is the friends are making you happy. The house doesn't make any difference. But if it's a conduit to having more meaningful relationships, awesome, fantastic.”

“so many people, they have a very high propensity to show off their wealth. A lot of times, it's because they are trying to fill an emotional wound that they had from earlier in their life, of some time in their life when they were snubbed in some way, and either for other people or even internally for themselves, they…”

“The reason that finance can be such a tense topic and subject of so much debate in a way that meteorology is not, in finance, there's an infinite number of right answers for different people.”

“There's two ways to use money. One is as a tool to give yourself a better life. The other is as a yardstick of status to insert yourself on the social pecking order.”

“nobody is thinking about you as much as you are. Nobody cares about your house or your car or your clothes as much as you do. They're busy thinking about themselves. Once you come to grips with that, then your desire for impressing strangers plunges, and then your desire for using money to help you and your immediate…”

“Part of the reason that it is so easy is because money is one of the only things in life that is so immediately tangible and quantifiable. I'll use the example. If I woke up and said, I want to be a Great goal. I would love to do that. What does that mean? How do you measure that? There's no way I can measure that. I…”

“social debt is a hidden liability. You don't actually see it, but it's very real. It's when society and your own expectations tell you how to live. And who to be and control your personality, control your desires in ways that might be opposite of your actual personality.”

“relative to where I was five years ago, I don't have more better days, but I think I have fewer bad days, which is a lifestyle improvement. That is a better life. That is an upgrade. But let's not pretend that when people make Some amount of money. They're just going to wake up grinning ear to ear. It's not like that.”

“Spending five grand on yourself will probably do nothing. Spending five grand for someone who's in need can utterly change their life. And you get an enormous boost from that.”

“You don't need to sit down your kids and tell them about money. But every time you say, we can't afford this, every time you make a snide comment about your neighbor's yard, every time you choose the hotel to go on, they're always paying attention. And by the time you're young adults, they have a very crystal clear…”

“all books are basically a seed stage startup in the sense of even if you do everything right, and it's run by talented people and well-funded, it's probably going to fail. That's most of the case. Books are a tail-driven business.”

“And the truth is if you sell ten million copies of a book, it's probably not repeatable unless you're like J.K. Rowling. It's just not repeatable.”

“I would say if I look at my entire life, personal life, career, everything, I would say, 20% of things have gotten better, 60% of things have stayed the same, and 20% of things have gotten worse. I think that's where it ends up.”

“As an author, even as an established author, you can sell a 100,000 copies of a book. That is an absolute mega grand slam. That is out of the park in the world series.”

“an underappreciated contributor to his success is that for his entire life, he's been such an effective communicator. I don't know if I'd say storyteller, but a very effective communicator. In the hedge fund partnership days, that gave him, I think, a more stable base of capital than other hedge fund managers who would…”

“I think the manager who has good performance, but it's a poor storyteller is just going to be on a very short leash with their investors.”

“every market valuation for any stock, public company, private company, even bond, is a number from today multiplied by a story about tomorrow. That's the basic mechanism of valuation. A number from today, like earnings per share, and a story about tomorrow, which is, what do I think your future growth rate is? That's…”

“The majority of investing problems from professionals or amateurs comes from people looking at that and saying, Let's get a little bit faster. How can we speed this up? How can we compress that? Historically, you've doubled your money every decade. How can we get that to every five years? And that's where most problems…”

“I think every successful fund manager has been selective about who they accept as clients or LPs. And that's really what it is. It's the stability of your investor base that's going to give you that endurance.”

“My basic definition of risk is something that you did not anticipate that's going to force your hand in a bad direction between now and the end of your time horizon.”

“My expectation is that on average, the world will break once per decade. Break in the sense of you wake up one morning and you realize that a lot of what you thought was true is no longer true. But the other common denominator there is That breakage is always a black swan. It's things that virtually nobody saw coming…”

“people do not necessarily Want to know what's going to happen next. They want to reduce the uncertainty that they have in their head. So when you were listening to a market pundit who says, stocks are going to do this this year. The economy is going to do this next year. I think most people don't actually care about…”

“almost without exception, people who are very good at one thing tend to be very bad at another thing. It's like your mind only has enough bandwidth for a certain amount of thought and action. And if you are a kind of person who's crazy successful, At this business or this investing strategy, that has probably taken up…”

“If you can tell a story about how people think, that is something that an eighty-year-old hedge fund manager will appreciate, and a sixteen-year-old will understand. I don't think there's any data equivalent of that. There's almost no chart or formula of data in which a professional investor will learn something from,…”

“I think if you are very public with your financial success, you get that equivalent. You're the equivalent of an A-list actor where everybody around you wants something for you, and they're going to laugh at your dumb jokes, and they're going to tell you that you're amazing because they want your money.”

“If you can't go to the grocery store without being recognized, that's a terrible thing. That's when your fame starts to go downhill and just becomes a liability. So I think if you can have a notable name, but people still don't recognize you at the grocery store and on flights and whatnot, that's like the sweet spot…”

“The knee-jerk reaction is more money, bigger stuff, more stuff, nicer stuff, better life. And I think that is maybe like, 20% true. There's a lot more that you need to dig into.”

“What's true for me that I think is true for almost any writer is if I'm writing 50 articles a year, about one a week, at the end of the year, I will be really proud of like five of them, even three of them. And then there'll be 20 or so that I'm like, eh, this is okay. And then 30, the majority of them, I'm like, nah,…”

“people really love when you write something that they already know. They intuitively know this idea. They just never put it into words. Because then when they see it in words, they instantly think, yes, you're right.”

“The reason it's hard to write is usually because the idea you're saying Is it right? You have this, like, conflict in your head, and the reason it's hard to write is because you know in your head that what you're saying does not make any sense.”

“We usually look at success and failure as binary. If you are successful, you made the right decisions. If you weren't, you made the wrong decisions. But when you realize that, like, we're all just trying to make probabilistic decisions of, let's say, you know, the odds of success are 80% in your favor, let's say. That…”

“So rather than trying to be rational, I think people should just try to be reasonable with their money. Just try to do things that try to make sense within the context of your own goals, your own personality, your own risk tolerances, your own flaws, and what you're good at.”

“There's two sides of overcoming stuttering. One is anticipating before you speak what words are going to trip you up. You have this dialogue in your head. You know the next sentence you're going to say, and you need to anticipate, oh, that word is not going to work for me. So once you can learn to predict what's going…”

“Independence is always a spectrum, and every dollar of wealth that you have is one more claim check of your own future that you own versus somebody else owns.”

“Rather than looking at other people and saying, why do you believe that? Why are you doing that? A way better question is, what have you experienced in life that makes you believe that? An even better question is, if I experience that same thing, would I believe what you do? And a lot of times the answer is yes.”

“writing is a really great way to clarify your thoughts and the vague ideas that you have in your head, the gut feelings to be able to sit down and put them to paper and clarify your thoughts for better or worse.”