Welcome back.
Just a short podcast today.
But one that hopefully you will find has more value per minute of recording than many others that you listen to.
I know the content today does that for me because what I'm going to do today is just share with you some of my favorite things that I've read recently.
Quotes from very smart people who I think said some very smart things.
I don't read poetry. Maybe I should because I love the concept of poetry, which is if you distill something down as briefly as you can, you can actually make something that has more insight and more power and more emotion in a couple lines or even just a couple of words than other people might be able to say in an entire book.
For sure there are quotes that I've come across that have caused me to think more and I think taught me more that I've learned from some books.
I don't know if that says more about the quote or the book, but I've always been a fan of just very brief little bits of knowledge.
I don't think it's a lazy thing to like a short quote.
I think it's extremely difficult to distill something profound into a sentence and when you come across it, it's a wonderful thing.
It's a beautiful thing.
So I've been collecting some quotes for years, maybe decades at this point.
I have a Google doc on my desktop called Thoughts where I just randomly collect all of these little sentences that I come across from various authors and thinkers and fund managers whoever it might be.
So let me just share with you some of these today that I've read recently that I thought were worth sharing with you.
People in their 30s know where the world is going because they're going to do it.
I am in my 80s so I have no idea.
That was from Daniel Conneman, the great psychologist who as you may have seen passed away yesterday.
He was an incredible man, lived an incredible life.
He said that at a dinner that I went to about a decade ago in response to a question of someone asking him, where's the world going to go?
And I thought for someone who won the Nobel Prize is qualified to give a response about where he sees the future.
I thought it was so humble and so wonderful for him to share those words.
Alright, moving on. Every group of people who think for a living is going to be sad.
Ignorance is bliss. So what is the opposite?
That's from Chris Rock.
I would say the most dangerous thing in the world with a 12 year old is to try to be his friend.
What the worst thing to do with a 40 year old is to try to be their parent.
That's from Chris Davis.
And the intellectual capabilities to fill it with contemplation and activity in the service of mankind.
That's from Darren Brown.
If you ask yourself why you're interested in business and can find no other answer than I want to make money, you will save money by getting out of business and going to work for someone else.
That's from Harvey Firestone.
When asked what was the best asset a man could have, Albert Lasker, the most astute of all advertising men, replied, humility in the presence of a good idea.
It is horribly difficult to even recognize a good idea.
That's from David Oglevy.
I became so avid a collector of instances of bad judgment that I paid no attention to the boundaries between professional territories.
Why should I search for some tiny, unimportant, hard to find new stupidity in my own field?
In some large, important, easy to find stupidity was just over the fence in the other fellow's professional territory.
That's from Charlie Munger.
The more I am around horse racing, the more I think that the most underrated thing is the horse, and that it is us trainers and jockeys and owners who are overrated.
That's from Leroy Jolly.
We are built with an almost infinite capacity to believe things, because the beliefs are advantageous for us to hold, rather than because they are even remotely related to the truth.
That's from Dee Hock. The momentum is on your side, people focus on your strengths, and forgive your weaknesses.
When the momentum stops, they scrutinize the whole thing.
That's from Pachy McCormick.
Join no creed, but respect all of them for the truth that is in them.
That's from Robert Henry.
Apple was Steve Jobs with 10,000 lives.
That's from David Cennara, and it reminds me of a related quote, which is that everyone suffers two deaths.
One when they die, and another when their name is spoken for the last time.
I want to see your best work.
I am not interested in your new work.
That's from Jerry Seinfeld.
It fits very well into the social media world.
Jonas Salk, the inventor of the polio vaccine, said the main motivation of his life was to be a good ancestor.
A great way to understand yourself is to seriously reflect on everything you find irritating in others.
That's from Kevin Kelly.
The world is split between those who don't know how to start making money, and those who don't know when to stop.
That's not seen to lab. It doesn't take much to convince us that we are smart and healthy, but it takes a lot of facts to convince us of the opposite.
That's from Dan Gilbert.
Happiness is that feeling that you get right before you need more happiness.
That's from the great philosopher, Don Draper.
What is that? Well, lots of people are happy to tell you about the Golden Ages.
Nobody ever seems to think that one is happening right now.
Maybe that's because the only place a Golden Age can ever happen is in our memory.
That's from Adam Masteryani.
I believe pretty strongly that one's overarching aim in life and work is to be always making oneself obsolete.
That's from my old boss, Tim Hanson.
I think it's true in parenting and in careers.
What you want to do is get to a spot where you have taught people your skills so that they can do them without you.
It is a very curious feature of our existence, that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life, but even better at extinguishing it.
That's from Bill Bryson, and it perfectly also explains the evolution and survival of the fittest in business and investing.
Fast growth is counterintuitively more perilous than declining revenue and can quickly destroy a company.
That's from Brent, be sure.
If passionate love is a drug, literally a drug, it has to wear off eventually.
That's from Jonathan Height.
And I think it applies to everything from relationships to businesses.
Curiosity is more sustainable than passion.
It's better to get your dopamine from improving your ideas than having them validated.
That's from Nat Friedman.
People with very high expectations have very low resilience.
That's from Nvidia CEO Jensen Wong.
It is good to be optimistic in the general and skeptical in the specific.
It's very dangerous to be pessimistic in the general and optimistic in the specific.
That's from Neval Robocont, and I'm paraphrasing him there.
The idea that you should be an optimist about the future, but skeptical of every new idea, every new technology, maybe every new startup.
Every dangerous, though, to be pessimistic about the future, but gullible about every new idea that you see.
The greatest trick that the devil ever played was making you believe that the pessimists are the good guys.
That's from Packing McCormick.
And we'll end it there. I hope you enjoyed those.
Thanks again for listening.
By the way, if you're looking for another podcast, Toast and Two, check out The Run Downed by my friends at public.com.
It's a financial news podcast that you can listen to in just five minutes.
Short and sweet, just like my own podcast.
In The Run Down, you'll learn about the stocks that are making the biggest moves this week.
You get caught up on what happened in the global economy and figure out what's happening in the wild, all those volatile world of crypto.
Maybe you'll even learn why your co-workers crypto advice is probably terrible and you shouldn't listen to it.
Each episode of The Run Downed is just five minutes and you'll walk away in the loop of understanding everything that's happening in the finance and economic world.
Check it out. Hope you enjoy it.
And thanks again for listening.
