Charlie Munger: “I can’t think of a single example in my whole life where keeping it simple has worked against us...”
Buffett: “Our investments continue to be few number and simple in concept: The truly big investment idea can usually be explained in a short paragraph.”
"Information is antifragile; it feeds more on attempts to harm it than it does on efforts to promote it. For instance, many wreck their reputations merely by trying to defend them." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb in Antifragile
Some extremely profound words of wisdom from Alan Watts.
"One day you'll realize you've already lived through some of the best days of your life and you didn't even know it at the time."
"You were too busy chasing what's next, busy worrying about what's missing. Thinking happiness was something you'd arrive at one day."
"But while you were waiting you were laughing with people who won't always be around. You were making memories in places you'll one day drive past and feel something you can't explain. You were standing in moments that didn't feel like the good old days until they were gone."
"So stop waiting for life to start. You're already living it."
Carl Sagan on books:
"What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years."
G. K. Chesterton explains that reading gives a man more lives than he was born with:
“A man who has read a thousand books is armed for life; a man who has read none is easy prey. The man who has read a thousand books has lived a thousand lives. He has seen cities he has never visited, spoken to men who died centuries ago, and walked in worlds that no longer exist. Reading does not merely inform him; it enlarges him. It stretches the boundaries of his own experience until he becomes something more than himself.”
A brilliant statistician who spent 50 years studying why massive engineering projects fail realized one terrifying truth:
Individual incompetence is almost never the actual problem.
His name is W. Edwards Deming, the man who famously rebuilt Japan's post-war manufacturing empire from scratch. He argued that we obsess over individual performance and completely ignore the environment.
Here are 4 operational frameworks he used to build elite, failure-proof organizations: