I have never made any money from my films but I have won prizes and recognition. I have been on the margins forever. They all came to see me receive the award - there was Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg and Richard Gere and so on. I was imagining what they would all be worth in money terms. You see I was never bankable, I could not bring any money ever to the table. I like the friendships and, yes, the admiration but I don’t want to make a big fuss about it. I will go on working as long as I am able!
How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success? Do you have a favourite failure?
Question
What advice would you give your twenty-year-old self, and what should they ignore?
Time & hindsight
Question
Do you rely on inspiration or discipline to make work?
Craft & work
Well yes, but like I said, small mistakes or small failures. We take small failures very often. We have failures in investment. We have failures in operation, but no big mistakes or big failures. How do we take that? Like ordinary business.
Academy of Achievement interview, 2 December 2007 source ↗
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Agnès Varda
Film director, photographer and installation artist
Cal Ripken Jr.
Baseball player; holder of the record for consecutive games played
No. I mean if you fail 70 percent of the time, you had a great year. You're dealing with failure seven out of ten times as a hitter.
Recorded
Academy of Achievement interviewer, Academy of Achievement interview, Washington, D.C., 18 August 2020
source ↗
Warren Buffett
Chairman and chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway, 1970–2025
My first mistake, of course, was in buying control of Berkshire. Though I knew its business - textile manufacturing - to be unpromising, I was enticed to buy because the price looked cheap. Stock purchases of that kind had proved reasonably rewarding in my early years, though by the time Berkshire came along in 1965 I was becoming aware that the strategy was not ideal. If you buy a stock at a sufficiently low price, there will usually be some hiccup in the fortunes of the business that gives you a chance to unload at a decent profit, even though the long-term performance of the business may be terrible. I call this the "cigar butt" approach to investing. A cigar butt found on the street that has only one puff left in it may not offer much of a smoke, but the "bargain purchase" will make that puff all profit. Unless you are a liquidator, that kind of approach to buying businesses is foolish.
Recorded
Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholder letter, Berkshire Hathaway Inc., 2 March 1990
source ↗
Peyton Manning
American football quarterback
That's a real challenge and a real issue. Reading the statistics, they had a ranking of quarterbacks, and the statistic was the percentage of a touchdown drive after an interception. To me, that is a telling statistic. The guys that have a high percentage are the guys that have short memories. They talk about having amnesia as a quarterback. You better move along from it. It is hard to say you forget about it, because you want to learn from it. You want to address it. You can't just say it never happened.
Recorded
Academy of Achievement interviewer, Academy of Achievement interview, Indianapolis, Indiana, 1 April 2007
source ↗
More from Carlos Slim Helú
View profile →The first thing to recommend is that they don’t work in some place that they don’t like, that they don’t do things that they don’t like. That they look for what they really want to do and what kind of thing they want to be involved in, or if they want to go it alone by themselves, to find that.
It takes a combination of ways to do these things, more than discipline. It’s a way of life. It’s like diet or gymnastics. You can know all the gymnastic things, all the exercises. You can know all the diets, but if you don’t do the diets, if you don’t do the exercise, it won’t work. It’s the same if you have some rules, but you don’t live them. It doesn’t work.
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