Most investors, of course, have not made the study of business prospects a priority in their lives. If wise, they will conclude that they do not know enough about specific businesses to predict their future earning power. I have good news for these non-professionals: The typical investor doesn't need this skill. ... The goal of the non-professional should not be to pick winners – neither he nor his "helpers" can do that – but should rather be to own a cross-section of businesses that in aggregate are bound to do well. A low-cost S&P 500 index fund will achieve this goal.
What are bad recommendations you hear in your profession or area of expertise?
Question
What is something everyone in your world agrees about that you think is wrong?
Values & belief
Question
How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success? Do you have a favourite failure?
Failure & regret
Yes, but not with a formula. So there are many, many efforts now to decentralize and they create a rigid formula and give people rules from on top and say, 'Now it's yours.' And that isn't worked very well either. … And, you think about the variety. If you look at a countryside, think of the variety out there in terms of the ecological variety. Well, if people are going to manage ecological variety, no single set of rules will work in a semi-arid versus a tropical-wet region. They have to be different.
Adam Smith, Telephone interview recorded immediately after the prize announcement, Nobel Prize Outreach, 12 October 2009 source ↗
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Warren Buffett
Chairman and chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway, 1970–2025
Recorded
Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholder letter, Berkshire Hathaway Inc., 28 February 2014
source ↗
Sonny Rollins
Jazz tenor saxophonist and composer
The life of a jazz musician is a difficult life, because you want to play, you want to be, you want to get to the inner spirit and sometimes you drink or you use drugs or you smoke a lot. You do all these things to try to get the spirit out. So it’s a difficult existence and a lot of the great people that I have known, and in history, they kind of over-indulge, and they never sort of are able to balance their musical life with their personal life. Maybe it’s not necessary to do that. That is another question, I don’t know, but I’d like to see young musicians coming up that don’t smoke and that don’t drink to excess and don’t use drugs, and don’t sort of debilitate themselves. I think that’s where we should go. I think that is what guys should be doing. I don’t think you have to drink and use drugs to play good jazz, but that’s been the model for so long that a lot of guys get caught up in that, you know.
David Hare
Playwright and screenwriter
Never take advice from anyone with no investment in the outcome.
Rahul Dravid
India Test and one-day international cricketer, 1996–2012; later India head coach
Let us not be so satisfied with the present, with deals and finances in hand that we get blindsided. Everything that has given cricket its power and influence in the world of sports has started from that fan in the stadium. They deserve our respect and let us not take them for granted. Disrespecting fans is disrespecting the game.
Recorded
Bradman Oration, Anzac Hall, Australian War Memorial, Canberra, ESPNcricinfo, 14 December 2011
source ↗
More from Elinor Ostrom
View profile →Yes, we're showing that. But we're also showing a very important role for face-to-face or even written communication. So, the prediction was that nobody would self-monitor because that's a second level social dilemma, if you go to Game Theory. But, what we've found is that people will, but it can be … people can escalate into, 'I'll punish you, you punish him, mamamamamma,' and it gets worse and worse. So, with communication, where there's an agreement on what is going to be the … what we are going to do. The 'we' then being well-defined, then people can follow rules, be cooperative and, occasionally, sanction one another to help that continue.
Recorded
Adam Smith, Telephone interview recorded immediately after the prize announcement, Nobel Prize Outreach, 12 October 2009
source ↗
Yes. Having lived through an era, where I was thinking of going to graduate school and was strongly discouraged because I would never be able to do anything but teach in a city college … Ah ha ha, life has changed!
Recorded
Adam Smith, Telephone interview recorded immediately after the prize announcement, Nobel Prize Outreach, 12 October 2009
source ↗
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