Your choices, your life. Your values, your fate

That means you have to work hard, be persistent and never give up. Success does not come to those who wait. It comes to those who work for it. Second, you must believe that you can do it. This means you must have confidence in your abilities and potential. Don't be afraid to take on challenges because every obstacle is an opportunity to grow and leam. It is essential to have a positive attitude. Life can be difficult at times, but if you have a positive attitude, you can overcome anything.

Stay optimistic and have faith in the future. Respect others and treat them as you would like to be treated. Remember that everday is another chance to live a happy and successful life. The reason many people fail is not for lack of vision but for lack of resolve and resolve is born out of counting the cost. A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best but what he has said or done otherwise shall give him no peace.

Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it.

Money is the root of all evil, and yet it is such a useful root that we cannot get on without it any more than we can without potatoes. If you would know the value of money, go and try to borrow some. It is too difficult to think nobly when one thinks only of earning a living. Money is the seed of money, and the first is sometimes more difficult to acquire than the second million. A wise man turns chance into good fortune.

Resolve not to be poor: whatever you have, spend less. Poverty is a great enemy to human happiness; it certainly destroys liberty, and it makes some virtues impracticable, and others extremely difficult. The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated. Every man is rich or poor according to the proportion between his desires and his enjoyments. There are two ways to conquer and enslave a country. One is by the sword. The other is by debt.

I really love my job. Sometimes it is very challenging and can be stressful but I have never really regretted taking the career path that I have. That is not to say that my career has followed a detailed plan. It hasn’t. I have often reached cross roads that I never expected or planned for but I have always found myself working with people who I have liked and who have challenged me in positive ways.

On a personal level, I am a very critical person who looks for defects in myself as well as in others. But, being so critical, I am also quite forgiving. I couldn't recognize my mistakes if I couldn't forgive myself. To others, being wrong is a source of shame to me, recognizing my mistakes is a source of pride. Once we realize that imperfect understanding is the human condition, there is no shame in being wrong, only in failing to correct our mistakes. Seeing that we are better than others is not right. Seeing that we are equal to others is not right. Seeing that we are inferior to others is not right. If we think we are better that others, pride arise. If we think we are equal to others, we fail to show respect and humanity at the proper time. If we are inferior to others, we get depressed thinking we are inferior, born under a bad sign and so on.

There are some things you can give another person, and some things you cannot give him, except as he is willing to reach out and take them, and pay the price of making them a part of himself. This principle applies to studying, to developing talents, to absorbing knowledge, to acquiring skills, and to the learning of all the lessons of life. Perhaps the most important insight of all with regard to success is that to achieve greatly, you must become a different person. It is not the material things you accomplish or acquire that matter so much as it is the quality of the person you must become to accomplish well above the average. The development of self-discipline is the high road that makes everything possible for you.

There have been many people whom I have admired, emulated and even  modeled parts of my life after. I study how they do things, and then I  go through a period of ‘trying on’ those same thinking patterns and  behaviors. After a while, what is not essentially me falls away while  the useful parts remain. The big challenge is to become all that you have the possibility of  becoming. You cannot believe what it does to the human spirit to  maximize your human potential and stretch yourself to the limit. We are entering an age of unreason, atime when the future, in so many areas, is to be shaped by us and for us. A time when the only prediction that will hold true, a time therefore, for bold imagining in privete life as well as public. For thinking the unlikely and doing the unreasonable.

On the abstract level, I have turned the belief in my own fallibility into the cornerstone of an elaborate philosophy. On a personal level, I am a very critical person who looks for defects in myself as well as in others. But, being so critical, I am also quite forgiving. I couldn't recognize my mistakes if I couldn't forgive myself. To others, being wrong is a source of shame; to me, recognizing my mistakes is a source of pride. Once we realize that imperfect understanding is the human condition, there is no shame in being wrong, only in failing to correct our mistakes.

The prevailing wisdom is that markets are always right. I take the opposition position. I assume that markets are always wrong. Even if my assumption is occasionally wrong, I use it as a working hypothesis. It does not follow that one should always go against the prevailing trend. On the contrary, most of the time the trend prevails; only occasionally are the errors corrected.

It is only on those occasions that one should go against the trend. This line of reasoning leads me to look for the flaw in every investment thesis. ... I am ahead of the curve. I watch out for telltale signs that a trend may be exhausted. Then I disengage from the herd and look for a different investment thesis. Or, if I think the trend has been carried to excess, I may probe going against it. Most of the time we are punished if we go against the trend. Only at an inflection point are we rewarded.

Let's deal first with your general theory of reflexivity. Essentially, it has to do with the role of the thinking participant, and the relationship between his thinking and the events in which he participates. I believe that a thinking participant is in a very difficult position, because he is trying to understand a situation in which he is one of the actors. Traditionally, we think of understanding as essentially a passive role, and participating is an active role. In truth, the two roles interfere with each other, which makes it impossible for the participant to base any decisions on pure or perfect knowledge.

Classical economic theory assumes that market participants act on the basis of perfect knowledge. That assumption is false. The participants' perceptions influence the market in which they participate, but the market action also influences the participants' perceptions. They cannot obtain perfect knowledge of the market because their thinking is always affecting the market and the market is affecting their thinking. This makes analysis of market behavior much harder than it would be if the assumption of perfect knowledge were valid.

Second, since our understanding of reality is imperfect, the criterion by which choices may be judged is not fully within our grasp. As a result, people will not necessarily make the correct choice and, even if they do, not everybody will accept it as such. Moreover, the correct choice represents merely the better of the available alternatives, not the best of all possible solutions.

New ideas and interpretations may emerge at any time. These are also bound to be flawed and may have to be discarded when the flaws become apparent. There is no final answer, only the possibility of a gradual approximation to it. It follows that the choice between alternatives involves a continuous process of critical examination rather than the mechanical application of fixed rules.

We are accustomed to think of events as a sequence of facts: one set of facts follows another in a never-ending chain. When a situation has thinking participants, the chain does not lead directly from fact to fact. It links a fact to the participants' thinking and then connects the participants' thinking to the next set of facts.