The hardest financial skill is getting the goalpost to stop moving. - Morgan Housel

Nassim Taleb put it this way: “Having an ‘edge’ and surviving are two different things: the first requires the second. You need to avoid ruin. At all costs.

you need short-term paranoia to keep you alive long enough to exploit long-term optimism.

Mark Twain once said he knew he was a successful author when Kaiser Wilhelm II said he’d read every Twain book, and later that day a porter at his hotel said the same. “Great books are wine,” Twain said, “but my books are water. But everybody drinks water.” He found the universal emotions that influence everyone, regardless of who they were or where they were from, and got them to nod their heads in the same direction. It’s nearly magic. Guiding people’s attention to a single point is one of the most powerful life skills.