There’s a line from an old movie, Wheeler Dealers: “You don’t go wheeling and dealing for the money, you do it for fun. Money’s just a way of keeping… - Sam Zell

when people live in a balloon, they tend to shy away from the guy holding the needle.

Once I have formed my opinion, I have to trust my perspective enough to act on it. That means putting my own money behind it. My level of commitment is usually high.

I told David, “Go look at every store and its entire inventory, who we would sell it to and what we would get for it, in case the deal goes south.” It was a basic fire-sale analysis — what we’d get in the worst-case scenario if we had to liquidate the company. David came back and said, “We’d get 80 percent of our purchase price back.” So I knew that what we had to lose was 20 percent.