Guy Spier > Quotes

“People will always stop you doing the right thing if it’s unconventional.”
― Guy Spier, The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment

“We like to think that we change our environment, but the truth is that it changes us. So we have to be extraordinarily careful to choose the right environment—to work with, and even socialize with, the right people. Ideally, we should stick close to people who are better than us so that we can become more like them.”
― Guy Spier, The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment

“Books are a priceless source of wisdom. But people are the ultimate teachers, and there may be lessons that we can only learn from observing them or being in their presence.”
― Guy Spier, The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment

“This became my own goal: not to be Warren Buffett, but to become a more authentic version of myself. As he had taught me, the path to true success is through authenticity.”
― Guy Spier, The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment

“But I think it’s important to discuss just how easy it is for any of us to get caught up in things that might seem unthinkable—to get sucked into the wrong environment and make moral compromises that can tarnish us terribly. We like to think that we change our environment, but the truth is that it changes us. So we have to be extraordinarily careful to choose the right environment—to work with, and even socialize with, the right people. Ideally, we should stick close to people who are better than us so that we can become more like them.”
― Guy Spier, The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment

“when your consciousness or mental attitude shifts, remarkable things begin to happen. That shift is the ultimate business tool and life tool.”
― Guy Spier, The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment

“our environment is much stronger than our intellect. Remarkably few investors—either amateur or professional—truly understand this critical point.”
― Guy Spier, The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment

“so often, we focus our analytical efforts in the wrong direction and miss something vital. So it’s crucial to be open to the possibility that we might be mistaken. During”
― Guy Spier, The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment

“Warren Buffett, quoting Henry Ford, often talks about the importance of keeping all your eggs in one basket, then watching that basket very carefully. One thing that appalled me and that I’d seen too many times was the Wall Street practice of having many eggs in many baskets. Even the most reputable mutual fund companies have a practice of selling multiple funds. The ones that do well are those that then get the marketing dollars and raise more money from investors. The ones that do poorly are either shut down or merged into the better-performing funds. In the process, the failures are buried as if they’d never existed while”
― Guy Spier, The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment

“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and 2 minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently.”
― Guy Spier, The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment

“As I've come to discover, investing is about much more than money. So as your wealth grows, I hope you will also come to realize that the money is largely irrelevant. And what you will want to do with the bulk of your wealth is give it back to society.”
― Guy Spier, The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment

“The world breaks everyone and afterward some are strong at the broken places.”
― Guy Spier, The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment

“tiny differences matter in investing—a pursuit where small structural changes can add up to big differences in returns over time. Long-term compounding is an investor’s best friend, so why get in its way? There’s a huge benefit to getting these seemingly minor details”
― Guy Spier, The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment

“I was driven in large part by what Warren Buffett calls “the outer scorecard”—that need for public approval and recognition, which can so easily lead us in the wrong direction. This is a dangerous weakness for an investor, since the crowd is governed by irrational fear and greed rather than by calm analysis. I would argue that this kind of privileged academic environment is largely designed to measure people by an external scorecard: winning other people’s approval was what really counted.”
― Guy Spier, The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment

“A goal that seems impossible in one instant can become entirely possible in the next if only you are willing to devote every ounce of your mind, body, and soul to reach it.”
― Guy Spier, The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment

“Through ambition, greed, arrogance, or naïveté, many bright, hard-working people have strayed into gray areas.”
― Guy Spier, The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment

“Part of the problem is that a finely trained but rarefied academic mind can be damaging to your long-term success.”
― Guy Spier, The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment

“Hang out with people better than you, and you cannot help but improve.”
― Guy Spier, The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood.”
― Guy Spier, The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment

“The very institutions that we have established to teach us to think independently often close our minds in potentially damaging ways.”
― Guy Spier, The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment

“The psychologist Roy Baumeister has shown that willpower is a limited resource, so we have to be careful not to deplete it.”
― Guy Spier, The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment

“Buffett and Munger joke that envy is the only one of the seven deadly sins that isn’t any fun. “Envy is crazy,” remarks Munger. “It’s 100 percent destructive. . . . If you get those things out of your life early, life works a lot better.”
― Guy Spier, The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment

“But these games also taught me a simpler truth: after so many years of taking life too seriously, I needed to adopt a more playful attitude.”
― Guy Spier, The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment

“Companies, like ant species, must adopt strategies that enable them to thrive or they will be at risk of extinction.”
― Guy Spier, The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment

“According to Warren, temperament is more important than IQ when it comes to investing.”
― Guy Spier, The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment

“when you begin to change yourself internally, the world around you responds”
― Guy Spier, The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment

“To become a good investor, I would need to come to an acceptance of myself as an outsider. The real goal, perhaps, is not acceptance by others, but acceptance of oneself.”
― Guy Spier, The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment

“Charlie and I always knew we would become very wealthy,” he told us, “but we weren’t in a hurry.” After all, he said, “If you’re even a slightly above average investor who spends less than you earn, over a lifetime you cannot help but get very wealthy—if you’re patient.”
― Guy Spier, The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment

“My simple rule was that, whenever I met someone, I would try to do something for them. It might simply be an introduction to someone else or even just a sincere compliment. What was intriguing to me was the way they reacted. In some cases, I sensed that they were saying to themselves, “That’s nice. I wonder what else this guy is going to do for me, or what else I can ask him for.” In other cases, I could see that they wanted to help me too. These seemingly trivial interactions provided a barometer of whether people approached the world as givers or takers.”
― Guy Spier, The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment

“TED talk by Nicholas Christakis”
― Guy Spier, The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment