Billy Nguyen > Billy's Quotes

“What we call the personality is often a jumble of genuine traits and adopted coping styles that do not reflect our true self at all but the loss of it.”
― Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

“I am most often irritated by those who attack the bishop but somehow fall for the securities analyst--those who exercise their skepticism against religion but not against economists, social scientists, and phony statisticians. Using the confirmation bias, these people will tell you that religion was horrible for mankind by counting deaths from the Inquisition and various religious wars. But they will not show you how many people were killed by nationalism, social science, and political theory under Stalin or during the Vietnam War. Even priests don't go to bishops when they feel ill: their first stop is the doctor's. But we stop by the offices of many pseudoscientists and "experts" without alternative. We no longer believe in papal infallibility; we seem to believe in the infallibility of the Nobel, though....”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“Wisdom cannot be imparted. Wisdom that a wise man attempts to impart always sounds like foolishness to someone else ... Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

“We are not going in circles, we are going upwards. The path is a spiral; we have already climbed many steps.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

“I will no longer mutilate and destroy myself in order to find a secret behind the ruins.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

“I have had to experience so much stupidity, so many vices, so much error, so much nausea, disillusionment and sorrow, just in order to become a child again and begin anew. I had to experience despair, I had to sink to the greatest mental depths, to thoughts of suicide, in order to experience grace.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

“What is meditation?... It is fleeing from the self, it is a short escape of the agony of being a self, it is a short numbing of the senses against the pain and the pointlessness of life. The same escape, the same short numbing is what the driver of an ox-cart finds in the inn, drinking a few bowls of rice wine or fermented coconut-milk.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

“An eruption of microparasites, such as a viral pandemic, rather than drastic changes in climate or topography, would more likely disrupt the megapolitical predominance of technology.”
― James Dale Davidson, The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age

“In the Information Society, no one who is truly able will be detained by the ill-formed opinions of others. It will not matter what most of the people on earth might think of your race, your looks, your age, your sexual proclivities, or the way you wear your hair. In the cybereconomy, they will never see you. The ugly, the fat, the old, the disabled will vie with the young and beautiful on equal terms in utterly color-blind anonymity on the new frontiers of cyberspace.”
― James Dale Davidson, The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age

“We live in the time of the computer, but our dreams are still spun on the loom.”
― James Dale Davidson, The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age

“in the future, one of the milestones by which you measure your financial success will be not just now many zeroes you can add to your net worth, but whether you can structure your affairs in a way that enables you to realize full individual autonomy and independence.”
― James Dale Davidson, The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age

“Even the best national currency of the postwar period, the German mark, lost 71 percent of its value from January 1, 1949, through the end of June 1995. In the same period, the U.S. dollar lost 84 percent of its value.9 This inflation had the same effect as a tax on all who hold the currency.”
― James Dale Davidson, The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age

“In almost every competitive area, including most of the world’s multitrillion-dollar investment activity, the migration of transactions into cyberspace will be driven by an almost hydraulic pressure—the impetus to avoid predatory taxation, including the tax that inflation places upon everyone who holds his wealth in a national currency.”
― James Dale Davidson, The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age

“after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned”6 —MARSHALL McLUHAN, 1964”
― James Dale Davidson, The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age

“The fact that people tend to respond to costs and rewards is an essential element of forecasting. You can say with a high degree of confidence that if you drop a hundred-dollar bill on the street, someone will soon pick it up, whether you are in New York, Mexico City, or Moscow. This is not as trivial as it seems. It shows why the clever people who say that forecasting is impossible are wrong. Any forecast that accurately anticipates the impact of incentives on behavior is likely to be broadly correct. And the greater the anticipated change in costs and rewards, the less trivial the implied forecast is likely to be.”
― James Dale Davidson, The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age

“Understanding the Agricultural Revolution is a first step toward understanding the Information Revolution. The introduction of tilling and harvesting provides a paradigm example of how an apparently simple shift in the character of work can radically alter the organization of society.”
― James Dale Davidson, The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age

“Decision-making becomes more difficult as numbers rise, because incentive traps proliferate. You need only think how hard it is to get a dozen people organized to go out to dinner. Imagine how hopeless would have been the task of organizing hundreds or thousands of persons to traipse around on a moveable feast. Lacking any sustained and separate political organization or bureaucracy required by specialization for war, hunting-and-gathering bands had to depend on persuasion and consensus—principles that work best among small groups with relatively easygoing attitudes.”
― James Dale Davidson, The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age

“I enjoy talking to you. Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mind except that you happen to be insane.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Luck and risk are both the reality that every outcome in life is guided by forces other than individual effort. They are so similar that you can’t believe in one without equally respecting the other. They both happen because the world is too complex to allow 100% of your actions to dictate 100% of your outcomes. They are driven by the same thing: You are one person in a game with seven billion other people and infinite moving parts. The accidental impact of actions outside of your control can be more consequential than the ones you consciously take.”
― Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money

“The customer is always right” and “customers don’t know what they want” are both accepted business wisdom. The line between “inspiringly bold” and “foolishly reckless” can be a millimeter thick and only visible with hindsight.”
― Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money

“A mindset that can be paranoid and optimistic at the same time is hard to maintain, because seeing things as black or white takes less effort than accepting nuance. But you need short-term paranoia to keep you alive long enough to exploit long-term optimism. Jesse Livermore figured this out the hard way.”
― Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money

“If expectations rise with results there is no logic in striving for more because you’ll feel the same after putting in extra effort. It gets dangerous when the taste of having more—more money, more power, more prestige— increases ambition faster than satisfaction. In that case one step forward pushes the goalpost two steps ahead. You feel as if you’re falling behind, and the only way to catch up is to take greater and greater amounts of risk.”
― Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money

“Optimism sounds like a sales pitch. Pessimism sounds like someone trying to help you.”
― Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money

“Planning is important, but the most important part of every plan is to plan on the plan not going according to plan.”
― Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money

“Expecting things to be bad is the best way to be pleasantly surprised when they’re not. Which, ironically, is something to be optimistic about.”
― Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money

“one of the most powerful ways to increase your savings isn’t to raise your income. It’s to raise your humility.”
― Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money

“At every stage of our lives we make decisions that will profoundly influence the lives of the people we’re going to become, and then when we become those people, we’re not always thrilled with the decisions we made. So young people pay good money to get tattoos removed that teenagers paid good money to get. Middle-aged people rushed to divorce people who young adults rushed to marry. Older adults work hard to lose what middle-aged adults worked hard to gain. On and on and on.48”
― Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money

“A plan is only useful if it can survive reality. And a future filled with unknowns is everyone’s reality.”
― Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money

“The ability to do what you want, when you want, for as long as you want, has an infinite ROI.”
― Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money

“A good definition of an investing genius is the man or woman who can do the average thing when all those around them are going crazy. Tails drive everything.”
― Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money