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You can be risk loving and yet completely averse to ruin. – Nassim Taleb

There’s the old pilot quip that their jobs are “hours and hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.” It’s the same in investing. Your success as an investor will be determined by how you respond to punctuated moments of terror, not the years spent on cruise control. A good definition of an investing genius is the man who can do the average thing when all those around them are going crazy.

The general assumption here has always been that Q-Tip is talking about Bonita's V, but a theory online asserting that he's talking about her B has gained popularity. I feel weird writing about this, but I also feel good writing about it because part of being a writer is trying to get people to think a thought they've never thought before, and Q-Tip eating a butt is probably up there.

The more you train without tools, the better the tools work when you add them.

On the path of mastery, monetization becomes a necessary aspect to sustain your love for what you do. In fact, monetization and business strategies are a part of the depth your craft has to offer. If you truly love what you do, you will truly love the utility that skills like marketing, sales, and self-promotion provide in your ability to pursue it for life.

Different environments bring out different aspects of your dog, and you don’t really know your dog until you’ve seen her in a variety of situations. “He does not!” a woman will say, frustrated that her husband is describing something that her dog has never done in his life. Ah, but her dog probably has done it, just not in her presence.

A movie or piece of art can save your life in the same way your life can be saved by a policy or law. This is why politicians seek out movie stars, and why movie stars want to become politicians. They seek the same target, which is the soul of the people.

At the age of fifty-three, I am hardly a juvenile, but I still love to play. And so do my friends, and so does the whole global community of humans and dogs, for that matter. Our species is obsessed with play: we are either participating ourselves or watching others play for us.

There is a lesson in this: Let the other guy save face with his people, but keep score.

When the game changes, you have to change with it. The more you change, the more you risk in order to survive—and it gets harder and scarier as you get older.

If you are to have any chance of making a real return on your money, you need to invest in things that have a chance of outperforming inflation.

Arguably the most important reason why many people fail at investment is that they fail to own a sufficiently wide range of investment products.

This is one of those strange aspects of human nature. Learning how to run your own financial affairs as a life skill, which must rank up there as one of the very best for having a positive impact on all other areas of your life, yet most of us invest our time learning about the vast range of other, far less useful life skills, and totally neglect finance.

All pursuits are materialistic until a philosophical sense of mastery is formed.