The gate agent came on the intercom and called boarding group C. Those people already huddled around the door awkwardly merged into a mass that resembled a line. I stayed in my seat. After the crowd had filtered through the gates and I had given them a bit of time to stow its baggage, I stood up and proceeded to the ticket taker with carryon in hand.
Two other passengers had adopted my same approach. Sometimes it’s just not worth fighting, standing, and waiting for the overhead bin space. As we …
“Alas,” wrote Henry Ward Beecher. “Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore!” Mine is relatively strong at Barnes & Noble, because I know that if I resist a volume on one visit, and someone else buys it, an identical volume will pop up in its place like a plastic duck in a shooting gallery. And if I resist that one, there will be another day, another duck. In a secondhand bookstore, each volume is one-of-a-kind, neither replaceable from a publisher’s warehouse nor visually identical to its original …
“One of the most memorable and instructive stories I’ve ever been told was actually wrapped in a metaphor. It was the early 1970′s, when the whole movie industry was going through a serious financial crisis, and I was a very young studio head at Columbia Pictures. We had a deal with Jack Warner, the legendary founder and recently retired chairman of Warner Bros., to make his first movie with us, a film version of the stage play 1776, and late one day we were having a meeting at Warner’s home …
If the essence of creativity is linking disparate facts and ideas, then the more facility you have making associations, and the more facts and ideas you have at your disposal, the better you’ll be at coming up with new ideas. As [Tony] Buzan likes to point out, Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, was the mother of the Muses.
The notion that memory and creativity are two sides of the same coin sounds counterintuitive. Remembering and creativity seem like opposite, not complementary, processes. But the idea that they are one and the …
I think the key thing for individual investors is to figure out what style of investing they want their portfolio to reflect, and then figure out how to get help to make that happen, as opposed to doing it themselves. I’m always struck by the fact that people don’t do surgery themselves, or do their own legal or dental work. Most people don’t fix their own cars. Yet many people seem to think they can do their own investing.
Howard Marks, Author of The Most Important Thing
Howard, I have news for …
