Everyone’s forecasts are, on average, consensus forecasts. If your prediction is consensus too, it won’t produce above-average performance even if it’s right. Superior performance comes from accurate non-consensus forecasts. But because most forecasters aren’t terrible, the actual results fall near the consensus most of the time – non-consensus forecasts are usually wrong…The problem is that extraordinary performance comes only from correct non-consensus forecasts, but non-consensus forecasts are hard to make, hard to make correctly and hard to act on.

– Howard Marks

The ability to face constructively the tension of opposing ideas and, instead of choosing one at the expense of the other, generate a creative resolution of the tension in the form of a new idea that contains elements of the opposing ideas but is superior to each…Integrative thinkers don’t break a problem into independent pieces and work on each piece separately. They keep the entire problem firmly in mind while working on its individual parts.

– Roger Martin, The Opposable Mind

There are not more than five musical notes, yet the combinations of these five give rise to more melodies than can ever be heard. There are not more than five primary colors (blue, yellow, red, white, and black), yet in combination they produce more hues than can ever been seen.

– Sun Tzu

Risk and time are opposite sides of the same coin, for if there were no tomorrow there would be no risk. Time transforms risk, and the nature of risk is shaped by the time horizon: the future is the playing field.

– Peter L. Bernstein

If you’re asked a question in school, on a test for example, that’s a clue about how to solve it. It means it can be solved using techniques you already know. This is a difference between school and the real world.

– Paul Graham

There is making mistakes, and then there’s the mistake of making no mistakes, and that is a very big mistake.

– Peter Thiel

Don’t aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long run—in the long run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it.

– Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search For Meaning

Organizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.

– Melvin Conway

All of us … are afraid of exposing that part of ourselves that we hold most dear for fear that it will be rejected. But the artist has a duty to risk that. And it’s a duty to risk it so that you’re able to be better.

– Brian Koppelman