Disruption is when “…a new entrant leverages a technical innovation to serve customers with a business model incumbents cannot compete with, and over time moves up the value chain until those incumbents end up with a worse product that is more expensive to boot.”

– Link

Anybody who thinks he knows what’s going to happen in the investment world is deceiving himself. But anybody who thinks he knows when it’s going to happen is really off base, in my opinion. I sometimes talk about what should happen, but I never talk about when it will happen.

– Howard Marks

Invert. Always invert. Turn a situation or problem upside down. Look at it backward. What happens if all our plans go wrong? Where don’t we want to go, and how do you get there? Instead of looking for success, make a list of how to fail instead – through sloth, envy, resentment, self-pity, entitlement, all the mental habits of self-defeat. Avoid these qualities and you will succeed. Tell me where I’m going to die, that is, so I don’t go there…In other words, if you want to help India, the question you should ask is not, ‘How can I help India?’ It’s, ‘What is doing the worst damage in India?

– Charlie Munger

The single biggest factor that differentiates multi-billion dollar companies is a scalable advantage in customer acquisition costs.

Link

If you are a great person, why would you want to work for someone whom you can’t learn anything from? The best managers are great individual contributors who never, ever want to be a manager but decide they have to be a manager because no one is going to be able to do as good a job as them.

– Steve Jobs

The problem in deciding whether a scientific result or a new “innovation” is a breakthrough, that is, the opposite of noise, is that one needs to see all aspects of the idea—and there is always some opacity that time, and only time, can dissipate.

– Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile

If you want to succeed in the world, you don’t have to be much cleverer than other people. You just have to be one day earlier.

– Leo Szilard

He is a great man who uses earthenware dishes as if they were silver; but he is equally great who uses silver as if it were earthenware. It is the sign of an unstable mind not to be able to endure riches.

– Seneca

While enthusiasm may be necessary for great accomplishments elsewhere, on Wall Street it almost invariably leads to disaster.

– Benjamin Graham