It’s impossible for anything rational to successfully evolve because the byproduct of being optimally rational and efficient is that you’d be predictable. If you are completely predictable, you’d be dead. The military do not look for the most efficient route from A to B, because the most efficienct route would be the one that’s most heavily guarded. So there is a huge danger in looking at life as if it’s an optimization problem. At some point our psychology has to have evolved to be a bit weird and random and unpredictable, for the simple reason that someone who’s predictable would be deceased.

– Rory Sutherland

When an industry goes through a strategic inflection point, the practitioners of the old art may have trouble. On the other hand, the new landscape provides an opportunity for people, some of whom may not even be participants in the industry in question, to join and become part of the action….Few of the top ten participants in the new horizontal computer industry rose from the ranks of the old vertical computer industry, bearing testimony to the observation that it is truly difficult for a successful industry participant to adapt to a completely different industry structure.

– Andy Grove

“The system we designed, of being able to see across asset classes and controlling risk, informed us where we should be and not be, which enabled us to grow very large-scale businesses with a small number of people. I think for people who weren’t set up like that, it was much more difficult.

…we didn’t get into trouble, which is very important in finance. Because if you get in trouble in finance, you have only so many people working at your firm. If they’re all working on messes, they can’t be doing investments; there isn’t enough bandwidth. So part of what benefited us was that we’re risk-averse. I have a saying: There are no brave old people in finance. Because if you’re brave, you mostly get destroyed in your 30s and 40s. If you make it to your 50s and 60s and you’re still prospering, you have a very good sense of how to avoid problems and when to be conservative or aggressive with your investments.”

– Steve Schwarzman

The production of ideas is just as definite a process as the production of Fords; that the production of ideas, too, runs on an assembly line; that in this production the mind follows an operative technique which can be learned and controlled; and that its effective use is just as much a matter of practice in the technique as is the effective use of any tool.

– James Webb Young

The game I play is a very interesting one. It’s imagination, in a tight straitjacket.

– Richard Feynman

I see it from the supply side, the supply of computing power. And this is the miracle story of the microprocessor, where every two and a half years they can make a computer chip that’s twice as fast. If you look at an industry where you have such a rapid increase in supply, usually that’s pretty bad, like when radial tires were invented, people didn’t start driving their cars a lot more, and so it means the need for production capacity went way down, and things got all messed up. The tire industry is still messed up.

– Bill Gates

A few things have worked out very well for me. And the nice thing about the investment business is that you don’t need very many. You’ll see plenty of times when you get chances to do things that just shout at you. And the thing you have to do is, when that happens, you have to take a big swing. That is no time to be reading a book on the theory of diversification …. When you find something where you know the business is within your circle of competence, you understand it, the price is right, the people are right—then you take your thumb out of your mouth and you barrel in.

– Warren Buffett

It is hard to explain to naive data-driven people that risk is in the future, not in the past.

– Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile