Warren Buffett Quotes – Part 14
Stop trying to predict the direction of the stock market, the economy, interest rates, or elections.
Successful investing takes time, discipline and patience. No matter how great the talent or efforts, some things just take time. You can produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant.
Talking to Time Magazine a few years back, Peter Drucker got to the heart of things: ‘I will tell you a secret: Deal-making beats working. Deal-making is exciting and fun, and working is grubby. Running anything is primarily an enormous amount of grubby detail work . . . deal-making is romantic, sexy. That’s why you have deals that make no sense.’
Tell me who your heroes are and I’ll tell you who you’ll turn out to be.
The best business returns are usually achieved by companies that are doing something quite similar today to what they were doing five or ten years ago.
The best thing I did was to choose the right heroes.
The best thing is to learn from other guy’s mistakes. [General George S.] Patton used to say, “It’s an honor to die for your country; make sure the other guy gets the honor.” There are a lot of mistakes that I’ve repeated. The biggest one, the biggest category over time, is being reluctant to pay up a little for a business that I knew was really outstanding.
The best thing that happens to us is when a great company gets into temporary trouble…We want to buy them when they’re on the operating table.
The big question about how people behave is whether they’ve got an inner scorecard or an outer scorecard. It helps if you can be satisfied with an inner scorecard.
The business schools reward complex behavior more than simple behavior, but simple behavior is more effective.