27 Quotes by Guy Spier

The very institutions that we have established to teach us to think independently often close our minds in potentially damaging ways.

The psychologist Roy Baumeister has shown that willpower is a limited resource, so we have to be careful not to deplete it.

We like to think that we change our environment, but the truth is that it changes us. So we have to be extraordinarily careful to choose the right environment – to work with, and even socialize with, the right people. Ideally, we should stick close to people who are better than us so that we can become more like them.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood.

Books are a priceless source of wisdom. But people are the ultimate teachers, and there may be lessons that we can only learn from observing them or being in their presence.

Hang out with people better than you, and you cannot help but improve.

This became my own goal: not to be Warren Buffett, but to become a more authentic version of myself. As he had taught me, the path to true success is through authenticity.

I was driven in large part by what Warren Buffett calls “the outer scorecard” – that need for public approval and recognition, which can so easily lead us in the wrong direction. This is a dangerous weakness for an investor, since the crowd is governed by irrational fear and greed rather than by calm analysis. I would argue that this kind of privileged academic environment is largely designed to measure people by an external scorecard: winning other people’s approval was what really counted.

As I’ve come to discover, investing is about much more than money. So as your wealth grows, I hope you will also come to realize that the money is largely irrelevant. And what you will want to do with the bulk of your wealth is give it back to society.