The lesson of Buffett was: To succeed in a spectacular fashion you had to be spectacularly unusual.
If you’ve got a dozen pitchers, you need to speak 12 different languages.
He was the guy who always won the game of chicken because his opponents suspected he might actually enjoy a head-on collision.
What are the odds that people will make smart decisions about money if they don’t need to make smart decisions—if they can get rich making dumb decisions?
The triple of Jeremy Brown’s imagination, in reality, is a home run.
Memory loss is the key to human reproduction. If you remembered what new parenthood was actually like you wouldn’t go around lying to people about how wonderful it is, and you certainly wouldn’t ever do it twice.
…a tourist can’t help but have a distorted opinion of a place: he meets unrepresentative people, has unrepresentative experiences, and runs around imposing upon the place the fantastic mental pictures he had in his head when he got there.
The difference between Strauss and Ranieri?” says one trader still at Salomon. “That’s easy. Strauss wouldn’t stoop to use the men’s room on the trading floor. He’d go upstairs. Lewie would piss on your desk.
The men on the trading floor may not have been to school, but they have Ph.D.’s in man’s ignorance.
foodstuffs absolved of the obligation to provide vitamins and minerals cavorted with reckless abandon.
The author refers to a player’s affected nonchalance and comments he is, “too young to realize you are what you pretend to be.
When you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice,’ Amos liked to say. ‘Once when you worry about it, and the second time when it happens.
When you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice,” Amos liked to say. “Once when you worry about it, and the second time when it happens.
The way it feels to me,’ he said, ‘is that there were certain ideas that I was put on this earth to think. And now I can think them.
We want to empower the doctors and patients to get all the other assholes out of the way,’ Clark had once told me, then laughed. ‘Except for us. One asshole in the middle.
On Wall Street, the lawyers play the same role as medics in war: They come in after the shooting is over to clean up the mess.
I hated discussing ideas with investors,” he said, “because I then become a Defender of the Idea, and that influences your thought process.” Once you became an idea’s defender you had a harder time changing your mind about it.
Stigmas speak to the idea of difference and how difference shames us and those we know.
People in both fields operate with beliefs and biases. To the extent you can eliminate both and replace them with data, you gain a clear advantage.
Those who say don’t know, those who know don’t say
That’s what happens when you’re thirty-seven years old: you do the things you always did but the result is somehow different.
Baseball has so much history and tradition. You can respect it, or you can exploit it for profit, but it’s still being made all over the place, all the time.
Baseball is a soap opera that lends itself to probabilistic thinking. [Dick Cramer]