Tuesday, November 28, 2006

General Stuff

Age and Treachery Will Aways Overcome Youth and Ability - 93 year old businessman

Correlation does not necessarily imply causation - Statistics

Play for more than you can afford to lose and you will learn the game - Winston Churchill

What can I do to get out of this position? Once you are in this position you cannot get out! - Kung Fu Master (A good lesson for chess players - defeat at times can be postponed but not avoided).

Tuesday, October 10, 2006

Woody Allen

80% of success is showing up

Tuesday, September 19, 2006

New Testament

Book of James

"The tongue is a small part of the body, and yet it boasts of great things. Behold, how great a forest is set aflame by such a small fire."

Friday, September 08, 2006

General Business Quotes

Bernard Baruch, the wealthiest Wall Street financier of the early 1900s, once said: "Nobody ever owned a Park Avenue mansion by being bearish."

Jonathan Sumption - called the cleverest man in England: "I think if you can earn a large sum of money in a field...then more power to your elbows". "I think that people who earn a lot of money in a free market, without any kind of dishonesty or unfair dealing are basically entitiled to".

Saturday, April 08, 2006

Thomas Hardy

In the ill-judged execution of the well-judged plan of things the call seldom produces the comer, the man to love rarely coincides with the hour for loving. Nature does not often say “See!” to her poor creature at a time when seeing can lead to a happy doing; or reply “Here” to a body’s cry of “Where?” till the hide-and-seek has become an irksome, outworn game. We may wonder whether at the acme and summit of human progress, these anachronisms will be corrected by a finer intuition, a closer interaction of the social machinery than that which jolts us round and along; but such completeness is not to be prophesised, or even conceived as possible.

“Justice” was done, and the President of the Immortals (in the Aeschylean phrase) had ended his sport with Tess. And the d’Urberville knights and dames slept on in their tombs unknowing.

William Shakespeare

Macbeth
This great play explores lust for power, through the tempted ambitions of Macbeth, persuaded through his certain weaknesses in character by the manipulative and equally lustful Lady Macbeth. The husband-wife co-dependency and dynamic is one of enormous clarity.
It follows a typical pattern of a Shakespearean Tragedy. The natural order is upset by an action. A state on disorder and
Further more, themes of fate - through the double meaning of words, the poverty of human experience - through the futility of struggle and the darkness of human nature are examined. Within the thoughts of Macbeth, I see a man who understands the devastating consequences of his actions, even before he has acted, but like an gambler, is compelled to act by a fierce ambitions.
The three weird sisters merely act to augment the drives that are within him. I suspect he had thought of becoming king well before he met the sisters, and his initially shock and retraction from their suggestion is evidence of his thoughts.
The armed head, in the second witch encounter, warning Macbeth about McDuff, may in fact be his own severed head. This ghoulish proposition has merit.
"So foul and fair a day I have not seen" Macbeth I.3
We are introduced to Macbeth. His comment relates to so much - military victory on a day of bad weather, military victory at the cost of bloodshed. The ambiguity of the play is introduction - nothing is what is seems.
"Tomorrow, and tomorrow and tomorrow, Creeps into this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time, And all our yesterdays have lighted fools, The way to dusty death. Out, out brief candle, Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,that struts and frets his our upon the stage,And then is heard of no-more: It is a tale,Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing". - Macbeth V.5
The philosophical musings of Macbeth as the world caves in. Soon after this he abandons his deeper understanding as one last flare of power lust takes hold before he is ultimately slain, and order is returned to Scotland.
The Tragedy of Hamlet - Prince of Denmark
This play is interesting for the exploration of human experience through the thoughts, internal suffering and perpetual inaction of one man - Hamlet. Haunted by the ghost of his father, Hamlet plunges into depression as he struggles with the pain of rectifying the wrongs that have occurred.
"There are more things on heaven and earth, than are dreamt of in your philosophy" - Hamlet, Act I Scene V
"I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself king of infinite space" - Hamlet Act II Scene II
"I have of late, - but wherefore I know not, - lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and, indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, - why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What piece of work is man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculties! in form and moving, how express and admirable! in action, how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god! And yet, to me, what is this quintessance of dust?" - Hamlet, Act II Scene II
Othello - The Moor of Venice
This play explores themes of jealosy, deception and betrayal through the twisted manipulations of Iago
"Good name in man and woman, dear lord, is immediate jewel of their souls; Who steals my purse steals trash; 'Twas mine, 'tis his, and has been slave to thousands; But he that filches from me my good name robs me of that which not enriches him, and makes me poor indeed". - Iago, Act III Scene III
"O, beware, my lord, of Jealosy; It is the green eyed monster with doth mock the meat it feeds on: that cuckold lives in bliss who, certain of his fate, loves not his wronger; " - Iago, Act III Scene III
"Men's natures wrangle with inferior things, though great ones are their object. 'Tis even so; For let our finger ache, and it endues our other healthful members even to that sense of pain;" - Iago, Act III Scene IV
Romeo and Juliet
Shall I hear more, or shall I speak at this?
The Merchant of Venice
The Tragedy of Julius Caesar
This play explores themes of absolute power through the autocrat Julius Caeser, Complex integrity and betrayal through Marcus Brutus and the power of oratory in political landscapes through Mark Antony. There are many further layers to this most satisfying read, in particular I note Brutus touching relationship with his wife, she empathising with his pain and he with hers.
"Men at some time are masters of their fate: The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves". - Cassius, Act I Scene II
"Let me have men about me that are fat; Sleek-headed men, and such as sleep o' nights: Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look; He thinks too much: Such men are dangerous". - Caeser Act I Scene II - But then Caesar goes on to be complacent about other warning signs from the seer and his wife.
"So soon as that spare Cassius. He reads much; He is a great observer, and he looks quite through the deeds of men: he loves no plays, As thou dost, Antony; he hears no music: Seldom he smiles; and smiles in such a sort, As if he mock'd himself and scorn'd his spirit, That could be moved to smile at any thing. Such men as he be never at heart's easeWhiles they behold a greater than themselves;And therefore are they very dangerous." Caeser I.2 . Provides a rich insight into the psychology of Cassius - a dangerous psychology according to Caeser.
Two Gentlemen of Verona
"Poor wounded name! my bosom as a bed Shall lodge thee till thy wound be thoroughly heal'd" I.2

Jean Paul Satre

I was in the municipal park just now. The root of the chestnut tree plunged into the ground just underneath my bench. I no longer remembered that it was a root. Words had disappeared, and with them the meaning of things, the methods of using them, the feeble landmarks which men have traced on their surface.

If anybody had asked me what existence was, I should have replied in good faith that it was nothing, just an empty form which attached itself to external things, without changing anything in their nature.

And then all of a sudden, there it was, as clear as day: existence had suddenly unveiled itself. It had lost it’s harmless appearance as an abstract category: it was the very stuff on things, that root was steeped in existence. Or rather the root, the park gates, the bench, the sparse grass on the lawn, all that had vanished; the diversity of things, their individuality, was only an appearance, a veneer. This veneer had melted, leaving soft, monstrous masses, in disorder – naked with a frightening obscene nakedness.

Albert Camus

What is a rebel? A man who says no – but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation.

When Heathcliff, in Wuthering Heights, says that he puts his love above God and would willingly go to Hell in order to be reunited with the woman he loves, he is prompted not only by his youth and his humiliation but by the consuming experience of a whole lifetime.

Metaphysical rebellion is the means by which a man protests against his condition and against the whole of creation.

The only truly serious philisophical problem is suicide.

Frank Herbert - Dune

What has mood to do with it? You fight when the necessity arises – no matter the mood. Mood’s a thing for cattle or making love or playing the baliset. It’s not for fighting.

Gurney Halleck (Page 48)

Knowing where the trap is – that is the first step to evading it.

Duke Leto Atreites

The Mind commands the Body and it obeys. The Mind orders itself and meets resistance.

Bene Gesserit Sister Jessica Quoting St Augustine

The whole theory of warfare is calculated risk

Duke Leto Atreites

When god hath ordained a creature to die in a particular place, He causeth that creature’s wants to direct him to that place

Kynes (Page 150)

Human’s live best when each has his own place, when each knows where he belongs in the scheme of things. Destroy the place, and destroy the person.

Thufir Hawat

One should never presume one is the sole object of a hunt

Fremen

What do you despise? By this you are truly known.

Princess Irulan

Francis Scott Fitzgerald

The strongest guard is placed at the gateway to nothing……..maybe because the condition of emptiness is too shameful to be divulged

They were still at the happier stage of love. They were full of brave illusions about each other, tremendous illusions, so that the communion of self with self seemed to be a plane where no other human relations mattered.

The truth is that for some months he had been going through that partitioning of the things of youth wherein it is decided whether or not to die for what one no longer believes in.

But the brilliance, the versatility of madness is akin to the resourcefulness of water seeping through, over and around a dike. It requires the united front of many people to work against it.

Tender is the night

Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her;

If you can bounce high, bounce for her too,

Till she cry ‘Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover, I must have you!’

Thomas Parke D’Invilliers

Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded relations of men.

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.


Peter Singer

Precautionary Principle in Relation to Climate Change

The precautionary principle suggests that even in the absence of complete information, we should be prepared to incur reasonable costs to avoid a significant chance of a disastrous outcome.

From a collective standpoint that takes everyone’s interests into account, it would be best if all countries with high levels of emissions made significant reductions in the amount of greenhouse gases the produce. But from the standpoint of an individual nation, this is not necessarily the best possible outcome, for the national costs associated with reducing greenhouse gas emissions could outweigh the national benefits.

The Myth of Ownership

Ownership is not a natural relationship between a person and a thing. It is a social convention, and in societies with a legal system, it is defined by the law.

The seventeenth century philosopher John Locke argued that we gain a right to property by ‘mixing our labour’ with natural objects, as long as we leave ‘enough and as good’ for others.

The best justification of a right to private property is that we will all be better off if we recognise such a right. But if it is the common good that justifies the recognition of a right to private property, then the common good can set limits to that right.

Social Capital

Herbert Simon, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, has estimated the proportion of income in wealthy countries that is the result of social capital – including technology and organisational and government skills – rather than individual effort. Given the enormous differences between the average incomes in rich and poor countries which cannot be explained by the differences in effort he suggests that social capital is responsible for at least 90 per cent of income in wealthy societies.

Utilitarianism

Utilitarianism is the view that the right action is that which is expected to have the best consequences for all those affected by our actions, now and in the future. Typically, utilitarians focus on consequences like pleasure and pain, happiness and misery, or the satisfaction and frustration of preferences. They seek to maximise the net surplus of the good consequences, after subtracting the bad ones. Individual rights have, at most, a derivative role to play in utilitarian thinking.

Offence

From the standpoint of public reason, the fact of offence is the issue, not how well grounded the offence might be. Although John Stuart Mill and other defenders of freedom have argued that mere offence should not, in the absence of more specific harm, be a ground for infringing individual liberty. Once we grant that a risk of offence to some justifies restricting the liberty of others, we have introduced a sweeping argument for prohibiting any kind of behaviour, public or private. What offends people is not fixed. People can learn to be more tolerant, and that is a better solution than restricting the liberty of others.

Public Reason

Some will think that public reason is a quant relic of enlightenment ideas about reason and progress, properly rejected in the post-modern world in which we now live. They will say it is naïve to believe than anyone decides anything on the basis of reason, and will deny that there is any basis for privileging reason and argument above religious faith, or belief in which doctors, or oracles, or any other way in which people might reach decisions about what we do. But those who say this do not fully think out the alternatives. There are methods of reaching decisions that we use every day, and would not want to do without. We do not want police to go before courts saying that they need no evidence that the accused committed the crimes of which he is accused, because they have faith that he did, and faith needs no evidence to support it. We want physicians who have studied what does or does not help sick people – and if we consult alternative healers, we look for evidence that their therapies work. If we abandon the assumption that reason, evidence and argument can lead to better decisions, more innocent people will be jailed and more sick people will die. So those who want public justification to fit within the same broad framework are not imposing some narrow, sectional set of standards on the debate. They are seeking standards of argument that everyone uses all the time.

Ethical Thinking

When we think ethically, we should do so from an impartial perspective, from which we recognise that our own wants and desires are no more significant that the wants and desire of anyone else. To base judgments about the rights and wrongs of an action on the impact it will have on the welfare of those affected by it is to base ethics on something that is real and tangible.

John Stuart Mill

On Liberty, the finest defence of individual liberty against government interference in the English language, was written by the liberal utilitarian John Stuart Mill. In opposition to conservatives who wanted to use the power of the state to stamp out prostitution, sodomy and suicide, Mill urged that the state should restrain individual liberty only to prevent harm to others. It was, in his view, wrong for the state to interfere with an individual ‘for the good of the individual’, whether physical or moral. For a century after the publication of On Liberty, conservatives in both Britain and the United States resisted Mill’s view, defending laws that restricted individual liberty in circumstances that could not be show to cause harm to others – for instance, laws that intruded into the bedrooms of consenting homosexuals, that made prostitution illegal, or that restricted the access of adults to sexually explicit films, books and magazines.

Hobbesian World

In Hobbesian world in which a dominant nation is liable to attack and overthrow weak governments that are not to its liking, the most sensible response for a government that fears it may be attacked is to obtain nuclear weapons as rapidly as possible. Only then can it deter an attack by threatening to inflict intolerable losses on the dominant nation or its allies. Overwhelming military superiority is less significant when the militarily inferior nation possesses and is prepared to use nuclear weapons.

Bush’s Use of Good and Evil

Bush’s tendency to see the world in terms of good and evil is especially striking. He has spoken about evil in 319 separate speeches, or about 30 percent of all the speeches he gave between the time he took office and 16 June 2003. In these speeches he uses the word ‘evil’ as a noun fare more than he uses it as an adjective – 914 noun uses as against 182 adjective uses. Only twenty-four times, in all of these occasions on which Bush talks of evil, does he use it as an adjective to describe what people do, that is, to judge acts or deeds. This suggests that Bush is not thinking about evil deeds, nearly as often as he is thinking about evil as a thing, or a force, something that has a real existence apart from the cruel, callous, brutal and selfish acts of which human beings are capable. His readiness to talk about evil in this manner raises the question of what meaning evil can have in a secular modern world.

Immanuel Kant

Kant advocated a system in which the states would give u, to a world federation, a monopoly on the use of force. The world federation would possess the moral authority of a body that established by mutual agreement, and reached its decision in an impartial manner.

Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand

Through free competition in the marketplace, the self interested strivings of individuals contribute to the common good.

Thomas Hobbes

Thomas Hobbes, the 17th Century English philosopher who lived through the chaos of the English civil war and the Thirty Years War, built his political philosophy on a conception of security that has become dominant in modern society. In his 1651 masterpiece, Leviathan, Hobbes argued that humans unconstrained by laws would, through competition for wealth and pre-eminence, create a persistent state of insecurity that would ultimately prevent them from attaining either:

In such condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of earth; no navigation, for use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing such things that require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’

Hobbes’s conception established a total and binary opposition between peace, a state of physical and material security, allowing the pursuit of higher goals, and war, a pervasive, debilitating sense of foreboding of “every man, against every man”.

For war, consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting; but in a tract of time, wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known for as the nature of foul weather, lieth not in a shower or two of rain; but in an inclination thereto of many days together: so the nature of war, consisteth not in actual fighting; but in the known disposition thereto, during all time there is assurance to the contrary. “

In this conception, Hobbes was being faithful to the etymology of the word “war”, which derives from the old French “guerre”, meaning “confusion”, “discord” and “strife”. According to a long Western tradition, then, insecurity and security are mutually exclusive physical and material conditions that fundamentally determine the quality of human life. In Hobbes’s theory, “man is a creature civilised by the fear of death”. Hobbes’s entire system of civil society and the state are built form a single “purging emotion” – the fear of death. The Hobbesian conception of security builds an intimate dynamic between physical and material security, in which unconstrained acquisitiveness and competition lead to physical insecurity, and in which physical security is the essential precondition to humans’ bounded pursuit of physical and other achievements. This conception ahs informed our understanding of the human condition, and the widespread popularity of Abraham Maslow’s argument that only physiological necessities precede security in the hierarchy of human needs demonstrates that most people find this conception to be intuitively correct. The priority of physical and material security has informed domestic and international natural and positive law, providing a widely recognised basic right of self-defence that trumps most other rules, norms and considerations. According to this conception, war is only justified when it is required to re-establish conditions of physical and material security or forestall physical and material insecurity.

Michael Wesley – “The search for moral security”

Australian Financial Review, 28th January, 2005.

General Philosophy

Anatole France

In every world government-state, wealth is a sacred thing; in democracies it is the only sacred thing.

Karl Marx - Manifesto

All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned

Albert Einstein

The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.

Erik Erikkson

Dressed like a brief authority - would never be more but was in constant danger of becoming less; and who had sold the birthright of a free man for an official title or a life pension.

Healthy children will not fear life if their elders have the integrity not to fear death.

There is another, more fundamental danger, namely man's restriction of himself and constriction of his horizons to include only his work to which, so the Book says, he has been sentenced to after his expulsion from paradise. If he accepts work as his only obligation, and 'what works' as his only criterion of worthwhileness, he may become the conformist and thoughtless slave of his technology and of those who are in a position to exploit it.

A kind of adult who has betrayed youth and idealism, and has sought refuge in petty and servile kind of conservatism.

Irving Yalom and Others

She will use little expressions and that will widen the abyss between us….She will say, "when I was a child" - or "when I am old" - or "never in all my life" - That stabs me, Mercury…. We miss something, Mercury - the poignancy of the transient - the intimation of mortality - that sweet sadness of grasping something you cannot hold. Jean Giraudeax - Amphitryon 38

Stalin gave me the impression of a grey blur which flickered obscurely and left no trace.
Nikolai Sukhanov

No man enjoys the true taste of life but he who is willing and ready to quit it. Seneca

Death is the condition that makes it possible for us to live authentically.

Responsibility avoiding defences:

  • innocent victim
  • losing control
  • out of my control

Only after one takes suicide seriously does one take one's life seriously. Irvin Yalom

To know and not to act is not to know at all. Japanese Proverb

Sigmund Freud

Mourning and Melancholia

Suicide

It is this sadism alone that solves the riddle of the tendency to suicide which makes melancholia so interesting – and so dangerous. So immense is the ego’s self-love, which we have come to recognise as the primal state from which instinctual life proceeds, and so vast is the amount of narcissistic libido which we see liberated in the fear that emerges at a threat to life, that we cannot conceive how that ego can consent to its own destruction. We have long known, it is true, that no neurotic harbours thoughts of suicide which he has not turned back upon himself from murderous impulses against others, but we have never been able to explain what interplay of forces can carry such a purpose through to execution. The analysis of melancholia now shows that the ego can kill itself only if, owing to the return of the object-cathexis, it can treat itself as an object – if it is able to direct against itself the hostility which relates to an object and which represents the ego’s original reaction to objects in the external world. Thus in regression from narcissistic object-choice the object has, it is true, been got rid of, but it has nevertheless proved more powerful than the ego itself. In the opposed situations of being most intensely in love and of suicide, the ego is overwhelmed by the object, though in totally different ways.

Civilisation and It's Discontents

Love

At the height of being in love the boundary between ego and object threatens to melt away. Against all the evidence of his senses, a man who is in love declares that 'I' and 'you' are one, and is prepared to behave as if it were a fact

Man the 'Prosthetic' God

Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic god. When he puts on all his auxillary organs he is truley magnificent; but those organs have not grown onto him and they still give him much trouble at times.

Peter Drucker

Management is about performance against an agreed criteria

Gearge Soros

Investing Structure

We position the fund to take advantage of larger trends – we call this marco-investing – and then, within those larger trends we also pick stocks and stock groups
Let’s say we use our money to buy stocks. We pay 50 percent in cash and we borrow the other 50%. Against bonds we borrow a lot more. For $1,000 we can buy at least $50,000 worth of long-term bonds. We may also sell stocks or bonds short in the hope of buying them back later cheaper. Or we take positions – long or short – in currencies or index futures. The various positions reinforce each other to create this three-dimensional structure of risks and profit opportunities. Usually two days – one up day, and one down day – are sufficient to tell us how the fund is positioned.

Buying Options

When you buy options, you’re paying the professionals a hefty premium for providing you with a leverage that we can create cheaper ourselves by borrowing against our securities.

Investment Theory

They’re generally constructed on the assumption of efficient market theory. That theory is in conflict with my theory of imperfect understanding and reflexivity. I think that those methods work 99% of the time, but they break down 1% of the time. I am more concerned with that 1%.
We are willing to invest our capital along three axes: we have stock exposure, we have interest-rate exposure and we have currency exposure.
Occasionally, there is a fourth axis because we do from time to time take positions in commodities.
Our understanding of the world in which we live is imperfect. The situations we need to understand in order to reach our decisions are usually affected by those decisions. There is an innate divergence between the expectations of the people taking part in the events and the actual outcome of the events. Sometimes the divergence is so small that it can be disregarded, but at other times it is so large that it becomes an important factor in determining the course of events. This is not an easy idea to communicate.
“Imperfect understanding”
Classic economic theory assumes that market participants act on the basis of perfect knowledge. That assumption is false. The participants perceptions influence the market in which they participate, but the market action also influences the participant’s perceptions.

Using Leverage

Managers of bond funds, if they have a positive view on interest rates, can lengthen the maturity of their portfolio to at most, 15 years. When they have a negative view, they can keep the average maturity short. We have a much greater freedom to manoeuvre. When we are bearish, we sell short; when we are bullish, we don’t have to buy long maturities; we can buy short maturities and use a lot of leverage.

Introduction

Thinking is part of the reality that people have to think about.
The belief that financial markets tend towards equilibrium and it is only government interference that prevents them from assuring a best allocation of resources……is both false and misleading.

The Concept of Reflexivity

The concept of reflexivity is very simple. In situations that have thinking participants, there is a two-way interaction between the participant’s thinking and the situation in which they participate.
Reflexivity renders participants understanding imperfect and ensures their actions will have unintended consequences.

Reflexivity and Economic Theory

The efficient market hypothesis claims that market prices fully reflect all the extant information. The closely related rational expectations theory holds that, in the absence of exogenous shocks, financial markets tend towards an equilibrium that accurately reflects the participants’ expectations. Together, these theories support the belief that financial markets, left to their own devices, assure the optimal allocation of resources.

The Human Uncertainty Principle

If perfect understanding were possible, there would be no room for human creativity.

Market Forces

I look for conditions of disequilibrium.
To others, being wrong is a source of shame; to me, recognising my mistakes is a source of pride. Once we realise that imperfect understanding is the human condition, there is no shame in being wrong, only in failing to correct our mistakes.
It hurts me to lose money and it gives me pleasure to win.
Trend is your friend most of the way; tend followers only get hurt at inflection points, where the trend changes. Most of the time I am a trend follower, but all of the time I am aware that I am a member of a herd and I am on the look out for inflection points.
There is nothing more self-destructive than denying your feelings. Once you are aware of your feelings you may not feel the need to show them. But sometimes, especially when you are under great strain, the need to hide it may make the strain intolerable. I remember an occasion, early in my career when I was practically wiped out in my personal account, yet I had to carry on in my job as if there was nothing wrong. The strain was unbearable. I could hardly bring myself to go back to the office after lunch. That is why I encourage my associates to share their problems.

Risk Taking

Risk taking is painful. Either you are willing to bear the pain yourself or you try to pass it on to others. Anyone who is in a risk taking business but cannot face the consequences is no good.
Going to the brink is something else – it serves a purpose. There is nothing like danger to focus the mind, and I do need the excitement connected with taking risks in order to think clearly. It is an essential part of my thinking ability. Risk taking is, to me, an essential ingredient in thinking clearly.
When you are a serious risk taker, you need to be disciplined. The discipline that I used was a profound sense of insecurity, which helped to alert me to problems before they got out of hand.

Success

Once you take your success for granted, you let down your guard.
I refuse to remain the slave of my business.

Frank Lowy

“Never give up! People don’t understand how persistent you have to be. You come up against and obstacle and you have to find a way of moving forward. You can take detours, navigate between obstacles and make it happen. Unless you are strong and convinced you can succeed, you will get swept away.”

“There was huge value in the company, so the question was how to unlock it.”

“I drive myself and spare no effort. It is a sheer slog that allows for no laziness of the mind or body”

“A lot of pain is associated with success. In the pursuit of success, time is of no consequence and effort has no limits. In many ways, being successful in business is no different from being a successful sportsman. To there you need drive, discipline and determination. You also need to cope with the pain of maybe not succeeding.”