A view of life and commercial real estate from Newark and Licking County, Ohio
If you want to get better at what you do, if you want to get better at this thing called life, you have to pay attention. When you pay attention, you can remember what really matters, what is real and enduring, versus what is false and fleeting. Thinking of an impartial spectator can help you know yourself and help you become a better boss, a better spouse, a better parent, a better friend.
-Russ Roberts, How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide To Human Nature And Happiness
.................................................explained.
This has always been a fatal flaw in the U. S. real estate: the volume of development has been related to the availability of funds, not to demand. The industry has a long history of overbuilding when there's easy money, without regard for who will occupy those spaces once they're built.
-Sam Zell, Am I Being Too Subtle: Straight Talk From A Business Rebel
Economics helps you understand that money isn't the only thing that matters in life. Economics teaches you that making a choice means giving up something. And economics can help you appreciate complexity and how seemingly unrelated actions and people can become entangled. . . . But life is about choices. Getting the most out of life means choosing wisely and well. And making choices—being aware of how choosing one road means not taking another.
-Russ Roberts, How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide To Human Nature And Happiness
(Although when I mentioned this to my priest friend Tom, he said you can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.)
-Anne Lamott, Bird By Bird: Some Instructions On Writing And Life
One is acceptance that an insane market doesn’t mean a broken market. Crazy is normal; beyond the point of crazy is normal. Every few years there seems to be a declaration that markets don’t work anymore – that they’re all speculation or detached from fundamentals. But it’s always been that way. People haven’t lost their minds; they’re just searching for the boundaries of what other investors are willing to believe.
-Morgan Housel, from this blog post
To me, that is the essence of being an entrepreneur—to not just recognize problems but to provide solutions.
Life, for many, is a futile attempt to become secure in a dimension that is intrinsically insecure. People constantly fight that, rather than accept the strangeness of the human lesson as a beautiful thing. God must have a marvelous sense of humor—the contradictions of life are awesome and funny and very appealing. I find them heroic. . . .
Life is mostly guesswork. You will usually guess more or less right, and sometimes you'll guess wrong. When you guess wrong, don't react—love your mistakes and don't beat yourself up.
-Stuart Wilde, Weight Loss for the Mind
When the chesty, fierce-furred bear becomes sick, he travels the mountainsides and the fields, searching for certain grasses, flowers, leaves and herbs, that hold within themselves the power of healing. He eats, he grows stronger. Could you, oh clever one, do this? Do you know anything about where you live, what it offers? Have you ever said, "Sir Bear, teach me. I am a customer of death coming, and would give you a pot of honey and my home on the western hills to know what you know."
-Mary Oliver, Upstream
I realized that the basics of business are straightforward. It's largely about risk. If you have a big downside and a small upside, run the other way. If you've got a big upside and a small downside, do the deal. Always make sure you're getting paid for the risk you take, and never risk what you cannot afford to lose, Keep it simple. . . . Opportunity is very often embedded in the imbalance between supply and demand.
-Sam Zell, Am I Being Too Subtle: Straight Talk From A Business Rebel
Five years earlier, the high school guidance counselor sat Barney Hall down and said, "Barney, you're bright enough, but you're not college material. Not yet." He was looking over Hall's standard test scores and other accumulated records from thirteen years in the Lower Cape May Regional School District. "You're not mature for your age. If you hadn't been sent to detention once a week, you wouldn't have done any studying at all."
-John Sanford, Ocean Prey
You must never stop being whimsical.
And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life.
One of the most tempting questions to ask when we first learn the QBQ is "What can we do?" The problem is "we" don't change. Teams, departments, and organizations don't change. People change, one at a time, through their own choices.
I'm a firm believer in the team concept, but if we're not careful, we can end up substituting the language of teams ("we" and "us") for the language of personal accountability. . . .
Personal accountability is not about changing others. It's about making a difference by changing ourselves.
Personal accountability. The power of one.
-John G. Miller, QBQ!: The Question Behind The Question
"People who are right a lot listen a lot, and they change their mind a lot. If you don't change your mind frequently, you're going to be wrong a lot."
If we are insecure, we make fun of others. If we're comfortable being wrong, we're not afraid to poke fun at ourselves. Laughing at ourselves reminds us that although we might take our decisions seriously, we don't take ourselves seriously. Research suggests that the more frequently we make fun of ourselves, the happier we tend to be. Instead of beating ourselves up about our mistakes, we can turn some of our past misconceptions into sources of present amusement.
-Adam Grant, Think Again
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