Quotes About Strategy

As legendary hedge fund manager Ray Dalio told Tony Robbins (page 210): "It's almost certain that whatever you're going to put your money in, there will come a day when you will lose 50% to 70%." It pays to remember that if you lose 50%, you need a subsequent 100% return to get back to where you started. That math is tough.

It is critical that you decide how you will sell and distribute your product before you commit to a product in the first place. The more middlemen are involved, the higher your margins must be to maintain profitability for all the links in the chain.

In negotiation, he who cares the least wins.

Words That Work, written by Republican political strategist Frank Luntz.

Dame seis horas para talar un árbol y dedicaré las cuatro primeras a afilar el hacha.

Even today, I still benefit from that because I don't merge and bring things together and see everything as one big problem. I

What you choose to work on, and who you choose to work with, are far more important than how hard you work.

TF: Decide beforehand—and not reactively when emotions run high—what types of findings are worth acting upon or ignoring, and what your "if/then" actions will be

We waste our time with short-term thinking and busywork. Warren Buffett spends a year deciding and a day acting. That act lasts decades.

John Dewey's dictum that "a problem well put is half-solved" applies.

LA ESPERANZA NO ES UNA ESTRATEGIA. LA SUERTE NO ES UN FACTOR. EL MIEDO NO ES UNA OPCIÓN.

Cus D'Amato, Mike Tyson's legendary first trainer, famously said: "Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.

In other words, the minutiae fit around the big things, but the big things don't fit around the minutiae.

How to Stay Motivated y Secrets of Closing the Sale, de Zig Ziglar:

CREATING DEMAND IS hard. Filling demand is much easier. Don't create a product, then seek someone to sell it to. Find a market—define your customers—then find or develop a product for them.

I personally aim for an 8–10× markup, which means a $100 product can't cost me more than $10–12.50.

When something goes badly, I don't automatically assume I did something wrong. Instead I ask myself, "What policy was I following that produced this bad outcome, and do I still expect that policy to give the best results overall, occasional bad outcomes notwithstanding?" If yes, then carry on!

MBA—$30K per year Commit to spending $2,500 per month on testing different "muses" intended to be sources of automated income. See The 4-Hour Workweek or Google "muse examples Ferriss" as a starting point.

If effectiveness is doing the right things, efficiency is doing things right.

Do your own thinking independently. Be the chess player, not the chess piece. —RALPH CHARELL

If you have a 10-year plan of how to get [somewhere], you should ask: Why can't you do this in 6 months?" For purposes of illustration here, I might reword that to: "What might you do to accomplish your 10-year goals in the next 6 months, if you had a gun against your head?

A good general strategy is reasoning counterfactually: if someone tells you that X is true, ask yourself—(i) what would they say if X really is true, and (ii) what would they say if X is false? If the answer to (i) and (ii) is "they will say roughly what they just said now," then their words provided you with exactly zero information.

In 2007, I had one wealth manager ask me, "What is your risk tolerance?" and I answered honestly: "I have no idea." It threw him off. I then asked him for the average of his clients' responses. He said, "Most answer that they would not panic up to about 20% down in one quarter." My follow-up question was: "When do most actually panic and start selling low?" His answer: "When they're down 5% in one quarter.

If you must play, decide on three things at the start: the rules of the game, the stakes, and the quitting time.