People pay good money for a taste of death. Bungee-jumping, skydiving, and terrifying amusement park rides give people the jolt that awakens fuller appreciation of life.

For modern, professional notetaking, a note is a “knowledge building block”—a discrete unit of information interpreted through your unique perspective and stored outside your head.

Setting boundaries inevitably involves taking responsibility for your choices. You are the one who makes them. You are the one who must live with their consequences.

A rational investor should pay a higher price for a share, other things equal, the larger the proportion of a company’s earnings paid out in cash dividends or used to buy back stock.

My experience over this period was like a series of blows to the head with a baseball bat. Being so wrong—and especially so publicly wrong—was incredibly humbling and cost me just about everything I had built at Bridgewater.

The greatest evils in the world will not be carried out by men with guns, but by men in suits sitting behind desks

Choosing where to direct your attention may sound easy, but I’ll be the first to admit how extremely difficult it can be.

Death is the light by which the shadow of all of life’s meaning is measured. Confronting the reality of our own mortality is important because it obliterates all the crappy, fragile, superficial values in life. You are going to die, and that’s because you were fortunate enough to have lived.

If you take mentoring seriously, and give it the time and energy it deserves, you'll soon find yourself involved in a brilliant learning network. You'll be the recipient of more information and more goodwill than you ever imagined, as you play the role of both master and apprentice in a powerful constellation of people all simultaneously teaching and being taught.

If we ask: ‘Why ought I to be unselfish?’ and you reply ‘Because it is good for society,’ we may then ask, ‘Why should I care what’s good for society except when it happens to pay me personally?’ and then you will have to say, ‘Because you ought to be unselfish’–which simply brings us back to where we started.