After 25 years of buying and supervising a great variety of businesses, Charlie [Munger] and I have not learned how to solve difficult business problems. What we have learned is to avoid them. To the extent we have been successful, it is because we have concentrated on identifying one-foot hurdles that we could step over rather than because we acquired any ability to clear seven-footers.
The delicate muses lose their head if their attention is once diverted. Perhaps if you were successful abroad in talking and dealing with men, you would not come back to your bookshelf and your task. When the spirit chooses you for its scribe to publish some commandment, it makes you odious to men and men odious to you, and you shall accept that loathsomeness with joy. The moth must fly to the lamp, and you must solve those questions though you die.
Successful people just don't let failure define them or keep them from doing what they want to do. For example, I'd have people come up to me after my shows, and they'd say they want to do stand-up but are scared they're going to fail. I'd tell them, "You are going to fail, and anyone who is success has powered through many, many failures."
Canada is today the most successful pluralist society on the face of our globe, without any doubt in my mind... That is something unique to Canada. It is an amazing global human asset.
I'm just lucky to have been in the right place at the right time. Another place, another time, I wouldn't have been as successful. Society enabled me to make my money and my money should go to society.
I think you can give meaning to any condition; you can be poor or unsuccessful or be so-called successful. But I don't think that it would give an individual human being a better condition.
If a director can find the exact combination between the written word as a guideline and improvisational input from his actors, I think that's where you'll find the most successful work being done.
It usually takes more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech. Overnight success is a fallacy. It is preceded by a great deal of preparation. Ask any successful person how they came to this point in their lives, and they will have a story to tell.
When a really new product comes along, it's almost always a mistake to hang a well-known name on it. The reason is obvious. A well-known name got well-known because it stood for something. It occupies a position in the prospect's mind. A really well-known name sits on the top rung of a sharply defined ladder. The new product, if it's going to be successful, is going to require a new name. New ladder, new name. It's as simple as that.
The most 'popular,' the most 'successful' writers among us (for a brief period, at least) are, 99 times out of a hundred, persons of mere effrontery-in a word, busy-bodies, toadies, quacks.
Ballots are the rightful and peaceful successors of bullets, and that when ballots have fairly and constitutionall y decided there can be no successful appeal back to bullets.
Moral values includes the immorality of 45 million uninsured or the immorality of working people who are having trouble raising a family despite working full-time. That has to be part of the moral equation. And if we are able to frame things in that fashion, then I think we can be successful.
The planet does not need more successful people. The planet desperately needs more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of all kinds.
Societies in which we are able to unify ourselves around values and ideals and character and how we treat each other and cooperation and innovation, ultimately are gonna be more successful than societies that don't.
To believe in the supernatural is not simply to believe that after living a successful, material, and fairly virtuous life here one will continue to exist in the best-possible substitute for this world, or that after living a starved and stunted life here one will be compensated with all the good things one has gone without: it is to believe that the supernatural is the greatest reality here and now.
We can learn from IBM's successful history that you don't have to have the best product to become number one. You don't even have to have a good product.
What is the highest good in all matters of action? To the name, there is almost complete agreement; for uneducated and educated alike call it happiness, and make happiness identical with the good life and successful living. They disagree, however, about the meaning of happiness.