A note from Daniel

Warren Buffett has a saying that I often come back to: "Diversification is protection against ignorance. It makes little sense if you know what you are doing." The thing is, most of us rarely know what we are doing with the confidence required to go all in. When you don't know what you are doing, a margin of safety saves you from the worst outcomes. Even when you do know what you're doing and you make the best possible decision at the time, things can change.

Daniel Clear Thinking, page 196 · January 27, 2024 Save to shelf
Notes like this take four seconds in Booksense. Scan the paragraph, it lands on the right page, and comes back for review later. Take your first note

More from readers of Clear Thinking

Sinasi Arslan p. -1

The greatest aid to judgment is starting from a good position. The company with cash on the balance sheet and low debt has nothing but good options to choose from. When bad times come, and they always do, their options go from good to great. On the other hand, a company with no cash and high debt has nothing but bad options to choose from. Things quickly go from bad to worse. And this example easily extends beyond the boardroom as well.
Sinasi Arslan
Sinasi Arslan p. -2

Each moment puts you in a better or worse position to handle the future. It's that positioning that eventually makes life easier or harder. When our ego takes over and we show someone we're the boss, we make the future harder. When we are passive-aggressive with a colleague at work, our relationship becomes worse. And while these moments don't seem to matter much at the time, they compound into our current posi-tion. And our position determines our future.
Sinasi Arslan

More from Daniel

See their profile
Ultra Successful p. 60

The False Constraints That Limit Your Potential: - How Quickly You Can Scale Whether it's your business or your career, there are unspoken timelines that people accept as gospel.They are all untrue: "You can only really grow at 10% a year." "You need to pay your dues for a decade before getting promoted." These artificial limits keep people moving at a crawl when they could be sprinting or pushing for more. The most successful people I know refuse to accept conventional wisdom about timelines, and oddly enough, they break them all the time.
Daniel

Stop losing the best parts of what you read.

Booksense pushes your highlights back to you for review, so a note from page 174 is still yours a year later. Free on iOS.

Get Booksense free
Daniel on Booksense 5,999 notes 387 hours of reading