Peter Lynch: “The market will go down sometimes. It’s a good thing when it does but if you’re not ready for that, you shouldn’t own stocks.”

I was a bricklayer. It was how I paid the bills when I first moved to America. Even the biggest title in bodybuilding, Mr. Olympia, only paid a thousand dollars back then.  It makes me proud that in March, the winner of our Arnold Classic and our Arnold Classic UK took home more than a million dollars. He can focus on bodybuilding. But in our day, that wasn’t an option. Some guys were teachers. Some sold insurance. Franco and I laid bricks. We put an ad in the paper and sold ourselves as European craftsmen. We figured if people heard the accents, they would picture old-world masonry instead of two bodybuilders with a wheelbarrow.  It worked.  The phone rang. And then we had to go out and actually do the job, which was the part nobody could fake. Luckily, Franco knew what he was doing. The work was simple. Mix the mortar. Set the brick. Tap it level. Scrape the edge. Then do it again. And again. Nobody claps for you. There is no crowd, no music, no trophy. There is just the next brick sitting there waiting for you. You can still find some of the walls we built in Venice. That’s where my lesson today comes from. One brick doesn’t look like anything. Ten bricks don’t look like anything. A hundred bricks, you’re starting to see something, but it doesn’t impress anyone. You just keep laying bricks until the job is done. And you know what happens after four or five hours on a wall? You are so damn tired, or you feel so great that you stop measuring. You are not standing back every ten minutes asking how far from finished it is. You are covered in mortar, your hands are raw, you’re schvitzing, and you are happy. The work took the question away from you. That is the part nobody tells you about hard work: It doesn’t just build the wall. It terminates the voice that keeps asking when the wall will be done.

You want to be successful in life? Forget the MBA and all the noise. Just listen to Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger talk about business, investing and life.

Peter Lynch: "You make more money on the upside. The market is going to be a lot higher ten years from now, twenty years from now, thirty years from now." "Over the long term, the upside is more than the downside." "If you can keep putting money in ... you should do well."

There's Always a Reason to Sell.

Yes

A Carnegie Mellon professor walked onto a stage in 2007 and gave an hour-long lecture to 400 people about achieving your childhood dreams. He did not tell the room that the entire talk was actually written for his three kids, who would grow up without him. His name was Randy Pausch. The date was September 18, 2007. The video has since passed 20 million views, and the book that followed spent more than a hundred weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Pausch was 46 years old, had been diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer a month earlier, and had been told he had three to six months of good health left. He did not walk onto that stage to talk about dying. He walked onto it to teach a single lesson hidden inside another one. Here is what I missed the first time I watched it. Pausch opened by doing push-ups on stage. He told the audience he was in phenomenally good shape, in better shape than most of them, and anyone who wanted to cry or pity him was welcome to get down and match him. The room laughed. Then he said the line that sets up the entire hour to come. We cannot change the cards we are dealt. Just how we play the hand. That was the frame. Everything after it was a demonstration. The lecture was officially titled Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams, and Pausch did spend the first 40 minutes working through his actual childhood list. Zero gravity. Playing in the NFL. Writing an entry in the World Book Encyclopedia. Being Captain Kirk. Becoming a Disney Imagineer. He walked the audience through which ones he got, which ones he didn't, and what the gap between wanting and getting had actually taught him. The framework inside those 40 minutes is the part most people remember, and it is the one Pausch delivered with the most force. He called it the brick wall. He said the brick walls in your life are there for a reason. They are not there to keep you out. They are there to give you a chance to show how badly you want something. They are there to stop the people who do not want it badly enough. They are there to stop the other people. Read that again slowly. He is not saying brick walls are a test you have to pass. He is saying brick walls are a filter nature uses to separate the people who actually want a thing from the people who only like the idea of wanting it. That is a completely different claim. Most people treat obstacles as unfair. Pausch argued obstacles are the mechanism by which desire gets proven, and without that mechanism the whole concept of wanting something would be meaningless. Every dream he achieved, he achieved by treating the wall as a signal that he was close, not a signal that he should stop. The second framework he taught the audience is the one almost nobody teaches in any classroom. He called it the head fake. He pulled it from football. Coaches teach young kids to tackle by having them run drills that look like they are about tackling, but the real lesson being embedded is teamwork, grit, how to take a hit and get back up. The kid thinks they are learning football. They are actually learning something much larger, and they will not realize it until years later. Pausch said the best teaching in the world is head fake teaching. You get people to learn the thing they need by dressing it up as the thing they already want. This is the technique behind Alice, the programming software he built at Carnegie Mellon. Kids thought they were making animated movies and games. They were actually learning to code. Pausch said one of his proudest claims to fame was that he had taught programming to a generation of students who had no idea they were being taught programming at all. And then, with about three minutes left in the lecture, he ran a head fake on the room. He asked the audience if they had figured out the first head fake of the talk itself. The room went quiet. He said the lecture was never actually about how to achieve your childhood dreams. It was about how to lead your life. If you lead your life the right way, the karma takes care of itself and the dreams come to you anyway. Then he asked if they had figured out the second head fake. Even quieter. He said the talk was not for the four hundred people in the room. It was for his three kids. Dylan was six. Logan was three. Chloe was eighteen months. They would grow up without their father, and he knew it. Pausch had spent an hour on stage pretending to give career advice to strangers because he needed to record something his children could watch when they were old enough to understand who their dad had been. The entire architecture of the lecture was a message in a bottle disguised as a keynote. The filtered brick-wall philosophy, the football stories, the dreams he chased and the ones he missed, the line about playing the hand you are dealt, all of it was something a father wanted three small children to internalize after he was no longer there to say it in person. That is the moment the video stops being a lecture and starts being something else entirely. Pausch died on July 25, 2008, ten months after giving it. His final sentence on stage was that he had given the talk tonight, and then he walked off. The applause lasted nearly a minute before the camera cut. Most professors spend their entire careers trying to say one true thing their students will remember for a week. He said one true thing his children will remember for the rest of their lives, and the rest of the world is still watching the footage.

RT @InvestingCanons: Warren Buffett: “If I spent time reading analyst reports, I wouldn’t have time to read annual reports.” t.co/…

Freddie is looking down and giving y'all a standing ovation. That's spectacular!😍💗 The most INSANE Bohemian Rhapsody Flashmob you will ever see!! With 30 musicians and singers in the STREET of Paris 😍 Cre : Julien Cohen Pianist

RT @InvestingCanons: Charlie Munger: “There will never be any shortage of good people in the world. All you've got to do is seek them out…

The power of compounding

A salary is the drug they give you to forget your dreams. It feels safe, predictable and even comfortable. But that paycheck? It’s just enough to keep you from chasing what you really want. Entrepreneurs don’t settle. They take risks, build something of their own, and wake up every day chasing freedom, not Fridays.

Warren Buffett on what caused the 2008 global financial crisis One of my favorite clips of him. Simple explanation but spot on

No entrepreneur is worried about an AI taking their job.