Tom Katz

61 useful quotes from 18 great books

If you hang around with people who behave worse than you, pretty soon you'll start being pulled in that direction.

@readswithravi Wild Company

What are you all currently reading?

If you learn to communicate better—through writing and in person—you increase your value by at least 50%. If you can't communicate—it's like winking at a girl in the dark. Nothing happens.

One can easily lose money in the markets, and one can lose their job, but it's virtually impossible to lose your education, skills, or vocation.

Recognizing reality is important. You do not want to try and fix something that's unfixable.

Charlie and I have not learned how to solve difficult business problems. What we have learned is to avoid them.

"I’d rather learn from other people's mistakes.” Read biographies.

We don't buy anything when the phrase ‘regardless of price’ enters into the sentence.

The stock market is a device for transferring money from the impatient to the patient.

Opportunities come infrequently. When it rains gold, put out the bucket, not the thimble.

Those who 'feel in control of their lives, have goals of their own choosing and make progress towards those goals are happier than people who do not'.

Change is not what gives you opportunities. What gives you opportunities is other people doing dumb things.

Fundamental to successful stories and successful lives is the fact that we don't passively endure the chaos that erupts around us. These events challenge us. They generate a desire. This desire makes us act.

Finding out who we are, and who we need to become, means accepting the challenge that story offers us. Are we brave enough to change? This is the question a plot, and a life, asks of each us.

We have two wired-in ambitions: to get along with people, so they like us and consider us non-selfish members of the tribe, and also get ahead of them, so we're on top. Humans are driven to connect and dominate. These drives, of course, are frequently incompatible.

The rational response, when encountering someone with alien ideas, would be to either attempt to understand them or shrug. And yet we become distressed. Incredibly, the brain treats threats to our neural models in the much same way as it defends our bodies from a physical attack.

Smart people are mostly better at finding ways to 'prove' they're right and tend to be no better at detecting their wrongness.

The brain defends our flawed model of the world with an armoury of crafty biases. When we come across any new fact or opinion, we immediately judge it.

Behavioral residue: the things we accidentally leave behind.

Identifying and accepting our flaws, and then changing who we are, means breaking down the very structure of our reality before rebuilding it in a new and improved form. This is not easy. It's painful and disturbing. We'll often fight with all we have to resist this kind of profound change. This is why we call those who manage it 'heroes'.