You don't have to be brilliant, only a little bit wiser than the other guys, on average, for a long, long, time.
If you invested in a very low cost index fund - where you don't put the money in at one time, but average in over 10 years -you'll do better than 90% of people who start investing at the same time.
You have to be very productive in order to become excellent. You have to go through a poor period and a mediocre period, and then you move into your excellent period. It may be very well be that some of you have done quite a bit of writing already. You maybe ready to move into your good period and your excellent period. But you shouldn't be surprised if it becomes a very long process.
We have domesticated crops over a very long period of time, like tens of thousands of years. And crops get - seeds get carried. Sometimes, if they're very small seeds, they get scattered off trucks. Pollen travels.
Humans more easily remember or learn items when they are studied a few times over a long period of time (spaced presentation), rather than studied repeatedly in a short period of time.
Setting aside the vast herd which shows no definable character at all, it seems to me that the minority distinguished by what is commonly regarded as an excess of sin is very much more admirable than the minority distinguished by an excess of virtue. My experience of the world has taught me that the average wine-bibbler is a far better fellow than the average prohibitionist, and that the average rogue is better company than the average poor drudge, and that the worst white-slave trader of my acquaintance is a decenter man than the best vice crusader.
It is better to get wisdom than gold. Gold is another's, wisdom is our own; gold is for the body and time, wisdom for the soul and eternity.
The power dynamics in a relationship are going to be fluid over a long period of time, so to wait for 'perfect' is going to be a mistake.
You work for a long period of time and the results don't really show, but at some point everything just comes together and you start to play better, or get more confidence.
I can evaluate a player in a very short period of time because I'm very close to that game, very educated in that game and played the game for a long, long time. I wasn't just a guy with talent. I learned a lot about the game.
A kaiseki meal is like that, very small courses over a long period of time.
The average Mexican lives longer now than the average Briton did in 1955. Infant mortality is lower today in Nepal than it was in Italy in 1951. The proportion of Vietnamese living on less than $2 a day has dropped from 90 per cent to 30 per cent in twenty years. The rich have got richer, but the poor have done even better.
So I grew up feeling that I wasn't good enough, and that no-one would love me unless I was perfect. But no-one's perfect, we're not meant to be perfect. We're meant to be complete. But it's hard to be complete if you're trying to be perfect, so you kind of become disembodied. And I spent a lot of my life that way.""And if you don't own your strength... Women like me tend to always look over their shoulder to see who... "Who's the leader? Who's the smart one?" Never thinking it might be ME. Took a long time for me to get over that.
The time between Bachelor's degree and a PhD, the median time is over 11 years. So then you're still only on a tenure ladder, you're not tenured. So it generally takes 6 to 8 years after that to get tenure. So that's a very long period of what's essentially apprenticeship, of insecurity.
I have probably become a lot more Zionist than I used to be. Jews have a history of being persecuted over a long, long period of time so I think it is absolutely right to have a country that is a Jewish state.
The people I want are very famous and very rich, and all I can offer them is a bit of exposure on TV and a bit of cash, so it's a miracle we get any guests at all. But we have been very lucky.