If you, like me, lived through 1973-74 or even the early 1990s... There was a waiting list to get OUT of the country club - that's when you know things are tough. If you live long enough, you'll see it.

Everybody engaged in complex work needs colleagues. Just the discipline of having to put your thoughts in order with somebody else is a very useful thing.”

If you have competence, you pretty much know its boundaries already. To ask the question (of whether you are past the boundary) is to answer it.

If you rise in life, you have to behave in a certain way. You can go to a strip club if you're a beer-swilling sand shoveler, but if you're the Bishop of Boston, you shouldn't go.

It's not the bad ideas that do you in, but the good ones.

Failure to handle psychological denial is a common way for people to go broke: you have made an enormous commitment to something. You have poured effort and money in. And the more you put in, the more that the whole consistency principle makes you think, "Now it has to work. If I put in just a little more, then it will work."

If you can get good at destroying your own wrong ideas, that is a great gift.