We don't like trading agony for money

To finish first you have to first finish. Don't get in a position where you go back to go. What's interesting is that some guy whose grandfather was a lawyer and a judge-hurriedly going to Harvard Law with a wave of veterans-I was willing to go into so many different businesses. I was constantly going right into the other fellow's business and doing better than the other fellow did. The reason it was possible? Self-education- developing mental discipline, big ideas that really work.

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."

In the corporate world, if you have analysts, due diligence, and no horse sense, you've just described hell.

Avoid working directly under somebody you don't admire and don't want to be like.

I talked to one accountant, a very nice fellow who I would have been glad to have his family marry into mine. He said, "What these other accounting firms have done is very unethical. The [tax avoidance scheme] works best if it's not found out [by the IRS], so we only give it to our best clients, not the rest, so it's unlikely to be discovered. So my firm is better than the others." [Laughter] I'm not kidding. And he was a perfectly nice man. People just follow the crowd...Their mind just drifts off in a ghastly way.

Choose clients as you would friends.