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.

I never allow myself to have an opinion on anything that I don't know the other side's argument better than they do.

A lot of success in life and business comes from knowing what you want to avoid: early death, a bad marriage, etc.

In my whole life, I have known no wise people who didn't read all the time - none ... ZERO.

We’re partial to putting out large amounts of money where we won’t have to make another decision.

Where you have complexity, by nature you can have fraud and mistakes. You'll have more of that than in a company that shovels sand from a river and sells it. This will always be true of financial companies, including ones run by governments. If you want accurate numbers from financial companies, you're in the wrong world.

It's hard to predict what will happen with two brands in a market. Sometimes they will behave in a gentlemanly way, and sometimes they'll pound each other. I know of no way to predict whether they'll compete moderately or to the death. If you could figure it out, you could make a lot of money.