A foreign correspondent, after talking to me for a while, once said: "You don't seem smart enough to be so good at what you're doing. Do you have an explanation?"

If you take sales presentations and brokers of commercial real estate and businesses... I'm 70 years old, I've never seen one I thought was even within hailing distance of objective truth.... 'incentive-caused bias,' causes this terrible abuse. And many of the people who are doing it you would be glad to have married into your family compared to what you're otherwise going to get.

You must have the confidence to override people with more credentials than you whose cognition is impaired by incentive-caused bias or some similar psychological force that is obviously present. But there are also cases where you have to recognize that you have no wisdom to add - and that your best course is to trust some expert.

I know just enough about thermodynamics to understand that if it takes too much fossil-fuel energy to create ethanol, that's a very stupid way to solve an energy problem.

The secret to happiness is to lower your expectations. ...that is what you compare your experience with. If your expectations and standards are very high and only allow yourself to be happy when things are exquisite, you'll never be happy and grateful. There will always be some flaw. But compare your experience with lower expectations, especially something not as good, and you'll find much in your experience of the world to love, cherish and enjoy, every single moment.

The idea of caring is that someone is making money faster [than you are] is one of the deadly sins. Envy is a really stupid sin because it’s the only one you could never possibly have any fun at. There’s a lot of pain and no fun. Why would you want to get on that trolley?

Learn how to ignore the examples from others when they are wrong, because few skills are more worth having.