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

Well, the questioner came from Singapore, which has perhaps the best economic record in the history of developing an economy. And therefore he referred to 15 percent per annum as modest. It's not modest, it's arrogant.

In business we often find that the winning system goes almost ridiculously far in maximizing and or minimizing one or a few variables - like the discount warehouses of Costco.

Clever derivatives broke dozens of companies. It killed them. Bankrupt. We don't need these kinds of innovation in finance. It's OK to be boring in finance. What we want is innovation in widgets.

Let me know what your problem is, and I will try to make it more difficult for you.

The average result has to be the average result. By definition, everybody can't beat the market. As I always say, the iron rule of life is that only 20% of the people can be in the top fifth. That's just the way it is.

You want to deliver to the world what you would buy if you were on the other end.