Knowing the edge of your competency is important. If you think you know more than you do, you will get in trouble.

We also believe candour benefits us as managers. The CEO who misleads often in public eventually misleads himself in private.

He must never forget Charlie's plea: Tell me where I'm going to die, so I'll never go there.

One’s objective should be to get it right, get it quick, get it out and get it over. Your problem won’t improve with age.

Very successful people say no to almost everything.

In that, we agreed with Andrew Carnegie, who said that huge fortunes that flow in large part from society should in large part be returned to society. In my case, the ability to allocate capital would have had little utility unless I lived in a rich, populous country in which enormous quantities of marketable securities were traded and were sometimes ridiculously mispriced. And fortunately for me, that describes the U.S. in the second half of the last century.

Charlie and I have a number of filters that things have to get through before we'll think about them.