The best education you can get is investing in yourself, and that doesn't mean college or university.

Calculate "owner earnings" to get a true reflection of value.

If you can't communicate and talk to other people and get across your ideas, you're giving up your potential.

If we have a strength, it is in recognizing when we are operating well within our circle of competence and when we are approaching the perimeter.

Most people get interested in stocks when everyone else is. The time to get interested is when no one else is. You can't buy what is popular and do well.

The latter qualification brings to mind a fellow who applied for a job and stated he had twenty years of experience-which was corrected by a former employer to read "one year's experience-twenty times.

None of this means, however, that a business or stock is an intelligent purchase simply because it is unpopular; a contrarian approach is just as foolish as a follow-the-crowd strategy. What's required is thinking rather than polling. Unfortunately, Bertrand Russell's observation about life in general applies with unusual force in the financial world: "Most men would rather die than think. Many do."