John Lloyd Wright, son of architect Frank Lloyd Wright, invented this classic building set. The original instructions included plans for a replica of Abraham Lincoln's cabin, obviously, but also directions for building Uncle Tom's cabin.

Lincoln Logs

After a stonemason saw kids building things with pencils and spools of thread, he got the idea for Tinkertoys.

Tinkertoys

Hula Hoops have been around forever in various formats, but the official Wham-O toy was invented in 1958. The inventors promoted it by going around to playgrounds and parks, giving children samples, and showing them how to use them.

Hula Hoops

These little critters are actual live animals called brine shrimp. They were "invented" in 1957 by Harold von Braunhut, the man who invented X-Ray Specs. Brine shrimp are ideal for packaging because they enter a natural (shippable) state of suspended animation in certain environments. When kids release the "monkeys" into the prepared water, they "hatch."

Sea Monkeys

The sculpting clay with the trademarked scent was first sold as a wallpaper cleaner. It was rolled on the walls to remove coal dust.

Play-Doh

These ugly-cute dolls were created in 1949 by a Danish fisherman who needed a cheap Christmas gift for his daughter. He used sheep's wool for the hair. Thomas Dam's dolls caught on, which is why the original dolls were called Dam Dolls.

Troll dolls

<ul><li>The Slinky was invented by naval engineer Richard James. </li><li>While he was working to develop springs that could keep ship instruments stable in choppy waters, he knocked a metal coil off a shelf. </li><li>The coil did what a Slinky does: It stepped down to a stack of books, then to the table, and then to the floor, where it righted itself into a cylinder. </li><li>James knew it would be a great toy and tests by neighborhood kids proved him right.</li></ul>

Slinky

<ul><li>A precursor to the familiar LEGO brick, the plastic Self-Locking Building Brick was developed in the late 1930s by the British toy inventor Hilary Fisher Page. </li><li>A decade later, a Danish master carpenter named Ole Kirk Christiansen examined the British bricks and designed a similar toy, sold in a set as LEGO Automatic Binding Bricks. </li><li>LEGO comes from the Danish words leg and godt, which mean "play well." Christiansen later discovered that in Latin, LEGO means "I put together."</li></ul>

LEGO

<ul><li>The dolls were invented by writer and illustrator Johnny Gruelle.</li><li> Raggedy Ann was created in 1915 for Gruelle's daughter. Gruelle reportedly named the doll after two poems from a book by James Whitcomb Riley: The Raggedy Man and Little Orphan Annie. </li><li>Ann inspired Gruelle to write stories about her adventures, and in 1918, Raggedy Ann Stories was released. Her brother, Andy, showed up in 1920.</li></ul>

Raggedy Ann and Andy

<ul><li>The sock monkeys that we have come to know and love today—the ones made with Rockford Red Heel socks—are thought to have come about in 1932. </li><li>The distinctive red heel (the monkey's mouth) was given to the socks so customers would know they were getting authentic Rockford socks. </li><li>When the Nelson Knitting Company discovered that their socks were being used across the country for this folk craft, they won the patent for the sock monkey pattern and started including it in the packaging of their socks.</li></ul>

Sock Monkeys

Ever wonder how Lincoln Logs or Sea Monkeys found their way into 20th-century toy stores? Here are the little-known origins of 10 classic toys.

history

History

How 10 Classic Toys Were Invented

When someone is a self-proclaimed realist, or simply pessimistic by nature, decisions are often made considering only one factor: risk.  Faced with a decision, they ask themselves questions such as: <ul><li>What is the worst possible outcome? </li><li>What do I need to protect myself against? </li><li>If this doesn’t go as planned, how will I respond? </li></ul>

Risk-Based Decisions

Aside from the benefits of considering what might be, rather than what might happen, studies have demonstrated that taking an optimistic view provides benefits beyond thinking big. A recent study in ScienceDaily found that optimistic people have less overall stress, and as a result live longer, healthier lives.  The shift from self-proclaimed “realist” to “striving optimist” comes from practicing what I refer to as “flipping the switch.”

Be A Striving Optimist

If you find yourself considering risks, flip the question to something positive. “What’s the worst that can happen?” becomes, “What are the best possible outcomes?”

Flip Your Negative Thoughts

If you are typically pessimistic, your biggest critic will be yourself. For this reason, make sure you share your optimistic questions and initial ideas out loud with others. When we repeat things out loud, we override the little green negative person who is on our shoulder whispering pessimistic views in our ear.

Share Your Optimistic View out Loud

It’s near impossible to be optimistic if you are surrounded by pessimistic people. This said, you can’t always eliminate these people from your life, so instead push back. When someone shares a pessimistic view, get in the habit of challenging their viewpoint. Don’t worry whether you have the answer to their concern; just simply share an opposing, yet positive, view.

Challenge Pessimists and Realists

Like step 3 above, although we can’t always control the people we are around, we can control what we consume. Be aware of what you read, where you travel, or who you choose to spend time with. If we consume negative news or information or spend time with negative people, we in turn will be negative. If you aren’t convinced flipping the switch makes sense for you, then consider the alternative. The world needs more optimism, and you can have an impact.

Minimize Time Spent in Negative Environments

Understand yourself and those around you.

psychology

Psychology

problemsolving

Problem Solving

leadershipandmanagement

Leadership & Management

How to become more optimistic

Selling is a delicate science. Instead of pages of elaborate descriptions, you only need the right words—even if it’s two sentences long.Goldstein came up with a two-line pitch that effectively summarized Hipmunk’s value proposition: Lowering distribution costs. Eventually, Goldstein's company went on to secure over $55 million from investors.

Adam Goldstein’s Two-Line Pitch & Shultz Photo School’s One-Liner

Think about the following questions when creating a short and concise B2B pitch deck:<ul><li>What does your product or service do? What are its benefits?</li><li>What is the unique selling proposition (USP) of your product or service? How is it different from your competitors?</li><li>What is the ultimate goal of a product or service? Think about the pain points that it can solve.</li></ul>

Takeaway

Your pitch should provide a perspective based on your audience, so they know how your product or service can benefit them and why they should buy it from you.Make sure your sales pitch is relevant to your target audience and interesting enough to pique their attention

Make it All About the Customer

Here are a few tips to make your live pitches fun and engaging:<ul><li>Explain the advantages of your product quickly.</li><li>Add humor to your demonstrations.</li><li>Add additional visual aids, such as graphs, statistics, and charts, to make your story more interesting.</li><li>Practice how you’d approach the audience with the product beforehand.</li></ul>

What do door-to-door salesmen, magicians, and late-night infomercials have in common?They try to create a “wow” moment by demonstrating the product or service’s most unique feature.Although giving a demo of your product in your sales pitch costs time and resources, it’s a worthy investment.An Eg Video: <a href="https://youtu.be/ggi3yfUv0Mo">Aaron Krause’s Scrubbing Tool Pitch</a>

Show What Your Product or Service Can Do

Apple’s keynote videos are a masterclass for those wanting to create the perfect sales pitch.It begins with the company’s rich history and moves the specifications of its products in a relatable and easy language. There is absolutely no use of jargon—only features that appeal to Apple’s audience.

Use Your Brand Story to Create Hype

Here’s how to create hype through your brand story:<ul><li>Explain your brand history briefly.</li><li>Create a backstory that’s interesting enough to attract prospects’ attention.</li><li>Avoid using metaphors.</li><li>Back your claims with facts.</li><li>Avoid jargon and instead, use a relatable and easy language.</li></ul>

Mark Cuban, the owner of Dallas Mavericks, had his work cut out for him when his team was struggling to win matches back in the early 2000s, which resulted in low ticket sales.He knew that low ticket sales would translate to heavy losses, which could really shake his company’s future. So he decided to take charge of the situation.Cuban got on the phone with former season ticket holders and asked them to come back to the game, reminding them of their experiences of going to the games as kids. He also emphasized how winning or losing of a team didn’t matter—the feeling did.

Build an Emotional Connection

Here are a few tips to create more emotionally-appealing sales pitches:<ul><li>Adopt a more compassionate and understanding approach when writing your pitch.</li><li>Create a phone sales pitch script that has nostalgic or emotional value.</li><li>Avoid making false claims while pitching.</li><li>Include commonalities between you and your customers.</li><li>Try to add shock value to your pitch.</li></ul>

Want to improve your B2B sales pitch? Get 10 proven B2B sales pitch examples and learn why they work well.

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Marketing & Sales

business

Business

10 Proven B2B Sales Pitch Examples to Inspire Your Own

We’ve all made mistakes at work before. If you dropped the ball on an important project, or done something to lose credibility and trust at work, there are steps you can take to build it back.After you’ve done the basics (you apologized, you owned up to your mistakes, and hopefully learned from it), the author suggests taking the following steps:<ul><li class="ql-align-justify">Level-set and manage expectations meticulously.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Balance under-promising and over-delivering.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Focus on small, quick wins.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Reassess your situation.</li></ul>

Get Your Credibility Back: Key Takeaways

It’s important to understand that when employees “fail,” it’s often because they don’t meet the expectations that were set for them. You can avoid this by making those expectations clearer from the start of your next project. Kick it off by ensuring that you and all of the stakeholders are <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/level-setting-expectations-relationship-management-diane/">on the same page</a>.

Manage Expectations Meticulously

Asking probing questions will help you identify your goals and ensure that you have the support and resources you need to reach them.Namely, you will want to find out:<ul><li>Who: Who is your customer?</li><li>What: What are your goals?</li><li>Where: Are there specific geographic or regional considerations to take into account (if applicable)?</li><li>When: What is the expected timeline for key deliverables?</li><li>How: How does your manager want you to communicate this information? How would your teammates prefer to collaborate throughout the project?</li></ul>

Ask Probing Questions

When you fail to meet someone’s expectations at work, you may feel the need to prove yourself the next time you work with them. If you’re not careful, this can lead to you overcompensating and taking on more than you can realistically handle. A better strategy is to <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/georgebradt/2017/08/15/why-you-should-under-promise-and-over-deliver-but-not-by-too-much/?sh=da00e2249285">under-promise and over-deliver.</a>When you’re coming from a level of damaged trust, exceeding promises has the potential to rebuild credibility and positively impact a damaged reputation.

Under-Promise and Over-Deliver

Once you set expectations and establish clear objectives and timelines, shift your focus to accomplishing small, quick wins. In a <a href="https://hbr.org/2009/01/the-quick-wins-paradox">study</a> surveying over 5,400 newly promoted leaders and their managers, the one attribute that stood out among high performers was a strong focus on results.  A collective quick win — a visible, high-impact contribution that adds measurably and meaningfully to the success of a project, and therefore, to the success of your team — can rebuild your reputation as a high performer and reassure your manager and teammates of your value.

Focus on Small, Quick Wins

Take a step back every couple of months to assess whether you’re making progress. The amount of time it takes to fully rebuild your reputation will vary based on a host of factors, like your manager’s personality, the magnitude of the previous failure, and more. But in those check-ins you have with yourself, you need to see progress. It can be slow and incremental, but it needs to be there.

Reassess Your Situation

Broken trust and credibility are one of the hardest things to regain in any relationship. Be patient with yourself, and give yourself some grace. We all make mistakes. We should all be given the opportunity to redeem ourselves and use our failures as milestones for our development. With a concerted effort of intentional, strategic actions, it’s possible to regain trust — from others and from yourself.

The Bottom Line

When you’re new to the workforce, a big mistake can push you back to square one.

So, You Dropped the Ball. How Do You Get Your Credibility Back?

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.

<ul><li>Even the best investors don’t get it right every time. The reasons are simple. No rule always works.</li><li>Psychology plays a major role in markets, and because it’s highly variable, cause-and-effect relationships aren’t reliable.</li><li>Because investing is at least as much art as it is science, it’s never my goal – in this book or elsewhere – to suggest it can be routinized.</li><li>One’s investment approach be intuitive and adaptive rather than be fixed and mechanistic.</li><li>Just invest in an index fund that buys a little of everything. That will give you what is known as ‘market returns’.</li></ul>

Market Investing Basics

Only a few of them will achieve the superior insight, intuition, sense of value and awareness of psychology that are required for consistently above-average results. Doing so requires second-level thinking.Your thinking has to be better than that of others – both more powerful and at a higher level.What is second-level thinking?First-level thinking says, ‘It’s a good company; let’s buy the stock.’ Second-level thinking says, ‘It’s a good company, but everyone thinks it’s a great company, and it’s not. So the stock’s overrated and overpriced; let’s sell.’

Second Level Thinking

First-level thinkers think the same way other first-level thinkers do about the same things.All investors can’t beat the market since, collectively, they are the market.To outperform the average investor, you have to be able to outthink the consensus. Are you capable of doing so? What makes you think so?The problem is that extraordinary performance comes only from correct non-consensus forecasts.The upshot is simple: to achieve superior investment results, you have to hold non-consensus views regarding value, and they have to be accurate. That’s not easy.

Don't Be Like The Crowd

In theory there’s no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is.

Asset prices immediately reflect the consensus view of the information’s significance. I do not, however, believe the consensus view is necessarily correct.To beat the market you must hold an idiosyncratic, or nonconsensus, view.The efficient market hypothesis is its conclusion that ‘you can’t beat the market.’The greatest ramifications of the Chicago theory has been the development of passive investment vehicles known as index funds.

Market Efficiency

If riskier investments could be counted on to produce higher returns, they wouldn’t be riskier.The key question is whether it’s right: Is the market unbeatable? Are the people who try wasting their time? Are the clients who pay fees to investment managers wasting their money?Second-level thinkers know that to achieve superior results, they have to have an edge in either information or analysis or both. They are on the alert for instances of misperception.

Taking Risk Is.... Risky

Efficiency is not so universal that we should give up on superior performance.Efficiency is what lawyers call a ‘rebuttable presumption’ – something that should be presumed to be true until someone proves otherwise.Inefficiency is a necessary condition for superior investing. Attempting to outperform in a perfectly efficient market is like flipping a fair coin: the best you can hope for is fifty-fifty.For investors to get an edge, there have to be inefficiencies in the underlying process – imperfections, mispricings – to take advantage of.

The Limits Of Efficiency

For investing to be reliably successful, an accurate estimate of intrinsic value is the indispensable starting point. Without it, any hope for consistent success as an investor is just that: hope.Buy at a price below intrinsic value, and sell at a higher price.An investor has two basic choices: gauge the security’s underlying intrinsic value and buy or sell when the price diverges from it, or base decisions purely on expectations regarding future price movements.

Defining Value

Day traders considered themselves successful if they bought a stock at $10 and sold at $11, bought it back the next week at $24 and sold at $25, and bought it a week later at $39 and sold at $40. If you can’t see the flaw in this – that the trader made $3 in a stock that appreciated by $30 – you probably shouldn’t read the rest of this content.Two approaches, both driven by fundamentals: value investing and growth investing.

The Flaw Of Day Trading

If value investing has the potential to consistently produce favourable results, does that mean it’s easy? No. For one thing, it depends on an accurate estimate of value. Without that, any hope for consistent success as an investor is just that: hope.It’s hard to consistently do the right thing as an investor. But it’s impossible to consistently do the right thing at the right time.Being too far ahead of your time is indistinguishable from being wrong.

Being Right Isn't Always Easy

<ul><li>Investment success doesn’t come from ‘buying good things,’ but rather from ‘buying things well.’</li><li>Deciding on an investment without carefully considering the fairness of its price is just as silly.</li><li>There’s no such thing as a good or bad idea regardless of price!</li><li>Well bought is half sold.</li><li>There’s nothing better than buying from someone who has to sell regardless of price during a crash.</li><li>You can’t make a career out of buying from forced sellers and selling to forced buyers.</li><li>Since buying from a forced seller is the best thing in our world, being a forced seller is the worst.</li></ul>

Buy It Well: The Price And The Value

<ul><li>Investing is a popularity contest, and the most dangerous thing is to buy something at the peak of its popularity.</li><li>The safest and most potentially profitable thing is to buy something when no one likes it. Given time, its popularity, and thus its price, can only go one way: up.</li><li>In bubbles, ‘attractive’ morphs into ‘attractive at any price.’</li><li>In bubbles, infatuation with market momentum takes over from any notion of value and fair price.</li></ul>

The Upside Down World Of Investing

Possible routes to investment profit:<ul><li>Benefiting from a rise in the asset’s intrinsic value.</li><li>Applying leverage.</li><li>Selling for more than your asset’s worth.</li><li>Buying something for less than its value.</li></ul>

The Heart Of The Matter

Dealing with risk is an essential element in investing. There are three reasons for this:<ul><li>First, risk is a bad thing, and most level-headed people want to avoid or minimize it.</li><li>Second, when you’re considering an investment, your decision should be a function of the risk entailed as well as the potential return.</li><li>Third, when you consider investment results, the return means only so much by itself; the risk taken has to be assessed as well. Was the return achieved in safe instruments or risky ones?</li></ul>

Understanding Risk

Risk means more things can happen than will happen.

Risk is – first and foremost – the likelihood of losing money.The possibility of permanent loss is a risk to worry about.<ul><li>Falling short of one’s goal</li><li>Underperformance</li><li>Career risk</li><li>Unconventionality</li><li>Risk that could jeopardize return to an agent’s firing point is rarely worth taking.</li><li>Illiquidity</li></ul>

The Probability Of Losing Money

<ul><li>First, risk of loss does not necessarily stem from weak fundamentals.</li><li>Second, risk can be present even without weakness in the macroenvironment.</li><li>Third, risk is deceptive.</li></ul>

The Three Attributes Of Risk

<ul><li>Skillful investors can get a sense of the risk present in a given situation. They make that judgment primarily based on (a) the stability and dependability of value and (b) the relationship between price and value.</li><li>The fact that something – in this case, loss – happened doesn’t mean it was bound to happen, and the fact that something didn’t happen doesn’t mean it was unlikely.</li><li>When markets are booming, the best results often go to those who take the most risk.</li><li>There’s a big difference between probability and outcome. Probable things fail to happen – and improbable things happen – all the time.</li></ul>

Risk: Hard to formulate, measure or predict

<ul><li>Risk cannot be measured. Certainly it cannot be gauged on the basis of what ‘everybody’ says at a moment in time.</li><li>Risk can be judged only by sophisticated, experienced second-level thinkers.</li><li>Investment risk is largely invisible before the fact – except perhaps to people with unusual insight – and even after an investment has been exited.</li><li>Risk exists only in the future, and it’s impossible to know for sure what the future holds.</li></ul>Only the things that happened, happened.

The Rabbit Hole Of Risk

The received wisdom is that risk increases in the recessions and falls in booms. In contrast, it may be more helpful to think of risk as increasing during upswings, as financial imbalances build up, and materializing in recessions.

<ul><li>No matter how good fundamentals may be, humans exercising their greed and propensity to err have the ability to screw things up.</li><li>Great investing requires both generating returns and controlling risk. And recognizing risk is an absolute prerequisite for controlling it.</li><li>Recognizing risk often starts with understanding when investors are paying it too little heed, being too optimistic and paying too much for a given asset as a result.</li><li>High risk, in other words, comes primarily with high prices.</li><li>Participating when prices are high rather than shying away is the main source of risk.</li></ul>

Recognizing Risk

<ul><li>Risk tolerance is antithetical to successful investing.</li><li>A prime element in risk creation is a belief that risk is low, perhaps even gone altogether.</li><li>Better safety gear can entice climbers to take more risk – making them in fact less safe.</li><li>Risk cannot be eliminated; it just gets transferred and spread.</li><li>Developments that make the world look less risky usually are illusory.</li><li>The risk-is-gone myth is one of the most dangerous sources of risk, and a major contributor to any bubble.</li></ul>

Tolerating Risk

<ul><li>Outstanding investors, in my opinion, are distinguished at least as much for their ability to control risk as they are for generating a return.</li><li>Loss is what happens when risk meets adversity. Risk is the potential for loss if things go wrong. As long as things go well, the loss does not arise.</li><li>Risk gives rise to loss only when negative events occur in the environment. The absence of loss does not necessarily mean the portfolio was safely constructed.</li></ul>

Controlling Risk

<ul><li>The manager’s value added comes not through higher return at a given risk, but through reduced risk at a given return.</li><li>The intelligent bearing of risk for profit, the best test for which is a record of repeated success over a long period of time.</li><li>So in most things, you can’t prepare for the worst case. It should suffice to be prepared for once-in-a-generation events.</li><li>Risk control is the best route to loss avoidance. Risk avoidance, on the other hand, is likely to lead to return avoidance as well.</li></ul>

The Value Of A Portfolio Manager

<ul><li>Nothing goes in one direction forever.</li><li>Rule number one: most things will prove to be cyclical. Rule number two: some of the greatest opportunities for gain and loss come when other people forget rule number one.</li><li>The basic reason for the cyclicality in our world is the involvement of humans.</li><li>When people are involved, the results are variable and cyclical. The main reason for this, I think, is that people are emotional and inconsistent, not steady and clinical.</li></ul>

Being Attentive to Cycles

<ul><li>The first, when a few forward-looking people begin to believe things will get better.</li><li>The second, when most investors realize improvement is actually taking place.</li><li>The third, when everyone concludes things will get better forever.</li></ul>What the wise man does in the beginning, the fool does in the end.

Investor Stupidity: The Three Stages of a Bull Market

it takes analytical ability, objectivity, resolve, even imagination, to think things will ever get better. The few people who possess those qualities can make unusual profits with low risk.The oscillation of the investor pendulum is very similar in nature to the up-and-down fluctuation of economic and market cycles.Extreme market behaviour will reverse.

Extreme Market Behaviour

Why do mistakes occur? Because investing is an action undertaken by human beings, most of whom are at the mercy of their psyches and emotions.The desire for more, the fear of missing out, the tendency to compare against others, the influence of the crowd and the dream of the sure thing – these factors are near universal.Inefficiencies – mispricings, misperceptions, mistakes that other people make – provide potential opportunities for superior performance. Exploiting them is, in fact, the only road to consistent outperformance.

Combating Negative Influences

Nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true.

To avoid losing money in bubbles, the key lies in refusing to join in when greed and human error cause positives to be wildly overrated and negatives to be ignored.<ul><li>Nobody has all the answers; we’re all just human.</li><li>No strategy can produce high rates of return without risk.</li></ul>

Avoiding Bubbles

<ul><li>Buy low; sell high is the time-honored dictum, but investors who are swept up in market cycles too often do just the opposite.</li><li>Once-in-a-lifetime market extremes seem to occur once every decade or so.</li><li>Most typical of market victims: the six-foot-tall man who drowned crossing the stream that was five feet deep on average.</li><li>Much of the time there aren’t great market excesses to bet against.</li></ul>

The Most Repeated Business Advice

Nobody goes to that restaurant anymore; it’s too crowded.

<ul><li>If you believe the story everyone else believes, you’ll do what they do.</li><li>Only a skeptic can separate the things that sound good and are from the things that sound good and aren’t.</li><li>Skepticism calls for pessimism when optimism is excessive. But it also calls for optimism when pessimism is excessive.</li><li>Skepticism and pessimism aren’t synonymous.</li><li>The key – as usual – was to become skeptical of what ‘everyone’ was saying and doing.</li><li>The error is clear. The herd applies optimism at the top and pessimism at the bottom.</li></ul>

Skepticism

The process of intelligently building a portfolio consists of buying the best investments, making room for them by selling lesser ones, and staying clear of the worst.The raw materials for the process consist of(a) a list of potential investments,(b) estimates of their intrinsic value,(c) a sense for how their prices compare with their intrinsic value (d) an understanding of the risks involved in each, and of the effect their inclusion would have on the portfolio being assembled.The starting point for portfolio construction is unlikely to be an unbounded universe.

Finding Bargains

Since bargains provide value at unreasonably low prices – and thus unusual ratios of return to risk – they represent the Holy Grail for investors.It’s obvious that investors can be forced into mistakes by psychological weakness, analytical error or refusal to tread on uncertain ground. Those mistakes create bargains for second-level thinkers capable of seeing the errors of others.

The Inevitable Mistakes

<ul><li>Patient opportunism – waiting for bargains – is often your best strategy.</li><li>You’ll do better if you wait for investments to come to you rather than go chasing after them.</li><li>An opportunist buys things because they’re offered at bargain prices. There’s nothing special about buying when prices aren’t low.</li><li>We don’t look for our investments; they find us.</li></ul>

Patient Opportunism

The market’s not a very accommodating machine; it won’t provide high returns just because you need them

<ul><li>One of the great things about investing is that the only real penalty is for making losing investments. There’s no penalty for omitting losing investments, of course, just rewards.</li><li>The dumbest thing you can do is to insist on perpetuating high returns – and give back your profits in the process.</li><li>You simply cannot create investment opportunities when they’re not there.</li><li>If it’s not there, hoping won’t make it so. Wishing won’t make it so.</li><li>You want to take risk when others are fleeing from it, not when they’re competing with you to do so.</li></ul>

To Invest Or Not Invest

We have two classes of forecasters: Those who don’t know – and those who don’t know they don’t know.

Every once in a while, someone makes a risky bet on an improbable or uncertain outcome and ends up looking like a genius. But we should recognize that it happened because of luck and boldness, not skill.The truth is, much in investing is ruled by luck. Some may prefer to call it chance or randomness, and those words do sound more sophisticated than luck.A great deal of the success of everything we do as investors will be heavily influenced by the roll of the dice.

Appreciating the Role of Luck

An investor needs to do very few things right as long as he avoids big mistakes.

Successful investing requires thoughtful attention to many separate aspects, all at the same time. The Most Important Thing by Howard Marks covers these key aspects in layman language and without a lot of finance jargon though it covers the concepts of investment theory.

"This is that rarity, a useful book."--Warren Buffett Howard Marks, the chairman and cofounder of Oaktree Capital Management, is renowned for his insightful assessments of market opportunity and risk. After four decades spent ascending to the top of the investment management profession, he is today sought out by the world's leading value investors, and his client memos brim with insightful commentary and a time-tested, fundamental philosophy. Now for the first time, all readers can benefit from Marks's wisdom, concentrated into a single volume that speaks to both the amateur and seasoned investor. Informed by a lifetime of experience and study, The Most Important Thing explains the keys to successful investment and the pitfalls that can destroy capital or ruin a career. Utilizing passages from his memos to illustrate his ideas, Marks teaches by example, detailing the development of an investment philosophy that fully acknowledges the complexities of investing and the perils of the financial world. Brilliantly applying insight to today's volatile markets, Marks offers a volume that is part memoir, part creed, with a number of broad takeaways. Marks expounds on such concepts as "second-level thinking," the price/value relationship, patient opportunism, and defensive investing. Frankly and honestly assessing his own decisions--and occasional missteps--he provides valuable lessons for critical thinking, risk assessment, and investment strategy. Encouraging investors to be "contrarian," Marks wisely judges market cycles and achieves returns through aggressive yet measured action. Which element is the most essential? Successful investing requires thoughtful attention to many separate aspects, and each of Marks's subjects proves to be the most important thing.

moneyandinvestments

Money & Investments

books

Books

"This is that rarity, a useful book."--Warren Buffett Howard Marks, the chairman and cofounder of Oaktree Capital Management, is renowned for his insightful assessments of market opportunity and risk. After four decades spent ascending to the top of the investment management profession, he is today sought out by the world's leading value investors, and his client memos brim with insightful commentary and a time-tested, fundamental philosophy. Now for the first time, all readers can benefit from Marks's wisdom, concentrated into a single volume that speaks to both the amateur and seasoned investor. Informed by a lifetime of experience and study, The Most Important Thing explains the keys to successful investment and the pitfalls that can destroy capital or ruin a career. Utilizing passages from his memos to illustrate his ideas, Marks teaches by example, detailing the development of an investment philosophy that fully acknowledges the complexities of investing and the perils of the financial world. Brilliantly applying insight to today's volatile markets, Marks offers a volume that is part memoir, part creed, with a number of broad takeaways. Marks expounds on such concepts as "second-level thinking," the price/value relationship, patient opportunism, and defensive investing. Frankly and honestly assessing his own decisions--and occasional missteps--he provides valuable lessons for critical thinking, risk assessment, and investment strategy. Encouraging investors to be "contrarian," Marks wisely judges market cycles and achieves returns through aggressive yet measured action. Which element is the most essential? Successful investing requires thoughtful attention to many separate aspects, and each of Marks's subjects proves to be the most important thing.

Howard Marks (born Dennis Howard Marks) was a Welsh author, former teacher and drug smuggler who achieved notoriety as an international cannabis smuggler through high-profile court cases, supposed connections with groups such as the CIA, the IRA, MI6, and the Mafia, and his eventual conviction at the hands of the American Drug Enforcement Administration. At the height of his drug career, he was said to have controlled 10% of the world's hashish trade.Marks attended Balliol College, Oxford between 1964 and 1967 to study Natural Science, with a Physics (B.A., Oxon).

Howard Marks

The Most Important Thing

Life is composed of systems that are yours to control or not to control.
There are two psychological approaches to finding a way to live a full and positive life:
<ol>
<li>The Freudian stance: Assumes that our past determines our present happiness</li>
<li>The cognitive approach: Our current thoughts determine our happiness</li>
</ol>
The cognitive approach is more practical as it implies that we control what happens in our lives.

Your Mindset

<ul><li>Fixing life’s problems in one swoop is impossible. You have to proceed one step at a time.</li><li>There is a direct relationship between happiness and the amount of control that we have.</li><li>To take control of our lives, we have to adopt a different perspective. We must question our status quo in relation to ourselves. It is about sorting the things that are under our area of influence.</li><li>Orderliness and attention to detail are keys to peace.</li><li>The mindset of successful people is such that they pay attention to the mechanical details of life.</li></ul>

Fixing Problems

The Work The System protocol has three main aspects:<ul><li>The Strategic Objective. This is similar to the declaration of independence. It is your mandate for a better future. It will provide overall direction to your work and personal life</li><li>The General Operating Principles document. This is similar to the constitution. It offers a guideline for future decision making</li><li>The Working Procedures. These are the laws guiding your game. These are the blue-collar fundamentals of your work.</li></ul>The world operates efficiently 99% of the time because physical laws are unchangeable.

The Three Pillars Of ‘Work The System’ Protocol

<ol><li>Internalize the fundamentals. Improve your perspective of life and business</li><li>Pinpoint the goals of your business, life, and job. This is your Strategic objective</li><li>Create your collection of General Operating Principles. Define specific systems for improvement.</li><li>Dissect each system into its fundamental aspects. Create a 1, 2, 3 step format for each subsystem in your life</li><li>Improve each step one at a time. Make your systems perfect</li><li>Document each system into a working procedure.</li><li>Put the new working procedures into play.</li></ol>

Work The System: The Essence

To end workplace chaos, get things on paper. Begin by developing your Strategic Objective document.The Strategic Objective document will become your fundamental guideline for making decisions.Without exception, the businesses that are large and successful are “working their systems.” And the ones without thoughtful direction and structured, sensible protocols—most small businesses— are struggling.

Keep Things Documented

<ul><li>Working Procedures make the system tangible, something that can be seen, touched and even perfected.</li><li>Working Procedures provide direction for flawless operation. </li><li>Be ruthless in insisting that the staff follow the set guidelines. </li><li>The procedure should be rock solid and inflexible until your management staff agrees that changes are necessary.</li></ul>

Working Procedures

<ol><li>Every recurring process requires a Working Procedure. The procedure should define the best method of doing the process</li><li>When a problem arises, your staff should use it as a cue to create or modify a Working Procedure. If the problem is infrequent, there is no need for that.</li><li>Involve your staff in creating new procedures. They are as responsible as managers for keeping the company running efficiently</li><li>Make procedures identical in presentation. This will make instructions clearer across the company</li><li>Every new procedure needs to be revised. </li><li>Sign off the procedures yourself.</li></ol>

Documenting Procedure

If your business depends on you, you don’t own a business—you have a job.

If you are employed, the goal is to use the 40 hour-week to produce large quantities of superior work to ascend the management ranks, earn serious money, and call your shots. Time and money wasted is time and money gone forever. And a waste of time and money means some other positive thing that could have happened, didn’t.<ul><li>Don’t waste your time on useless content or by complaining about what you cannot influence.</li><li>Not taking action is a choice. And since you are making choices daily, why not make them count?</li><li>Point-of-sale posture: Being ready to act and on the offence.</li></ul>

Time And Money

<ul><li>Biological prime time(BPT) is all about maximizing your productivity when your brainpower is at its peak. Some people work best in the morning while others in the evening.</li><li>The concept of prime time aims at the most fundamental of systems which is our actions.</li><li>BPT is when you should create your Strategic Objective, General Operating Principles, and Working Procedures. Of course, after your initial Work the System documentation is complete, BPT will continue to be there for whatever takes focus, whatever takes the most concentration. You will learn to cherish these golden hours.</li></ul>

Biological Prime Time

Mechanical prime time (MPT) is the time spent working on system improvement and building primary systems such as your career and your business. MPT exists only if we create it. During the workday, no matter what you are doing, look at each action you take and ask yourself if it is contributing to “making more and working less."

Mechanical Prime Time

A Simple Mindset Tweak Will Change Your Life. After a fifteen-year nightmare operating a stagnant service business, Sam Carpenter developed a down-to-earth methodology that knocked his routine eighty-hour workweek down to a single hour—while multiplying his bottom-line income more than twenty-fold. In Work the System, Carpenter reveals a profound insight and the exact uncomplicated, mechanical steps he took to turn his business and life around without turning it upside down. Once you “get” this new vision, success and serenity will come quickly. You will learn to: • Make a simple perception adjustment that will change your life forever. • See your world as a logical collection of linear systems that you can control. • Manage the systems that produce results in your business and your life. • Stop fire-killing. Become a fire-control specialist! • Maximize profit, create client loyalty, and develop enthusiastic employees who respect you. • Identify insidious “errors of omission.” • Maximize your biological and mechanical “prime time” so that you are working at optimum efficiency. • Design the life you want—and then, in the real world, quickly create it! You can keep doing what you have always done, and continue getting mediocre, unsatisfactory results. Or you can find the peace and freedom you’ve always wanted by transforming your business or corporate department into a finely tuned machine that runs on autopilot!

Discover the world of business and economics.

economics

Economics

A Simple Mindset Tweak Will Change Your Life. After a fifteen-year nightmare operating a stagnant service business, Sam Carpenter developed a down-to-earth methodology that knocked his routine eighty-hour workweek down to a single hour—while multiplying his bottom-line income more than twenty-fold.  In Work the System, Carpenter reveals a profound insight and the exact uncomplicated, mechanical steps he took to turn his business and life around without turning it upside down. Once you “get” this new vision, success and serenity will come quickly. You will learn to:  • Make a simple perception adjustment that will change your life forever.  • See your world as a logical collection of linear systems that you can control.  • Manage the systems that produce results in your business and your life.  • Stop fire-killing. Become a fire-control specialist!  • Maximize profit, create client loyalty, and develop enthusiastic employees who respect you.  • Identify insidious “errors of omission.”  • Maximize your biological and mechanical “prime time” so that you are working at optimum efficiency.  • Design the life you want—and then, in the real world, quickly create it!  You can keep doing what you have always done, and continue getting mediocre, unsatisfactory results. Or you can find the peace and freedom you’ve always wanted by transforming your business or corporate department into a finely tuned machine that runs on autopilot!

Sam Carpenter

Work the System

Working long hours is an inconvenience, and here is why you should take a pause:By working long hours you are increasing your risk for cardiovascular diseases, generally poor health, and fatigue.The boundaries between work and life are becoming more blurred and the ability to carry our work diminishes in return. Having busy schedules don't allow us to fully turn off, thus sacrificing the time we need to replenish our energy for our healthy and productivity.

Working long hours

Developing an end-of-day routine helps us wind-down and get ready to go home. It gets you motivated even when you don't feel like it. Routines let us fall back on our everyday habits to make sure that, in this case, we leave the office on time without having to rely on willpower or memory.Here are some things you can do for your end-of-day routine:<ol><li>Tidy up your desk and close out every tab open</li><li>Review your completed tasks at the end of the day and plan out tomorrow's to-do list realistically</li><li>Leave open one tab for your "most important task" in the morning</li><li>Have a quick-win ready</li></ol>

Build an end-of-day routine

If you don't have a real "go-home" time, you'd easily forget to leave work and often stay late, and while some may commend that, it can cause a toll on your health.One way to solve this problem is to have an appointment that will force you to get out of the door after work hours. This will structure your day to leave on time.Here are some ideas for events you can schedule after work:<ol><li>Meet a friend for dinner</li><li>Go to the gym and exercise after work</li><li>Sign up for a class </li></ol>Make sure to put the event on your calendar and treat them as events that are ugent.

Set a hard finish time

When working from home, have you ever felt like you couldn't do anything after lunch because you know you have the time to work on it later at night? This phenomenon is called Parkinson's law where work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. It basically means that your work will take as much time as you have to complete it.

Parkinson's Law

Simply put, working long hours is bad for your health and bad for your work. Here are 4 approaches that can help you leave work on time, without the guilt.

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The Most Important Thing

Logan