“Meditation helps you stay in a calm, clear-headed state so that when challenges come at you, you can deal with them like a ninja – in a calm thoughtful way. When you’re centered, your emotions are not hijacking you.”

I could see that making judgments about people so that they are tried and sentenced in your head, without asking them for their perspective, is both unethical and unproductive. So I learned to love real integrity and to despise the lack of it.

Successful people ask for the criticism of others and consider its merit.

What matters most is that the people you work with share your values.

Since the only way you are going to find solutions to painful problems is by thinking deeply about them – i.e., reflecting – if you can develop a knee-jerk reaction to pain that is to reflect rather than to fight or flee, it will lead to your rapid learning/evolving.

The media has the power to create an entrenched perception of reality that’s incorrect.

There is slow growth, but it is positive slow growth. At the same time, ratios of debt-to-incomes go down. That’s a beautiful deleveraging.

I’ve learned that each mistake was probably a reflection of something that I was (or others were) doing wrong, so if I could figure out what that was, I could learn how to be more effective.

People who acquire things beyond their usefulness not only will derive little or no marginal gains from these acquisitions, but they also will experience negative consequences, as with any form of gluttony.

Success is achieved by people who deeply understand reality and know how to use it to get what they want. The converse is also true: idealists who are not well-grounded in reality create problems, not progress.

Almost everything is like a machine.

Meditation, more than any other factor, has been the reason for what success I’ve had.

When you think that it’s too hard, remember that in the long run, doing the things that will make you successful is a lot easier than being unsuccessful.

If you don’t own Gold, you know neither history nor economics.

When growth is slower than expected, stocks go down. When inflation is higher than expected, bonds go down. When inflation’s lower than expected, bonds go up.

You should have a strategic asset allocation mix that assumes that you don’t know what the future is going to hold.

Like the saying goes, don’t believe everything you read.