12 highlights
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Success has a nasty tendency to increase confidence more than ability. The longer it lasts, and the more it was tied to some degree of serendipity, the truer that becomes. It’s why getting rich and staying rich are different skills.
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But when success is maintained for a long period the greatest skill often isn’t technical, or even specific to your trade. It’s identifying and resisting a few dangerous feelings that can nuzzle their way in after you’ve achieved any level of success.
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A few of the big ones:
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It’s part of why people who quit while they’re ahead are so admirable – it’s often not so much that they gave up, but that they’re aware of what made them successful and when that trait begins to wane.
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- Finding other peoples’ flaws more than you look for your own improvements
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- The decline of paranoia that made you successful to begin with.
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Part of the reason the Wrights fell behind so quickly was that while competitors spent their time designing better planes the Wrights spent their time suing people for patent infringement.
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Charlie Munger says you shouldn’t have an opinion on something unless you understand the opposing side’s view as well as they do. It’s good advice, but it’s easy to take it too far. It’s almost always easier to find a flaw in a system than it is to discover why or how something might work, in the same way that it’s easier to destroy a relationship than build one.
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A dangerous feeling is when your position on a topic centers around criticizing the other side versus evaluating why you’re right – or even better, why you might be wrong.
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- The feeling of mastering a topic, particularly if that topic adapts and evolves.
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Veterans fall behind the younger generation because if veterans admitted that they had to adapt to what the younger generation is doing they’d feel like the hard work they put over their career was for nothing.
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Investor Dean Williams put it: “Expertise is great, but it has a bad side effect. It tends to create an inability to accept new ideas.”