From "The Element" Ken Robinson

• When people are in the zone, they align naturally with a way of thinking that works best for them. There is a level of effortlessness and you simply don't feel time the same way. Everything comes more easily.
• One of the strongest signs of being in the zone is a sense of freedom and authenticity. When we are doing something that we love and are naturally good at, we are much more likely to feel centered in our true sense of self - to be who we truly feel we are.
• Doing the thing you love is no guarantee that you'll be in the zone every time. Sometimes the mood isn't right, the time is wrong and ideas just don't flow. "When its not going well, I put it away and try again tomorrow or the next day. What I don't do is watch other people's work that may make me feel worse".
• My definition of creativity is : "the process of having original ideas that have value". Imagination can be entirely internal. You couldn't be creative unless you actually did something.
• When they are very young, kids aren't particularly worried about being wrong. They'll just have a go at it and see how things turn out. What is true is that if you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original.

My fave iphone quotes

* If I only had an hour to shop down a tree, I would spend the first 45 minutes sharpening my axe.

* Quarrel not at all. No man resolved to make the most of himself can spare time for personal contention. - Abraham Lincoln

* I have learned not to worry about love but to honor its coming with all my heart. Alize Walker

* Well done is better than well said

* Let no one who loves be called unhappy. for even love unreturned has its rainbow

* Respect a man, he will do more

* How much time he saves who does not look to see what his neighbor says or does or thinks -Marcus Aurelius

* What other people think about me is not my business

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* Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value

* The pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, an almost fanatical love of justice, and the desire for personal independence - these are the features of Jewish tradition that make me thank my stars that I belong to it - Einstein

There is a certain majesty in simplicity which is far above all the quaintness of wit. - Alex pope

* Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action. -Disraeli

* Cleanliness and order are not matters of instinct, they are matters of education and like most great things, you must cultivate a taste for them. Disraeli

* Sir. I say that justice is truth in action. Disraeli

Friendship is born when one person says to another : "What! You too? I thought I was the only one" CS Lewis

He approaches nearest to gods who knows how to be silent, even though he is in the right. Cato the Elder

* A big man is one who makes us feel bigger when we are with him.

* The ancient Greek definition of happiness was the full use of your powers along the lines

of excellence.

* Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think.

* Nothing in the affairs of men is worthy of great anxiety.

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* An artist cannot do anything slovenly. Jane Austen

I love the deep quiet in which I live and grow against the world and harvest what they cannot take from me by fire or sword. Goethe

Just trust yourself and you will then know how to live. Goethe.

Where can I find a man governed by reason instead of habits and urges - Gibran

A purpose of human life, is to love whoever is around to be loved. Kurt Vonnegut

* When it is not necessary to make a decision, it is necessary not to make a decision. Lord Falkland.

* No man enjoys the true taste of life, but he who is ready and willing to quit it. Seneca

No one is safe from slander. The best way us to pay no attention to it, but live in innocence and let the world talk. Moliere.

The whole point of being alive is to evolve into the complete person you were intended to be. Oprah

A chief event in which we have encountered a mind that startles us. Ralph Waldo Emerson.

* We generate our own environment. We get exactly what we deserve. How can we rest the life we've created for ourselves? Who's to blame, who's to credit but us? Who can change it anytime we wish, but us? Richard Bach, One

* To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming is the only end of life. RL Stevenson.

* Be silent as to services you have rendered, but speak of favours you have received. Seneca

The good befriend themselves - Sophocles

Friends are those rare people who ask how you are and then wait for the answer.

* Men judge us by the success of our efforts. God looks at the efforts themselves.

* There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which

are beyond the power of our will.

* The real service a friend can really render is to keep up your curage by holding up to

you a mirror is which you can see a noble image of yourself.

• “He that rises late must trot all day.“ – Benjamin Franklin

• “Is what I’m doing or about to do getting us closer to our objective?“ – Robert Townsend
• “What comes first, the compass or the clock? Before one can truly manage time (the clock), it is important to know where you are going, what your priorities and goals are, in which direction you are headed (the compass). Where you are headed is more important than how fast you are going. Rather than always focusing on what’s urgent, learn to focus on what is really important – Unknown
• “We realize our dilemma goes deeper than shortage of time; it is basically a problem of priorities. We confess, we have left undone those things that ought to have done; and we have done those things which we ought not to have done.“ – Charles E. Hummel
• “Review our priorities, ask the question; what’s the best use of our time right now?“ – Alan Lakein

• “To save time is to lengthen life.“ – Unknown
• “Until we can manage time, we can manage nothing else.“ – Peter F. Drucker
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• “If you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you’ll never get it done.“ – Bruce Lee
• ““To think too long about doing a thing often becomes its undoing.“ – Eva Young
  “Never leave ’till tomorrow which you can do today.“ – Benjamin Franklin
  “Better three hours too soon, than one minute too late.“ – William Shakespeare
  “Don’t wait. The time will never be just right.“ – Napolean Hill
  “Make measurable progress in reasonable time.“ – Jim Rohn
  
  “The less one has to do, the less time one finds to do it in.“ – Lord Chesterfield
  “So much of our time is spent in preparation, so much in routine, and so much in retrospect, that the amount of each person’s genius is confined to a very few hours.“ – Ralph Waldo Emerson
  “Don’t watch the clock; do what it does. Keep going.“ – Samuel Levenson
  “One always has time enough, if one will apply it well.“ – Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
  “Take care of the minutes and the hours will take care of themselves.“ – Lord Chesterfield
  “Determine never to be idle. No person will have occasion to complain of the want of time who never loses any. It is wonderful how much can be done if we are always doing.“ – Thomas Jefferson
  “Well arranged time is the surest mark of a well arranged mind. – Pitman
  “A wise person does at once, what a fool does at last. Both do the same thing; only at different times.“ – Baltasar Gracian
  “Time spent in getting even would be better spent in getting ahead.“ – Unknown

From "the double comfort safari club" Mccall Smith

He paused. It was necessary, he felt, to order the mind when one was about to think something profound.

That was the way the world was; it was composed of a few almost perfect people (ourselves); then there were a good many people who generally did their best but were not all that perfect (our friends and colleagues); and finally there wetre a few other nasty ones. The last group was, thankfully, very small

Spaniards want to rechristen Paul the octopus as Pablo
Indo-Asian News Service
Potchefstroom

The Spanish team has fallen in love with Paul the octopus after it predicted that Spain will beat the Netherlands in the World Cup final.
All of Paul's predictions have been true in this World Cup, bestowing international fame on the 'psychic' sea creature.
Spain's defensive midfielder Sergio Busquets said Friday that the Spaniards are in love with the octopus and and out of gratitude they want to re-christen it Pablo.
"We guess it is a Spanish octopus. We are in love with it and want to name it Pablo," said Busquets.
Paul will be hoping to keep a perfect record for South Africa 2010, having correctly predicted four Germany victories and two losses in the tournament. Paul, at the Oberhausen Sea Life aquarium in Germany, is now hated by the Germans after predicting Spain's victory over Germany in the semifinal.

Paul first shot into limelight during the 2008 European Championship during which his five out of six games involving Germany were proved correct. But in this World Cup Paul has made international headlines.
So much so that Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero is worried about the safety of "El Pulpo Paul," as he's known in Spain, and has offered Paul protection after its semifinal predictions were proved right.

Mr. Klarman is president of the Baupost Group, an investment firm in Boston that manages $22 billion. His three private partnerships have returned an annual average of around 19% since inception in 1983—and nearly 17% annually over the past decade, as stocks went nowhere.

But the professorial Mr. Klarman speaks in public about as often as the Himalayan yeti. He made an exception last Tuesday, when I interviewed him in front of a standing-room-only crowd of 1,600 financial analysts at the CFA Institute annual meeting in Boston. He then made another exception, speaking with me over the phone later to clarify points that he feared had been misconstrued.

Mr. Klarman specializes in buying securities that nauseate other investors. As the credit crisis exploded, he put more than a third of his assets into high-yield bonds and mortgage-related securities.

Some members of the audience gasped audibly when Mr. Klarman said, "The government is now in the business of giving bad advice." Later, he got more specific: "By holding interest rates at zero, the government is basically tricking the population into going long on just about every kind of security except cash, at the price of almost certainly not getting an adequate return for the risks they are running. People can't stand earning 0% on their money, so the government is forcing everyone in the investing public to speculate."

"We didn't get the value out of this crisis that we should have," Mr. Klarman told the audience. "For our parents or grandparents, it was awful to have had a Great Depression. But it was in some ways helpful to carry a Depression mentality throughout their later lives, because it meant they were thrifty with their money and prudent in their investment decisions." He added: "All we got out of this crisis was a Really Bad Couple of Weeks mentality."

You could have heard a pin drop as Mr. Klarman proclaimed, "I am more worried about the world, more broadly, than I ever have been in my career." That's because you can make good investing decisions and still end up with bad results if you reap your profits in currencies that do not hold their purchasing power, he explained.

"Will money be worth anything," asked Mr. Klarman, "if governments keep intervening anytime there's a crisis to prop things up?"

To protect against that "tail risk," said Mr. Klarman, Baupost is buying "way out-of-the-money puts on bonds"—options that have no value unless Treasury bonds plummet. "It's cheap disaster insurance for five years out," he said.

Later, I asked Mr. Klarman what he would suggest for smaller investors who share his worries.

"All the obvious hedges"—commodities and foreign currencies, for example—"are already extremely expensive," he warned.

Especially gold. "Near its all-time high, it's a very hard moment to recommend gold," said Mr. Klarman.

Mr. Klarman pointed out that his own ideas "on bottom-up opportunities in undervalued securities are more likely to be accurate than my top-down views on what's going to happen in the world at large."

And, said Mr. Klarman, one of the best ways to protect against a decline in purchasing power is to buy whatever is "out of favor, loathed and despised." So forget about gold or other trendy hedges. Instead, wait patiently for markets—European stocks, perhaps—to get so cheap that they turn most investors' stomachs. Then you can pounce. As Mr. Klarman put it, "Sometimes, when you can't figure out a good defense, the best thing to do is to go on offense."

Jason Zweig at mailto:intelligentinvestor@wsj.com;

Get a good read on the market: Pick up a book

By Andrew Feinberg
Sunday, June 13, 2010; G03

The best investors read all the time. As Berkshire Hathaway vice chairman Charlie Munger has said in assessing the success of his sidekick, Warren Buffett: "If you want to be an outlier in achievement, just sit on your ass and read most of your life."

Billionaire hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman loves to read, too, according to "Confidence Game," a fine new book about his ultimately correct bet against the shares of bond insurer MBIA. In the book, one of his best friends describes a week spent at a beach house with Ackman and his family: "Bill did what he always did on vacation" -- he read financial statements.

Why it helps. You don't have to be a compulsive consumer of 10-Ks to improve your investment performance (although the more you know about the stocks you own, the better you should do).

In my view, reading offers investors three distinct benefits. First, it crowds out the TV noise. The folks on CNBC's Fast Money may be smart, but their Whac-A-Mole approach always makes you feel as if you should be doing something -- anything -- to make a quick buck. Not a good attitude for a successful long-term investor. Second, reading helps you develop all the qualities that go into successful investing. Third, reading can give you specific investment ideas. But don't become a voracious reader to finance a Caribbean spree. You read not to make a quick killing but to learn more about the investing process and the world around you.

So where do you start? My must-read list includes wonderful books by Benjamin Graham ("The Intelligent Investor"), Seth Klarman (the hard-to-get "Margin of Safety"), Joel Greenblatt ("You Can Be a Stock Market Genius") and Philip Fisher ("Common Stocks" and "Uncommon Profits"). Michael Lewis's new book, "The Big Short," offers a terrific peek into the minds of some smart, iconoclastic investors.

But books aren't enough. You need to understand the present, too. By far the best investment publication available today, for both the astuteness of its stock picks and the depth of its study of the investment process, is the Value Investor Insight newsletter (www.valueinvestorinsight.com; $349 a year for 12 issues). I devour my monthly copy as soon as it arrives.

The next essential read is the monthly letter from Howard Marks, chairman of Oaktree Capital Management (http://www.oaktreecapital.com). Marks is a more philosophical version of Buffett, a great investor who always makes you think. In a recent missive, Marks observed that stock-market bulls were, in effect, betting that Congress would be able to cut spending. He was dubious that our elected leaders would succeed. I also find valuable the monthly comments of Bill Gross (http://www.pimco.com), the quarterly letters of Jeremy Grantham (http://www.gmo.com) and the daily commentary on RealMoney Silver (http://www.thestreet.com; $900 a year).

Most of the time, reading leads to contemplation, which keeps you from acting. That's a good thing. Most investors are too active for their own good. Having a solid background in investing history and, in particular, in value investing (the approach that works best over time) can be especially helpful at market extremes. If I had read less, I would not have been so quick to sell technology in early 2000, near the peak of the bubble, or dive into bank stocks at the market lows in March 2009.

- Kiplinger's Personal Finance