From : Field Guide to the Loner: The Real Insiders

Loners often hear from well-meaning peers that they need to be more social, but the implication that they're merely black-and-white opposites of their bubbly peers misses the point. Introverts aren't just less sociable than extroverts; they also engage with the world in fundamentally different ways. While outgoing people savor the nuances of social interaction, loners tend to focus more on their own ideas—and on stimuli that don't register in the minds of others. Social engagement drains them, while quiet time gives them an energy boost.
"Some people simply have a low need for affiliation," says Jonathan Cheek, a psychologist at Wellesley College. "There's a big subdivision between the loner-by-preference and the enforced loner." Those who choose the living room over the ballroom may have inherited their temperament, Cheek says. Or a penchant for solitude could reflect a mix of innate tendencies and experiences such as not having many friends as a child or growing up in a family that values privacy.

Guyer separated child subjects into "outgoing" and "reserved" groups and then had them play a game in which they had to press a button in order to win money. The reserved subjects showed two to three times more activity in the striatum region of the brain, which is associated with reward, than did the more outgoing ones.
Previous MRI studies have shown that during social situations, specific areas in the brains of loners experience especially lively blood flow, indicating a sort of overstimulation, which explains why they find parties so wearying.

Research by psychotherapist Elaine Aron bears out Guyer's hunch, demonstrating that withdrawn people typically have very high sensory acuity. Because loners are good at noticing subtleties that other people miss, Aron says, they are well-suited for careers that require close observation, like writing and scientific research. It's no surprise that famous historical loners include Emily Dickinson, Stanley Kubrick, and Isaac Newton.

From :   America: Land of Loners?

But in restricting ourselves to the thin gruel of modern friendships, we miss out on the more nourishing fare that deeper ones have to offer. Aristotle, who saw friendship as essential to human flourishing, shrewdly observed that it comes in three distinct flavors: those based on usefulness (contacts), on pleasure (drinking buddies), and on a shared pursuit of virtue—the highest form of all. True friends, he contended, are simply drawn to the goodness in one another, goodness that today we might define in terms of common passions and sensibilities.

We’re good at currying contacts and we may have lots of pals, but by falling short on Aristotle’s third and most important category of friendship, we’ve left a hole in our lives. Here, as on so many fronts, we often buy what we need. The affluent commonly hire confidants in the form of talk therapists, with whom they may maintain enduring (if remunerated) relationships conducted on a first-name basis. The number of household pets has exploded throughout the Western world, suggesting that not just dogs but cats, rats, and parakeets are often people’s best friends.

Buffett again

1. Rule No.1 : Never lose money. Rule no.2 : Never forget rule No.1 
2. It is easier to stay out of trouble than it is to get out of trouble.
3. There is a huge difference between the business that grows and requires lots of capital to do so and the business that grows and doesn't require capital.
4. I look for businesses in which I think I can predict what they're going to look like in ten to fifteen years' time.
5. If you let yourself be undiciplined on the small things, you will probably be undisciplined on the large things as well.
6. There is nothing like writing to force you to think and get your thoughts straight.
7. IPOs: The only time to buy these is on a day with no "y" in it. Investment bankers will never serve you a bargain, but the stock market will.
8. That which is not worth doing at all is not worth doing well.
9. Our menthod is very simple. We just try to buy businesses with good-to-superb underlying economics run by honest and able people and buy them at sensible prices. That's all Iam tryng to do.
10. Great investment opportunities come around when excellent companies are surrounded by unusual circumstances that cause teh stock to be misappraised.
11. Uncertainty actually is the friend of the buyer of long-term securities.

•On perspective: Don’t be looking to make a deal your best one ever. Market conditions and opportunity costs will be different at different times. Don’t compare past and recent deals. Just focus on making a satisfactory deal, one that’s the best that you can do at the time.


•On anger and patience: You can always tell a man to go to hell tomorrow.

Apparently, WEB currently looking at paper companies

Lot of traders just invest in high beta stocks

Keep your old clunker or buy a new car?

It may clang and bang, but your despised old car may be the best bargain around.
Let's divide the car-buying universe into two camps: those who keep a car until it drops, and those who think a new car will change their lives.
To the first, a round of applause. There's nothing short of the bus that's cheaper than keeping a car until it crumbles into a pile of rust. Almost any car can be nursed to 200,000 miles without endangering your life, and even a new engine is cheaper than all but the cheapest used cars.

It no longer fits my life. You may have taken up gardening in a big way but still own a Corvette.  Your little Accord may be a tight squeeze when family comes to town. The answer to all: Rent.  Even at $180 a weekend, renting is far cheaper than a car payment. Plus you get to drive the very latest without worrying about insurance, license tags, maintenance or depreciation.

Those repair bills are really adding up.  Does the cost of repairs exceed the cost of a new car? A typical new car is around $28,000; that's about $475 a month for five years after 20% down. A rebuilt transmission might run $1,800, but far less than the $5,700 a year you'd spend on new-car payments alone. In any case, anybody with a car older than three years should be tucking aside $50 a month for repairs and maintenance.
  
I'm nervous driving an older car. You might simply spend $56 on a AAA Basic membership and carry a cell phone, reminding yourself that even new cars aren't immune to mechanical failure. The upside of frequent breakdowns is that you'll get to know mechanics quite well. Find one you like. Flatter him.  And the next time he fixes your car, ask him to take a few minutes to see what else will need repair soon. 

The repair costs more than the car is worth. A $1,500 engine rebuild that keeps your '83 Toyota on the road still makes good financial sense. It's at this point, however, that all but the flintiest drivers begin to think about upgrading.

From Big Bad Bully 

HOW TO HANDLE A BULLY

What Children Can Do:

• A wise line of defense is avoidance. Know when to walk away. It is thoroughly adaptive behavior to avoid a bully. Being picked on is not character-building.
• Use humor to defuse a bully who may be about to attack. Make a joke: "Look, Johnny, lay off. I don't want you to be late for school."
• Or tell the bully assertively, "Get a life. Leave me alone." And walk away. This may be the best defense for girls.
• Recruit a friend. Observers find that having a friend on the playground is one of the most powerful protectives, especially for boys.
• In general, seek out the friendly children and build friendships with them.

What Parents Can Do:

• See that your child has a grounding in assertive behavior. The real first line of defense against a bully is self-confidence.
• Spread the word that bullying is bad for bullies.
• Ask your children how peers treat them. Children often are ashamed to bring up the subject. Parents must.
• Model good relationships at home. Help siblings get along.
• Increase the social opportunities of all kids, but especially victimized ones. Invite other children, and groups of children, over to the house. Encourage sleepovers. This is your job; parents are social engineers.
• Enroll your child in classes or groups that develop competencies in activities that are valued by peers. Even kids who don't love sports may like karate, tae kwon do, and similar activities.
• Help your child come up with a set of clever verbal comebacks to be used in the event of victimization by verbally abusive peers.
• See that kids in groups have plenty of things to do. Provide play materials. Buy a soccer ball. Paint a hopscotch pattern on the sidewalk. Bullying flourishes when kids are together and have nothing else to do.
• Do not tell or teach a kid to fight back. Fighting back is the worst defense. In most instances, victimized children really are weaker and smaller than the bully—thus their fears of losing there fights may be quite real. Besides, not all bullying takes the form of physical aggression. Counter-aggression to any form of bullying actually increases the likelihood of continued victimization.
• Do not expect kids to work it out on their own. Given the influence of the peer groups and reputational factors in maintaining the behavior of bullies and victims, it is extremely unrealistic to expect kids to alter the dynamics of bullying by themselves.
• Always intervene. Adults have a crucial role to play in the socialization of children. And consistency counts. Any time adults do not intervene they are essentially training others to solve problems through aggression.
• Intervene at the level of the group. Let all kids know bullying is not OK. Declare emphatically: "This is not acceptable behavior. You can't do this here."
• Talk to your child's teachers to find out what is normal behavior for children of that age group and to find out what the class atmosphere is like.
• Get the school involved. At the very least, ask that the school declare bullying off-limits. A change in the atmosphere of the school is not only possible, but helpful in reducing bullying.
• Go to the school administration and demand that bullies be transferred to other classes or schools. Every child has the right to a safe school environment.
• If all else fails, see that your child is transferred to another school. The same child may thrive in a different school with a group of children having different values.

Edited from the 2011 Berkshire annual meeting Q&A transcript at Omaha.com. Coincidentally, someone asked about index vs active investing - something I was pndering myself today.


On the U.S. debt ceiling

Congress will raise the debt ceiling, you can take that to the bank. But, Buffett said, not before much politicking and pandering.If the ceiling isn't raised it would be the “most asinine act Congress has ever performed,” Buffett said. “It's extraordinary, that with our deficit running well over $100 billion a month ... having a debt ceiling to start with is a mistake. The U.S. of 2011 has a different debt capacity than the U.S. in 1911.”“The amount and number of silly statements you hear (from Congress) seems like such a waste of time. In my view, there's no chance they don't increase the debt ceiling.”

On too big to fail

Buffett isn't a fan of bailouts but said government intervention with some of the major financial institutions and other companies was necessary.The General Motors bailout, for example, was a good choice: “I was really on the fence about saving the auto companies, but I think the administration did the right thing. They made the right decision.” In a perfect world, Buffett said, executives would face serious consequences for making risky bets and decisions that later backfired and crippled their companies. He said companies need to “reduce the propensity to fail” by making sure there are rules in place so that if the CEO and any directors of a company need to be bailed out by taxpayers, the CEO and his or her spouse should be left “dead broke,” and officers and directors should also face severe consequences.

On the weakness of the U.S. dollar
“We have not been really active in the foreign exchange market, but there's no question that the power of the U.S. dollar is going to decline over time.  We do own some businesses — Coca-Cola — where 80 percent of earnings are nondollar. We are unlikely to make another big currency bet, although I do think the U.S. dollar is going to decrease.” Buffett said he has had some unwarranted fears about the rapid decline of the dollar. A dollar from when Buffett was born is worth just 6 cents now. That could be discouraging, projecting a similar decline over the next 50 years or so, he said, but “inflation has not destroyed us. ... Overall we've still done pretty well.” “I hate inflation, but we've adapted to it pretty well over the years. It's something you always have to guard against.”

On the Lubrizol purchase

Buffett said he wasn't wild about the Lubrizol deal at first but warmed to it over time.
“It struck me as a business I didn't know anything about. I never would understand the chemistry of it. What is important is that I understand the economic dynamics of the industry. As a matter of fact, I suggested to Dave (Sokol) to call Charlie because I just don't know anything about that business. Talked to Charlie a few days later and he said, ‘I don't understand it either.'
“What Dave passed along to me after having dinner with Lubrizol CEO James Hambrick was that I thought I got a good understanding of industry dynamics and what the role of oil companies would be compared to additive companies like Lubrizol.
“I had come to the conclusion that the Lubrizol position is the No. 1 company in terms of market share in that business and that it's sustainable over time. They're helping engines run longer and smoother. Lubricants are important and they're always going to be around. I did not have a fix on that, nor did Charlie, prior to Dave relaying what he had learned at that dinner.”


Investing advice for beginners

Question from a man who Buffett said “sounds like he's ready to start a hedge fund”: What advice would Buffett and Munger give from their beginnings in investing?
Buffett said he first invested for his family and did with their money what he did with his own money. He said he stumbled along for almost six years, operating out of his own house, keeping his own books.
Munger said it helps to attract capital to a fund if you conduct your life in a way where people trust you.
Just attracting money can be a huge skill, Buffett said. “The skill may be in the short term a more important quality (compared with actually picking stocks that perform), but neither one of us (Buffett or Munger) charged any fixed fee of any kind.”

Index funds vs. personal portfolio

What factors would you consider when deciding between putting money in an index fund or creating your own diversified portfolio?
Buffett said index funds aren't a bad alternative. Munger however, was much more sour on pouring his money into indexes.
Buffett: “If I personally had a choice between an index fund and Berkshire, I would pick Berkshire. But I wouldn't be unhappy if I had to stick my money in an index fund. I like Berkshire better.”
Munger: “I would be very unhappy (to put all his money in an index fund). I think Berkshire's a pretty good bet.”

Investing in black gold

What about investing in oil?
“We actually did take a position in oil a long time ago,” Buffett said. “We really don't know. Obviously, you're dealing with a finite resource. ... New frontiers have been found, but we've stuck a lot of straws into the earth.
“If we could make money sitting in a room trading oil, we would do that. There are few commodities where I could tell what direction they were heading in over the next six months or year.
“I really think an intelligent person can make more money over time thinking about productive assets rather than speculating on commodities or fixed-dollar investments.”

Equity Investing

Equity investments are not an afterthought, Buffett said, but he much prefers large acquisitions to equity. He wants to add significant companies to the portfolio, especially firms that were acquired in recent years that will have higher earnings potential five to 10 years from now.
“We are buying securities where we have to put billions of dollars in them in most cases.”
In short, Buffett isn't a fan of investments that don't “do anything.” That includes gold.


“The classic case of that is gold. If you take all of the gold in the world and put it into a cube, it will be a cube that's about 67 feet on a side and 170,000 metric tons. You could get a ladder and get up on top of it and think you're king of the world. You could fondle it, polish it ... you could do all these things with it ... but it doesn't do anything. You're hoping someone else in a year or five years will pay you for the thing ... that doesn't do anything. You're betting on how much people will be scared two years from now.” (The value of that gold cube, by the way, is worth about $8 trillion, Buffett said.)


Any advice for young people, so they can chart their own course?

Buffett: Read and do anything to improve your own skills.
He said economics courses had limited value to him as a student, but he and Charlie have found reading to be most pleasurable and educational.“I have one diploma hanging in my office. I have a couple others, but the one I have hanging was from a Dale Carnegie course that cost me 100 bucks.” There's nothing like improving your own skills, especially communication skills, said Buffett.


On Jain, Buffett said: “He's as rational a thinker as Charlie (Munger) is. He loves what he does. He's creative. Ajit's mind works like a machine, day after day. I don't know what his best deal was. But I know what mine was, and that was hiring him. “He thinks of Berkshire first. He's just a remarkable human being.”

He guaranteed that when a dividend is announced, the Berkshire stock price will go down.

» Does BYD remain an attractive long-term investment despite product launch delays?
Any company that moves as fast and on as many fronts as BYD does, is going to have delays in some products, Munger said. In fact, Munger is encouraged by BYD. The company tried to double auto sales for the first six years, and it did that successfully for five years, he said.
Buffett, chuckling: “I have nothing to add.”

» Which Berkshire subsidiary will do best and worst because of inflation?
Buffett: The best performers will be the ones that need little money. See's Candy, for example, sells 75 percent more pounds of candy at much higher revenues — even though the dollar is worth much less — than it did when Berkshire bought it. The worst will be utilities, like MidAmerican Energy. They're “not going to do so well because it has certain aspects of a bond-like investment,” Buffett said.
» Aside from Nebraska Furniture Mart, Buffett said, retail entities have been the weakest part of Berkshire's empire. Even though the Furniture Mart is wildly successful, the other retail businesses (not including See's) haven't recorded the kind of earnings Buffett would like to see, even though retailers are just a small percentage of Berkshire's operation.
» Interesting note on See's Candies in response to a question about investments and tangible asset infusions for growth:
When Berkshire bought See's, the company was doing about $25 million in sales on 16 million pounds of candy. Now, the company produces about 30 million pounds and earns nearly $300 million. At first, it took $9 million in tangible assets to run See's, and now it takes $40 million. Not much of an increase for 10 times the sales, Buffett said.

“I think nuclear power is an important part of the world's equation in dealing with its problems,” Buffett said. “I think it's safe and I don't think it's going anyplace in the United States because of the action with Tokyo Electric Power,"


Market conditions and opportunity costs, he said, are different in every single case. And comparing past deals to recent deals doesn't really make any difference. The one big error people make in business is measuring deals against one another, he said.
“The goal is to make a satisfactory deal, and one that is the best deal at the time.”

 What would each of you like to be remembered for?
Buffett: “Old age.”
Then, he said, “A teacher. I enjoy teaching a lot. I really enjoy having students come in. I would say that.”

If I had invested in the S&P last year, I would have come out ahead than I have with my own stock picking. At what point do I give it up and move everything into vanguard index funds ? Seems the wisest way forward at this point. I think it would be productive to  focus on the following in the next few months :

1) become a clearer thinker
2) focus better
3) become more articulate
4) have higher energy (lose excess weight)
5) security analysis study
6) reading news and periodicals/analysis
7) Spend time on reading about new technology trends and research.


Is wisdom and humility enough to really succeed in investing ? How to find what one's passion is ?This much I know that what makes me happiest is loving my close ones, meeting new people, reading and trying to build wealth, how does that guide me to my calling and vocation ? It is certainly a big relief to be out of the soul-killing workplace. It is a drain on the mind and soul to be constantly judged, to have to live up to someone else's expectations and have to put up with people one would not rather not associate with. Also to spend one's energies on ridiculous meetings and activities that are setup only to feel busy and important. Iam lucky to be able to afford to take a year or two off.  I may have to go back to it one day, but I am savoring not having to deal with it for the next year atleast. Thank you god for my wonderful better half and parents who support me so completely in my decision to quit and try finding what I truly am meant to do. I truly believe one has to come to a full stop to figure it out. Let the mind be idle, relax and wait for an epiphany. Will it happen? We shall see.

From Oprah's site (edited) : 
Since the day the late Gene Siskel asked me, "What do you know for sure?" and I got all flustered and started stuttering and couldn't come up with an answer, I've never stopped asking myself that question. This time around, I looked back and came up with my list:

1. What you put out comes back all the time, no matter what. (This is my creed.)

2. You define your own life. Don't let other people write your script.

3. Whatever someone did to you in the past has no power over the present. Only you give it power.

5. Worrying is wasted time. Use the same energy for doing something about whatever worries you.

6. What you believe has more power than what you dream or wish or hope for. You become what you believe.

7. If the only prayer you ever say is thank you, that will be enough.

8. The happiness you feel is in direct proportion to the love you give.

9. Failure is a signpost to turn you in another direction.

10. If you make a choice that goes against what everyone else thinks, the world will not fall apart.

11. Trust your instincts. Intuition doesn't lie.

12. Love yourself and then learn to extend that love to others in every encounter.

13. Let passion drive your profession. Find a way to get paid for doing what you love. Then every paycheck will be a bonus.

15. Love doesn't hurt. It feels really good.

18. Doubt means don't. Don't move. Don't answer. Don't rush forward.

19. When you don't know what to do, get still. The answer will come.

20. This, too, shall pass.