From : Peculiar Habits of Incredibly Successful People

Adams writes in his book How to Fail at Almost Everything:

A system is something you do on a regular basis that increases your odds of happiness in the long run. If you do something every day, it's a system. If you're waiting to achieve it someday in the future, it's a goal.

The system-versus-goals model can be applied to most human endeavors. In the world of dieting, losing twenty pounds is a goal, but eating right is a system. In the exercise realm, running a marathon in under four hours is a goal, but exercising daily is a system. In business, making a million dollars is a goal, but being a serial entrepreneur is a system.

President Obama wears the same style suits to reduce low-level decision-making

He explained in 2012:

You'll see I wear only gray or blue suits. I'm trying to pare down decisions. I don't want to make decisions about what I'm eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make. You need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself. You can't be going through the day distracted by trivia.

Charles Darwin tried his whole life to prove his own theories wrong

Charlie Munger once explained Darwin's philosophy:

One of the great things to learn from Darwin is the value of the extreme objectivity. He tried to disconfirm his ideas as soon as he got 'em. He quickly put down in his notebook anything that disconfirmed a much-loved idea. He especially sought out such things. Well, if you keep doing that over time, you get to be a perfectly marvelous thinker instead of one more klutz repeatedly demonstrating first-conclusion bias.

Munger quotes

My favorite quotes from http://www.valuewalk.com/charlie-munger-page/

CHARLIE MUNGER QUOTES

1. You must value the business in order to value the stock.
2. The best thing a human being can do is to help another human being know more.
3. Experience tends to confirm a long-held notion that being prepared, on a few occasions in a lifetime, to act promptly in scale, in doing some simple and logical thing, will often dramatically improve the financial results of that lifetime. A few major opportunities, clearly recognizable as such, will usually come to one who continuously searches and waits, with a curious mind that loves diagnosis involving multiple variables. Then all that is required is a willingness to bet heavily when the odds are extremely favorable, using resources available because of prudence and patience in the past.
4.  Just as animals flourish in niches, people who specialize in some narrow niche can do very well.
5. The number one idea is to view a stock as an ownership of the business and to judge the staying quality of the business in terms of its competitive advantage. Look for more value in terms of discounted future cash flow than you are paying for. Move only when you have an advantage.
6. Over the very long term, history shows that the chances of any business surviving in a manner agreeable to a company’s owners are slim at best.
7. It is not given to human beings to have such talent that they can just know everything about everything all the time. However, it is given to human beings who work hard at it. Who look and sift the world for a mispriced bet – that they can occasionally find one.
8. In addition, the wise ones bet heavily when the world offers them that opportunity. They bet big when they have the odds. And the rest of the time they don’t. It is just that simple.
9. Acknowledging what you do not know is the dawning of wisdom.
10. Determine value apart from price; progress apart from activity; wealth apart from size.
11. Remember that reputation and integrity are your most valuable assets – and can be lost in a heartbeat.
12. I think records of accomplishment are very important. If you start early trying to have a perfect one in some simple thing like honesty, you are well on your way to success in this world.
13. We try more to profit from always remembering the obvious than from grasping the esoteric.
14. Someone will always be getting richer faster than you. This is not a tragedy.
15. Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up. Discharge your duties faithfully and well. Systematically you get ahead, but not necessarily in fast spurts. Nevertheless, you build discipline by preparing for fast spurts. Slug it out one inch at a time, day by day. At the end of the day – if you live long enough – most people get what they deserve.
16. Over the long term, it’s hard for a stock to earn a much better return that the business which underlies it earns. If the business earns six percent on capital over forty years and you hold it for that forty years, you are not going to make much different than a six percent return – even if you originally buy it at a huge discount. Conversely, if a business earns eighteen percent on capital over twenty or thirty years, even if you pay an expensive looking price, you will end up with one hell of a result.
17. You must have the confidence to override people with more credentials than you whose cognition is impaired by incentive-caused bias or some similar psychological force that is obviously present. Nevertheless, there are also cases where you have to recognize that you have no wisdom to add – and that your best course is to trust some expert.
18. The safest way to try to get what you want is to try to deserve what you want. It is such a simple idea. It is the golden rule. You want to deliver to the world what you would buy if you were on the other end.
19. I am not entitled to have an opinion unless I can state the arguments against my position better than the people who are in opposition. I think that I am qualified to speak only when I have reached that state.
20. Avoid working directly under somebody you do not admire and don’t want to be like.
21. Intense interest in any subject is indispensable if you are really going to excel in it.
22. Never, ever, think about something else when you should be thinking about the power of incentives.
23. Everybody engaged in complex work needs colleagues. Just the discipline of having to put your thoughts in
24. Good businesses are ethical businesses. A business model that relies on trickery is doomed to fail.

Sequoia Fund letter excerpts

Excerpts from Sequoia Fund Second Quarter Commentary

Sequoia Fund’s investment objective is long-term growth of capital. In pursuing this objective the Fund focuses on investing in equity securities that it believes are undervalued at the time of purchase and have the potential for growth. A guiding principle is the consideration of equity securities, such as common stock, as units of ownership of a business and the purchase of them when the price appears low in relation to the value of the total enterprise. The balance sheet and earnings history and prospects of each company are extensively studied to appraise fundamental value. Sequoia Fund typically sells the equity security of a company when the company shows deteriorating fundamentals, its earnings progress falls short of the investment adviser’s expectations or its valuation appears excessive relative to its expected future earnings.

We believe it is futile to try to predict the direction of the stock market from year to year. Rather than try to guess what might happen next, we think it more prudent to own a portfolio of market-leading companies that earn high returns on capital, boast strong balance sheets and self-fund their growth. We try to invest alongside motivated and ethical management teams and to identify businesses with many years of growth ahead of them. We try to buy these businesses carefully, taking advantage of occasional periods when their stocks seem to be mispriced. Though it contradicts academic theory, we believe a concentrated portfolio of businesses that has been intensively researched and carefully purchased will generate higher returns with less risk over time than a diverse basket of stocks chosen with less care. However, a concentrated portfolio may deliver results in an individual year that do not correspond closely to the returns generated by the broader market.

I found my favorite Mahatma Gandhi quote here on Goodreads :

“Do not worry in the least about yourself, leave all worry to God,' - this appears to be the commandment in all religions.
This need not frighten anyone. He who devotes himself to service with a clear conscience, will day by day grasp the necessity for it in greater measure, and will continually grow richer in faith."