Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom.
The key to letting go is simple.
If you're still sitting at the table after three rounds of drinks and five hands of cards, yet can't figure out who the mark is, then you're the mark.
Those who see the essence of things in a second lead lives utterly different from those who spend a lifetime unable to understand.
If your fixed monthly expenses are 5,000 and your salary is 6,000, you can only save 1,000. He earns 30,000 a month and can save 25,000. 30,000 is five times 6,000, but 25,000 is twenty-five times 1,000.
His salary increased fivefold, but his savings grew twenty-fivefold. That's why higher-paid workers can more easily afford to buy a house or a car—the real difference lies here.
So when calculating what it takes to live on a salary, the most important figure is your absolute savings.
You can't stand in an unstable state. Under any unstable state, conflict is inevitable. If you don't take his pieces, he'll take yours.
In Game of Thrones, Littlefinger said, "Chaos is a ladder." How many were left from the Seven Kingdoms in the end?
What you should pursue is the maximum value within a stable state, not launching into the next unstable state before you're ready.
In investing, that means developing your own strategy and generating consistent profits.
People must gather toward the latter so that robots can gather toward the former. This is what we mean by “people rise upward, while machines flow downward.”
If you don’t strive upward, eventually there’s nowhere left for you to go. You might scrape by on past savings by not making money for a while—can you do that for a lifetime? And if you can’t make money for a lifetime, can you go on forever without making any?