Big companies are looking closer term, and even the most technological companies spend less than 1% of sales on research. Startups have suffered the burst bubble.
People should always know better.
If you don't find a way to make money while you sleep, you will work until you die.
The best investment you can make, is an investment in yourself. . . The more you learn, the more you'll earn.
Look for 3 things in a person. Intelligence, Energy, & Integrity. If they don't have the last one, don't even bother with the first two.
If you've got the power to raise prices without losing business to a competitor, you've got a very good business. And if you have to have a prayer session before raising the price by a tenth of a cent, then you've got a terrible business. I've been in both, and I know the difference.
To invest successfully over a lifetime does not require a stratospheric IQ, unusual business insights, or inside information. What's needed is a sound intellectual framework for making decisions and the ability to keep emotions from corroding that framework. You must supply the emotional discipline.
I was visiting my mother in Florida when the September 11, 2001 attacks happened. I was working on The Tale of Despereaux at that point. I had already gone into writing it with a great deal of trepidation and fear, and then this God-awful thing happens and it was really hard to even get back home to Minneapolis.
It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank clothed with many plants of many kinds with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about and with worms crawling through the damp earth and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms so different from each other and dependent on each other and so complex a manner have all been produced by laws acting around us.
And for the first time in hundreds of years, the night came alive with the music of dragons.
The last time someone dried my hair for me was in sixth grade, when i broke my arm. " "How did you break it?" "I fell out of a tree. " "You fell out of a tree?" "I think there was a boy and a dare involved. " "Ah.