Fire and Knowledge

1. Specialize in a very small niche; develop a core skill.
2. Choose a niche that you enjoy, where you can excel and stand a chance of becoming an acknowledged leader.
3. Realize that knowledge is power.
4. Identify your market and your core customers and serve them best.
5. Identify where 20 percent of effort gives 80 percent of returns.
6. Learn from the best.
7. Become self-employed early in your career.
8. Employ as many net value creators as possible.
9. Use outside contractors for everything but your core skill.
10. Exploit capital leverage.

—Richard Koch, The 80/20 Principle: The Secret of Achieving More With Less (1998), p. 188

In one of this famous experiments, Asch assembled a dozen or so Swarthmore students and announced that they were taking part in an experiment on visual perception. He showed them three line segments, and asked each one in turn which line was the longest. It was an easy task—the correct answer was obvious.

However, Asch had secretly instructed all but the last person, who was the real result of the subject of the experiment, to say that the medium-length line was the longest. The aim was to see whether the subject would rely on his or her own judgment, or go along with the group.

As it turns out, 70 percent of the subjects caved in to group pressure and said that the medium-length line was the longest. The conclusion was that most human beings, under conditions that are hardly severe, will follow the crowd, even when the crowd is clearly wrong.

—Stephen Leeb, The Coming Economic Collapse (2006), p. 40

I don’t know what kind of weapons will be used in the third world war, assuming there will be a third world war. But I can tell you what the fourth world war will be fought with—stone clubs.

—Albert Einstein

According to a 1990 study, 90 percent of all first-time offenders in federal courts were sentenced to an average of five years in prison. Violent first-time offenders, by contrast, were imprisoned less often and received on average just four years in prison.

You are, in short, less likely to go to prison for kicking an old lady down the stairs than you are for being caught in possession of a single dose of any illicit drug.

—Bill Bryson, I’m a Stranger Here Myself (Broadway Books: 1999), p. 90.

It is essential to employ, trust, and reward those whose perspective, ability, and judgment are radically different from yours. It is also rare, for it requires uncommon humility, tolerance, and wisdom.

—Dee W. Hock, as quoted in Guy Kawasaki, The Art of the Start (2004), p. 100.

If we want our forests to last, then we must make wood products that last, for our forests are more threatened by shoddy workmanship than by clear-cutting or by fire.

—Wendell Berry, “Preserving Wilderness” in Home Economics (1986), p. 143.

More Americans now declare bankruptcy each year than graduate from college.

—Richard Evans, The 5 Lessons a Millionaire Taught Me (2006), p. 6

Writing that will endure tends to consist of words that are short and strong; words that sedate are words of three, four and five syllables, mostly of Latin origin, many of them ending in “ion” and embodying a vague concept.

—William Zinsser, On Writing Well, p. 240.