Great Quotes, Vol. 22: A Nation Forever Young

**David Gardner** (0:00)
Recurring series have long been a staple of Rule Breaker Investing, inspired years ago by stuff like David Letterman's Top 10 Lists, and Saturday Night Live's Weekend Update. One of my favorites is great quotes. Sometimes I theme these episodes Shakespeare or Buffett or Entrepreneurs, and sometimes we simply gather together five quotations that have recently stopped me in my tracks. And that's today's Episode 5 Great quotes from remarkable thinkers, five ideas that I hope will make us all a little smarter, happier and richer. Only on this week's Rule Breaker Investing.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:40)
It's the Rule Breaker Investing podcast with Motley Fool co-founder David Gardner.

**David Gardner** (0:50)
Welcome back to Rule Breaker Investing. A delight to be with you here. Still, I would say here in the Northern Hemisphere, we're right in the dead middle of summer. I realize summer, according to the meteorologists, starts on June 1 and according to the astronomers, it starts on June 21 or so. But right here on July 7th, it feels kind of peak times anyway for me. I hope you're having a nice summer or if you're one of our southern cousins, I hope you're having a delightful winter. This is Great Quotes, Volume 22 Before I start, I wanna mention, I really enjoyed being on someone else's podcast in the past week. So if you wanna hear me talk, not on Rule Breaker Investing and not necessarily always about Rule Breaker Investing, but I got to join with host Caleb Silver and his wonderful podcast, The Investopedia Express. That was a lot of fun. Breaking investing rules with the ultimate fool, he called it. So if you don't get enough of me on this week's podcast, I hope you'll enjoy my conversation with Caleb Silver, who, as I tweeted out, is a real pro. And that was a fun conversation. Well, this is going to be fun too. I'm getting to share with you five quotes that I've queued up over the course of the last months and year or so. You know, I make a real point of making lists as I go through life. I use Evernote primarily for my lists, but I'll just come across something and I'll be like, oh, I'm going to put that up on the list and it'll be a great quote. And then eventually the list gets big enough and I decide it's time to do a great quotes episode. And that's where we are this week. I have per the history of this podcast series, generally I've presented five over and over. This is volume 22, 11 years in. We do this about twice a year. And this is my most recent volume. Of course, every time I do a quote, one of the five, it's always never been done before. So I'm always trying to bring you new material. I would get bored if I were rehashing material. Of course, there are themes that I rehash over and over. I'll probably do that some this week. Can't help it, cuz when you zoom out one level, all information just becomes categorized and slotted in my mind into the various ways that can be used to help you and to help me. So themes will recur, but individual nuggets, well, each, I hope, is its own little piece of gold. Let's get started with great quote number one. This from a book I talk about a lot. It's Warren Bennis' book on becoming a leader. Warren Bennis, my favorite writer on the topic of leadership. I've only read about a book and a half by him. He wrote a lot of books and a lot of essays, and he was a great thinker on leadership. And this is maybe my single favorite Bennis quote, because early on in his book, he's talking about self-knowledge and how we're all on a quest our whole lives long for self-knowledge. I don't remember whether he mentions this, but I believe it's true of the Greek Oracle at Delphi in ancient Greece. It was scrawled on the side of the Greek Oracle at Delphi.
Early Graffiti, know thyself. Of course, it was written in Greek, but know thyself, a lifelong quest for all of us. And taking that up, Bennis presents his four lessons of self-knowledge. They're brief, so I've packed them all into a single great quotation. Here we go, number one, Warren Bennis.
Quote, the four lessons of self-knowledge, they are, one, you are your own best teacher. Two, accept responsibility, blame no one.
Three, you can learn anything you want to learn.
And four, true understanding comes from reflecting on your experience. Well, I could light up a whole podcast on any one of those, because each is so true and so profoundly true and worth thinking about. So I'll be giving a short shrift here as I glide with a few thoughts on quotation number one. The first one, naturally for me, goes to investing, because that's the real heart and soul of this podcast and always will be. And I just think about self-knowledge preceding investing. So to me, as an investor, I'm reading Benes' quote. It's really a quote about becoming an investor, accept responsibility. Lesson number two, blame no one. Benes writes, and that makes me think about people that I've met before who blame the Fed, or they blame short sellers.