Ideas and Speeches

To do something well you have to like it. That idea is not exactly novel. We’ve got it down to four words: “Do what you love.” But it’s not enough just to tell people that. Doing what you love is complicated. The very idea is foreign to what most of us learn as kids. When I was a kid, it seemed as if work and fun were opposites by definition… Read More

Three individuals were standing at the base of a steep hill. Having just traveled a great distance, all three were extremely tired, but knew that they must ascend the hill if they were to reach their goal destination. “That’s a pretty steep hill we have to climb. I don’t know if I can make it… Read More

At 17, I wrote a speech titled, “When You Come to the End of Your Days, Will You Be Able to Write Your Own Epitaph?” It reflected the approach to life I adopted after my mother’s untimely death from cancer at age 49… Read More

Written by Clayton M. Christensen Before I published The Innovator’s Dilemma, I got a call from Andrew Grove, then the chairman of Intel. He had read one of my early papers about disruptive technology, and he asked if I could talk to his direct reports and explain my research and what it implied for Intel. … Read More

Written by Marc Andreessen Every Western institution was unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic, despite many prior warnings. This monumental failure of institutional effectiveness will reverberate for the rest of the decade, but it’s not too early to ask why, and what we need to do about it. Many of us would like to pin the … Read More

Running A Successful Company: Ten Rules That Worked for Me From Sam Walton, Made in America, June 1992 This isn’t the first time that I’ve been asked to come up with a list of rules for success, but it is the first time I’ve actually sat down and done it. I’m glad I did because … Read More

Written by Eduardo Porter, The New York Times Could the world order survive without growing? It’s hard to imagine now, but humanity made do with little or no economic growth for thousands of years. In Byzantium and Egypt, income per capita at the end of the first millennium was lower than at the dawn of the Christian … Read More

Written by Drew Dickson, Albert Bridge Capital This is going to be an uncharacteristic departure for me. This story is deeply personal, for our family, and for our oldest son in particular. But it is a story he’s letting me tell, because it is a story he wants people to hear. My son Max was … Read More

Written by Lori Johnston (ABJ ’95 UGA) and Jeremy Bales (AB, ABJ ’01 UGA) and published in the December 2014 issue of GEORGIA MAGAZINE The Statue of Liberty looms in the distance through the floor-to-ceiling windows on the 27th floor of Citi’s Greenwich Street offices in the Tribeca neighborhood of Lower Manhattan. Bethany McCain (AB, … Read More

America’s deteriorating public credit is the cold-button issue of the 2018 midterms. With rare bipartisanship, Democrats and Republicans compete to pretend that the country isn’t going broke. In 1992, the third-party presidential candidate Ross Perot likened the widening gap between federal receipts and federal spending to “the crazy aunt tucked away in the room upstairs nobody talks about.”… Read More

To my son, if I ever have one: Kid, I am writing this on Sept. 3, 1984. I have just returned from Athens, where I spent Saturday watching the University of Georgia, your old dad’s alma mater, play football against Clemson. While the events of the day were still fresh on my mind, I wanted … Read More

Written by Michael Griffin In April 2011, an Ariane 5 rocket hurled the “New Dawn” communications satellite into geostationary Earth orbit some 36,000 kilometers above the Earth. The $250 million satellite successfully released a set of pins that had held its primary antenna in a folded configuration during launch; however, the antenna did not unfold. Hobbled … Read More

Since 1990, Oaktree Capital’s Howard Marks has been routinely publishing memos to memorialize lessons he has learned, insights he has had, and effects of current events on the markets. His memos provide unique clarity into the world around us as it relates to financial markets and the investments we make… Read More

Our current policy is to invest all of our retained investor’s capital (and then some) when we think we can achieve our targeted hurdle rates. When we can’t find enough attractive investments, we plan to maintain our hurdle rates and build cash for as long as our shareholders and board will allow. We believe that … Read More

Since 1977, Berkshire Hathaway’s annual shareholders are candid and insightful glimpses into how the company sees the world and in turn makes investments… Read More

By Fernando del Pino December 2015 When I was kindly invited by our founder to make a presentation in our first meeting, I thought it would be interesting to bring out some global views on what I believe is a multi- generational decline of the Western civilization rather than talking about the very interesting but … Read More

Written by Peggy Noonan What do I think about when I think about that day? The firemen who climbed “the stairway to Heaven” with 50, 60 pounds of gear. The people who called from Windows on the World and said: “I just want you to know I love you.” The men on the plane who … Read More

Written by Jean M. Twenge One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do … Read More

TOLSTOI HOLDS LINCOLN WORLD’S GREATEST HERO. Bigger Than His Country. Bigger Than All the Presidents Together: a Christ in Miniature. STILL TOO NEAR TO APPRECIATE HIS POWER. Great Russian Tells of Reverence For Lincoln Even Among Barbarians. Of all the great national heroes and statesman of history, Lincoln is the only real giant. Alexander, Fredric the Great, Caesar, Napoleon, Gladstone … Read More

Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future. Its failure to achieve adoption to date is because systems built on trust, norms, and institutions inherently function better than the type of no-need-for-trusted-parties systems blockchain envisions. That’s permanent: no matter how much blockchain improves it is still headed in the wrong … Read More