INVESTING MISTAKES

"A man who has committed a mistake and doesn't correct it, is committing another mistake." Confucius

“They say best men are molded out of faults, And, for the most, become much more the better For being a little bad.” William Shakespeare

“The only man who never makes mistakes is the man who never does anything.” Theodore Roosevelt

“The only mistakes you can learn from are the ones you survive.” Jim Collins

“We do not learn from experience, we learn from reflecting on experience.” John Dewey

“Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.” Eleanor Roosevelt

“Give me the fruitful error any time, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections.” Vilfredo Pareto

“To make no mistakes is not in the power of man; but from their errors and mistakes the wise and good learn wisdom for the future.” Plutarch

“Learning by trial & error, or experimentation can be exciting, the lessons learned deeply engrained. Learning by failure is a remarkably good way of gaining knowledge. Failure is to be welcomed rather than avoided. It shouldn’t be feared by the engineer, scientist or indeed by anyone else.” James Dyson

“Recognize a fault, but don’t dwell on it.” Dickson G Watts

“Show me a person who has never failed, and I will show you a failure of a person. What we learn from failure, and what we do with that knowledge, is what matters –– and it's what makes us who we are.” Michael Bloomberg

"I have a criterion that I can use to identify my mistakes; the behaviour of the market." George Soros

“We all know when we are wrong. The market will tell the speculator when he is wrong, because he is losing money. When he first realises he is wrong is the time to clear out, take his losses, try to keep smiling, study the record to determine the cause of his error, and await the next big opportunity. It is the net result over a period of time in which he is interested.” Jesse Livermore

"With the good men, you can see the learning juices churning around every mistake. You learn from mistakes. When I look back, my life seems to be an endless chain of mistakes." Adam Smith, The Money Game

“When you blame others for your investing mistakes it proves you didn’t do enough of your own work. Own your mistakes so you learn from them.” Ian Cassel

"By properly handling the earnings shortfalls, unexpected competitive developments, or adverse market performance, you will enhance your reputation. Avoiding or denying your mistakes is a sign of weakness in your character." Leon Cooperman

"I have found that failure is a far better teacher than success." Bernard Baruch

“I don’t revisit mistakes to bewail them, I revisit them for their learning purposes.” Charlie Munger

"In investment terms, once lessons have been learnt, mistakes can be put on a price earnings ratio of one and the resultant, good behavior on a ratio of more than one. In other words, mistakes become net present value positive." Nick Sleep

“Realise you will make mistakes and you want to learn from the mistakes. And you want to be able to identify them early. Mistakes are good. There is nothing wrong with mistakes. You really need to leave your ego at the front door.” Reece Duca

“One of my personal investment mantras is that there’s no such thing as a loss, it’s just an unmonetized lesson.” Ted Weschler

“A bull market hides a multitude of investment sins giving investors the impression they can’t lose. Failure, however, is a great teacher. In a way, acquiring battle scars is like acquiring immunity from making the same mistake twice, serving as a booster shot for future returns.” Jake Rosser

"Failure was a key element to my life’s journey." Paul Tudor Jones

“Learn from mistakes. That’s not just a cliché. I sure made my share. Remember the doors that smashed your fingers the first time and be more careful the next trip through.” T. Boone Pickens

“You got to be willing to talk about your mistakes and you got to lean into them. You got to make them not as an opportunity for you to learn, but for the whole firm to learn. Hey, we're not perfect. We've made mistakes. But what I think we've always done is really learn from them, and I think that that's been core to the success of the firm.” Mike Trigg

"In business or out of it, there’s nothing unusual or shameful about making a mistake – once. But… to stumble twice against the same stone is a proverbial disgrace." J Paul Getty

"Everyone makes mistakes." Warren Buffett

“I am a professional mistake maker. One third of my trades are probably wrong.” Ray Dalio

“An investor who claims to have never made a mistake has had a memory lapse, hasn't been investing very long or has lost the truth.” Henry Kravis

“The only way to avoid mistakes is not to invest — which is the biggest mistake of all.” John Templeton

“You never get totally over making silly mistakes.” Charlie Munger

“There are some people that don’t like making mistakes, [if so] don’t go into money management.” Jean-Marie Eveillard

"While we will inevitably make some mistakes, we are determined to learn from each one." Seth Klarman

"We’re going to make a lot of mistakes at Berkshire. And we’ve made them in the past, we’ll make them in the future. You know, if every shot you hit in golf was a hole-in-one, the game would soon lose interest. So you have to hit a few in the woods occasionally just to make it a little more interesting." Warren Buffett

“Most investment books are about how to be right, not the possibility of being wrong. And yet, the would-be active investor must understand that every attempt at success by necessity carries with it the chance for failure.” Howard Marks

"We are constantly thinking about the past occasions when we blew opportunities. Since those don’t hit financial reports, the opportunities you had but didn’t accept, most people don’t bother thinking about them very much. At least that is a mistake we don’t make. We rub our own noses in our mistakes in blowing opportunities." Charlie Munger

"Our Vice Chairman, Charlie Munger, has always emphasized the study of mistakes rather than successes, both in business and other aspects of life." Warren Buffett

“I force myself every year to spend a few days thinking about what were the big mistakes of the last few years and what did I learn from that? When I write the annual letter, probably where I spend the most time are the three best mistakes of the year. And it’s a long process because I really try to be very honest with myself, and sometimes you can think it was a mistake not to invest.” Francois Rochon

“One of the reasons Warren’s so successful is that he is brutal in appraising his own past. He wants to identify mis-thinkings and avoid them in the future.” Charlie Munger

"It is mistakes that are more noteworthy. Each brought its own new lesson." Phil Fisher

“I've often said that my mistakes, if brought together, could be paraded up Fifth Avenue five abreast. I've also said, and firmly believe, that anyone in this business who says they haven't made mistakes either doesn't make decisions or is a liar.” Leon Cooperman

“To others, being wrong is a source of shame; to me, recognizing my mistakes is a source of pride. Once we realize that imperfect understanding is the human condition there is no shame in being wrong, only in failing to correct our mistakes.” George Soros

“In investing it is never wrong to change your mind. It is only wrong to change your mind and do nothing about it.” Seth Klarman

"I can think of a lot of wrong decisions I’ve made. But I certainly can’t think of anything I agonized over making for any long period of time." Warren Buffett

"I would argue that what Warren's done, and what I’ve done to a lesser extent, is to learn a lot from other people’s mistakes. That is really a much more pleasant way to learn hard lessons." Charlie Munger

"There's an old saying in the investment game: ‘It's okay to be wrong: it's not okay to stay wrong.’” Scott Fearon

“Quickly identify mistakes and take action.” Charlie Munger

"Recognize a mistake early, and take immediate action." Roy Neuberger

"If you make a mistake, sell as fast as you can." Li Lu

“If you have made a mistake, deal with the mistake, don’t compound it.” Michael Steinhardt

“Being humble is to recognise mistakes. That’s just the nature of investing in the stock market – you’ll make mistakes. The key thing is to recognise them as early as possible because the earlier you recognise mistakes, the sooner you can reduce the losses. You must be quick to take losses. But to do that, you must be humble. You must recognise that things didn’t work as expected. You must recognise you made an error of judgment on the nature of the business, the nature of the other competitive players, or the management. Whatever mistake you’ve made, you’ve made a mistake and it happens. But you must say, “Well, okay, I’ll learn something, and I’ll sell and buy something else.” Francois Rochon

"There’s nothing that produces wisdom more thoroughly than really getting your own nose whacked hard when you make a mistake, and we had a firm amount of that." Charlie Munger

“Investing is nothing but a journey of learning from mistakes and getting better at it. If you’re not willing or able to do that – however you define yourself as an investor – you won’t survive over the long term.” Rajiv Jain

"I'm leery of compounding a mistake with inertia and more optimism." Allan Mecham

“Our greatest insights by far have come from mistakes, not victories.” Yen Liow

"I learned that there is an incredible beauty to mistakes, because embedded in each mistake is a puzzle, and a gem that I could get if I solved it, i.e a principle that I could use to reduce my mistakes in the future." Ray Dalio

“There is a very good investor I speak to frequently who said ‘All I bring to the party is twenty-eight years of mistakes.’ I really believe he is right.” Michael Steinhardt

“It is really useful to be reminded of your errors. I think we’re [Warren Buffett and I] pretty good at that. We do kind of mentally rub our own noses in our own mistakes. And that is a very good mental habit.” Charlie Munger

“I don’t think anybody can do this for a career without having made some important mistakes. You can’t win all the time.” Michael Steinhardt

"I've done well enough to survive with honour, but I've made my share of mistakes along the way. I think you learn at least as much from screw-ups as you do from successes." Ralph Wanger

“I have no problem admitting my mistakes. I’m loaded with them. But I never bought a pencil without an eraser on it, and God invented erasers on pencils for people like me.” Ken Langone

"We frame the stock certificates of our biggest investment mistakes and we put a plaque on the bottom and that plaque has the transferable lesson learned. Because the value of mistakes lies in the lessons you learn from them." Chris Davis

“When something goes wrong, I like to think about the bad decisions and learn from them so that hopefully I don’t repeat the same mistake.” David Einhorn

“Part of what you must learn is how to handle mistakes and new facts that change the odds. Life, in part, is like a poker game, wherein you have to learn to quit sometimes when holding a much–loved hand.” Charlie Munger

“No investment philosophy, unless it is just a carbon copy of someone else’s approach, develops in its complete form in any one day or year. In my own case, it grew over a considerable period of time, partly as a result of what perhaps may be called logical reasoning, and partly from observing the successes and failure of others, but much of it through the more painful method of learning from my own mistakes.” Phil Fisher

“I want to learn as much as I can vicariously. It’s too painful to do it by personal hardship. Of course. I collect big calamities in my head and big stupidities. I do that so I can avoid them. Think of how little in the way of big calamity has ever come to Berkshire. And it’s not that we don’t ever have reverses and disappointments in that or never have whole businesses disappear. But averaged out, we have less misfortune than others.” Charlie Munger

“While most others seem to believe that mistakes are bad things, I believe mistakes are good things because I believe that most learning comes via making mistakes and reflecting on them.” Ray Dalio

“I want to be able to explain my mistakes. This means I do only things I completely understand.” Warren Buffett

"I have long since learned, as all should learn, not to make excuses when wrong. Just admit it and try to profit from it." Jesse Livermore

“I’m only rich because I know when I’m wrong.” George Soros

".. one other thing that is absolutely critical: You have to be willing to make mistakes regularly: there is nothing wrong with it." Bruce Kovner

"Great investors become great by objectively examining their mistakes and weaknesses and consciously reflecting on them." Christopher Pavese

"Even the best of speculators must be prepared to be wrong in a certain percentage of his operations. In such cases he must be able to strike his tent on the instant and conduct a swift, skillful, and silent retreat." Bernard Baruch

".. you have got to make decisions even though you know you may be wrong. You can't avoid being wrong, but by being aware of the uncertainties, you're more likely to correct your mistakes than the traditional investor." George Soros

“Replaying losses in your head is the only way you learn from your mistakes.” David Tepper

"We are going to make mistakes." Bill Ackman

"It is not a crime to make a mistake in the investment business, but you have to recognize your mistakes early and take decisive action to reverse the decision." Pierre Lagrange

"We learn by trial and error, not by trial and rightness." Joe Ross

"We work hard to create an environment where mistakes aren't swept under the rug but are surfaced and examined right away. Part of working as a team is trying to help each other, not tear each other down when things go wrong. Address the issue, learn from it and move on." John Fox

"This is a very stressful business. We are all human, and we all make mistakes. How one responds to those mistakes and whether someone can keep a level head and make thoughtful decision is critical. Conversely, how does one respond to a few big wins? With some folks, early success leads to inflated confidence that may slow the recognition of a mistake." Lee Ainslie

"Every great money manager I've ever met, all they want to talk about it their mistakes. There's a great humility there." Stanley Druckenmiller

“In fact, I'm often looking, when I interview people, tell me your failures. I want to know. And some, ‘Oh, I've never had a failure. I've never had a bad investment.’ Well, next. Because that's not a life.” Henry Kravis

"I usually prefer talking more about the things I have gotten wrong, because I learned from them." Jim Rogers

“The competitive advantages of admitting our mistakes and learning from them": Experience is making mistakes and learning from them. We have made many mistakes over 20 years, and we treasure each and every one of them. We write about our mistakes in our public letters. We talk about them in podcasts and interviews, and they are widely featured in the media. We are transparent about our errors for two reasons: our investors are entitled to as much transparency about our failures as our successes, and importantly, our public disclosure of mistakes encourages us to study and learn from them, markedly decreasing the likelihood that they will be repeated.” Bill Ackman

"When I am wrong, the only instinct I have is to get out. If I was thinking one way and now I can see it was a mistake, then I am probably not the only person in shock, so I better be the first one to sell. I don't care what the price is. In this game, you have an option to keep 20% of your P&L this year, but you want to own the serial option of being able to do that every year. You can't be blowing up." Michael Platt

“We (strapping on the protective armour of the first person plural) have made lots of mistakes. (I will be less cowardly) I have made lots of mistakes. Sometimes we made the mistakes ourselves. Sometimes we learnt from others. Sometimes they were direct investment mistakes. Sometimes they were part of growing up (look out for those private mistakes, they are full of investment lessons). But there they are. Warts and all. This is how life is. We do not justify them, but we do not condemn them either. Indeed, they are best not judged. Our model is to learn from our mistakes and what we learn we hope to give you, in better performance results.” Nick Sleep

“There will be lots of mistakes going forward, from stocks we missed and also from stocks we did buy but shouldn’t have, but I try to think of mistakes like capital expenditures that are necessary education costs that pave the way to greater returns in the future.” John Huber

"I think one of my strengths is that I view anything that has happened up to the present point in time as history. I really don’t care about the mistake I made three seconds ago in the market. What I care about is what I am going to do from the next moment on. I try to avoid any emotional attachment to the market. I avoid letting my trading opinions be influenced by comments I may have made on the record about a market." Paul Tudor Jones

“Since actual perfection and 100% satisfaction with a position are impossible, we must learn from results and not dwell on past outcomes, either good or bad. Moving forward, even from large errors, is required.” Paul Singer

"I have also made some bad investments. There is no question that you are going to make mistakes in your life. I've made a lot, and I'm going to make more. You just have to make sure your blunders are never fatal, and you don't want to make them on the really big decisions. For example, choosing the person you are going to marry. I may try to minimise my errors, but I'm not one to dwell on them. It isn't worth it. You have to put mistakes behind you and not look back. Tomorrow is another day. Just go on to the next thing and strive to do your best." Warren Buffett

“There is no point in trying to wish away your mistakes of judgment. There is nothing wrong with getting it wrong. The idea is to learn from it and not repeat those mistakes going forward. To never let ego, get in the way of your investing.” Chetan Parikh

“I’m willing to bet I’ve made more mistakes than any other investor in the whole world. My fund is so big, and I have so many stocks. Learn from your mistakes. Just move on. Don’t be frozen.” Will Danoff

“On average, I think people beat themselves up too much over their mistakes. I don’t think it’s that productive.” Warren Buffett

“I try not to fret over mistakes. If I did fret, the investment process would be less enjoyable and more stressful. In my opinion, onvestors do best when they are reaxed and having fun.” Ed Wachenheim

“We never beat ourselves over a mistake. We sell it and move on.” Roger Engemann

“Feel the mistake deeply, but only deep enough that it helps and not hinders your development.” Yen Liow

“There’s no way that you can live an adequate life without many mistakes. In fact, one trick in life is to get so you can handle mistakes. Failure to handle psychological denial is a common way for people to go broke.” Charlie Munger

"I began a habit I was never to forsake - of analyzing my losses to determine where I had made my mistakes." Bernard Baruch

"The people I have seen succeed in this business have stuck to it and have been obsessive about learning from their mistakes." Matthew McLennan

"I've made so many mistakes I can't even think about it." Barry Rosenstein

"All investors make mistakes (even the great ones), but what separates the great ones from the rest is the ability to learn from those mistakes and change their behaviour." Mark Yusko

"Mistakes are the best teachers. One does not learn from success. It is desirable to learn vicariously from other people's failures, but it gets much more firmly seared in when they are your own." Mohnish Pabrai

“We had some mistakes to remember. It’s hard to learn, we learned a lot vicariously because it’s so much cheaper, be we learned a lot from unpleasant experiences, and so just doing it, you’ll automatically get a few mistakes, nobody can avoid them.” Charlie Munger

"Observe how you react to mistakes, so that you can respond more constructively the next time things go wrong." Jim Rogers

".. you cannot live life without making a mistake. Every time I make a mistake I learn something." Li Lu

"One learns the most from mistakes, not successes." Paul Tudor Jones

"It's very very helpful to have mistakes that you notice. I would value them. The natural tendency when you make a mistake is to forget it as quickly as possible. What you should do is do the opposite. You should study it. The best mistakes are the ones you can practice theoretically. But the ones you really really learn are the ones you feel in your stomach or your wallet, or some combination of the two." Bill Ackman

"We lose lots of money on hundred of trades each day. We want to prevent losses that arise from making the same mistake twice." Ken Griffin

"We actually believe an ability to identify mistakes early and act on them is as or even more important in a portfolio than being right in the first place." Eric Marshall

"I am wrong a lot. While the analogy may be pushing it, you can think of a painter painting many brush strokes. He can be wrong a lot. No one brush stroke is right or wrong. We are constantly painting a picture." Bruce Kovner

"I have lost enough money being wrong that I have gotten better at it I guess. If I've gotten better at it, it's because I've made enough mistakes." Jim Rogers

"The times I normally learn my biggest lessons are when we lose money. When we make money, we don't learn much. I don't like to learn lessons after spending $55m. I'd much rather learn lessons after spending $15 on a book. It's a very expensive lesson. I don't think I will be forgetting it anytime soon." Mohnish Pabrai

“When we make mistakes, we always try to do post-mortems.” Lou Simpson

"Post-mortems prove useful for hospitals and football teams; why not for businesses and investors?" Warren Buffett

"We do post-mortems on all of our positions - as well as regular position reviews of what we own - to constantly assess what we got right and what we didn't. That matters because we want to learn from mistakes even if the investment outcome turned out fine because we were lucky. Luck is not a sustainable way to make money as an investor. Avoiding mistakes that you've made before is." Shawn Kravetz

“Reviewing past mistakes is a key part of learning and post-mortems are the most effective means of doing so. Many investors pay lip service to this exercise. At Broyhill, postmortems are a critical component of our investment process. Every time we exit a position, we analyze our performance, review our investment thesis, and analyze our results relative to our expectations. This takes time, but the lessons learned through these formal write-ups and discussions have proved invaluable.” Chris Pavese

"One way to improve investment results – which we try hard to apply at Oaktree – is to think about what ‘today’s mistake’ might be and try to avoid it." Howard Marks

"Pain plus reflection equals progress. We must admit that we were wrong in orders to learn from our mistakes." Christopher Parvese

"The big difference between those who are successful and those who are not is that successful people learn from their mistakes and the mistakes of others." Sir John Templeton

"An investor doesn't need to make personal investment mistakes to find out what doesn't work. What's needed is to read about other's mistakes and never follow them." Fransico Garcia Parames

"Each mistake that I make, and there are probably a huge number of mistakes in the future, but each mistake is an opportunity to learn. I look very carefully at the mistakes and say, why did this happen; are there lessons here that can help in the future? It's best to learn from other people's mistakes because they are a lot cheaper. But still, your own mistakes hit home the most and one is likely to learn the most from them." Mohnish Pabrai

“If you’re willing to fail, not every ideas is going to work, and you allow people to fail, and you may learn something in the failing, I think that is a good strategy. If you’re not innovating you’re dying. We’re always thinking of new ways to attack the problems we deal with on a daily basis.” Steve Cohen

"You need to learn from your failures and mistakes and I have had many." Marc Cohodes

“It’s very difficult in the investment business to avoid mistakes. You are going to make mistakes. The key is to keep learning and getting better and over time even with a one third error rate you will end up with a better than average record if you keep at it.” Mohnish Pabrai

"Making some mistakes is as much an inherent cost of investing for major gains as making some bad loans is inevitable in even the best run and most profitable institution. The important thing is to recognize them as soon as possible, to understand their causes, and to learn how to keep from repeating the mistakes." Phil Fisher

"We’re going to make mistakes. Believe me, we’ve made a lot of mistakes.... I don’t know if there’s any one biggest mistake. We’ve had financial mistakes. We’ve had companies that didn’t work out, such as TXU and Samson, or Regal Cinemas a long time ago. But you learn from those mistakes. You hope you never do them again; shame on us if we do." Henry Kravis

"We realise that from time to time we will make mistakes. If we never made a mistake, we should properly be criticised for being too conservative. To make money one must take some risks." Ed Wachenheim

“You know what Rudyard Kipling said? Treat those two imposters just the same success and failure. Of course, there’s going to be some failure in making the correct decisions. Nobody bats a thousand. I think it’s important to review your past stupidities so you are less likely to repeat them, but I’m not gnashing my teeth over it or suffering or enduring it. I regard it as perfectly normal to fail and make bad decisions. I think the tragedy in life is to be so timid that you don’t play hard enough so you have some reverses.” Charlie Munger

"If you don't make some misjudgements, you're doing it wrong: you've not taken enough risk and you'll never score a big one. You do best when your investments are controversial - when you stray farthest from the herd." Ralph Wanger

"I have always believed that the chief difference between a fool and a wise man is that the wise man learns from his mistakes, while the fool never does. The corollary of this is that it behooved me to go over my mistakes pretty carefully and not to repeat them again." Phil Fisher

"My techniques have changed from time to time as I learned from events and mistakes. Anyone can make a mistake - the important thing is to recognise an error in judgement as quickly as possible and do something about it." Roy Neuberger

"When my efforts resulted in failure, I did everything possible to insure that my mistakes were not repeated." J Paul Getty

"Turn each mistake into a learning experience. Determine exactly what went wrong and how you can avoid the same mistake in the future." Sir John Templeton

“I’ve studied a lot of thinkers and game-players. You read about chess masters and they basically tell you what makes them great is not the quantity of practice it’s the quality. They spend most of their time after the chess match reviewing their decisions that were bad. Self-criticism is the secret to self-improvement. Negative feedback is a good thing. This physicist, named Niels Bohr, who says ‘the definition of an expert is one that makes all the mistakes you can make in a very narrow field’. Mistakes are not to be discouraged; on the contrary they should be cultivated and investigated.” Jeffrey Ubben

“The best advice I can give an investor whose already developed his own technique is to keep on sharpening the saw. Keep on saying, okay I made a mistake here, what was the mistake. Study the mistakes you make, which every investors makes. Search out what you could have done differently. Write it down in a book and then when you get together with your quiet moments, say to yourself what could I have done different, how come I went wrong, where did I go wrong? And then get in a quiet state and let that develop in your mind. And eventually as you get into your subconscious it will give you guidance.” Arnold Van Den Berg

"It is important to distinguish between mistakes. A mistake that wipes out 85% of capital invested isn't remotely comparable to one that brings a 10% loss. The 85% loss requires a 566% return to get back to par, while a 10% loss requires only an 11% return. I'll certainly make mistakes in the future, but I hope to avoid major blow-ups that cripple returns." Allan Mecham

"We constantly attempt to learn from our mistakes and draw enduring lessons." Seth Klarman

"I think most investment shops slide their mistakes under the rug. There aren’t a lot of discussions about the years and the places when they screwed up. This is a mistake because they hurt themselves. They don’t learn, and we want to air the laundry in public. Part of airing the laundry in public helps us to learn. Warren does the same thing at Berkshire, and he always started his letters with the mistakes first. We want to do that too, because we want to learn. It’s the only way to improve." Mohnish Pabrai

"Charlie [Munger] constantly collects and researches the notable failures in each and every type of people, business, government, and academia, and arranges the causes of failures into a decision-making checklist for making the right decisions. Because of this, he has avoided major mistakes in his decision making in his life and in his career. The importance of this on the performance of Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway over the past 50 years cannot be emphasized enough." Li Lu

"I have not, however, made my last mistake in purchasing either businesses or stocks. Not everything works out as planned." Warren Buffett

"Granted, we all make mistakes. The important thing about making errors in judgement is the ability to admit those errors. If you grow into adulthood unable to acknowledge your mistakes - in life, as well as investing - you will learn your lessons the hard way. Only when you recognise your mistakes will you be able to make corrections necessary to put yourself on the right path." Jim Rogers

“Peter Bernstein said, ‘Every day, we walk into the unknown.’ The future is a distribution of possibilities, and some days, we don’t even know what the possibilities are. He said, ‘The future is not ours to know, but it helps to know that being wrong is inevitable and normal, not some terrible tragedy, not some awful failing in reasoning, not even bad luck in most instances. Being wrong comes with the franchise of an activity whose outcome depends on an unknown future.’ And I think that’s a great way to think about the world we have to work in, and if you accept and inhale the unpredictability, variability, and randomness of the world, I think you’re likely to do a lot better in it.” Howard Marks

“Some lessons are readily apparent, but others bubble up over time. Thus, revisiting past exited investments can flesh out good learnings down the road. Ours will not be an error-free investment program, but we can commit to reviewing our decision-making process in search of lessons and adjustments to be applied going forward.” Polen Capital

“If you deal with failure well and you persist, you have a high probability of being successful. So I’ve always kind of had that view, and then I’ve had to apply it to myself certainly a few times. I always like to say that experience is making mistakes and learning from them, and I’ve had the benefit of having made a lot of mistakes.” Bill Ackman

“One way to really improve is to look at your mistakes and try to learn something from them. The first part is really to accept that you’ll make mistakes and it’s just the nature of the stock market. In my rule of three, one stock out of three stocks that we’ll purchase will turn out to be either a mistake or not exactly what we hoped for; you have to accept that’s just the nature of things. You’re investing and you don’t know the future, so you have to make your own assessment and your best judgment of things, but you have to accept that you’ll make mistakes. I think it’s a waste of time to be depressed, but I think you have to focus on accepting that you’ll make mistakes. For every mistake, you learn something, and you can advance a little step because you made one mistake or two or three, but you have to permit yourself to make mistakes. If you’re too scared to make mistakes, well, you won’t make great investments. It’s a never-ending task to always look for improving your craft of investing.” Francois Rochon

"Most of Berkshire's success grew from stupidity and failure that we learned from. I hope that makes you feel better about your own life." Charlie Munger

“You will make mistakes. You will buy stocks you shouldn’t. You will sell winners too soon. You will hold losers too long. But whatever you do don’t blame others. When you blame others for your investing mistakes it proves you didn’t do enough of your own work. Own your mistakes so you learn from them.” Ian Cassel

“Organizations benefit enormously from candid disclosure of what has gone wrong. Unfortunately, mistakes are always made by an individual (or a group of individuals) who typically suffer loss of stature and diminished organizational confidence when they share all the things they did badly. When faced with such incentives, we wanted to find ways of creating an internal culture in which the sharing of mistakes is not just a habit but also valued and rewarded. One way we have tried to lessen the stigma of sharing mistakes internally is to discuss some of them in open forums [such as an investment letter.]” MIT Investment Management Company

“We also value learning as much from our mistakes as from our successes. We carefully study our mistakes, both errors of commission and omission, and we share them publicly to imprint them even deeper in our minds.” Bill Ackman

Further Reading:
‘Black Box Thinking,’ Matthew Syed, 2015, John Murray Publishers.