Words of wisdom from people who have navigated the road to success are often useful and motivational for those who dare to achieve greatness. Be inspired by these 10 quotes on success from billionaire power broker George Soros. He is a Hungarian-American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist. He is the chairman of Soros Fund Management. Soros is ranked #30 on Forbes Billionaire’s List.
1. “If investing is entertaining, if you’re having fun, you’re probably not making any money. Good investing is boring.
2. “Well, you know, I was a human being before I became a businessman.
3. “Once we realize that imperfect understanding is the human condition there is no shame in being wrong, only in failing to correct our mistakes.
4. “I’m only rich because I know when I’m wrong…I basically have survived by recognizing my mistakes.”
5. “The worse a situation becomes, the less it takes to turn it around, and the bigger the upside.”
6. The prevailing wisdom is that markets are always right. I take the opposition position. I assume that markets are always wrong. Even if my assumption is occasionally wrong, I use it as a working hypothesis. It does not follow that one should always go against the prevailing trend. On the contrary, most of the time the trend prevails; only occasionally are the errors corrected. It is only on those occasions that one should go against the trend. This line of reasoning leads me to look for the flaw in every investment thesis. … I am ahead of the curve. I watch out for telltale signs that a trend may be exhausted. Then I disengage from the herd and look for a different investment thesis. Or, if I think the trend has been carried to excess, I may probe going against it. Most of the time we are punished if we go against the trend. Only at an inflection point are we rewarded.
7 “It’s more difficult, you know, to bring about positive change than it is to make money. It’s much easier to make money, because it’s a much easier way to measure success — the bottom line. When it comes to social consequences, they’ve got all different people acting in different ways, very difficult to even have a proper criterion of success. So, it’s a difficult task. Why not use an entrepreneurial, rather than a bureaucratic, approach. As long as people genuinely care for the people they’re trying to help, they can actually do a lot of good.”
8. “We try to catch new trends early and in later stages we try to catch trend reversals. Therefore, we tend to stabilize rather than destabilize the market. We are not doing this as a public service. It is our style of making money.”
9. “I used to be opposed to the idea of social entrepreneurship. I said, you know, let business be business, and philanthropy be philanthropy. Keep the two separate, don’t mix it up, and this is what I did, and I did that rather successfully, but I now recognize that actually you do need to mix it up and I think there is room for social entrepreneurship.”
10. “Making an investment decision is like formulating a scientific hypothesis and submitting it to a practical test. The main difference is that the hypothesis that underlies an investment decision is intended to make money and not to establish a universally valid generalization.”