Enough: True Measures of Money, Business, and Life

(3) exercising competence, using our God-given and self-motivated talents, inspired and striving to learn

It is economics that controls long-term equity returns; the impact of emotions, so dominant in the short term, dissolves.

The message is clear: In the long run, stock returns have depended almost entirely on the reality of the relatively predictable investment returns earned by business.

Therefore, as I wrote in my Little Book of Common Sense Investing, “the stock market is a giant distraction from the business of investing.”

(2) maintaining connectiveness with other human beings, in the form of love of our families, our pleasure in friends and colleagues, and an openness with those we meet in all walks of life

Investing is all about the long-term ownership of businesses. Speculation is precisely the opposite. It is all about the short-term trading, not long-term holding, of financial instruments—pieces of paper, not businesses—largely focused on the belief that their prices, as distinct from their intrinsic values, will rise.

Albert Schweitzer got it exactly right. “Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success.”

In the very long run, all of the returns earned by stocks are created not by speculation but by investment.

Innovation in finance is designed largely to benefit those who create the complex new products, rather than those who own them.

Keynes defined investment - he called it “enterprise” - as “forecasting the prospective yield of an asset over its entire life.” He defined speculation as “the activity of forecasting the market.”