Enough: True Measures of Money, Business, and Life

(1) autonomy, the extent to which we have the ability to control our own lives, “to do our own thing”

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

It’s not money that determines our happiness, but the presence of some combination of these three attributes:

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

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

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

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

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.”

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.