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

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.

The totally unpredictable perceptions of market participants, reflected in momentary stock prices and in the changing multiples that drive speculative returns, essentially have counted for nothing.

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.

(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

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

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

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