I learned my principles over a lifetime of making a lot of mistakes and spending a lot of time reflecting on them.

（作者 獲取原則的方法：通過犯錯誤和花時間反思）

Since I was a kid, I’ve been a curious, independent thinker who ran after audacious goals. I got excited about visualizing things to go after, had some painful failures going after them, learned principles that would prevent me from making the same sort of mistakes again, and changed and improved, which allowed me to imagine and go after even more audacious goals and do that rapidly and repeatedly for a long time. So to me life looks like the sequence you see on the opposite page.

I believe that the key to success lies in knowing how to both strive for a lot and fail well.

（如何更好的努力和更好的失?。?/p>

?By failing well, I mean being able to experience painful failures that provide big learnings without failing badly enough to get knocked out of the game.

（經(jīng)歷能夠?qū)W到很多東西，而不是被踢出局的失敗）

This way of learning and improving has been best for me because of what I’m like and because of what I do. （那適合自己的學(xué)習(xí)方式是什么呢）

I’ve always had a bad rote memory and didn’t like following other people’s instructions, but I loved figuring out how things work for myself. I hated school because of my bad memory but when I was twelve I fell in love with trading the markets.?

To make money in the markets, one needs to be an independent thinker who bets against the consensus and is right. That’s because the consensus view is baked into the price.?

One is inevitably going to be painfully wrong a lot, so knowing how to do that well is critical to one’s success.?

（一個人不可避免地會經(jīng)歷很多錯誤，所以知道如何做好這一點對于成功至關(guān)重要。）

To be a successful entrepreneur, the same is true: One also has to be an independent thinker who correctly bets against the consensus, which means being painfully wrong a fair amount.?

Since I was both an investor and an entrepreneur, I developed a healthy fear of being wrong and figured out an approach to decision making that would maximize my odds of being right.