There was a finance professor at HBS (Harvard Business…

There was a finance professor at HBS (Harvard Business School) who taught Entrepreneurial Finance. I didn't take the course, but I was told to go to his last class, so, I did. And the professor said a couple things. He said, "Be careful what you ask for, because you may achieve it." That has been an interesting motto that I've thought about my whole career. And then he said, "Find the freight trains in your life and get on them instead of in front of them." I actually think about both of these all the time. You know, luck is when preparation meets opportunity. You create your own luck. You set the table to get lucky. And, I think you have to have chips on the table to be successful and play the game. It's no skill to say no to everything. You have to take risks and you're going to fail. I think the most important milestones of my early career were the worst deals I did, because of how much I learned from those. My son just graduated from HBS last week and I was telling him that the most exciting part about investing and learning is that I actually approach every investment like I'm stupid. I think about what could go wrong-worry about the downside, and the upside will take care of itself. So, in investing, you try to take the right risks and never cross the line on ethics, ever. I think that among other things, that has been the reason Starwood Capital Group has been so successful. We've always put our investors first, and we've always done the right thing, even when they didn't know we were doing the right thing. Wehave the same fee structure in our funds today that we had in 1991. Investors get their money back, a return on their money, and then we participate. As my father said, "If you do the right thing, you can always feel good when you look in the mirror every morning."

— from The Flight Plan (Purpose/Wisdom/Risk) · Holy Grail of Investing: The World's Greatest Investors Reveal Their Ultimate Strategies f

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