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 suc-cessful 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 invest-ment 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 Leadership & Business (Leadership/Business) · Holy Grail of Investing: The World's Greatest Investors Reveal Their Ultimate Strategies f

In the book

One of the wisest investors I know says he approaches every single investment as if he were stupid: he worries about what could go wrong, and lets the upside take care of itself. Luck, he says, is what happens when preparation meets opportunity — you have to have chips on the table to win, and you must never, ever cross the line on ethics. On his first day at Goldman Sachs, a young recruit was told by a partner to be “long-term greedy” — a phrase worth a whole career. […] Know your indispensable, scalable parts. Find the chef-versus-ingredients answer before you try to grow. Invest with a margin of safety, and never for the line you won't cross. Don't lose money; respect cycles; approach every deal humbly; keep your ethics spotless. Back the right people and support them. That, more than any deal, is where the real return lives. […] Here is what I most want you to take. Do the right thing even when no one is watching, so you can always meet your own eyes in the mirror. Integrity is simply how you behave when no one is watching and no one will ever know — and almost nothing of lasting value gets built except out of relationships, which is exactly why your word has to be unbreakable. — Leadership & Business (Leadership/Business)

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