After spending many years in Wall Street and after making and losing millions of dollars I want to tell you this: It never was my thinking that made the big money for me. It always was my sitting. Got that? My sitting tight!
Interpretation
Success in investing relies more on patience than intelligence or strategy.
Jesse Lauriston Livermore's quote emphasizes the crucial role of patience in achieving financial success. Despite his extensive experience and knowledge in the market, he underscores that the most significant factor in his wealth was not his strategies or analysis but rather his ability to remain steadfast and hold onto his investments during turbulent times.
In practice
A motivational speaker may use this quote during a workshop on investment strategies.
The average man doesn't wish to be told that it is a bull or a bear market. What he desires is to be told specifically which particular stock to buy or sell. He wants to get something for nothing. He does not wish to work. He doesn't even wish to have to think.
Don't take action with a trade until the market, itself, confirms your opinion. Being a little late in a trade is insurance that your opinion is correct. In other words, don't be an impatient trader.
At long as a stock is acting right, and the market is right, do not be in a hurry to take profits. One should never permit speculative ventures to run into investments.
He really meant to tell them that the big money was not in the individual fluctuations but in the main movements that is, not in reading the tape but in sizing up the entire market and its trend.
Men who can both be right and sit tight are uncommon. I found it one of the hardest things to learn. But it is only after a stock operator has firmly grasped this that he can make big money.
It is what people actually did in the stock market that counted - not what they said they were going to do.
You may learn much more from a game you lose than from a game you win. You will have to lose hundreds of games before becoming a good player.
I owe my success to the fact that I never had a clock in my workroom. Seventy-five of us worked twenty hours every day and slept only four hours - and thrived on it.
The ability to bounce back after a setback is the single most important trait an entrepreneurial venture can possess.
The key to ending extreme poverty is to enable the poorest of the poor to get their foot on the ladder of development. The ladder of development hovers overhead, and the poorest of the poor are stuck beneath it. They lack the minimum amount of capital necessary to get a foothold, and therefore need a boost up to the first rung.
Service to many leads to greatness- great respect, great satisfaction.
It is a paradoxical but profoundly true and important principle of life that the most likely way to reach a goal is to be aiming not at that goal itself but at some more ambitious goal beyond it.
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