Learning is the beginning of wealth. Learning is the beginning of spirituality. Searching and learning is where the miracle process all begins. Formal education will make you a living. Self-education will make you a fortune. We must learn to apply all that we know so that we can attract all that we want. The book you don’t read won’t help. If someone is going down the wrong road, he doesn’t need motivation to speed him up. What he needs is education to turn him around. Some people read so little they have rickets of the mind. Miss a meal if you have to, but don’t miss a book. The great gift of the human imagination is that it has no limits or ending. Nourish the mind like you would your body. The mind cannot survive on junk food. Everything you need for your better future and success has already been written. And guess what? It’s all available. All you have to do is go to the library. But guess what? Only three percent of the people in America have a library card. Wow, they must be expensive! No, they’re free. Probably in every neighborhood. Three percent! Ignorance is not bliss. Ignorance is poverty. Ignorance is devastation. Ignorance is tragedy. Ignorance is illness. It all stems from ignorance.
Success is not to be pursued; it is to be attracted by the person we become. At the end of each day you should play back the tapes of your performance. The results should either applaud you or prod you. There are some things you don’t have to know how it works. The main thing is that it works. While some people are studying the roots, others are picking the fruit. It just depends which end of this you want to get in on. Part of success is preparation on purpose.
If you care at all, you’ll get some results. If you care enough, you’ll get incredible results. Success is not so much what we have as it is what we are. The greatest form of maturity is at harvest time. That is when we must learn how to reap without complaint if the amounts are small and how to reap without apology if the amounts are big. My goal is to translate response into results. Some teachers teach for others to learn. That’s not me. Some teachers teach for others to accomplish. That is me. Life asks us to make measurable progress in reasonable time. That’s why they make those fourth grade chairs so small. Success is the study of the obvious. Everyone should take Obvious 1 and Obvious 2 in school. I found it easier to get rich than I did to make excuses. Goals. There’s no telling what you can do when you get inspired by them. There’s no telling what you can do when you believe in them. There’s no telling what will happen when you act upon them. Reasons come first. Answers come second. There are two ways to face the future.
Learn how to be happy with what you have while you pursue all that you want. Happiness is not an accident. Nor is it something you wish for. Happiness is something you design. There are three things to leave behind; your photographs, your library, and your personal journals. These things are certainly going to be more valuable to future generations than your furniture! The word “tip” stands for “to insure promptness.” So when should you give it? Up front, of course. Sophisticated people don’t take chances on poor service, they insure good service. Let others lead small lives, but not you. Let others argue over small things, but not you. Let others cry over small hurts, but not you. Let others leave their future in someone else’s hands, but not you.
It can be dangerous to weaken the strong in our attempts to strengthen the weak. One of the great liberal documents of the world is the Declaration of Independence. One of the great conservative documents of the world is the Constitution of the United States. We need both documents to build a country. One to get it started. Liberal. And the other to help maintain the structure over the years. Conservative. The real genius to make a marketplace flourish doesn’t come from the government. It comes from the individual genius of its people. Beware of those who seek to take care of you lest your caretakers become your jailers An ancient script asks, “Would you let a man rule the city who cannot even rule his own spirit?” Sometimes we do. In America we have the greatest chance for opportunity than anyone else in the past six and a half thousand years. Never in recorded history have so many different gifts been brought from all over the world and deposited in one country. Debate refines a good idea. That’s why we have two major parties in Congress. Somebody says, “I have a great idea for the country.” We say, “Wonderful. Put it on the table. Let’s debate. And we start the debate by questioning the guy who has this great idea. After the third question he says, “I withdraw my great idea. I forgot about those three questions.” Succeeding in America is easy! That’s why everyone wants to come here. People haven’t plotted and schemed for the last fifty years saying, “If I could just get to Poland everything would be okay.” Tyranny knows no restraint of appetite.
You’ve probably already figured out how this story ends. The tsunami of hundreds of PIPs against me right after the war announcement was enough to make me spend the rest of the day picking up the pieces of what was left of my trading account and licking the wounds of my trau- matized trader’s psyche. It was a devastating experience, but I am grateful that it happened to me, because in the days and months of soul searching that followed, I became a born-again trader with a revived mindset and a completely new trading method. This is how *The Quarters Theory* was born. It was a result of my rigor- ous process of recovery from the turmoil that I had inflicted on my trading account and on myself. Whether I wanted it or not, I was taken back to Square One. From that point, there was no other way to go but back to the basics, rebuilding from the ground up. And what better way to get back to the basics than focusing on the most basic unit of information for everything.