Book Byte #298 "Business Adventures" by John Brooks

Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street

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📣 Curious Quotes from the Author

“Expectation of an event creates a much deeper impression … than the event itself.”

“I don’t think money makes much difference, as long as you have enough.”

“If you’re not able to communicate successfully between yourself and yourself, how are you supposed to make it with the strangers outside?”

“Any board-room sitter with a taste for Wall Street lore has heard of the retort that J. P. Morgan the Elder is supposed to have made to a naïve acquaintance who had ventured to ask the great man what the market was going to do. “It will fluctuate,” replied Morgan dryly.”

“Why should I want to have a lot of copies of this and that lying around? Nothing but clutter in the office, a temptation to prying eyes, and a waste of good paper.”

“we may see another speculative buildup followed by another crash, and so on until God makes people less greedy.”

“To set high goals, to have almost unattainable aspirations, to imbue people with the belief that they can be achieved—these are as important as the balance sheet, perhaps more”

“There is no possible protection from technology except by technology,” he wrote. “When you create a new environment with one phase of technology,”

“they were “very clever in inventing reasons” for a sudden rise or fall in stock prices,”

“Whether the nostalgia of the Edsel boys for the Edsel runs to the humorous or to the tragic, it is a thought-provoking phenomenon. Maybe it means merely that they miss the limelight they first basked in and later squirmed in, or maybe it means that a time has come when—as in Elizabethan drama but seldom before in American business—failure can have a certain grandeur that success never knows.”

📚 Cognition of the Book’s Big Idea

We can trace our understanding of corporate ethics and the financial market back to significant historical events. For instance, one man's struggle to switch jobs had a long-lasting effect on workers' rights.

Until Tomorrow,
Jason (Founder Club255)