The best advice I ever got (Fortune article)
Warren Buffet: invest emotion-free
Charlie Munger: Coping with change is key
Jim Rogers: Read everything
"The best advice I ever got was on an airplane. It was in my early days on Wall Street. I was flying to Chicago, and I sat next to an older guy. Anyway, I remember him as being an old guy, which means he may have been 40. He told me to read everything. If you get interested in a company and you read the annual report, he said, you will have done more than 98% of the people on Wall Street. And if you read the footnotes in the annual report you will have done more than 100% of the people on Wall Street. I realized right away that if I just literally read a company's annual report and the notes -- or better yet, two or three years of reports -- that I would know much more than others. Professional investors used to sort of be dazzled. Everyone seemed to think I was smart. I later realized that I had to do more than just that. I learned that I had to read the annual reports of those I am investing in and their competitors' annual reports, the trade journals, and everything that I could get my hands on. But I realized that most people don't bother even doing the basic homework. And if I did even more, I'd be so far ahead that I'd probably be able to find successful investments."
Tiger Woods: Keep it simple
"When I was young, maybe 6 or 7 years old, I'd play on the Navy golf course with my pop. My dad would say, "Okay, where do you want to hit the ball?" I'd pick a spot and say I want to hit it there. He'd shrug and say, "Fine, then figure out how to do it." He didn't position my arm, adjust my feet, or change my thinking. He just said go ahead and hit the darn ball. My dad's advice to me was to simplify. He knew that at my age I couldn't digest all of golf's intricacies. He kept it simple: If you want to hit the ball to a particular spot, figure out a way to do it. Even today, when I'm struggling with my game, I can still hear him say, "Pick a spot and just hit it." When I'm making adjustments during a round, I know some of the television commentators theorize that I'm changing this or moving that, but really what I'm doing is listening to Pop."
Mohamed El-Erian: Push beyond your comfort zone
"We were living in Paris, back when my father was Egypt's ambassador to France. Each day we used to get at least four daily newspapers, from Le Figaro on the right side of the political spectrum to L'Humanité, which was the newspaper of the Communist Party. I remember asking my father, Why do we need four newspapers? He said to me, "Unless you read different points of view, your mind will eventually close, and you'll become a prisoner to a certain point of view that you'll never question."
Reading widely is particularly important right now. Most of the market research these days asks the same question: Is this the market bottom? To answer that question, they look at historical valuations and try to extrapolate from them. And most of the time that is the correct approach. However, right now we are going through major and unpredictable changes in the financial landscape. As a result, "Is this the bottom?" is the wrong question. But you have to read other people like [New York University economics professor Nouriel] Roubini, like [The Black Swan author] Nassim Taleb, and some of the behavioral-finance guys to understand why the question is wrong. The question we should be asking is, In this new world how do the historical variables morph, and what are the unintended consequences of government policy? There's a tendency for everyone to operate in a comfort zone and to want to read what is familiar to them. But if you are just used to following one person or one newspaper, you will miss these big shifts."
For more advice, see the Fortune article.