As for me, I want to help people help people; to invest my time, treasure, and talents into others so that they might realize who they might become or what they could offer the world.

In this way, I view investing as no more than the allocation of assets in order to help people. Whether capital or compassion, belief or bullion, I have found that any genuine investment in another human being pays the handsomest dividends.

[E]ach discipline entwines with, and in the process strengthens, every other. From each discipline, the thoughtful person draws significant mental models, the key ideas that combine to produce a cohesive understanding. Those who cultivate this broad view are well on their way to achieving worldly wisdom.

To me, prudent investment lies upstream of economic growth. It serves as the seeds, the sunlight, the water, and the careful cultivation that bears a bountiful future harvest. With it, abundance and cornucopia; without it, drought and famine.

The history of economic growth indicates that…growth alleviates misery, improves happiness and opportunity, and lengthens lives. Wealthier societies have better living standards, better medicines, and offer greater personal autonomy, greater fulfillment, and more sources of fun.

Robert E. Lucas, Nobel Laureate in Economics, put the point succinctly: “Once one starts to think about [exponential] growth, it is hard to think about anything else.”

New ideas are the product of human reason; it was Aristotle who defined man as the rational animal.

We do have an obligation to work hard, save, invest, and fulfill our human potential, and we should take these obligations very seriously.

Identifying a hypothesis about how the world works.

Tapping capital in order to fund the testing of said hypothesis and to generate the data indicates the likelihood of its inevitability.

Replicating the experiment at increasing scale, so as to lower the margin of error underlying the solution to your hypothesis.

If you are playing in the right sandboxes, fishing in the clear blue oceans, you need not worry about being “late” to a market, asset, trend. By positioning yourself around the proper people, places, and things, you catch wind of those trends that are just getting started.

What is the product’s absolute value? Can you quantify—in dollars—the potential of Return on Investment?

What is its relative value? Is this solution incrementally better or dramatically better than what’s out there?

How much did the market spend to solve your problem last year? If you are much better (or cheaper while maintaining equal efficacy) than the existing mousetrap, you have the ability to capture that sum of money.

What is your moat? How is it defensible? It is important to note that not all moats are created equally.