Howard Marks

But I think also very importantly,

We look for team players.

We look for people who can work and exchange ideas and can do well with ideas from their peers, from their lessors, from their superiors, managers, subordinates, and throw it all together.

We don't want the lone wolf.

We don't want the you eat what you kill kind of person.

And we don't pay people on the basis of their one year's quantitative performance as an individual.

And we don't want people to work that way.

You know, my last memo came out a couple of weeks ago was called I Beg to Differ.

And it was all about the need to be different.

And it's exactly what you're saying.

The path to exceptionality cannot come through doing what everybody else does.

And

The advantage of the things we do, especially Andrew does, that we've been discussing, is the fact that there is no clear roadmap.

There's no simple algorithm which will produce a consistently correct outcome.

But we are dealing with challenging concepts here.

And the person who sees differently and better...

is the one who's going to win.

And David Swenson, who ran the endowment at Yale, used to talk about the need to do things that are uncomfortably idiosyncratic.

You have to be idiosyncratic to split tax and to win.

And for many people, it'll be uncomfortable because they'll be out of step with so-called common sense, but you got to do it anyway.