No matter how smart you are, if you don’t exchange values, you’ll starve to death. For one thing, being self-sufficient enables survival, but self-sufficiency is only possible if you have your own assets and can borrow from others. However, even with existing assets, one can only survive through minimal labor and effort, which means engaging in productive activities. Thus, having great intelligence and applying that intelligence to productive activities are two different things. Even if you aren’t brilliant, you can survive if you are productive. It’s essential to identify the productive activities in which I excel and those where I need improvement. If I understand that, I must act without looking back. - Joseph’s “just my thoughts”
Let’s think about it this way. If you run a business and only make one transaction per day, chances are you won’t keep a record of those transactions because you can remember them. However, if there are hundreds of transactions in a year, or even in a single day, will you be able to remember all those transactions? A business makes a profit, but do you know how much you have earned or how much you’ve lost? After all, if we don’t keep the books, we can’t know the profit or loss. Those book records are called financial statements (balance sheets). You can do business without reading and understanding financial statements, but you’re just doing the hard-working, foolish thing without knowing the real content of the business. - Joseph’s “just my thoughts”