Page 82 - Morgan Housel - The Psychology of Money_ Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness-Harriman House Limited (2020)

Peter Lynch is one of the best investors of our time. “If you’re terrific in this
business, you’re right six times out of 10,” he once said.
COBACOBA

There are fields where you must be perfect every time. Flying a plane, for
example. Then there are fields where you want to be at least pretty good
nearly all the time. A restaurant chef, let’s say.

Investing, business, and finance are just not like these fields.

Something I’ve learned from both investors and entrepreneurs is that no one

makes good decisions all the time. The most impressive people are packed
full of horrendous ideas that are often acted upon.

Take Amazon. It’s not intuitive to think a failed product launch at a major
company would be normal and fine. Intuitively, you’d think the CEO should
apologize to shareholders. But CEO Jeff Bezos said shortly after the
disastrous launch of the company’s Fire Phone:

If you think that’s a big failure, we’re working on much bigger failures right
now. I am not kidding. Some of them are going to make the Fire Phone look
like a tiny little blip.

It’s OK for Amazon to lose a lot of money on the Fire Phone because it will
be offset by something like Amazon Web Services that earns tens of billions
of dollars. Tails to the rescue.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings once announced his company was canceling
several big-budget productions. He responded:

Our hit ratio is way too high right now. I’m always pushing the content team.
We have to take more risk. You have to try more crazy things, because we
should have a higher cancel rate overall.