Mojo’s Laws

Mojo’s Laws

The following are the laws that I hold true.  These laws were won from hard fought and often expensive lessons from the field of battle in both business and investing. 

1. Always have an unfair advantage.  Never compete on a level playing field in business because the other guy may be more willing to sacrifice his health, wealth, and family to beat you. 

2. Play into your strengths.  Each of us has many strengths and many weaknesses, recognize yours and focus on your strengths.  Hire others to compensate for your weaknesses and let them do their job.

3. Don’t try to teach a pig to sing. It only upsets the pig and irritates the neighbors.  This is about accepting people for who they are and also for who they aren’t.  Keep yourself and your people focused in their strengths and make room for them to be themselves.

4. As an investor your primary job is to not lose money. Always be managing your risk and working to preserve your capital.  Investing isn’t just about risk vs. reward.  It’s about risk vs. reward plus probability of success.  If you only focus on risk vs. reward you would never invest in anything other than a lottery ticket, where you would risk $1 to make $83,000,000. 

5. As an investor your secondary job is to make money.  No investment is completely safe.  Once you have done all you can to conduct your diligence, follow your investing rules, mitigate your risk and then pull the trigger.  Speed is of the essence.

6. Pigs get fed and hogs get slaughtered. Don’t be greedy.  This is a good southernism that cautions you to not be too greedy in setting a deal or a contract.  Even if the other side accepts the terms, they’ll feel taken advantage of and it’s unlikely they’ll be doing deals with you again in the future.

7. If you find yourself ‘hoping’ with an investment, get out. Hope is for suckers.

8. Bad news does not get better with age.

9. Control what you can and mitigate everything else.  We often operate under a much larger illusion of control than what really exists.  Understand this, appreciate it, and use it in business.

10. Rich or Right.  By rich, I mean rich in joy, laughter, health, relationships, time, and money.  Life gives us many opportunities to be rich or right.  Say for instance choosing between continuing an argument with your best friend so that you can be “right” instead of giving way and allowing the other person to be “right” so that you can maintain the richness of the relationship.  This is HUGE!

11. Don’t confuse motion with progress.  A lot of us get caught up in this one.  Just because you are moving and making effort doesn’t mean you are getting anything done.  Set specific and measurable goals each year, each quarter, each month, each week, and each day.  At the end ask yourself “Did I finish this?” 

12. There’s a huge gap between knowing and doing. I’ve known how to lose weight for most of my life but just knowing it didn’t help until I started doing it. Don’t confuse knowing and doing, they are miles apart.

13. You know that you’ve completed your past when your past and your future are completely incongruent.  Most people spend the majority of their lives simply repeating their past.  For instance, if you were born into a poor, under educated and dysfunctional family you will likely create that same situation for yourself and your family.  Once you’ve completed your past (that is, recognized that your past is your past and that it no longer has to define who you are) then you are free to construct whatever future you chose.

14. Always be learning. Have an insatiable quest for lifetime learning.

15. Presumption of success. Have an irrational certainty of success.

16. Live into your expectations.  Life, people, and places tend to live into your expectations.  If you think that going to your in-laws for the holidays will be horrible, it probably will.  If you think going out with your buddies will be great it probably will.  Neither your in-laws nor buddies generate these results.  Your expectations do.

17. Everyday become a little faster, a little smarter, a little better.

18. It’s better to fail quickly than to succeed slowly.

19. Anytime you can learn and earn, you are doing very well.

20. Half results mean nothing.  Real life gives you no credit for trying.  This is not grade school, stop looking for gold stars for trying to get something done.  Either do or don’t.  There is no try.

21. Hope for the best and plan for the worst.

22. 30% getting in and 70% getting out.  Most traders spend 90% of their time trying to perfect the entry.  Don’t.  The magic isn’t in the entry, it’s in the management and exit.  Spend no more than 30% of your time looking for trades and no less than 70% of your time defending / exiting your trades.

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