Markel's Tom Gayner: The Difference Between Bluster and Real Success

Absolutely, and I think there are several key points to keep in mind there. One, I think a sense of humor is a sign of intelligence because it shows that you're able to look at something and think about it from a different point of view or see the absurdity in things. Boy, if you don't have that, life will beat you down because there are just so many things that you encounter in life that are just absurd. Absurd that, for me anyway, having a sense of humor is a way of reframing things and laughing. It is an aspect of humility and not taking yourself too seriously because if you take yourself too seriously, that can easily slip over into thinking you're right. And if you think you're right, you know, then you're setting yourself up for a fall. Can't remember if this was Mark Twain or Will Rogers said something, it's not the things that you don't know, it's the things that you know that aren't so that get you in trouble. So, a sense of humor acts as a brake on that sort of thing, and that's important. And then the last thing, humor/fun, and again, these are words that they're not the same words, but they sort of touch one another and have some overlap. So, I wrote about Cal Ripken in the annual report this year, and I had the great pleasure of seeing him give a talk quite recently. And in the context of his talk and the questions that people asked as to how that streak came to be, one of the things he talked about was that as he was a rookie or in his first or second or third year, and he would talk to some of the older players on the club who had been there, they made a special point of sort of acknowledging that they were at the end of their career or had just finished, and it was so much fun that they had forgotten how to have some of the joy that they should have had while playing the game. So, that was one of the things that kept Cal Ripken motivated and dedicated to showing up every single day and continuing to play is that he knew it was not going to last forever. So, as a consequence, that helped him frame it in such a way that he appreciated each day at the ballpark. That's joy.

I think that's correct and really one of the ways you could frame that or think about it is for me it is a force multiplier. Because if the contest and the task is going to be how high you can jump or how quickly you can process something, I'm not going to win those contests. There's somebody better, faster, quicker at those sorts of that almost any task you can imagine. But that ability to persist and endure and stay with it, it magnifies the power of whatever aspect you're talking about. The other thing that I think is relevant and I think this is a valuable tool for anybody. The idea of writing what I wrote about Cal Ripken, I don't think you need to be a trained doctorate level psychiatrist to understand I'm probably writing that as an admonition/prescription for myself. So those letters that I write, sure there's an audience, but the most important audience for what I write is me. I'm talking to myself in so much of what I write and it helps me clarify my thinking and think about what I want to be and who your heroes are. Buffett and Munger talk about choosing heroes, selectively, all those things just go into the soup of how it all fits together.