5 Great Quotes on Selling and Buying, Using and Losing, and Freedom

"If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."
-- Sir Isaac Newton

Now, that is not one of the quotes picked by Rule Breaker Investing host and Motley Fool co-founder David Gardner for Volume 10 of his Great Quotes series, but in a way, it's a meta-quote that explains why he keeps returning to this theme. Thank goodness we don't have to figure everything out on our own! We too can mentally stand on the shoulders of giants such as playwright George Bernard Shaw and Rhode Island founder Roger Williams -- two of his sources in this episode.

And when it comes to investing, Gardner's pretty tall, too, so when he quotes himself, you could do worse than to listen to his counterintuitive advice on the subject.

To catch full episodes of all The Motley Fool's free podcasts, check out our podcast center. A full transcript follows the video.

This video was recorded on June 12, 2019.

David Gardner: The date was October 24th, 2018. Do you remember what you were doing last October? It was a Wednesday. Do you keep a journal? You could look it up. Do you, like me, not keep a journal? Well, in my case, I keep a very well documented electronic calendar, which is a pretty great plan B when you don't keep a journal. My iCal shows me, well, it was a Wednesday. We published this podcast that day. October 24th, 2018, and it was called Great Quotes: Volume 9. The ninth time we came together for me to feature five quotations to reflect on, be challenged or inspired by, and yes, Volume 9, because that was the ninth time.

That's why October 24th, 2018 was special, for me anyway, because it's been more than seven months since we kicked around great quotes. The wait is over. One of my longest-running series gets its newest installment this week on Rule Breaker Investing.

[...]

Hi, I'm David Gardner! So glad you're with me! Rule Breaker Investing. You know, I had lunch earlier, I spoke at a luncheon at the Sulgrave Club here in Washington, D.C. One of the attendees said, "You know, you always start off your podcast by saying 'welcome back.' Have you ever thought about saying something different?" So, there it is. I just went with, "Hi!" That's right, because we never want to get too set in our ways here. We are, after all, Rule Breakers. Once rules start to get set, if things start to firm up a little bit, it's nice to crack the mold. Hi! If that sounds as dorky to you as it did to me, we probably won't be keeping that up on this podcast.

Well, my voice has not fully recovered, I don't think, since last week's Fool Fest Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, at National Harbor across the river in Washington, D.C. We had up to 700 plus Fools flying in from around the country and around the world. I talked a lot. And a lot of my talking was in fact not even in front of the whole audience. It was just over cocktails and discussions with fellow Fools. You sharing your stories with me, just like you do in Mailbag, but it was kind of like Mailbag without the mail or the bag. It was face to face. It was a lot of fun. And I had so much fun that I lost my voice and it's still not back here as we tape Tuesday afternoon, June 11th. I'm delighted that you're with me. I want to say thank you to the many listeners who came up and said hello. Kurt, Fergus, Adash, Luis, Lisa. Thank you for connecting with me for listening and contributing, as you often do to our Mailbags here on Rule Breaker Investing.

Couple of more notes before we get started. One is at that luncheon today, I was sitting next to a Motley Fool member, and she said, "You guys send me a lot of email." And I said, "We do, don't we?" And she said, "And yet, I'm a Motley Fool ONE member, so I shouldn't be getting marketing or advertising for services that I already use and own." And I said, "I'm so sorry that we're doing that." And I said, "Not only do I think I have an answer for you, but I should give that answer through my podcast this afternoon," because it's one of those things that pops up from time to time, and I know we have a lot of members listening.

I want to make sure -- this is a little bit of customer service here from the co-founder. If you do own all of our services as a Motley Fool ONE member, you should not be getting marketing for any of them. If you only own one of our services, let's say Motley Fool Stock Advisor, certainly you probably will get marketing from The Motley Fool, encouraging you, enticing you to join a new service or whatever we've just opened up or are showing off. And for a lot of you, good news is, enough of you click on them and join them that we keep sending those marketing emails. But anybody can always call our Member Services team and have yourself removed from our marketing emails if you're getting too many Motley Fool emails.

But let's go back to that Motley Fool ONE member. That's our highest-level service. It's all you can eat, you get everything. So there shouldn't be any marketing for you if you are a Motley Fool ONE member. But here's what happens, and here's why I'm doing some customer service from my company here. What happens is, over the course of 5 or 10 years of association, often, people will give us more than one email address. They'll have their personal one, and then they'll have their work one, or maybe they change work or they adopted Gmail after AOL. Whatever it is, we may have three, four, or five email addresses that you've given us over the course of 5 or 15 years. We cannot associate one of your email addresses with another. We don't know that the person [email protected] also happens to be [email protected], your work address. We can't associate those. Our database has no ability to do that. So what's happening is, we're giving you The Fool ONE service to your personal email address, let's say; but to your work address, which you also gave us, we don't know that's you, so we send you all of our marketing for everything that we're doing.

I hope that I've helped at least a few of you with this short note know that you can always call Motley Fool Member Services. If you're a member, you will see the phone number right there on your screen. You can give us a call and double-check that we have removed other email addresses for you and are just focused on the one that you want to use. I hope that was helpful. Tsuki, who sat next to me at lunch today, Tsuki, I hope that helps you. I hope that helps anybody else who's hoping to reduce, if you need to or want to, your Motley Fool marketing emails.

All right, well, let's get into it, shall we? "Great Quotes: Volume 10." In the past, we've occasionally themed these. We had an all-Buffett edition; I think somewhere background Volume 4. But this is not themed. I'm just going to be motley, as I often am with this series, and just come up with a variety of considerations about investing and things outside investing to inspire and challenge you. Without further ado, let's get started.

Great quote No. 1. For great quote No. 1, I'm going to hold off telling you who this came from. I'll just give you the quote and let you guess who might have said this. This is not going to be in any great book of quotations. This is just a line I pulled from an article about this person once, something that this person said. You won't find this in Bartlett's or The Penguin Book of Quotations, at least not yet. I quote,

In the very earliest days, I'm taking you back to 1995, when we started posting customer reviews, a customer might trash a book, and the publisher wouldn't like it. I would get letters from publishers saying, "Why do you allow negative reviews on your website? Why don't you just show the positive reviews?" One letter in particular said, "Maybe you don't understand your business. You make money when you sell things."

I bet you've guessed by now, it's Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon. Bezos goes on, "I thought to myself, we don't make money when we sell things. We make money when we help customers make purchase decisions."

I love that line! Why do I love that line? Because what's underneath that is this concept of reframing, which is one of my favorite things to do in business, investing, and life. When the world's looking at something one way, and you flip it and show that you're looking at it in a different way. I'll give a couple of more examples in a second. Bezos right there is reframing what Amazon is about. He's being lectured by book publishers who are getting fewer sales, in some cases, because of bad reviews. "Hey, your job is to sell things." And Jeff said back, "No, we make money when we help customers make purchase decisions." And it is that customer-centric viewpoint that has led to a great business and one of the great 20-plus-year runs on the stock market that you will ever see. So, reframing.

Here's another example. Maybe you know this joke about monks, smoking, and praying. This is a perfectly illustrative example of reframing. The monk approaches the abbot at the monastery. The monk says, "Is it OK if I smoke when I'm praying?" And the answer is, "Of course it is not OK to smoke while you're praying!" So he tells one of his monk friends this, and the monk friend goes back up to the abbot himself and says, "Is it OK if I pray while I'm smoking?" And the answer comes back from the abbot, "Of course it's OK. That's a wonderful thing, to pray while you're smoking." Reframing.

I see this done in business. Conscious capitalism is a wonderful reframing of capitalism in a world that previously thought that the purpose of business was to maximize shareholder value. That was, in the 20th century, the reason for the corporation, the raison d'être, to "maximize" shareholder value. But conscious capital came along and said, "No, it's not about a single stakeholder and just maximizing that stakeholder's value. Enterprises exists for all of their stakeholders." To create wins for not just your shareholders, but of course, for your customers. That's, after all, why most businesses exist in the first place, creating products, services, solutions, for customers.

You're also there, another key stakeholder, you see them every day, with your employees. And then of course, you've got your partners and your suppliers. You might have the community, if you're a local community business. Maybe you have the environment in your mind. The environment might care about your business. There are a lot of stakeholders that surround enterprises. The mental picture I have is that they're all joined hands, and in the middle is this corporation, and they're trying to lift it up and say, "Create a win for all of us." That is capitalism done right. That's that stakeholder orientation, the second principle of conscious capitalism. There are four. If you don't know them, you can just google it. But that's No. 2. It's my favorite. And that is a reframing how to think about capitalism and about businesses. The ones that get it, that solved for all their stakeholders, not just arbitrarily one of them, to max it out for that one group, the ones that do it for all, are much more successful, and you and are typically invested in them. They're the Rule Breaker stock picks that I make in Rule Breakers and Stock Advisor. Not every company is perfect, and not every company that does this is a real exemplar. But the best ones really are. Reframing.

Before we go to our next quote, Rule Breaker Investing in a lot of ways is a reframing of how people thought about investing in the past. Here's a good example. Sometimes I think, in a world that was trying to find a great valuation, I decided, "Let's find great businesses." You have a lot of people walking around looking for the right P/E ratio or the right balance sheet item that they're using a screening tool to screen the market for. They're looking for valuation metrics. That, for a lot of them, was what traditionally, from Benjamin Graham going forward, what they cared about, what they were searching for most of all. "Just give me a good valuation, and I'll buy any business," goes that line of thinking.

But I've done really well, and I hope you have, too, if you're listening and following me, we've done really well by finding not great valuations but great businesses. After all, valuations are pretty temporary. They change from one month or quarter to the next. Great businesses do not. In particular, if you and I are going to buy these companies to hold them for at least three years, if not three decades, you're really buying a business, aren't you? Far more than a valuation? So, reframing. In a world where people were looking for great valuations, we've been looking for great businesses.

Thank you, Jeff Bezos, with great quote No. 1, for teaching and illustrating how to reframe and the value that comes from that. In a world where people thought you were making money selling things, you were actually making money by helping customers make their purchase decisions. The power of online reviews, from the earliest days.

Great quotation No. 2. This one comes from George Bernard Shaw. I bet you might have heard this one before. It's one of those, I feel like I've heard it 8 or 10 times. But each time I rehear it maybe every year or two, I think that is a great quote. This is from his play Man and Superman, and I was reviewing my notes, how did I come across this one and save it as I do, the quotations that I save to Evernote, which is where I store a lot of my documents and my thinking over the course of my life. I have my whole life, really, on Evernote over the last 10 years. Thousands and thousands of notes and notebooks. And this one was in fact sent to me after the death of my mother in 2008. It was by one of our board members. Just reminded me some of the perspective about what a great life is, what it sounds or feels like. So here it is. George Bernard Shaw.

This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one, the being a force of nature, instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community, and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch, which I've got held up for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

After sharing the Bezos quote, I thought I want to explain a little bit more around that, lay some scaffolding around reframing, give some examples. For the Bernard Shaw quote on living a great life, we're just going to leave that one right there. There is a wonderful little tool on most of our podcast players, and it's the rewind it 15 seconds or 30 seconds. Feel free to take that one in a second time, or save it for another day.

All right, great quotation No. 3. This will be the fourth time in 10 volumes that I've included myself in one of the quotes. I'm not trying to suggest this is a great quote. In fact, I don't think this is a particularly great quote. But it is a platform for me to talk about how to invest better. Here's the quote, great quote No. 3.

Dips buy on dips.

I'm not going to say you are a dip if you bought on a dip. But I will say, it's pretty dippy to base your investment process and strategy around waiting for stocks to drop and then deciding to buy them. I think there's a psychological safety to that. You think, "Well, it was at $60 a couple of weeks ago. Now it's at $52. That feels better." The problem is, some of the great stocks, some of the great Rule Breakers, don't really dip that much. People who are waiting for dips end up looking pretty dippy when stocks don't dip.

I was reminded of this; I first wrote about this more than a decade ago. I'm going to share part of that essay right now, just to lay down some more dippy language around this to support my radical contention that dips buy on dips. I'm sorry, if you are somebody who buys on dips, that you might feel personally insulted by this. This will only be brief, then we'll forget and be best friends again. Here's how that essay, some years ago, started. It said,

"Dear fellow Fools, do you buy on dips? Many investors do, but let me explain why I don't. For starters, some of our stocks never really dip, or at least not for long. If you follow the logic, you're going to see that these are often our best performers, because after all, they never dipped, right? Which means that if you're sitting back waiting for the dip, you're going to miss the sizzle. I prefer sizzle to dip."

That essay continued,

Look at our three best Rule Breaker picks so far this year. Of the three, two have dipped, but only briefly, and only from well higher than where they were picked. One stock went from $90 to $80 in a two-week period in July. Another fell from $60 to $52 for a few days in early November. So if you're a dippy investor, I won't call you a dip, looking to dip your way into the Rule Breakers scorecard, you may not have bought our three best picks this year unless you were particularly lucky or adept, acting in a narrow window of a week or two.

Let me say that again. If you insisted on buying on dips, you very likely didn't buy any of our three best stocks this year. Even if you did buy that first stock at $80 when it dipped from $90, guess what? Our cost basis was $60 anyway, meaning it was already up 33% once you'd perfectly timed your dip. In the meantime, that stock that dipped from $60 to $52, when you snapped it up right there at $52, our costs basis was $31 for that stock. Again, it was still up to 67% from what we'd first paid for it when you perfectly timed your dip, you dip.

I'm sorry, did I just call you a dip? I apologize!

By contrast, our three worst selections that year offered investors numerous dips on their ways to 30% to 40% declines. Thus, the dippy investor who looks for dips as precursors to buying has now established positions, perhaps multiple positions, in our three worst-performing stocks.

This is how sometimes, people join Rule Breakers or Stock Advisor with their wonderful winning scorecards, but they wind up losing money and then canceling their memberships. "It's not for me," they say, after missing all the winners and buying all the losers. Dips! OK, I'll stop. But let me close with a solution.

How do I suggest approaching Rule Breakers, or even just investing in general? Make a commitment to the companies that you want to own, not the stocks that you're going to buy on dips. Be an investor, not a share price guesser. Once you've committed to plunking down an investment in any of our stocks, buy it all right then, which is what I usually do; or, if you like, buy in thirds. But if you're going to buy in thirds, where you divide up your money into three thirds, and with one of those thirds, you put it in now, and the others down the line; if you're going to buy in thirds, please do it based on time, not share price moves. Tell yourself, "I'm going to establish a full position in this stock over, let's say, the next quarter. I'll buy on the 15th of each of the next three months." If you want to own many of our best stocks, this is the surest way. You're going to end up an Intuitive Surgical investor instead of just a dippy Intuitive Surgical watcher.

I realize it's an extreme position. I don't like to call my fellow Fools dips, but I do think it's pretty dippy behavior. Part of why The Motley Fool exists is to challenge the conventional wisdom. I think there is conventional wisdom out there that the proper way to time your way into a stock or the market is to wait for a dip. But in a world in which the market typically rises on average around 10% a year and doubles every seven years or so, and that's just the market averages, it doesn't make a lot of sense to me to be sitting there, being the person waiting for the dip.

All right, great quote No. 4. This one is hundreds of years old. But part of the reason I love this sentiment, and also the person who came up with it, is this was a man who was thinking well ahead of his time. Some of you may remember Roger Williams. Roger Williams did found the colony of Rhode Island, history will show. He'd been booted out by the pilgrims in Plymouth. He'd had to leave Massachusetts and start his own separatist area. He started Rhode Island. This is a guy who was born in Great Britain, in England. He knew some of the great minds of his time. For example, he knew Francis Bacon back in England. He studied under Sir Edward Coke, the great English jurist or the British father of law. He tutored John Milton, in Dutch. He also tutored John Milton, if you can believe this, in some of the American Indian languages of the time.

But what makes William such an interesting figure for us today is that he had two primary areas of thought where he innovated. One was the separation of church and state. Centuries ago, both in America, Puritan America, and in England, there wasn't that separation. And he felt very strongly that we needed to keep those things separate, and that has profoundly influenced America ever since, although it remains a debate we still have in some ways today.

His second big area of focus was a separation of the individual's rights vs. the state's rights. What are you allowed to do? For example, Sir Edward Coke, whom he studied under, said an Englishman's home is his castle. That concept that your property that you live on, you can do what you want on your property. Not everybody felt that way back then. Some of these key themes that keep coming back, even in modern-day politics today in America. The separation of church and state and the separation of an individual's rights vs. what the state can ask of him or her. These are very au courant, but Williams was ahead of his time.

In fact, before I get to the quote, I'll mention he was one of the first abolitionists. He got Rhode Island with its own law against slavery in the mid-1600s. Even though later, Rhode Island would ignore that law -- slave trading and slave ownership certainly happened in Rhode Island. In fact, Brown University was started by a family that was indulging in slave trading. But Roger Williams set things up at the beginning so that there was a law against slavery. One of the first abolitionists. Also, a man who had to survive on his own in harsh winters when he was expelled from Massachusetts, so he got to know the American Indians around him at the time and became the first one to write up a book about the Narragansett Indians and their language. This is a really interesting person.

Why do I know so much about Roger Williams? Because John M. Barry wrote an outstanding book a few years ago called Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul. I had the pleasure of meeting John Barry at my book club. He came and appeared after our club read the book. So I learned more about Roger Williams. If Roger Williams was just a footnote that you remembered from fifth grade, when you studied the pilgrims and found out about how Rhode Island started -- or, I know I have some Rhode Island listeners, Brian Feroldi, you all probably know the founding father of your state better than I do. He was a remarkable man.

This is the quote that I've queued up to share. It's different from the others. We're going a different direction here with great quote No. 4. He's talking about freedom that you and I have, and he calls it, the term they were using back then is "the liberty of conscience." Do you have the liberty to do and say and think what you want to? From the book Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul, I quote, "He said he had always 'disclaimed and abhorred' any interpretation of his views which suggested that liberty of conscience led to anarchy. To explain himself, Williams used an analogy." Here comes the great quote. There's a little bit of storytelling here, so settle in.

There goes many a ship to sea, with many a hundred souls in one ship. A true picture of a commonwealth, or a human combination, or society. Papists and Protestants, Jews and Turks, may be embarked into one ship. All the liberty of conscience that ever I pleaded for turns upon these two hinges: that none of the Papists, Protestants, Jews, or Turks be forced to come to the ship's prayers or worship; nor, secondly, compelled from their own particular prayers or worship. I never denied that, notwithstanding this liberty, the commander of this ship ought to command the ship's course, yea, and also, if any seamen refused to perform their service, or passengers to pay their freight, if any refused to obey the common laws and orders of the ship, concerning their common peace and preservation, if any shall preach or write that there ought to be no commanders nor officers because all are equal in Christ, therefore no masters nor officers, no laws nor orders, no corrections nor punishments, I say I never denied. But in such cases, the commander or commanders may judge, resist, compel, and punish such transgressors.

I can't lay out the full context for that, but I hope you enjoyed right a little bit the language that they were rocking back in the 1600s. What you saw there is Williams describing a ship where we're all from different places. And none of us should be compelled, in this case, to have to observe or worship the same as anybody else. This was such a radical notion. To think that Williams himself started Rhode Island and in many ways was the first American. In fact, Barry's book ends -- spoiler alert here, these just the last couple of lines of this book -- "Decades earlier, he had told his countryman John Winthrop, 'I have not yet turned Indian,'" because there were concerns about how much time he was spending with the Indians.

But the author goes on to say he still was not at the end of his life, but neither was he any more English. He was an American. So, in a lot of ways, that sentiment that Williams had and possessed, and in some ways died for, dedicated his life to, it's really at the heart of the founding of our country. It's about what are your rights vs. mine, and it's a conversation that'll continue. But if you didn't already know Roger Williams, or you could appreciate that quote, just think about that big ship that we're all on together as we go out to sea, and what are our responsibilities and what are not. I think it's really helpful and instructive here in the year 2019.

All right, great quote, No. 5. I have to mention to you one of my favorite new websites. Occasionally I'll rock out one of my top 100 websites. This one, I'm going to say, falls somewhere in the 60s. It's quoteinvestigator.com. If you're doing Great Quotations: Volume 10, and you've done nine previous volumes, you probably care about quotations. If you do care about quotations, you should care to know whether they were actually said by people. Quoteinvestigator.com is a wonderful site that I use to figure out, did this person actually say this? I've been asking that question at different points in this podcast for the last few years. Only recently did I discover that there's an entire website dedicated to getting to the source, the actual, real, non-fake-news source, for every one of these great quotes. Sometimes it turns out they said it, and sometimes they didn't.

Before referring to quoteinvestigator.com this week, I would have told you that Winston Churchill said great quote No. 5. As it turns out, not only did he not say this, nor did Abraham Lincoln, to whom this is also attributed, nor anybody else. We really can't figure out who first said great quote No. 5, one of my favorite quotes.

Great quote No. 5. Not by Churchill, not by Lincoln. You know it, you love it, here it goes.

Success is going from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.

In fact, I use that quotation on a regular basis when welcoming new Fools to our offices. New employees, when we have coffee together, I ask them, "What's your superhero power? You obviously have at least one, you got hired by our company. So share it with us." We go around the table, what your superhero power is. Whenever it comes to me, I always share mine.

Mine is the ability to lose, and lose constantly. I'm amazingly good at losing. Most of the board games that I play, even though I'm teaching people the rules, they then beat me at the game. People assume, since I have hundreds of board games, that I must be really great at them, that's why I have so many games. Not really. I'm actually not that good at games, I just love them. People would also assume, since I help run Motley Fool Stock Advisor and Motley Fool Rule Breakers, clearly, I must be winning all the time out there in the stock market. You, dear listener, if you've been with me for any measurable amount of time, you already know that I lose constantly. In fact, I have more bad losers than any advisor or analyst in Motley Fool history. As I've often said, I have more bad losers, just flat-out more losers, than anybody else, and more bad losers -- stocks that drop 50% or more.

And yet, that leads to a little conversation about losing to win. I won't bore you with that now near the end of this podcast. But for me, the process of losing is necessary in order to win. When I pick stocks, I take risks on purpose. I've always said the greatest, least mentioned risk of all in investing is not taking enough risk. I think most people don't take enough risk. Sometimes, arguably, I take too much risk, and I lose more than anybody I know, which is why I've always loved what I thought was Churchill's line about stumbling from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.

In fact, if you're going to be a superhero at losing, you'd darn well better count it up. Let's take a quick look live at The Motley Fool Rule Breakers scorecard as I tape here on Tuesday afternoon. Counting down, I have -- and this is a shocking statistic. Before I give it to you, let me mention that I picked two stocks on behalf of my team and myself, two stocks every single month, since October of 2004. That's 24 stocks a year, times about 15 years. We're talking about 350 or so stock picks in the history of Motley Fool Rule Breakers. Here's a shocking statistic.

About one-sixth of those are down 50% or more each. Literally 58 of those stock picks have lost between 50% and 98%. We've never had one lose 100%. But 58 times in the history of those monthly stock picks, we have literally lost 50% or more, which sounds horrible. Every single one of them I believed in at the time. I thought, "Sure, I'm going to pick this. I'm ready for new members to buy this, and old members and anybody who wants this, because I believe in this company. We're going to take some risk; we're going to be willing to lose." We've always said that as Rule Breakers. And it's happened 58 times that we've lost 50% or more of our money.

But, even given that, not only has Rule Breakers whomped the market averages over its 15-year history, but I'm not sure there are any other services in the world that are even close -- with the exception, maybe, of Motley Fool Stock Advisor. But here's the beautiful statistics: 58 stocks losing 50% or more of their value. Winston Churchill. But 58th-best pick, the 58th-best pick, is up 294%. That's the 58th-best pick. We've had 57 do better than that. The very best pick so far for Rule Breakers has been MercadoLibre, which is up 4,263%. If you multiply all those 58 losers, their losses get wiped out by that one stock. And we still have 57 below it that are all multiple times in values. Seventeen 10-baggers, etc.

That's why I think that my superhero power is the ability to lose and look like a small fool, look silly, airball from the free throw line when you thought I was a professional, on a regular basis. The secret here, as Rule Breakers, is that we lose to win.

So, yes, even if Winston Churchill never said it and Abraham Lincoln never said it -- you can look it up on quoteinvestigator.com, there is no evidence that either of these gentlemen ever said it -- my secret to success is stumbling from failure to failure without losing my enthusiasm. There's something in there about resilience, too, but I think you get that, fellow Rule Breaker.

All right, well, if you haven't already, please subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Spotify, or Google Play. You can follow us on Twitter at @RBIPodcast. Follow me on Twitter if you like, I'm @DavidGFool. Finally, I hope you'll give us a review. Throw me some stars. Let us know how we're doing. I read every comment, whether we win, whether we lose.

Next week, yep, it's that time of the quarter, one of my favorite weeks for Rule Breaker Investing, because it's The Market Cap Game Show. Begin boning up, memorize your market caps, know your stocks.

I have an announcement to make: Emily Flippen, who in the past few Market Cap Game Shows has rocked it, will be abroad. Therefore, we will be bringing in some fresh blood for The Market Cap Game Show next week. Now, if anybody has any connections into the now dearly departed Jeopardy champion James Holzhauer, we'd be happy to feature James in The Market Cap Game Show, if you want it to play next week. Have him email me. [email protected], of course, is my email address. In fact, right around the April Fool's Day Jeopardy show, you may remember James answered correctly, "What is The Motley Fool?" James, you have a special Motley Fool connection. James, we'd love to have you on! Failing James, though, we'll have one of our talented Motley Fool analysts here to play the game against you. See you next week! Fool on!

As always, people on this program may have interest in the stocks they talk about, and The Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against, so don't buy or sell stocks based solely on what you hear. Learn more about Rule Breaker Investing at rbi.fool.com.