Long-Term Performance Quotes

If CEO compensation was performance-driven, which I believe it was in IBM's case, nobody would ever argue. If the shareholders didn't make billions and billions of dollars, I wouldn't make millions of dollars. My salary was the same for 10 years. It was all performance-based.

I think over any period of time, especially if you don't use leverage, it is difficult to continually beat the S&P 500.

If you want better behavior from bankers, then make their financial incentives more like those in the hedge-fund world - where managers have 'skin in the game,' and their net worth is tied to their long-term performance.

You may reasonably expect a man to walk a tightrope safely for ten minutes; it would be unreasonable to do so without accident for two hundred years.

For 30 years, I've produced results for people.

Arsene Wenger is just an unbelievable manager. I think he's a tremendous person, and he is just as good as there is. You can't judge a manager on one game or on one stretch of games. You judge him over time.

The fundamental basis of above-average performance in the long run is sustainable competitive advantage.

... skepticism about past returns is crucial. The truth is, much as you may wish you could know which funds will be hot, you can't - and neither can the legions of advisers and publications that claim they can. That's why building a portfolio around index funds isn't really settling for average. It's just refusing to believe in magic.

It's fun to play around... it's human nature to try to select the right horse... But for the average person, I'm more of an indexer... The predictability is so high... For 10, 15, 20 years you'll be in the 85th percentile of performance. Why would you screw it up?

Size will hurt returns. Look at Berkshire Hathaway - the last five things Warren has done have generated returns that are splendid by historical standards, but now give him $100 billion in assets and measure outcomes across all of it, it doesn't look so good. We can only buy big positions, and the only time we can get big positions is during a horrible period of decline or stasis. That really doesn't happen very often.

My wife was an opera singer, you know. She bellowed her way through Wagner as a Valkyrie. I married her and made her give up the theatre, to my eternal cost. She was to go on acting for myself alone. A performance at his own expense, lasting for more than twenty years, tends to wear out your spectator.

Put the right pitching mechanics together with good health, and there's nothing surprising about lasting a long time.

In business, no one pays you to have a really good year and then 10 bad years.

If you want to say I was a disaster of a player, then say it. But give me another disaster of a player who played almost 500 games across 14 years.

If you see your company culture as a family, you don't want to fire someone just because their short-term performance is not good. If you do, even the people on your team who are excellent performers will look at what's going on and say, 'Someday you might fire me too.' You'll lose everyone's trust.

I used to take acting so seriously, but after we did the Quest pilot and the show sold, Kurt Russel said, "You know, you work too hard. You'll make yourself sick. You can't work that hard doing a series, because it goes on so long. It's like a baseball season. You've got 162 games. You can't just go all-out the first week or two. You can't maintain that pace." And it's true.

Having done a lot of theater, I'm used to sustaining characters over long periods of time.

Trying to pick individual stocks is a trap. I can't do it. Warren Buffett can, but hardly anyone else can beat the indexes over a long period of time.

The rankings show the players playing the best and most consistent for 12 months.

In those one-off games, everyone can do those, but you put together a six, seven-game tournament, the strong survive. For me to still feel good from beginning to end, that's a testament to how I train and what I do.

Driving stock up from one day to the next is not what we are about. We are about building a good company and performing for the long term. I know everyone says that, that sounds trite when I repeat it that way, but that is and has always been our attitude about our business. If we do the right things, the stock price will take care of itself, and our shareholders will be rewarded.

I tend to lose my performance energy the longer things go on for, so I'm always best on the very first take.

There's a lot of guys that are able to perform for a short period of time. It could be a week, it could be a month, it could be two months, it could be one season. It's doing it over and over. And being consistent was something that watching Patrick Roy all these years, that's what he was. He never had down years.

We were required to predict a soldier's performance in officer training and in combat, but we did so by evaluating his behavior over one hour in an artificial situation. This was a perfect instance of a general rule that I call WYSIATI, "What you see is all there is." We had made up a story from the little we knew but had no way to allow for what we did not know about the individual's future, which was almost everything that would actually matter. When you know as little as we did, you should not make extreme predictions like "He will be a star."

After so many surgeries, I had to modify my game. I know what I can and can't do in order to keep performing for a long period of time.