Great Quotes, Vol. 22: A Nation Forever Young

In this episode of Motley Fool Rule Breaker Investing, Motley Fool co-founder David Gardner examines five quotations, five conversations, and perhaps one or two ideas that will quietly change the way you see investing, business, and life. He also explores:

• Why the best investors first become students of themselves
• Why human minds work better when they’re surrounded by rich ideas
• Why business is one of humanity’s great engines for creating value
• Why prosperity may make societies not just wealthier but wiser
• Why one vision of America argues that a nation’s greatest competitive advantage isn’t its geography or its resources, but its ability to continually renew itself.

To catch full episodes of all The Motley Fool's free podcasts, check out our podcast center. When you're ready to invest, check out this top 10 list of stocks to buy.

A full transcript is below.

This podcast was recorded on July 8, 2026.

David Gardner: Recurring series have long been a staple of Rule Breaker Investing, inspired years ago by stuff like David Letterman's Top Ten Lists and Saturday Night Live's Weekend Update. One of my favorites is Great Quotes. Sometimes I theme these episodes, Shakespeare or Buffett or Entrepreneurs. Sometimes we simply gather together five quotations that have recently stopped me in my tracks, and that's today's episode. Five great quotes from remarkable thinkers, five ideas that I hope will make us all a little smarter, happier, and richer. Only on this week's Rule Breaker Investing.

Welcome back to Rule Breaker Investing. A delight to be with you here. Still, I would say here in the northern hemisphere, we're right in the dead middle of summer. I realize summer, according to the meteorologists, starts on June 1, and according to the astronomers, it starts on June 21 or so, but right here on July 7, it feels peak times anyway. For me, I hope you're having a nice summer, or if you're one of our Southern cousins, I hope you're having a delightful winter. This is Great Quotes Volume 22.

Before I start, I want to mention I really enjoyed being on someone else's podcast in the past week. If you want to hear me talk, not on Rule Breaker Investing and not necessarily always about Rule Breaker investing, but I got to join with host Caleb Silver and his wonderful podcast The Investopedia Express. That was a lot of fun. Breaking investing rules with the ultimate Fool, he called it. If you don't get enough of me on this week's podcast, I hope you'll enjoy my conversation with Caleb Silver, who, as I tweeted out, is a real pro, and that was a fun conversation.

Well, this is going to be fun, too. I'm getting to share with you five quotes that I've cued up over the course of the last months and year or so. I make a real point of making lists as I go through life. I use Evernote primarily for my list, but I'll just come across something, and I'll be, Oh, I'm going to put that up on the list, and it'll be a great quote. Then, eventually, the list gets big enough, I decide it’s time to do a great quotes episode, and that’s where we are this week. I have, per the history of this podcast series, generally, I've presented five over and over. This is Volume 22, 11 years in. We do this about twice a year. This is my most recent volume. Of course, every time I do a quote, one of the five, it's always never been done before. I'm always trying to bring you new material. I would get bored if I were rehashing material. Of course, there are themes that I rehash over and over. I'll probably do that some this week. I can't help it, because when you zoom out one level, all information just becomes categorized and slotted in my mind into the various ways that can be used to help you and to help me. Themes will recur, but individual nuggets. Well, each, I hope is its own little piece of gold.

Let's get started with Great Quote No. 1. This from a book I talk about a lot. It's Warren Bennis' book On Becoming A Leader. Warren Bennis my favorite writer on the topic of leadership. I've only read about a book and a half by him. He wrote a lot of books and a lot of essays, and he was a great thinker on leadership. This is maybe my single favorite Bennis quote because early on in his book, he’s talking about self-knowledge and how we’re all on a quest our whole lives long for self-knowledge. I don't remember whether he mentions this, but I believe it's true of the Greek Oracle at Delphi in ancient Greece. It was scrawled on the side of the Greek Oracle at Delphi [inaudible] graffiti, Know Thyself. Of course, it was written in Greek, but Know Thyself, a lifelong quest for all of us. Taking that up, Bennis presents his four lessons of self-knowledge. They're brief. I've packed them all into a single great quotation. Here we go, No. 1, Warren Bennis. Quote the four lessons of self-knowledge, they are one. You are your own best teacher. Two, accept responsibility. Blame no one. Three, you can learn anything you want to learn. Four, true understanding comes from reflecting on your experience.

Well, I could light up a whole podcast on any one of those because each is so true and so profoundly true and worth thinking about. I'll be giving it short shrift here as I glide by with a few thoughts on quotation Number 1. The first one naturally, for me, goes to investing because that's the real heart and soul of this podcast and always will be. I just think about self-knowledge preceding. Investing. To me, as an investor, I'm reading Bennis' quote. It's really a quote about becoming an investor. Accept responsibility.

Lesson No. 2, blame no one, Bennis writes, and that makes me think about people that I've met before who blame the Fed, or they blame short sellers. They might even blame CNBC. Or just the market overall. You can almost hear echoes of that blame in so many things that run through our society. Yet, I have been dedicated for the last couple of decades since I read this book, I've been dedicated to trying in every context to accept responsibility. Blame no one. As an investor, that strengthens you so much because you take responsibility for your losers. Losing to win is maybe one of my favorite sections of my short book Rule Breaker Investing published last year in September, Losing to Win, how many bad stock picks have I made? I tallied them all up and came up with a really sad statistic, which I originally presented on this podcast, which is that in the history of the Motley Fool Rule Breakers service, as I picked over 20 years, I had 63 stocks that had lost 50% or more, and that was the bad news, and it's horrible. Even when I say it, I cringe a little bit as I say that.

But the good news, and those who followed me, regular listeners will know where I'm headed here. The good news is that I think my 63rd best pick back then was up 400%. That was my 63rd best pick up 400%. The most you can ever lose is 100%. Of course, I am drubbing myself for my 50% losers. But when you can make so much more than that, you start to realize that losing is highly overrated and part of the process of winning is losing to win, and part of the process to becoming a successful investor is to accept responsibility, Bennis says, and blame no one.

Before we move on to quote No. 2, I'd be remiss if I didn't speak to this one, as well. Lesson No. 1 of self-knowledge, you are your own best teacher, and I love that line because investing is ultimately apprenticeship. By experience, nobody can just hand you conviction. You need to earn it. There's nothing like putting the reps in in any context in life. When you use a muscle, it gets stronger. If you don't use a muscle or your brain, it gets weaker. It's all about putting the reps in, in my mind, and you are your own best teacher. I certainly didn't take any investing courses in college. I am a literature major. I took no business courses in college. I decided after college, as my own best teacher that I should finally understand accounting a little bit more. I'd never taken an accounting course, but picking up the book, How to Read a Financial Report by John Tracy back in the day and coming to understand how income statements connect with cash flow statements, how the balance sheet works, has been invaluable for me ever since. Something like 40 years ago, I finally decided I should learn financial statements, and we are our own best teacher and self-knowledge lesson.

Number 3, Bennis as well, you can learn anything you want to learn. I hope that great Bennis quote will stick with you. Any one of those four lessons I didn't even really speak to. Number 4, true understanding comes from reflecting on your experience. But if I were to ding myself on any one of these, I'd say, I probably don't spend enough time reflecting on my experience. Maybe that's true if you two. But true understanding comes from taking the time to ask, What just happened there? What can I learn about you or about me from whatever just happened? Anyway, those four lessons, each one of them is so valuable and taken together into a single quote. Well, that is great quote No. 1 for Great Quotes Volume 22.

Let's move on to No. 2. This one I first came across in the wonderful book Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte, but in that book, Tiago is quoting Annie Murphy Paul. Annie wrote a book called The Extended Mind, and that is where quote No. 2 comes from. She wrote, "We extend beyond our limits, not by revving our brains like a machine or bulking them up like a muscle, but by strewing our world with rich materials and by weaving them into our thoughts." I'm going to say it again. “We extend beyond our limits, not by revving our brains like a machine or bulking them up like a muscle, but by strewing our world with rich materials and by weaving them into our thoughts.” Now, I realize I just came out of quote No. 1 saying it's all about using that muscle, and the ones we use grow and the ones we don't atrophy. But ironically, Annie is saying here that we extend beyond our limits, not by revving our brains like a muscle. She's really speaking to the environment that we find ourselves in the environment that we can design our way to live into James Clear's wonderful book Atomic Habits.

One of James' great points about forming good habits is it's not about you or the habit, a lot of the time it's about the environment that you find yourself in. Design yourself into good habits. I have a friend David Epstein, writer of the wonderful book Inside The Box. David says he's somebody who his whole life has been a very successful runner. He's in great shape, not that much younger than I am. He's in great shape, much better than I am. He says, I go to bed with my workout clothes on, because the next day I almost have no excuse not to workout early in the morning. That's a simple example of strewing our world with rich materials and weaving them into our thoughts. This quote is really much deeper than you might initially realize when you think about it. I was thinking about how just great quotes themselves. The act of seeking them out, finding them, and then collecting them is, in a sense strewing my own little world with rich materials,

I would say the same things about my board games or about my books. We're going to do authors in August once again this coming month, and I'm looking forward to conversations with authors of books that I've appreciated, and quotes, board games, books, conversations, podcast episodes, those things that we gather, that we strew around us in our world. We're in control of our environments most of the time. Then weaving those things into our thoughts to me, again, explains a lot about, let's go back to it, investing. Because it isn't so much that you're stuffing information into your head as an investor, it's that you're enriching your world by going out and trying when it first debuted Chipotle and seeing what a fast casual environment looks like or by downloading that app and trying something new on your phone or even having a smartphone. The iPhone only debuted in 2007, still less than 20 years ago, being an early adopter of new technologies is an example of strewing your world with rich materials. Of course, great quotes for me, books, etc, literature major.

These are examples, but I know you have them, too, in your world, and Annie Murphy Paul is reminding us that it's about surrounding yourself with great materials, I would also add, of course, great people that is really going to cause you to extend beyond your own limits and become a greater butterfly than you might ever have imagined in your caterpillar stage. Building a second brain is a great example of that, as well. Tiago Forte's book where I found this quote is all about organizing your digital life, your second brain so that you can be more successful with your first brain. The one you're listening to me now with. The one you used to think and dream and build that first brain is so advantaged if you do a good job with building your second brain, which is, again, another example of strewing your world with rich materials and then weaving them into your thoughts.

Before we move on to quote Number 3, I should just call out portfolio principle No. 1 of the Rule Breaker portfolio. Make your portfolio reflect your best vision for our future. It's all about getting in touch with fascinating people and companies, products, and services and realizing, Wow, that would be really cool. The world would be better if the Internet showed up back in the day or if somebody dreamed up this idea that rather than stay in a hotel room, you could stay in somebody's living room, and that's Airbnb or artificial intelligence as it makes its way onto the planet still in such early days for AI, make your portfolio reflect your best vision for our future. I think most of my great stock picks came about because I tried something earlier than most other people. I was willing to go with Netflix and say, Sure, I'll wait three days for you to mail me a DVD to watch my next video and then mail it back to you. That sounds interesting. Plus, you're changing the business model. Blockbuster video was all about transactions and late fees, and all of a sudden, Netflix wasn't just about the mail. It was also a subscription business model, which was a brand new thing. The more experiences you can string together as you lead a more interesting life, I think the better you'll do as an investor, and Annie Murphy Paul reminds us, the more you will extend beyond your own limits.

Let's move on to quote Number 3. This one from the book Conscious Capitalism, authored by John Mackey and Raj Sisodia, two people that I deeply admire and have gotten to know over the course of my life, and my life is much richer for it. Here's a great quote from Conscious Capitalism, and I quote, "Business is fundamentally about people working together cooperatively to create value for other people. It is the greatest creator of value in the world. This is what makes business ethical and what makes it beautiful." For some listeners, now for some of my fellow Fools, this is a statement of the obvious. This is how you see the world, and you're more likely to see the world this way if you've started a business of your own, suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, sometimes for you, sometimes turning against your own fortunes, but showing resilience and building something over time, giving other people jobs, and giving them fulfillment in their jobs as they seek to deliver a product or service to others that is worth paying above the costs that you and I incur as the manufacturers and distributors of those products.

Profit is a magical thing when you look at it that way. People are willing to pay you more or what you're doing, that it cost you to do it. That is truly how the greatest value has been created in the world for centuries. Now, we do live in a world where many people perceive business as extraction. It's zero sum. It's about greed. If you win, that must mean I lose. I obviously could not disagree more having seen business both as an entrepreneur, but more than anything as an investor. Doing investment research, seeking other people's businesses and asking me, who are the people I admire most? What are the products and services that I want to succeed in this world? Because the world will be better 10 years from now as a consequence of those products and services getting deployed and creating success and value for all the stakeholders that made them possible. That's why, for me, investing is inherently an optimistic act, because it's partly a belief in things unseen.

When Amazon.com launched just as an online bookstore, it would have been hard to picture Amazon as it is today. It would even be harder to picture things like the Cloud that showed up well after Amazon launched, and Amazon Web Service is such a big part of that company today. I think back again to my make your portfolio reflect your best vision for our future, business creates value. If that's true, then owning businesses becomes an act of optimism and successful businesses. I realize this sounds a little bit naive, and we can all think of counterexamples. But successful businesses are really beautiful things if they're truly doing what Raj Sisodia and John Mackey wrote about in Conscious Capitalism, and many businesses do, certainly not all. But the ones that really succeed create a win for all the stakeholders in the enterprise. It has to be a win for the customers. Otherwise, they won't buy what you're selling. It has to be win for your employees. They have to love working with you, at least tolerate it. Otherwise, you won't have that life energy to breathe into your enterprise, to actually deploy your products and services. Our employees bring the energy and possibility of even succeeding from one day to the next. They have to win, too, and you're probably not going to win for very long if you're not winning for your suppliers and for your business partners, depending on what type of business you are, they are very important stakeholders. Also, they want to feel proud that they got to supply you, that you put them in your front window, not somebody else. Suppliers and partners need to win.

Obviously, for some businesses, the environment needs to win. For many other businesses, the environment may not be very important, but for some, it's very important. Also, local communities, for some businesses, are a great example of a stakeholder and one that you want to have winning along with you, as well. And then, of course, I've saved them to the end, but shareholders. If you're winning for all those other stakeholders we just talked about, then I'm almost sure you're winning for shareholders, too, and that's a great reason why the stock market goes up, by the way, 10% or so on average over the years. Annualized 10% shows the clear value being created in our world at large. You don't need me to tell you that about the stock market. Just look at the improvements in longevity, in health, in public safety, in enjoyment, in entertainment options, in agency, in travel, all these things that possibly too many of us take for granted here in 2026. A lot of them weren't in place in 1976 or 1926, but they're there for you today, largely because business has made them possible.

Now, before I move on to quote number four, I hasten to add that not everything is done for profit. There are some beautiful not-for-profits in this world at large, too, and we're certainly trying to create one with The Fool Community Foundation. I want to thank those listening to me who've taken the time to visit our foolfoundation.org and see our own work. There are so many amazing, interesting not-for-profits around the world, and those fit naturally here, too. They are also beautiful enterprises. I will say this. There is a role both for profit and not-for-profit, but I’m expressing particular gratitude here with quote number three for the for-profit businesses, the conscious capitalists out there, because for-profit makes us into owners of competitive enterprises. With the majority of our fellow citizens, by the way, working in the private sector every day, trying to deliver that better product or service, which, by the way, does make it a competitive world, and competition can be taken too far, and some people will always view competition negatively.

But in my own mind, some of our greatest competition is ourselves, is working every day to deliver a better product or service than you did yourself the day before. Especially, I want to say this about profits: they are generative. Not-for-profits need to keep handing out the hat and asking for donations because they can't turn a profit by their very nature. They've chosen not to do so. They need donations, and I appreciate that, and I have made a fair amount of those in my life and will be making more. For-profit companies are generative. Those enterprises, when they’re working, are self-sustaining and, indeed, generating those profits enables them to grow and grow further. They gain more agency, they raise value and wealth for everybody around them, for all their stakeholders. Again, that is the win-win-win that is the genius of conscious capitalism.

I'm going to read this quote one more time, and then we'll move on to No. 4, because I think for a lot of people, this strikes them as crazy talk. Yet, to me, it's so obvious and so well stated. "Business is fundamentally about people working together cooperatively to create value for other people. It is the greatest creator of value in the world. This is what makes business ethical and what makes it beautiful."

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David Gardner: Onto great quote number four, this one from Stephen Pinker, his book Enlightenment Now. If you ever want to hear me interview Stephen Pinker, just Google Rule Breaker Investing Stephen Pinker, and you'll hear the conversation we had about his book Enlightenment Now years ago. Here's the quote: "Not surprisingly," Pinker writes, "As countries get richer, they get happier. See Chapter 18. More surprisingly, as countries get richer, they get smarter. Chapter 16." Now, the reason I took this down in my highlighted reading when I first read this book is because the purpose of The Motley Fool, as I hope many of you know, is to make the world smarter, happier, and richer. As I read Pinker's quote 10 years ago, where he says, "Not surprisingly, as countries get richer, they get happier, and as they get richer, they also get smarter," I couldn't fail to notice The Motley Fool's purpose statement writ large. But there are two things I want to speak to here. First of all, the more obvious point.

Again, I hope it's obvious, but some people might debate this. The idea that as countries get richer, they get happier. Well, he mentions Chapter 18. He cites that in this quote. So in Chapter 18 of his book Enlightenment Now, Pinker tackles what is known as the Easterlin paradox. You can look it up. It's an old theory that once a country reaches a certain level of wealth, more money doesn't make people any happier. Pinker, in his book, presents newer data showing that the Easterlin paradox, he contends, is mostly a myth. He notes that, "Richer people within a country are happier, richer countries are happier, and people get happier as their countries get richer." He discusses how wealth buys things that lead to happiness. Things like better healthcare, more freedom to travel, more education, and never to be forgotten, more control over your own life. Wealth clearly buys those things. He also mentions the World Happiness Report, and you've probably seen this before. It shows that the happiest countries in the world, those include countries like Denmark, Switzerland, and Norway are also among the wealthiest and the most free. Of my two points, I wanted to point out about this great quote from Stephen Pinker, that's the first. It's a little bit the more obvious one. As countries get richer, they get happier, although some people don't think that's obvious. I do.

But the second point he makes is the one that surprised me a little bit and made me happy to think about it. As I thought about it more it became clear about why it's true. The second clause of his quote is, "More surprisingly, as countries get richer, they get smarter." Now, not just happier, smarter. He references Chapter 16 of his book, and in Chapter 16, Pinker discusses the Flynn effect. You can look this one up. It's the observation that IQ scores have been rising significantly worldwide, about three points a decade since the early 20th century. Pinker argues in Chapter 16 that as countries develop economically, people are nourished better, and they're then exposed to more complex and abstract environments. This forces them to exercise what he calls scientific spectacles. Beginning to view the world through categories, through logic, and again, abstract relationships rather than just your concrete local experience.

I’ve looked into this some because you can see the purveyor of the Flynn Effect give a TED Talk. This is more than 10 years ago now, but I'm going to quote some from his TED Talk in a second to make it clear how richer is getting us to be smarter. But before I do that, let me just mention that Pinker says that an average person in the year 1900 would have been considered, and these are Pinker's words, and he's being technical here. This is being used as a technical phrase in his book, and you could look it up. He says, again, the average person in 1900 would have been considered, "Mentally retarded by today's scoring standards, simply because they weren't trained to think in the abstract logical ways that a modern developed society demands." I wasn't around back in 1900. You weren't either.

But Flynn cites Alexander Luria, the Russian neuropsychologist who conducted interviews with a lot of people a century ago. As Flynn says in his TED Talk, Luria looked at people just before we entered the scientific age, and he found that these people were resistant to classifying what we would call today the concrete world. They wanted to break it up into little bits that they could use. Luria found that they were resistant to deducing the hypothetical, to speculating about what might be. He found finally they didn't deal well with abstractions or using logic on those abstractions.

When I first came across that, I was wondering, what did he mean by that? Flynn then samples some of Luria's interviews. He talks to a man, head of a village in rural Russia. They'd only had, as people had in 1,900, about four years of schooling at that point. Again, this is somebody with four years of schooling in rural Russia more than a century ago, and Luria asks this particular man, "What do crows and fish have in common?" The guy says back, "Absolutely nothing. I can eat a fish. I can't eat a crow. A crow can peck at a fish, but a fish can't do anything to a crow." And Luria says back, "But aren't they both animals?" He says, "Of course not. One's a fish. The other is a bird." And then Luria goes to another person. He says to them, "There are no camels in Germany. Hamburg is a city in Germany. Are there camels in Hamburg?" The fellow says, "Well, if it's large enough, there ought to be camels there." Luria said, "But what do my words imply?" He says, back, "Well, maybe it's a small village, and there's no room for camels." In other words, he was unwilling to treat that as anything but a concrete problem. People did not think as abstractly a century ago. He was used to camels being in villages. He was quite unable to use the hypothetical to ask himself, what if there were no camels in Germany?

Then one more for you, just to drill this one home. A third interview conducted by Luria with someone about the North Pole, Luria says, "At the North Pole, there is always snow. Wherever there is always snow, the bears are white. What color are the bears at the North Pole?" The response was, "Such a thing is to be settled by testimony." If a wise person came from the North Pole and told me the bears were white, I might believe him. But every bear that I have seen is a brown bear.

Now you see, again, this person rejecting, going beyond their own concrete experience, hard for them to analyze or imagine things that are abstract or removed from their own local environment. One of them said back to Luria after one of these interviews where he's using logic in the way that you're hearing, and they said back to him, how can we solve things that aren't real problems? None of the problems you're giving me are real. How can we address them? When I say the world is smarter as a consequence of being wealthier, and there are many reasons behind that, you can see what that looks like after a century of greater nourishment, more understanding of abstract concepts, more connections that you can make beyond just the local, and then you start throwing things in like modern media, like radio, then TV, then the Internet.

Now, artificial intelligence, this is a much wealthier world that could even give rise to these things, and now you're also hearing that it's helping. As a consequence of being a wealthier world, it is clearly making us smarter. What I love about the Pinker quote is, it isn't just that we're happier, although, while many people debate that, I don't, and I already thought about happier, but hearing that connection between not just richer, happier, but also smarter, too, makes me very happy to be a Motley Fool.

By the way, let me mention something I did in the past week. There is an SEC proposal right now, you may have heard about this, to reduce the regular reporting times that public companies have had for decades. That would be the quarterly earnings report that we get used to four times a year, to reduce that from four times to just twice a year. I completely oppose that notion, especially as an individual investor, somebody who is a part-owner of those companies to think that we would only be getting information twice a year about how companies are performing versus four times a year, I think is a huge step backward, but especially in light of what I've just shared with you here. About smarter, happier, and richer, and how they're tied together. If we move to a world where you only hear twice a year the company's results that you co-own, that is clearly a dumber world, a world with less information, less analytics, and less possibility of understanding what's happening. I obviously strongly disagree with that SEC proposal. If you want to see me do a four-minute and 57-second video on this, just recorded it earlier this week, go to The Motley Fool’s YouTube channel and look at the video entitled This Could Change Everything, and you’ll see just a few minutes of further thoughts on this. I really hope the SEC does not go that direction or make that decision. It really hurts private, self-directed investors like you and me. If you want to make your voice heard, while the SEC deadline for comments has just passed earlier this week, it's something I hope you'll follow with fervor and interest. It would be a huge step back, and in light of this quote, Number 4, it will make us dumber. I am not a fan of things that make us dumber.

Let's close out now with great quote Number 5. This one I came across via letters from an American, which was written by Heather Cox Richardson, the American historian. But she's just recounting the final day of a presidency. In this case, it was the presidency of Ronald Reagan. His last speech, which was delivered on January 11th of 1989, I think this is a really great quote. I hope you appreciate it, too. Reagan was recalling what someone had once written to him. He's quoting what someone had once written to him first. He said, You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany, or Turkey, or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone from any corner of the Earth can come to live in America and become an American.

Richardson went on to quote further from his speech to close. She wrote, The departing President continued, and I quote here. "To me, this as an American who is politically neutral and doesn't really follow or care too much about the parties. You never hear me say things like red state or blue state because that's not how I think we should think about this world." This departing president said the following. "We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people, our strength, from every country and every corner of the world. By doing so, we continuously renew and enrich our nation. While other countries cling to the stale past, here in America, we breathe life into dreams. We create the future, and the world follows us into tomorrow. Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we're a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier. This quality is vital to our future. As a nation, if we ever close the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost."

Well, I have this quote in mind, of course, for two reasons. First, we celebrated America’s 250th birthday this past week, and how could I not think about the incredible energy and power that has been brought continuously, generation by generation, to these shores by people who left somewhere else looking for a better life? I've often said it on this podcast. If you want to meet an optimist, just tap any recent immigrant to the United States of America. The vast majority are among our greatest optimists, and I love that energy and always will. The second reason I have this in mind is, of course, the World Cup, where America was just eliminated within the last 24 hours as I do this podcast, and that was too bad, although I'm not a huge soccer fan anyway. It doesn't matter to me as much as the announcers try to make it sound. It should. But what I do want to say is how many stories do we see over the last few weeks, and probably over the next couple of people coming to visit this country because they wanted to watch their team in one of our American stadiums. While I'm sure some people don't like some things about America, and I would agree with you, by the way, I also don't like some things about America.

Most of all, what I loved hearing were people who saw something new that we were doing here in America, something that amazed them, fresh people, fresh ideas, fresh energy. They'll take that back to their country, I hope, and make their own neighborhoods better. For me, my favorite memories of the World Cup aren't what happens on the soccer pitch, but seeing all of these videos and cultural moments where we're connecting with each other, and we're sharing something we're good at, and you're sharing back something that you're good at. To me, that's the story of humanity.

I'm going to close out thinking briefly about my two favorite stocks, my two best stock picks, and who started them. Before I do that, still here with quote Number 5, I want to point out a cycle that I think is really important to see. I hope you see it, too. A culture of openness, step No. 1 leads to step No. 2 entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs, step No. 2, lead to step number 3, innovation. Innovation leads to step number four, business. Business leads to step number 5, investing, and investing leads to step number 6, the end of our cycle here, prosperity. I hope with me, you've got this pattern recognition. You can see the bigger picture that culture of openness that a departing president was speaking to, and I hope it's still true today. This was said now more than 30 years ago, that culture of openness sprouts entrepreneurs who sprout innovation, who create business, which leads to the ability to invest, which leads to more prosperity for us all.

My two best stock picks, both of which I have ironically the same cost basis, thanks to stock picks and holding over long periods of time. My two best stock picks ever for Motley Fool members, Amazon.com and Nvidia, I have a 16-cent cost basis for both. Both are now up over 1,000 times our money for Motley Fool members. Who started Amazon, and who started Nvidia? Well, Jeff Bezos did not have an easy childhood in this country. In fact, he took his name from his stepfather, who was a Cuban immigrant. That's where the name Bezos comes from. But, Jeff, there he was in high school, having to work as a short-order line cook at McDonald's on the breakfast shift.

That is who created Amazon.com. Who started Nvidia? Well, Jensen Huang came from a middle-class Taiwanese family. His dad once got to go to New York City, saw what life was like there, and decided to send Jensen at the age of 9 to the United States because of the opportunity he saw in order that Jensen could grow up with his uncle's family. I'm going to quote from the Wikipedia entry. There's more there, of course, if you want to read it. But here's a little bit about what Jensen Huang faced at the age of nine, as with immigrant energy, he came to this country, and I quote. "Both Huang's aunt and uncle were recent immigrants themselves to Washington State. They accidentally enrolled him and his brother in the Oneida Baptist Institute, a religious reform academy in Kentucky for troubled youth. Mistakenly believing it to be a prestigious boarding school. In order to afford the academy's tuition, Jensen's parents sold nearly all their possessions.

When he was 10-years-old, Huang lived with his older brother in the Oneida Boys dormitory in Kentucky. Each student was expected to work every day, and his brother was assigned to perform manual labor on a nearby tobacco farm. Because Jensen was too young to attend classes at the Reform Academy, he was educated at a separate public school, the Oneida Elementary School in Oneida, Kentucky, arriving "as an undersized Asian immigrant with long hair and heavily accented English." He was frequently bullied and beaten. In Oneida, Huang cleaned toilets every day. He learned to play table tennis. He joined the swimming team. He actually once appeared in Sports Illustrated at the age of 14. He taught his illiterate roommate. This is Jensen's description of his illiterate roommate, a "17-year-old covered in tattoos and knife scars," how to read in exchange for being taught how to bench press.

In 2002, Huang said he remembered his life in Kentucky "more vividly" than just about any other. Now, there's good news as an addendum to that snapshot. His parents moved to the United States just a year or two after to Beaverton, Oregon, for those keeping score at home. Shout out to Beaverton listeners, and they then brought their boys back from that Oneida, Kentucky, experience, now with passionate work ethics those young men had, and they led much more normal lives, and I'll point out more normal lives as Americans.

That is great quote Number 5, and two brief thoughts about it, especially reflecting on who started the two greatest stock picks that I've ever made from Motley Fool members, both of which I have a 16-cent cost basis. You've just heard about the backgrounds from a couple of underdogs which have sprung some of the greatest companies the world has ever seen, specifically in this culture of the United States of America, back to quote No. 2, strewing our world with rich materials and weaving them into our thoughts. Well, at close here, let's just summarize our five quotes this week.

Obviously, I'm not going to read them all again, but quote number one from Warren Bennis, about being your own best teacher, accepting responsibility. What a wonderful reminder that leadership begins with self-leadership. Quote No. 2, from Eddie Murphy Paul, We don't become smarter. Simply by thinking harder, we become smarter by enriching the world around us; books, conversations, notes, friends, ideas, and weaving those into our own thinking. Quote number 3 from John Mackey and Raj Sisodia, Business at its heart is people working together cooperatively to create value for others. I love that definition. It's one of the reasons I've always viewed investing as an optimistic and positive act. Quote number 4 from Stephen Pinker, As countries grow richer, they don't just grow happier, though they do, they grow smarter. It's a wonderful, virtuous cycle. It is one well worth continuing to build. Then finally, a former president reminds us that one of America's great enduring strengths has always been renewal. New people, new ideas, new dreams, a nation that continually renews itself, and occasionally gets to host a World Cup.

As I look back over our five quotes this week, what strikes me is how they widen my perspective. I hope yours too. We begin with the individual, know yourself. But then we move to your own thinking, and then to business. Then finally, to a nation. It reminds me our lives actually work the same way. We improve ourselves first, then we help those around us, and then together, we try to create something larger than any one of us could have built alone. Well, these are the kinds of quotes I'm never going to tire of collecting and pinning up in my Evernote. I hope at least one of them finds a home in your own thinking and stays there for years to come. Thanks for joining with me this week. We'll be back next week with my next ten years later, looking at a five-stock sampler I picked 10 years ago next week. In the meantime, Fool on.

David Gardner has positions in Amazon and Netflix. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Airbnb, Amazon, Chipotle Mexican Grill, Netflix, and Nvidia. The Motley Fool recommends the following options: long January 2028 $320 calls on McDonald's, short January 2028 $340 calls on McDonald's, and short September 2026 $35 calls on Chipotle Mexican Grill. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.