“You Measure Success By How Many Dollar Bills Are Coming In. I Measure Success By How Much Value I Am Contributing to the World. It Is By Adding Value That We Create the Wealth That Permits Us to Be Paid Large Sums.”

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:

“Einstein’s definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

Says the guy who’s been blogging on the same topic for 15 years.

Precisely so. But you overlook the fact that Bogle has been saying the same thing for 45 years. That’s three times as long!

And I have been learning amazing things in just about every one of the days that I have lived through during those 15 years. Things that someone with my background should not be so blessed to learn.

You measure success by how many dollar bills are coming in. By that standard I am a miserable failure. But I don’t measure success that way. I measure success by how much value I am contributing to the world. It is by adding value that we create the wealth that permits us to be paid large sums. But that standard. I have achieved 500 times the success that I ever dreamed of in earlier days. So I just keep on doin’, you know?

Dylan said” “There’s no success like failure and failure is no success at all.” I used to use that one as my signature line way at Motley Fool way back in the Summer of 2002. If I had given up back then, as you Goons advised me, I wouldn’t today have my name on the most important piece of peer-reviewed research published in this field in over 30 years. How did I know that that’s where this was leading? I didn’t know the specifics. I just knew that the way to real wealth is creating value and that it would be a mistake to walk away from the greatest opportunity that anyone has been presented with in a long, long. long time. I saw where the long-term wealth was and I ran in that direction.

And I soldier on to this day.

My best wishes to you.

Rob