Jim Rogers : As far as I know, I’m not quite sure. I do know that I have learned over the years, always, when nearly everybody is thinking the same way that means somebody’s not thinking that means we got to start thinking about it and see if there’s not another way, another approach. Because if everybody says the sky is blue, I at least urge you to go and look out the window and see if it’s blue because I have found that most people won’t even bother to look out the window. If they see on the television or in the newspaper or something that everybody says the sky is blue, I at least urge them to look out the window. I find that most people don’t want to do their homework, that’s the first problem that many people have, is just doing simple homework.
“…no matter what we all know today, it’s not going to be true in 10 or 15 years…”
Second, I have learned that if everybody says the sky is blue and I
go and look out the window and see that it is blue, I have also learned
that, well wait a minute, if everybody knows the sky is blue, is that
going to change? Now that everybody knows something, is it time to start
thinking about “Well maybe tomorrow the sky will not be blue?” And
again, most people say “Well everybody knows the sky is blue and that’s
all we need to know.” No, it’s not all you need to know because another
thing I have learned in my life is that no matter what we all know
today, it’s not going to be true in 10 or 15 years. You pick any year in
history and go back and then look to see what everybody thought was
true in that year, 15 years later the world had changed enormously.
Enormously. And yet in that particular year everybody was convinced that
this is the way the world was. Pick 1900, 1930, 1950, any year you want
to pick, and you will see that 15 years later, the world was totally,
totally different from what everybody thought it was at that time.