Before you invest, wash your hands

Investment

Being successful in the stock market can sometimes be a disadvantage. You’re likely to grow an over-sized ego, and it’s easier to exploit people when big egos are involved. This is true in both investing and medicine.

For most of recorded history, surgeons didn’t wash their hands before treating patients. In 1847, a Hungarian physician named Ignaz Semmelweis was widely ridiculed for trying to change this unsanitary policy. For his efforts, he got fired and later died in an asylum; an unfortunate fate for one of the world’s greatest contributors to modern medicine.