Ian Cassel shared a very interesting read about Investing written by Rod maciver, who has decades of experience as a investor.
Lesson 1: The role of financial markets is to take money away from mediocre and underperforming companies and put it in stable, growing, high return on capital companies. Money has an almost metaphysical attraction to places where it is put to careful, good use. You can fight that trend, and invest in companies, for instance that are deeply undervalued and mismanaged – and some people are successful investing in the dregs – but very few over the long term. To use a whitewater kayaking analogy, freshwater seeks salt water, and you can fight that if you want, but paddling upstream eventually is likely to become highly problematic.
Lesson 2: I’ve worked for two extremely successful investors who were experts in cyclical, commodity-dependent, capital intensive industries – real estate and mining – and learned that almost all of the real money made in those areas is made only by extremely patient investors who invest once every ten or twenty years, liquidate their holdings once a decade and spend long, long periods of time in cash.
Lesson 3: Most successful investors share some common personality characteristics.
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Investing can be looked at as an emotional competition – your emotions and ability to control them versus the emotions of those you buy or sell securities from and to. A primary function of investment strategy is to counteract emotional impulses and thus survive (and take advantage of) adverse market developments. Investment performance is mostly determined by patience, risk management, a willingness to study, and what you do when things go differently than you anticipated. Those factors are personality driven.
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Whatever one’s position on that subject, an investment strategy needs to anticipate significant market declines, as well as declines in the securities in one’s portfolio, since declines have been a part of markets ever since markets were first created. Humans are emotional, therefore markets are emotional, debt results, markets collapse, and humans become more emotional. And master investors invest.
These highlights do not do justice to the full content. Do give it a read 
Here’s the link to the full article.