The second part of achieving success is focusing on the very best people in the sector. They will give you spectacularly better returns than the merely good people in the sector. So, personally having the opportunity to do business over long periods of time with the likes of Bob Quartermain, Ross Beaty, Robert Friedland, Pierre Lassonde, Harold Pedersen, and Lukas Lundin, by sticking with these people and others of this caliber, by only doing business with the best of the best, and disassociating with the rest, is also a key to success.

I would say that the third element of success is to understand that big deposits and small deposits offer up the same variety of risks. In other words, everything that can go wrong with a big deposit can go wrong with a small deposit. But a small deposit can never make you big money. So, if you are going to take the risk, make sure that the risk you are taking is one that you are taking for relevant rewards. In other words, search for big stuff. Don’t search for little stuff.

The fourth thing that has worked for me has been an understanding that in the speculative end of the market, not the investment end of the market, that money is made by answering unanswered questions. So, before you deploy any capital understand what the most important unanswered question is. Understand something about the probabilities of success and failure. Understand the capital required to get a yes or a no answer. And understand something about the value that would be associated with a yes or no answer.

What Rick Rule learned after making 'egregious' early investing mistakes