Back before I first became the global success I am today, I began looking into investing. Among the things you can't miss when you enter that world looking to learn is the endless promotions from a company called The Motley Fool, advertising their subscription service, in which they give you a stock pick or two a month, and which they trumpet as having a stellar average return, far in excess of the market average and most common benchmarks like the S&P.

Welllllll there's just one thing. I noticed one word...

A lot of dishonest people try to slide things by others, in life in general, by showing great "averages", because "averages" are easily inflated by rare outliers.

For instance, consider this series of stock returns of hypothetical investments:

Investment 1: -2% return
Investment 2: -1.1% return
Investment 3: 0.7% return
Investment 4: 58% return