“The global economy was crippled at this point, and Omaha was no exception. Stores were closed, businesses were boarded up.Jim said to Warren, “It’s so bad right now. How does the economy ever bounce back from this?”Warren said, “Jim, do you know what the bestselling candy bar was in 1962?”“No,” Jim said.“Snickers,” said Warren. “And do you know what the bestselling candy bar is today?”“No,” said Jim.“Snickers,” Warren said.Then silence. That was the end of the conversation.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“If you traveled in time to five hundred years ago or five hundred years from now, you would be astounded at how much technology and medicine has changed. The geopolitical order would make no sense to you. The language and dialect might be completely foreign. But you’d notice people falling for greed and fear just like they do in our current world. You’d see people persuaded by risk, jealousy, and tribal affiliations in ways that are familiar to you. You’d see overconfidence and shortsightedness that remind you of people’s behavior today.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Change captures our attention because it’s surprising and exciting. But the behaviors that never change are history’s most powerful lessons, because they preview what to expect in the future.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“I have no clue what the stock market will do next year (or any year). But I’m very confident about people’s penchant for greed and fear, which never changes. So that’s what I spend my time thinking about.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“I try to keep two things in mind in a world that’s this vulnerable to chance and accident. One is highlighting this book’s premise—to base predictions on how people behave rather than on specific events.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“I have no idea who will win the next presidential election. But I’m confident about the ways people’s attachment to tribal identities influences their thinking, which is the same today as it was a thousand years ago and will be a thousand years from now.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“People like to say, “To know where we’re going, you have to know where we’ve been.” But more realistic is admitting that if you know where we’ve been, you realize we have no idea where we’re going. Events compound in unfathomable ways.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“The other thing to keep in mind is to have a wider imagination. No matter what the world looks like today, and what seems obvious today, everything can change tomorrow because of some tiny accident no one’s thinking about.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“We are very good at predicting the future, except for the surprises—which tend to be all that matter. ”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Look at the big news stories that move the needle—COVID-19, 9/11, Pearl Harbor, the Great Depression. Their common trait isn’t necessarily that they were big; it’s that they were surprises, on virtually no one’s radar until they arrived.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Asking what the biggest risks are is like asking what you expect to be surprised about. If you knew what the biggest risk was you would do something about it, and doing something about it would make it less risky. What your imagination can’t fathom is the dangerous stuff, and it’s why risk can never be mastered.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“The fact that you can’t see it coming is exactly what makes it risky.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“So, in personal finance, the right amount of savings is when it feels like it’s a little too much. It should feel excessive; it should make you wince a little.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“It’s become so much easier in recent decades to look around and say, “I may have more than I used to. But relative to that person over there, I don’t feel like I’m doing that great.” Part of that envy is useful, because saying “I want what they have” is such a powerful motivator of progress. Yet the point stands: We might have higher incomes, more wealth, and bigger homes—but it’s all so quickly smothered by inflated expectations.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Peter Kaufman, CEO of Glenair and one of the smartest people you will ever come across, once wrote:
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
We tend to take every precaution to safeguard our material possessions because we know what they cost. But at the same time we neglect things which are much more precious because they don’t come with price tags attached: The real value of things like our eyesight or relationships or freedom can be hidden to us, because money is not changing hands.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“When asked, “You seem extremely happy and content. What’s your secret to living a happy life?” ninety-eight-year-old Charlie Munger replied:
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
The first rule of a happy life is low expectations. If you have unrealistic expectations you’re going to be miserable your whole life. You want to have reasonable expectations and take life’s results, good and bad, as they happen with a certain amount of stoicism.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“A common storyline of history goes like this: Things get better, wealth increases, technology brings new efficiencies, and medicine saves lives. The quality of life goes up. But people’s expectations then rise by just as much, if not more, because those improvements also benefit other people around you, whose circumstances you anchor to. Happiness is little changed despite the world improving.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“John D. Rockefeller never had penicillin, sunscreen, or Advil. But you can’t say a low-income American with Advil and sunscreen today should feel better off than Rockefeller, because that’s not how people’s heads work.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Money buys happiness in the same way drugs bring pleasure: incredible if done right, dangerous if used to mask a weakness, and disastrous when no amount is enough.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“If you look at the 1950s and ask, “What was different that made it feel so great?” this is at least part of your answer. The gap between you and most of the people around you wasn’t that large.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Rockefeller never yearned for Advil because he didn’t know it existed. But social media today adds a new element, in which everyone in the world can see the lifestyles—often inflated, faked, and airbrushed—of other people. You compare yourself to your peers through a curated highlight reel of their lives, where positives are embellished and negatives are hidden from view.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“You think you want progress, both for yourself and for the world. But most of the time that’s not actually what you want. You want to feel a gap between what you expected and what actually happened.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Psychologist Jonathan Haidt says people don’t really communicate on social media so much as they perform for one another.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Eliud Kipchoge, the world’s best marathon runner, was being held in a staging room during the 2021 Olympic Games in Tokyo. He and two other runners—Bashir Abdi from Belgium and Abdi Nageeye of the Netherlands—were waiting to receive their Olympic medals after the marathon race, which Kipchoge won for the second time. Logistics of the awards ceremony meant the runners would have to wait for several hours in a cramped, dull room with nothing to do but sit. Abdi and Nageeye later explained that they did what anyone else would do—they pulled out their cell phones, found a Wi-Fi network, and aimlessly scrolled social media. Kipchoge didn’t. Abdi and Nageeye said he just sat there, staring at the wall, in perfect silence and contentment. For hours.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“What kind of person makes their way to the top of a successful company, or a big country? Someone who is determined, optimistic, doesn’t take no for an answer, and is relentlessly confident in their own abilities. What kind of person is likely to go overboard, bite off more than they can chew, and discount risks that are blindingly obvious to others? Someone who is determined, optimistic, doesn’t take no for an answer, and is relentlessly confident in their own abilities.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Naval Ravikant once wrote:
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
One day, I realized with all these people I was jealous of, I couldn’t just choose little aspects of their life. I couldn’t say I want his body, I want her money, I want his personality. You have to be that person. Do you want to actually be that person with all of their reactions, their desires, their family, their happiness level, their outlook on life, their self-image? If you’re not willing to do a wholesale, 24/7, 100 percent swap with who that person is, then there is no point in being jealous.
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Something that’s built into the human condition is that people who think about the world in unique ways you like almost certainly also think about the world in unique ways you won’t like.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“The key thing is that unique minds have to be accepted as a full package, because the things they do well and that we admire cannot be separated from the things we wouldn’t want for ourselves or we look down upon.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Physicist Freeman Dyson once explained that what’s often attributed to the supernatural, or magic, or miracles, is actually just basic math.
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
In any normal person’s life, miracles should occur at the rate of roughly one per month: The proof of the law is simple. During the time that we are awake and actively engaged in living our lives, roughly for eight hours each day, we see and hear things happening at a rate of one per second. So the total number of events that happen to us is about 30,000 per day, or about a million per month.
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“A one-hundred-year event doesn’t mean it happens every one hundred years. It means there’s about a 1 percent chance of it occurring in any given year. That seems low. But when there are hundreds of different independent one-hundred-year events, what are the odds that one of them will occur in a given year? Pretty good.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Charlie Munger gave a talk in the 1990s called “The Psychology of Human Misjudgment.” He listed twenty-five biases that lead to bad decisions. One is the “Doubt-Avoidance Tendency,” which he described:
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
The brain of man is programmed with a tendency to quickly remove doubt by reaching some decision.It is easy to see how evolution would make animals, over the eons, drift toward such quick elimination of doubt. After all, the one thing that is surely counterproductive for a prey animal that is threatened by a predator is to take a long time in deciding what to do.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“The inability to forecast the past has no impact on our desire to forecast the future.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“The best story wins. Not the best idea, or the right idea, or the most rational idea. Just whoever tells a story that catches people’s attention and gets them to nod their heads is the one who tends to be rewarded.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“If you have the right answer, you may or may not get ahead. If you have the wrong answer but you’re a good storyteller, you’ll probably get ahead (for a while). If you have the right answer and you’re a good storyteller, you’ll almost certainly get ahead.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“There is too much information in the world for everyone to calmly sift through the data, looking for the most rational, most correct answer. People are busy and emotional, and a good story is always more powerful and persuasive than ice-cold statistics.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“One of his books—The Body: A Guide for Occupants—is basically an anatomy textbook.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Leverage squeezes the full potential out of something with less effort. Stories leverage ideas in the same way that debt leverages assets.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Investor Jim Grant once said:
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
To suppose that the value of a common stock is determined purely by a corporation’s earnings discounted by the relevant interest rates and adjusted for the marginal tax rate is to forget that people have burned witches, gone to war on a whim, risen to the defense of Joseph Stalin and believed Orson Welles when he told them over the radio that the Martians had landed.
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“If you’ve relied on data and logic alone to make sense of the economy, you’d have been confused for a hundred years straight. Economist Per Bylund once noted: “The concept of economic value is easy: whatever someone wants has value, regardless of the reason (if any).”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Historian Will Durant once said, “Logic is an invention of man and may be ignored by the universe.” And it often is, which can drive you mad if you expect the world to work in rational ways.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Some things are immeasurably important. They’re either impossible, or too elusive, to quantify. But they can make all the difference in the world, often because their lack of quantification causes people to discount their relevance or even deny their existence.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Carved on the wall at University of Chicago is a quote from Lord Kelvin that says, “When you cannot measure, your knowledge is meager and unsatisfactory.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Jeff Bezos once said, “The thing I have noticed is when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. There’s something wrong with the way you are measuring it.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Athletic performance isn’t just what you’re physically capable of. It’s what you’re capable of within the context of what your brain is willing to endure for the risk and reward in a given moment.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“it’s obvious that the one thing you can’t measure, can’t predict, and can’t model in a spreadsheet is the most powerful force in all of business and investing—just like it’s the most powerful force in the military. Same in politics. Same in careers. Same in relationships. A lot of things don’t compute.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Author Robert Greene once wrote, “The need for certainty is the greatest disease the mind faces.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Minsky’s seminal theory was called the financial instability hypothesis. The idea isn’t heavy on math and formulas. It describes a psychological process that basically goes like this:
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
• When an economy is stable, people get optimistic.• When people get optimistic, they go into debt.• When they go into debt, the economy becomes unstable.
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
Minsky’s big idea was that stability is destabilizing.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“The decline in deaths from infectious diseases has made the world less equipped to handle them—maybe not medically, but certainly psychologically. What was a tragic but expected part of life a hundred years ago is now a tragic and inconceivable part of modern life—which is indeed what made the COVID-19 pandemic so shocking and overwhelming.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“First you assume good news is permanent. Then you become oblivious to bad news. Then you ignore bad news. Then you deny bad news. Then you panic at bad news. Then you accept bad news. Then you assume bad news is permanent. Then you become oblivious to good news. Then you ignore good news. Then you deny good news. Then you accept good news. Then you assume good news is permanent. And we’re back where we began. The cycle repeats.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Carl Jung had a theory called enantiodromia. It’s the idea that an excess of something gives rise to its opposite.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Whenever people discover something valuable—particularly a lucrative investment or a special skill—there is a tendency to ask, “Great, but can I have it all faster?” Can we push it twice as hard? Can we make it twice the size? Can we squeeze some more juice out of it? It’s a natural question, and understandable. But the history of taking something valuable and pushing it too far, trying to make it go too fast, and asking too much, is long.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Schultz wrote in his 2011 book Onward: “Growth, we now know all too well, is not a strategy. It is a tactic. And when undisciplined growth became a strategy, we lost our way.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Nassim Taleb says he’s a libertarian at the federal level, a Republican at the state level, a Democrat at the local level, and a socialist at the family level.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Cars and airplanes are two of the biggest innovations of modern times. But there’s an interesting thing about their early years. Few looked at early cars and said, “Oh, there’s a thing I can commute to work in.” Few saw a plane and said, “Aha, I can use that to get to my next vacation.” It took decades for people to see that potential. What they did say early on was, “Can we mount a machine gun on that? Can we drop bombs out of it?” Adolphus Greely was one of the first people outside the car industry to realize the “horseless carriage” could be useful.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Are militaries home to the greatest technical visionaries? The most talented engineers? Perhaps. But more importantly, they’re home to Really Big Problems That Need to Be Solved Right Now.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Innovation is driven by incentives, which come in many forms. On one hand there’s “If I don’t figure this out I might get fired.” That will get your brain in gear. Then there’s “If I figure this out I might help people and make a lot of money.” That will produce creative sparks. Then there’s what militaries have dealt with: “If we don’t figure this out right now we’re all going to die and Adolf Hitler might take over the world.” That will fuel the most incredible problem-solving and innovation in the shortest period of time that the world has ever seen.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“There’s an obvious limit to stress-induced innovation. There’s a delicate balance between helpful stress and crippling disaster. The latter prevents innovation as resources are sapped and people turn their attention from getting out of a crisis to merely surviving it.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“President Richard Nixon once observed:
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
The unhappiest people of the world are those in the international watering places like the South Coast of France, and Newport, and Palm Springs, and Palm Beach. Going to parties every night. Playing golf every afternoon. Drinking too much. Talking too much. Thinking too little. Retired. No purpose.So while there are those that would totally disagree with this and say “Gee, if I could just be a millionaire! That would be the most wonderful thing.” If I could just not have to work every day, if I could just be out fishing or hunting or playing golf or traveling, that would be the most wonderful life in the world—they don’t know life. Because what makes life mean something is purpose. A goal. The battle, the struggle—even if you don’t win it.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Entrepreneur Andrew Wilkinson echoed the same when he said, “Most successful people are just a walking anxiety disorder harnessed for productivity.” Investor Patrick O’Shaughnessy writes: “In my experience many of the most talented people I’ve met couldn’t be described as happy. In fact there are probably more that could be described as ‘tortured.’ ” The fear, the pain, the struggle are motivators that positive feelings can never match. That’s a big takeaway from history, and it leads to a realization that will always be true: Be careful what you wish for.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“ constant truth you see throughout history is that the biggest changes and the most important innovations don’t happen when everyone is happy and things are going well. They tend to occur during, and after, a terrible event. When people are a little panicked, shocked, worried, and when the consequences of not acting quickly are too painful to bear”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Militaries are engines of innovation because they occasionally deal with problems so important—so urgent, so vital—that money and manpower are removed as obstacles”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“An important fact that explains a lot of things is that good news takes time but bad news tends to occur instantly. Warren Buffett says it takes twenty years to build a reputation and five minutes to destroy one.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Making a human: incomprehensibly complex. The death of a human: really simple.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Good news is the deaths that didn’t take place, the diseases you didn’t get, the wars that never happened, the tragedies avoided, and the injustices prevented. That’s hard for people to contextualize or even imagine, let alone measure. But bad news is visible. More than visible, it’s in your face. It’s the terrorist attack, the war, the car accident, the pandemic, the stock market crash, and the political battle you can’t look away from.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“The most important things come from compounding. But compounding takes awhile, so it’s easy to ignore.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“If I were to say, “What are the odds the average American will be twice as rich fifty years from now?” it sounds preposterous. The odds seem very low. Twice as rich as they are today? Doubling what we already have? It seems too ambitious. But then if I said, “What are the odds we can achieve 1.4 percent average annual growth for the next fifty years?” I almost sound like a pessimist. One percent? That’s it? But those numbers, of course, are the same.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“It took less than fifteen months for Lehman Brothers—a 158-year-old company—to go from an all-time high to bankrupt. Same with Enron, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Nokia, Bernie Madoff, Muammar Gaddafi, Notre-Dame Cathedral, and the Soviet Union. Things that thrived for decades can be ruined in minutes. There is no equivalent in the other direction.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Growth always fights against competition that slows its rise. New ideas fight for attention, business models fight incumbents, skyscrapers fight gravity. There’s always a headwind. But everyone gets out of the way of decline. Some might try to step in and slow the fall, but it doesn’t attract masses of outsiders who rush in to push back in the other direction the way progress does.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Tens of billions of individual steps have to go right in the correct order to create a human. But only one thing has to happen to cause its demise.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Yuval Noah Harari writes: “To enjoy peace, we need almost everyone to make good choices. By contrast, a poor choice by just one side can lead to war.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“The irony is that growth and progress are way more powerful than setbacks. But setbacks will always get more attention because of how fast they occur. So slow progress amid a drumbeat of bad news is the normal state of affairs. It’s not an easy thing to get used to, but it’ll always be with us.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“A lot of progress and good news concerns things that didn’t happen, whereas virtually all bad news is about what did occur.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“But we didn’t get hit with a single, one-in-billions risk. What happened—and I can say this only with hindsight—was a bunch of small risks colliding and multiplying at once. A new virus transferred to humans (something that has happened forever), and those humans interacted with other people (of course). It was a mystery for a while (understandable), and then bad news was likely suppressed (bad, but common). Other countries thought it would be contained (standard denial) and didn’t act fast enough (bureaucracy). We weren’t prepared (overoptimism) and could respond only with blunt-force lockdowns (panic, do what you gotta do). None of those on their own are surprising.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“It’s good to always assume the world will break about once per decade, because historically it has. The breakages feel like low-probability events, so it’s common to think they won’t keep happening. But they do, again and again, because they’re actually just smaller high-probability events compounding off one another. That isn’t intuitive, so we’ll discount big risks like we always have. And of course, the same thing happens in the other direction.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“John F. Kennedy said neither country wanted “a war that would leave not one Rome intact but two Carthages destroyed.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function,” physicist Albert Bartlett used to say.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“If you understand the math behind compounding you realize the most important question is not “How can I earn the highest returns?” It’s “What are the best returns I can sustain for the longest period of time?”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Pessimism is more intellectually seductive than optimism and captures more of our attention. It’s vital for survival, helping us prepare for risks before they arrive. But optimism is equally essential. The belief that things can be, and will be, better even when the evidence is murky is one of the most essential parts of everything from maintaining a sound relationship to making a long-term investment.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Stockdale was then asked who had the hardest time in prison. He said that was easy: “It was the optimists.” The prisoners who constantly said, “We’re going to be home by Christmas” were the ones whose spirits were shattered when another Christmas came and went. “They died of a broken heart,” Stockdale said. There is a balance, he said, between needing unwavering faith that things will get better while accepting the reality of brutal facts, whatever they may be. Things will eventually get better. But we’re not going home by Christmas.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Psychologists Lauren Alloy and Lyn Yvonne Abramson have a theory I love called depressive realism. It’s the idea that depressed people have a more accurate view of the world because they’re more realistic about how risky and fragile life is. The opposite of depressive realism is “blissfully unaware.” It’s what many of us suffer from. But we don’t actually suffer from it, because it feels great. And the fact that it feels good is the fuel we need to wake up and keep working even when the world around us can be objectively awful, and pessimism abounds.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“What Gates seems to get is that you can only be an optimist in the long run if you’re pessimistic enough to survive the short run.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“George Shultz:
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
His hour of solitude was the only way he could find time to think about the strategic aspects of his job. Otherwise, he would be constantly pulled into moment-to-moment tactical issues, never able to focus on larger questions of the national interest.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Albert Einstein put it this way:
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
I take time to go for long walks on the beach so that I can listen to what is going on inside my head. If my work isn’t going well, I lie down in the middle of a workday and gaze at the ceiling while I listen and visualize what goes on in my imagination.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Mozart felt the same way:
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
When I am traveling in a carriage or walking after a good meal or during the night when I cannot sleep—it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“A species that evolves to become very good at one thing tends to become vulnerable at another. A bigger lion can kill more prey, but it’s also a larger target for hunters to shoot at. A taller tree captures more sunlight, but becomes vulnerable to wind damage. There is always some inefficiency.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“species rarely evolve to become perfect at anything, because perfecting one skill comes at the expense of another skill that will eventually be critical to survival.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Psychologist Amos Tversky once said that “the secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“This meshes with a Stanford study that showed walking increases creativity by 60 percent.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“it’s better to be approximately right than precisely wrong.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“There’s a scene in the movie Lawrence of Arabia in which Lawrence puts out a match with his fingers and doesn’t flinch. Another man watching tries to do the same and yells in pain. “It hurts! What’s the trick, then?” he asks. “The trick is not minding that it hurts,” Lawrence says. This is one of the most useful life skills—enduring the pain when necessary rather than assuming there’s a hack, or a shortcut, around it.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Jeff Bezos once talked about the realities of loving your job:
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
If you can get your work life to where you enjoy half of it, that is amazing. Very few people ever achieve that.Because the truth is, everything comes with overhead. That’s reality. Everything comes with pieces that you don’t like.You can be a Supreme Court justice and there’s still going to be pieces of your job you don’t like. You can be a university professor and you still have to go to committee meetings. Every job comes with pieces you don’t like.And we need to say: That’s part of it.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Keep running” just to stay in place is how evolution works. And isn’t this how most things in modern life work?”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“His work, later deemed Cope’s Rule—not universal enough to call a law—tracked the lineages of thousands of species and showed a clear bias toward animals evolving to become larger over time.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“The tendency for evolution to create larger species is counterbalanced by the tendency of extinction to kill off larger species.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“The most dominant creatures tend to be huge, but the most enduring tend to be smaller. T-Rex < cockroach < bacteria.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“What’s incredible about this is that evolution encourages you to get bigger, then punishes you for being big.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Success has its own gravity. “The higher the monkey climbs a tree, the more you can see his ass,” oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens used to say.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Another is that success tends to lead to growth, usually by design, but a big organization is a different animal than a small one, and strategies that lead to success at one size can be impossible at another.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“One is that being right instills confidence that you can’t be wrong, which is a devastating characteristic in a world where outlier success has a target on its back, with competitors in tow. Size is associated with success, success is associated with hubris, and hubris is the beginning of the end of success.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“A third is the irony that people often work hard to gain a competitive advantage for the intended purpose of not having to work so hard at some point in the future.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“A fourth is that a skill that’s valuable in one era may not extend to the next. ”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“The last is that some success is owed to being in the right place at the right time.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“ how people respond to what eventually becomes a world-changing new technology:
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
• I’ve never heard of it.• I’ve heard of it but don’t understand it.• I understand it, but I don’t see how it’s useful.• I see how it could be fun for rich people, but not me.• I use it, but it’s just a toy.• It’s becoming more useful for me.• I use it all the time.• I could not imagine life without it.• Seriously, people lived without it?• It’s too powerful and needs to be regulated.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“No one can know what traits will be useful; that’s not how evolution works. But if you create a lot of traits, the useful one—whatever it is—will be in there somewhere. It’s the same thing with innovation. At any given moment it’s easy to look around at what start-ups are building or what scientists are discovering and think that what we’re working on is maybe neat—at best—but pales in comparison to what we did yesterday. Since we never know how multiple innovations will collide, the path of least resistance is to conclude that our best days are behind us while ignoring the potential of what we’re working on.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“There’s a theory in evolutionary biology called Fisher’s Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection. It’s the idea that variance equals strength, because the more diverse a population is, the more chances it has to come up with new traits that can be selected for.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“it’s easy to always feel like we’re falling behind. In most eras it can feel like we haven’t invented anything useful for ten or twenty years. But that’s merely because it can take ten or twenty years for an innovation to become useful.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Dee Hock says, “A book is far more than what the author wrote; it is everything you can imagine and read into it as well.” It’s similar with new technology. The value of every new technology is not just what it can do; it’s what someone else with a totally different skill set and point of view can eventually manipulate it into.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Life magazine asked James Baldwin where he gets his inspiration. Baldwin responded:
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive. An artist is a sort of emotional historian.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“an expert is always from out of town. It’s similar to the Bible verse that says no man is a prophet in his own country.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“It’s easiest to convince people that you’re special if they don’t know you well enough to see all the ways you’re not.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Good advice that took me awhile to learn is that everything is sales. Everything is sales. This is usually framed as career advice—no matter what your role in a company is, your ultimate job is to help sales.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Everything is sales also means that everyone is trying to craft an image of who they are. The image helps them sell themselves to others. Some are more aggressive than others, but everyone plays the image game, even if only subconsciously.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“When you are keenly aware of your own struggles but blind to those of others, it’s easy to assume you’re missing some skill or secret that others have. The more we describe successful people as having superhuman powers, the more everyone else looks at them and says, “I could never do that.” Which is unfortunate, because more people would be willing to try if they knew that those they admire are probably normal people who played the odds right.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“There’s an important difference between someone whose specific talent should be celebrated versus someone whose ideas should never be questioned. Eat the orange, throw away the peel.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“ Zweig of The Wall Street Journal says there are three ways to be a professional writer:
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
1. Lie to people who want to be lied to, and you’ll get rich.2. Tell the truth to those who want the truth, and you’ll make a living.3. Tell the truth to those who want to be lied to, and you’ll go broke.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“ “How many people in the world are truly crazy?” I might say, I don’t know, 3 percent to 5 percent. But if I asked, “How many people in the world would be willing to do something crazy if their incentives were right?” I’d say, oh, easily 50 percent or more.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“In 1923, Henry Luce wanted to create a magazine called Facts. It was going to report only on things that were objectively true. But Luce soon realized that was harder than you’d think. Instead he called it Time, with the idea that saving readers time with succinct stories was the most value a publisher could add. “Show me a man who thinks he’s objective and I’ll show you a man who’s deceiving himself,” Luce said.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Incentives can be cultural and tribal, where people support things because they don’t want to upset or become banished from their social group. A lot of people can resist financial incentives; cultural and tribal incentives are more seductive.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“the biggest thing they don’t teach in medical school is the difference between medicine and being a doctor—medicine is a biological science, while being a doctor is often a social skill of managing expectations, understanding the insurance system, communicating effectively, and so on.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“When good and honest people can be incentivized into crazy behavior, it’s easy to underestimate the odds of the world going off the rails.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Unsustainable things can last longer than you anticipate.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“A good question to ask is, “Which of my current views would change if my incentives were different?”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Harry Truman once said:
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
The next generation never learns anything from the previous one until it’s brought home with a hammer. . . . I’ve wondered why the next generation can’t profit from the generation before, but they never do until they get knocked in the head by experience.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Varlam Shalamov, a poet who spent fifteen years imprisoned in a gulag. He once wrote how quickly normal people can crack under stress and uncertainty. Take a good, honest, loving person and strip them of basic necessities and you’ll soon get an unrecognizable monster who’ll do anything to survive. Under high stress, “a man becomes a beast in three weeks,” Shalamov wrote.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“In investing, saying “I will be greedy when others are fearful” is easier said than done, because people underestimate how much their views and goals can change when markets break.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Jim Carrey once said, “I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it’s not the answer.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Your belief in the long run isn’t enough. Your partners, coworkers, spouses, and friends have to sign up for the ride. An investment manager who loses 40 percent can tell his investors, “It’s okay, we’re in this for the long run” and believe it. But the investors may not believe it. They might bail.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Benjamin Graham said, “The purpose of the margin of safety is to render the forecast unnecessary.” The more flexibility you have, the less you need to know what happens next. And never forget John Maynard Keynes: “In the long run we’re all dead.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“I try to ask when I’m reading: Will I care about this a year from now? Ten years from now? Eighty years from now? It’s fine if the answer is no, even a lot of the time. But if you’re honest with yourself you may begin to steer toward the more enduring bits of information.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“saying “I’m in it for the long run” is a bit like standing at the base of Mount Everest, pointing to the top, and saying, “That’s where I’m heading.” Well, that’s nice. Now comes the test.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“A lot of it comes from the gap between what you believe and what you can convince other people of.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Permanent information is: “How do people behave when they encounter a risk they hadn’t fathomed?” Expiring information is: “How much profit did Microsoft earn in the second quarter of 2005?”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Persuading somebody to quit smoking is a psychological exercise. It has nothing to do with molecules and genes and cells. And so people like me are essentially uninterested in it.
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
That’s in spite of the fact, he says, that getting people to quit smoking can make a bigger impact in the war on cancer than anything he, as a biologist, can do in his lifetime.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra once wrote:
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
Simplicity is the hallmark of truth—we should know better, but complexity continues to have a morbid attraction. When you give an academic audience a lecture that is crystal clear from alpha to omega, your audience feels cheated. . . . The sore truth is that complexity sells better.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“A trick to learning a complicated topic is realizing how many complex details are cousins of something simple. John Reed wrote in his book Succeeding:
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
When you first start to study a field, it seems like you have to memorize a zillion things. You don’t. What you need is to identify the core principles—generally three to twelve of them—that govern the field. The million things you thought you had to memorize are simply various combinations of the core principles.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Stephen King explains in his book On Writing:
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
This is a short book because most books about writing are filled with bullshit. I figured the shorter the book, the less bullshit.
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
Poetry.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Things you don’t understand create a mystique around people who do. If you say something I didn’t know but can understand, I might think you’re smart. If you say something I can’t understand, I might think you have an ability to think about a topic in ways I can’t, which is a whole different species of admiration.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Length is often the only thing that can signal effort and thoughtfulness. A typical nonfiction book covering a single topic is perhaps 250 pages, or something like 65,000 words. The funny thing is the average reader does not come close to finishing most books they buy. Even among bestsellers, average readers quit after a few dozen pages. Length, then, has to serve a purpose other than providing more material.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Simplicity feels like an easy walk. Complexity feels like a mental marathon. If the reps don’t hurt when you’re exercising, you’re not really exercising. Pain is the sign of progress that tells you you’re paying the unavoidable cost of admission.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“McCrae’s medical school professor watched the diagnosis and interrupted with every student’s nightmare: in fact, the patient had a rare and serious disease. McCrae had never heard of it. The diagnosis required immediate surgery. After opening the patient up, the professor realized that McCrae’s initial diagnosis was correct. The patient was fine. McCrae later wrote that he actually felt fortunate for never having heard of the rare disease. It allowed his mind to settle on the most likely diagnosis, rather than be burdened by searching for rare diseases, like his more educated professor.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“ an enduring quirk of human behavior: the allure of complexity, intellectual stimulation, and discounting things that are simple but very effective, in preference to things that are complex but less effective”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Sometimes length is necessary. When the Allies met to discuss what to do with Germany after World War II, Winston Churchill noted, “We are dealing with the fate of eighty million people and that requires more than eighty minutes to consider.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“In finance, spending less than you make, saving the difference, and being patient is perhaps 90 percent of what you need to know to do well. But what’s taught in college? How to price derivatives and calculate net present value. In health it’s sleep eight hours, move a lot, eat real food, but not too much. But what’s popular? Supplements, hacks, and pills.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Mark Twain said kids provide the most interesting information, “for they tell all they know and then they stop.” Adults tend to lose this skill”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Complexity gives a comforting impression of control, while simplicity is hard to distinguish from cluelessness.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Richard Feynman and Stephen Hawking could teach math with simple language that didn’t hurt your head, not because they dumbed down the topics but because they knew how to get from A to Z in as few steps as possible”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“The moral of this is not that ignorance is an advantage. But some of us are too much attracted by the thought of rare things and forget the law of averages in diagnosis.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Here’s a common theme in the way people think: Wounds heal, but scars last. There’s a long history of people adapting and rebuilding while the scars of their ordeal remain forever, changing how they think about risk, reward, opportunities, and goals for as long as they live.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Pavlov’s dogs became famous for teaching psychologists about the science of learned behavior. Less known is what happened to the poor dogs years later. A massive flood in 1924 swept through Leningrad, where Pavlov kept his lab and kennel. Flood water came right up to the dogs’ cages. Several were killed. The surviving dogs were forced to swim a quarter mile to safety. Pavlov later called it the most traumatic thing the dogs had ever experienced, by far. Something fascinating then happened: The dogs seemingly forgot their learned behavior of drooling when the bell rang.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“People tend to have short memories. Most of the time they can forget about bad experiences and fail to heed lessons previously learned. But hard-core stress leaves a scar. Experiencing something that makes you stare ruin in the face and question whether you’ll survive can permanently reset your expectations and change behaviors that were previously ingrained.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“What have you experienced that I haven’t that makes you believe what you do? And would I think about the world like you do if I experienced what you have?”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“most debates are not actual disagreements; they’re people with different experiences talking over each other.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“A study of twenty thousand people from thirteen countries who lived through World War II found they were 3 percent more likely to have diabetes as adults and 6 percent more likely to suffer depression. Compared to those who avoided the war, they were less likely to marry and less satisfied with their lives as older adults.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“It is too easy to examine history and say, “Look, if you just held on and took a long-term view, things recovered and life went on,” without realizing that mindsets are harder to repair than buildings and cash flows.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Different conditions productive of extreme excitation often lead to profound and prolonged loss of balance in nervous and psychic activity . . . neuroses and psychoses may develop as a result of extreme danger to oneself or to near friends, or even the spectacle of some frightful event not affecting one directly.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“A mind that is stretched by new experience can never go back to its old dimensions,” said Oliver Wendell Holmes.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“It’s uncomfortable to think that what you haven’t experienced might change what you believe, because it’s admitting your own ignorance. It’s much easier to assume that those who disagree with you aren’t thinking as hard as you are.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Disagreement has less to do with what people know and more to do with what they’ve experienced.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“The idea that what lies in front of us is a dark hole of uncertainty can be so intimidating, it’s easier to believe the opposite—that we can see the future, and that its path is logical and predictable. No belief in history is as commonly held, and no belief is as consistently wrong.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Look backward, and be broad. Rather than attempting to figure out little ways the future might change, study the big things the past has never avoided.”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Who has the right answers but I ignore because they’re not articulate?”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Which of my current views would I disagree with if I were born in a different country or generation?”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“What do I desperately want to be true so much that I think it’s true when it’s clearly not?”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“What is a problem that I think applies only to other countries/industries/careers that will eventually hit me?”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“What do I think is true but is actually just good marketing?”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“What haven’t I experienced firsthand that leaves me naive about how something works?”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“What looks unsustainable but is actually a new trend we haven’t accepted yet?”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Who do I think is smart but is actually full of it?”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Am I prepared to handle risks I can’t even envision?”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Which of my current views would change if my incentives were different?”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“What are we ignoring today that will seem shockingly obvious in the future?”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“What events very nearly happened that would have fundamentally changed the world I know if they had occurred?”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“How much have things outside my control contributed to things I take credit for?”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“How do I know if I’m being patient (a skill) or stubborn (a flaw)?”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“Who do I look up to that is secretly miserable?”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“What hassle am I trying to eliminate that’s actually an unavoidable cost of success?”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“What crazy genius that I aspire to emulate is actually just crazy?”
—Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
“What strong belief do I hold that’s most likely to change?”