Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

by Morgan Housel

Good stories tend to do that. They have extraordinary ability to inspire and evoke positive emotions, bringing insight and attention to topics that people tend to ignore when they’ve previously been presented with nothing but facts.

people don’t remember books; they remember sentences.

When a topic is complex, stories are like leverage. Leverage squeezes the full potential out of something with less effort. Stories leverage ideas in the same way that debt leverages assets. Trying to explain something like physics is hard if you’re deadlifting facts and formulas. But if you can explain things like how fire works with a story about balls rolling down hills and running into one another—that’s what physicist Richard Feynman, an astounding storyteller, used to do—you can explain something complex in seconds, without much effort.

The most persuasive stories are about what you want to believe is true, or are an extension of what you’ve experienced firsthand. Poet Ralph Hodgson put this well when he said, “Some things have to be believed to be seen.” Poor evidence can be a very compelling story if that story scratches an itch someone wants to go away, or gives context to a belief they want to be true.

Good stories create so much hidden opportunity among things you assume can’t be improved. How many great ideas have already been discovered but could grow one hundred times or more if someone explained them better?

Most decisions aren’t made on a spreadsheet, where you just add up the numbers and a clear answer pops out. There’s a human element that’s hard to quantify and explain, and that can seem totally detached from the original goal, yet it carries more influence than anything else. 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. Attempting to distill emotional and hormonal humans into a math equation is the cause of so much frustration and surprise in the world.

Every investment price, every market valuation, is just a number from today multiplied by a story about tomorrow.

Economist Per Bylund once noted: “The concept of economic value is easy: whatever someone wants has value, regardless of the reason (if any).”

Historian Dan Carlin wrote in his book The End Is Always Near: Pretty much nothing separates us from human beings in earlier eras than how much less disease affects us. . . . If we moderns lived for one year with the sort of death rates our pre-industrial age ancestors perpetually lived with, we’d be in societal shock. Modern life in general is about as safe as it’s ever been. And effectively all the improvement over the last century has come from a decline in infectious disease.

“For every type of animal there is a most convenient size, and a change in size inevitably carries with it a change of form,” Haldane wrote. A most convenient size. A proper state where things work well but break when you try to scale them to a different size or speed. It applies to so many things in life. —

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.”

The same people with the same intelligence have wildly different potential under different circumstances.

And the circumstances that tend to produce the biggest innovations are those that cause people to be worried, scared, and eager to move quickly because their future depends on it.

Most catastrophes come from a series of tiny risks—each of which is easy to ignore—that multiply and compound into something huge. The opposite is true: Most amazing things happen when something tiny and insignificant compounds into something extraordinary.

you have a big number in the exponent slot, you do not need extraordinary change to deliver extraordinary results. It’s not intuitive, but it’s so powerful. “The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function,” physicist Albert Bartlett used to say.

Biologist Anthony Bradshaw says that evolution’s successes get all the attention, but its failures are equally important. And that’s how it should be: Not maximizing your potential is actually the sweet spot in a world where perfecting one skill compromises another. Evolution has spent 3.8 billion years testing and proving the idea that some inefficiency is good. We know it’s right. So maybe we should pay more attention to it.

But here we have an example of complexity being favored for its excitement, when simplicity may actually do a better job.

Computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra once wrote: 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.

But in most situations a handful of simple variables drives the majority of outcomes. If you’ve covered the few things that matter, you’re all set. A lot of what gets added after that is unnecessary filler that is either intellectually seductive, wastes your time, or is designed to confuse or impress you. Nature has figured this out.

Evolution figured out its version of simplification. It (if you can imagine evolution talking) says, “Get all that useless crap out of the way. Just give me the few things I need and make them effective.”

But a truth that applies to almost every field is that there are no points awarded for difficulty. It’s possible to try too hard, to be too attracted to complexity, and doing so can backfire spectacularly.

most debates are not actual disagreements; they’re people with different experiences talking over each other.

The oldest story is that of two sides who don’t agree with each other. The question “Why don’t you agree with me?” can have infinite answers. Sometimes one side is selfish, or stupid, or blind, or uninformed. But usually a better question is, “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?” It’s the question that contains the most answers about why people don’t agree with one another. But it’s such a hard question to ask.