Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

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. Your future. Everyone’s future. No matter who you are, where you’re from, how old you are, or how much money you make, there are timeless lessons from human behavior that are some of the most important things you can ever learn.

Predicting what the world will look like fifty years from now is impossible. But predicting that people will still respond to greed, fear, opportunity, exploitation, risk, uncertainty, tribal affiliations, and social persuasion in the same way is a bet I’d take.

History knows three things: 1) what’s been photographed, 2) what someone wrote down or recorded, and 3) the words spoken by people whom historians and journalists wanted to interview and who agreed to be interviewed. What percentage of everything important that’s ever happened falls into one of those three categories? No one knows. But it’s tiny. And all three suffer from misinterpretation, incompleteness, embellishment, lying, and selective memory.

Your happiness depends on your expectations more than anything else.

Today’s economy is good at generating three things: wealth, the ability to show off wealth, and great envy for other people’s wealth.

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.

Charlie Munger

marriage: It only works when both people want to help their spouse while expecting nothing in return.

the overwhelming attention we pay to getting more and the negligible attention we put on managing expectations makes little sense, especially because the expectations side can be so much more in your control.

Professor Philip Tetlock has spent most of his career studying experts, self-proclaimed or otherwise. A big takeaway from his research is how awful so many experts are at predicting politics and the economy.

Winston Churchill was, by most accounts, a mediocre politician. But he was a master storyteller and orator, a savant at getting people’s attention through motivation and provoking emotion—which is what made all the difference during his time in office.

The ones who thrive long term are those who understand the real world is a never-ending chain of absurdity, confusion, messy relationships, and imperfect people.

Maybe there’s more potential out there, but it’s fine to say, “You know what, I’m pretty happy with this level of risk and I’m fine just watching this game play out.” Not everyone can do it—and markets on average can never do it—but more of us should try.

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. People handle risk and responsibility in totally different ways when a group scales from 4 people to 100 to 100,000 to 100 million.

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. After just five weeks a human embryo has a brain, a beating heart, a pancreas, a liver, and a gallbladder. By birth, a baby has 100 billion neurons, 250 trillion synapses, 11 cooperating organ systems, and a personality.

The typical attempt to clear up an uncertain future is to gaze further and squint harder—to forecast with more precision, more data, and more intelligence. Far more effective is to do the opposite: 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.