Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

by Morgan Housel

But more realistic is admitting that if you know where we’ve been, you realize we have no idea where we’re going.

Nassim Taleb says, “Invest in preparedness, not in prediction.” That gets to the heart of it.

It’s staggering how expectations can alter how you interpret current circumstances.

Everyone, everywhere, doing almost any task, is just in pursuit of some space between expectations and reality.

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.

But we shouldn’t be surprised that the world feels historically broken in recent years and will continue that way going forward. It’s not—we just see more of the bad stuff that’s always happened than we ever saw before.

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.

Or, put another way: Calm plants the seeds of crazy. Always has, always will.

The irony of good times is that they breed complacency and skepticism of warnings.

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.

It’s that if you read good books you’ll have an easier time understanding what you should or shouldn’t pay attention to in the news.