Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

by Morgan Housel

One is highlighting this book’s premise—to base predictions on how people behave rather than on specific events. 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.

As financial advisor Carl Richards says, “Risk is what’s left over after you think you’ve thought of everything.”

• Either everyone in the past was blinded by delusion. • Or everyone in the present is fooled by hindsight.

There is rarely more or less economic uncertainty; just changes in how ignorant people are to potential risks.

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.

And all three suffer from misinterpretation, incompleteness, embellishment, lying, and selective memory.

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

Two, realize that if you’re only preparing for the risks you can envision, you’ll be unprepared for the risks you can’t see every single time. 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.

The same goes for how much debt you think you should handle—whatever you think it is, the realit...

Montesquieu wrote 275 years ago, “If you only wished to be happy, this could be easily accomplished; but

we wish to be happier than other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are.”

Investor Charlie Munger once noted that the world isn’t driven by greed; it’s driven by envy.

There is no such thing as objective wealth—everything is relative, and mostly relative to those around you. It’s the path of least resistance to determining what life owes you and what you should expect. Everyone does it. Subconsciously or not, everyone looks around and says, “What do other people like me have? What do they do? Because that’s what I should have and do as well.”

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.

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

Actual circumstances don’t make much difference in all these cases. What generates the emotion is the big gap between expectations and reality.

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.

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.

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My friend Brent has a related theory about marriage: It only works when both people want to help their spouse while expecting nothing in return. If you both do that, you’re both pleasantly surprised.

Someone who is determined, optimistic, doesn’t take no for an answer, and is relentlessly confident in their own abilities.

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.

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.

“When you cannot measure, your knowledge is meager and unsatisfactory.”

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.”

“At your highest moment, be careful. That’s when the devil comes for you.”

I would really love to just compound at fifteen percent per year. Because if I can do that for fifty years that’s just enormous. Just slow and steady against hard problems.

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.”

There are endless similar examples in nature, most highlighting that a good idea sped up too fast quickly becomes a terrible idea.

Fast growth leads to soft, airy wood that never had time to densify. And soft, airy wood is a breeding ground for fungus and disease. “A tree that grows quickly rots quickly and therefore never has a chance to grow old,” forester Peter Wohlleben wrote. Haste makes waste.

Robert Greene writes: “The greatest impediment to creativity is your impatience, the almost inevitable desire to hurry up the process, express something, and make a splash.”

An important thing about this topic is that most great things in life—from love to careers to investing—gain their value from two things: patience and scarcity. Patience to let something grow, and scarcity to admire what it grows into.

“I was hoping to remember to stay afraid because that is the best way to stay alive and not make careless mistakes.” It’s good advice and a smart insight that applies to many things.

Because what makes life mean something is purpose. A goal. The battle, the struggle—even if you don’t win it.

Entrepreneur Andrew Wilkinson echoed the same when he said, “Most successful people are just a walking anxiety disorder harnessed for productivity.”

Warren Buffett says it takes twenty years to build a reputation and five minutes to destroy one.

good news comes from compounding, which always takes time, but bad news comes from a loss in confidence or a catastrophic error that can occur in the blink of an eye.

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.

Making a human: incomprehensibly complex. The death of a human: really simple.

The idea of “complex to make, simple to break” is everywhere.

The best financial plan is to save like a pessimist and invest like an optimist.

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.

That’s the balance—planning like a pessimist and dreaming like an optimist.

Remaining optimistic while accepting the reality of despair is fascinating to witness.

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.

You could tell three things about Bill Gates pretty quickly. He was really smart. He was really competitive; he wanted to show you how smart he was. And he was really, really persistent.

At one end you have the pure optimist. They think everything is great, will always be great, and see all negativity as a character flaw. Part is rooted in ego: they’re so confident in themselves they can’t fathom anything going wrong.

At the other end you have the pure pessimists. They think everything is terrible, will always be terrible, and see all positivity as a character flaw. Part is rooted in ego: they have so little confidence in themselves they can’t fathom anything going right. They’re the polar opposite of the pure optimist, and just as detached from reality.

In the middle is the sweet spot, what I call the rational optimists: those who acknowledge that history is a constant chain of problems and disappointments and setbacks, but who remain optimistic because they know setbacks don’t prevent eventual progress.