Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

by Morgan Housel

your happiness completely relies on expectations.

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.

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.

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.

the market historically crashes every five to seven years.

calm plants the seeds of crazy.

“A tree that grows quickly rots quickly and therefore never has a chance to grow old,”

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.

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.

Complexity gives a comforting impression of control, while simplicity is hard to distinguish from cluelessness.

“A mind that is stretched by new experience can never go back to its old dimensions,”

Historian Michael Howard has said that war and welfare go hand in hand.

It’s uncomfortable to think that what you haven’t experienced might change what you believe, because it’s admitting your own ignorance.