Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

by Morgan Housel

species rarely evolve to become perfect at anything, because perfecting one skill comes at the expense of another skill that will eventually be critical to survival.

Psychologist Amos Tversky once said that “the secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours.”

A lot of thought jobs basically never stop, and without structuring time to think and be curious, you wind up less efficient during the hours that are devoted to sitting at your desk cranking out work.

Concentration is the best way to maximize returns, but diversification is the best way to increase the odds of owning a company capable of delivering returns.

The more precise you try to be, the less time you have to focus on big-picture rules that are probably more important.

Once you accept a certain level of inefficiency, you stop denying its existence and have a clearer view of how the world works.

almost 40 percent of all public companies lost all their value from 1980 to 2014.

being right instills confidence that you can’t be wrong, which is a devastating characteristic in a world where outlier success has a target on its back,

strategies that lead to success at one size can be impossible at another.

the Peter Principle: talented workers will keep getting promoted until they’re in over their head, when they fail.

people often work hard to gain a competitive advantage for the intended purpose of not having to work so hard at some point in the future.

a skill that’s valuable in one era may not extend to the next.

some success is owed to being in the right place at the right time.

you should never be surprised when something that dominates one era dies off in the next.

Big innovations don’t come at once, but rather are built up slowly when several small innovations are combined over time.

it’s so easy to underestimate how two small things can compound into an enormous thing.

It’s easiest to convince people that you’re special if they don’t know you well enough to see all the ways you’re not.

Most things are harder than they look and not as fun as they seem.

Incentives are the most powerful force in the world and can get people to justify or defend almost anything.

Nothing is more persuasive than what you’ve experienced firsthand.

Unexpected hardship makes people do and think things they’d never imagine when things are calm.

The long run is just a collection of short runs you have to put up with.

The reason so many financial professionals stray toward short-termism is because it’s the only way to run a viable business when customers flee at the first sign of trouble.

Patience is often stubbornness in disguise.

fooling yourself into believing a falsehood is so much easier than admitting a mistake.

the odds of success fall deepest in your favor when you mix a long time horizon with a flexible end date—or an indefinite horizon.

The more flexibility you have, the less you need to know what happens next.

permanent information never expires, letting you accumulate it. It also compounds over time, leveraging off what you’ve already learned.

There are no points awarded for difficulty.

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

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

Experiencing something that makes you stare ruin in the face and question whether you’ll survive can permanently reset your expectations and change behaviors that were previously ingrained.

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

as Benedict Evans says, “The more the Internet exposes people to new points of view, the angrier people get that different views exist.”

the more history I read, the more comfortable I became with the future.

Which of my current views would I disagree with if I were born in a different country or generation?

What do I desperately want to be true so much that I think it’s true when it’s clearly not?

What do I think is true but is actually just good marketing?

What haven’t I experienced firsthand that leaves me naive about how something works?

What looks unsustainable but is actually a new trend we haven’t accepted yet?

Who do I think is smart but is actually full of it?

Which of my current views would change if my incentives were different?

How much have things outside my control contributed to things I take credit for?

How do I know if I’m being patient (a skill) or stubborn (a flaw)?

Who do I look up to that is secretly miserable?

What hassle am I trying to eliminate that’s actually an unavoidable cost of success?

What strong belief do I hold that’s most likely to change?