Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

by Morgan Housel

Bezos said it’s impossible to imagine a future where Amazon customers don’t want low prices and fast shipping—so he can put enormous investment into those things.

Some of the biggest and most consequential changes in history happened because of a random, unforeseeable, thoughtless encounter or decision that led to magic or mayhem.

Every current event—big or small—has parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, siblings, and cousins. Ignoring that family tree can muddy your understanding of events, giving a false impression of why things happened, how long they might last, and under what circumstances they might occur again.

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.

We are very good at predicting the future, except for the surprises—which tend to be all that matter.

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

But that’s the point: The biggest news, the biggest risks, the most consequential events are always what you don’t see coming.

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.

“The idea that what you don’t see might refute everything you believe just doesn’t occur to us.”

Nassim Taleb says, “Invest in preparedness, not in prediction.”

Risk is dangerous when you think it requires a specific forecast before you start preparing for it.

Expectations and forecasts are two different things, and in a world where risk is what you don’t see, the former is more valuable than the latter.

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 first rule of happiness is low expectations.

“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.”

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.

yourself to your peers through a curated highlight reel of their lives, where positives are embellished and negatives are hidden from view.

I’ve come to believe, is that expectations for Truman’s abilities were so low that any leadership qualities he exhibited blew people’s minds. A little success was a win; a big success felt like a miracle.

But your happiness completely relies on expectations.

But on the other side there’s an almost complete ignorance of expectations, especially managing them with as much effort as we put into changing our circumstances.

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.

The key thing is that unique minds have to be accepted as a full package, because the things they do well and that we admire cannot be separated from the things we wouldn’t want for ourselves or we look down upon.

He was unique in every way—good, bad, awful, and occasionally illegal. —

Part of the reason it happens is because the same personality traits that push people to the top also increase the odds of pushing them over the edge.

Use of too much of your strength without moderation

The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.

I’ve never heard of a better way to teach people that life is about managing probabilities. And what an amazing way to scare the daylights out of students, forcing them to realize the consequences of assuming that certainty exists in a world filled with unknowns.

A common trait of human behavior is the burning desire for certainty despite living in an uncertain and probabilistic world.

But few people actually use probability in the real world, especially when judging others’ success.

The core here is that people think they want an accurate view of the future, but what they really crave is certainty.

Bad news gets more attention than good news because pessimism is seductive and feels more urgent than optimism.

“We need to believe we live in a predictable, controllable world, so we turn to authoritative-sounding people who promise to satisfy that need.”

Distinguishing between unfortunate odds and recklessness is hard when risk has painful consequences. It’s easier to see black and white even when the odds are apparent.

Morgan Freeman can narrate a grocery list and bring people to tears, while an inarticulate scientist might cure a disease and go unnoticed.

If you have the wrong answer but you’re a good storyteller, you’ll probably get ahead (for a while). If you have the right answer and you’re a good storyteller, you’ll almost certainly get ahead.

have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today!

Even within a good story, a powerful phrase or sentence can do most of the work. There is a saying that people don’t remember books; they remember sentences.

“Music is God,” he says. “It’s not just the icing on the cake. It’s the fudge, baked right in there.”

But we live in a world where people are bored, impatient, emotional, and need complicated things distilled into easy-to-grasp scenes.

Mark Twain said, “Humor is a way to show you’re smart without bragging.” —

“Logic is an invention of man and may be ignored by the universe.” And it often is, which can drive you mad if you expect the world to work in rational ways.

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.”

Capabilities are a function of in-the-moment circumstances.

Our bodies are not machines, and we shouldn’t expect them to perform as such. They have feelings, emotions, and fears, all of which regulate what we’re capable of.

But the stories are often bizarre reflections of people’s hopes, dreams, fears, insecurities, and tribal affiliations. And they’re getting more bizarre as social media amplifies the most emotionally appealing views.

Whenever something like this happens you see people shocked and angry about how the world has become detached from fundamentals.

What was a tragic but expected part of life a hundred years ago is now a tragic and inconceivable part of modern life—which

Death of familuh members

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

But paranoia is stressful, so you abandon it quickly once you achieve success.

Now you’ve abandoned what made you successful and you begin to decline—which is even more stressful.

Carl Jung had a theory called enantiodromia. It’s the idea that an excess of something gives rise to its opposite.