Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

by Morgan Housel

There’s an investing quip that it’s better to be approximately right than precisely wrong.

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

Flesh from the dead was cut off and meticulously labeled to prevent a survivor from having to eat their own family member.

Donner party story of 1847

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.

“The safest way to try to get what you want is to try to deserve what you want. It’s such a simple idea. It’s the golden rule. You want to deliver to the world what you would buy if you were on the other end.”

A unique skill, an underrated skill, is identifying the optimal amount of hassle and nonsense you should put up with to get ahead while getting along.

Many managers have little tolerance for nonsense. They think it’s noble. I demand excellence, they say. But it’s just unrealistic. The huge majority of them won’t thrive in their careers. Compounding is fueled by endurance, so sitting through periods of insanity is not a defect; it’s accepting an optimal level of hassle.

running a company is like eating glass while being punched in the face.

Most competitive advantages eventually die.

The most dominant creatures tend to be huge, but the most enduring tend to be smaller. T-Rex < cockroach < bacteria.

The career version of this is the Peter Principle: talented workers will keep getting promoted until they’re in over their head, when they fail.

the irony that 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.

In a 1973 paper titled “A New Evolutionary Law,” Van Valen wrote that “the probability of extinction of a taxon is effectively independent of its age.” If you take a thousand marbles and remove 2 percent of them each year, some marbles will remain in the jar after twenty years. But the odds of being picked out are the same every year (2 percent). Marbles don’t get better at staying in the jar.

Evolution is the study of advantages. Van Valen’s idea is simply that there are no permanent advantages. Everyone is madly scrambling all the time, but no one gets so far ahead that they become extinction-proof.

A common view through history is that past innovation was magnificent, but future innovation must be limited because we’ve picked all the low-hanging fruit. On January 12, 1908, The Washington Post ran a full-page spread headlined “America’s Thinking Men Forecast the Wonders of the Future.” Among the “thinking men” buried in the fine print was Thomas Edison. Edison had already changed the world at this point; he was the Steve Jobs of his time. The Post editors asked: “Is the age of invention passing?”

Edison, for example, did not invent the first light bulb; he just greatly improved upon what others had already built. In 1802—three quarters of a century before Edison’s lightbulb—a British inventor named Humphry Davy created an electric light called an arc lamp, using charcoal rods as a filament. It worked like Edison’s lightbulb, but it was impractically bright—you’d nearly go blind looking at it—and could stay lit only for a few moments before burning out, so it was rarely used. Edison’s contribution was moderating the bulb’s brightness and longevity. That was an enormous breakthrough. But it was built on the back of dozens of previous breakthroughs, none of which seemed meaningful in their own right.

Author Safi Bahcall notes that Polaroid film was discovered when sick dogs that were fed quinine to treat parasites showed an unusual type of crystal in their urine. Those crystals turned out to be the best polarizers ever discovered.

There’s a theory in evolutionary biology called Fisher’s Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection. It’s the idea that variance equals strength, because the more diverse a population is, the more chances it has to come up with new traits that can be selected for. No one can know what traits will be useful; that’s not how evolution works. But if you create a lot of traits, the useful one—whatever it is—will be in there somewhere.

“The grass is always greener on the side that’s fertilized with bullshit.”

You never know what struggles people are hiding.

When someone is viewed as more extraordinary than they are, you’re more likely to overvalue their opinion on things they have no special talent in.

Halo effect

When the incentives are crazy, the behavior is crazy. People can be led to justify and defend nearly anything.

I think an advisor just feels useless if they tell a client “we don’t need to do anything here.” In the quest to be helpful they add complexity even when none is needed, or when it might backfire.

A good question to ask is, “Which of my current views would change if my incentives were different?”

[Interviewer]: At the beginning of this interview, you said that most grown-ups welcomed Hitler’s measures. [German civilian]: Yes, clearly. One has to remember that in 1923 we had the inflation. . . . The [currency] had inflated a trillion times. . . . Then Adolf came to power with his new idea. For most that was indeed better. People who hadn’t had a job for years had a job. And then the people were all for the system. When someone helps you get out of an emergency situation and into a better life, then you’re going to give them your support. Do you think people would then say, “This is all such nonsense. I’m against that”? No. That doesn’t happen.

Historian Stephen Ambrose chronicled World War II soldiers who left basic training full of bravado and confidence, eager to fight when they joined the front lines. Then they get shot at, and everything changes. “There was no way training could prepare a man for combat,” Ambrose wrote. It could teach you how to fire a gun and follow orders. But “it could not teach men how to lie helpless under a shower of shrapnel in a field crisscrossed by machine-gun fire.” No one could understand it until they experienced it.

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

Your belief in the long run isn’t enough. Your partners, coworkers, spouses, and friends have to sign up for the ride.

Doing long-term thinking well requires identifying when you’re being patient versus just stubborn.

Long term is less about time horizon and more about flexibility.

Persuading somebody to quit smoking is a psychological exercise. It has nothing to do with molecules and genes and cells. And so people like me are essentially uninterested in it. That’s in spite of the fact, he says, that getting people to quit smoking can make a bigger impact in the war on cancer than anything he, as a biologist, can do in his lifetime. It’s astounding, isn’t it? Here you have one of the top cancer researchers in the world, and he’s saying he could make a bigger impact on cancer if he focused on getting people to quit smoking—but that’s not intellectually stimulating enough for him.

in most situations a handful of simple variables drives the majority of outcomes. If you’ve covered the few things that matter, you’re all set. A lot of what gets added after that is unnecessary filler that is either intellectually seductive, wastes your time, or is designed to confuse or impress you.

John Reed wrote in his book Succeeding: When you first start to study a field, it seems like you have to memorize a zillion things. You don’t. What you need is to identify the core principles—generally three to twelve of them—that govern the field. The million things you thought you had to memorize are simply various combinations of the core principles.

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

Things you don’t understand create a mystique around people who do.

Length is often the only thing that can signal effort and thoughtfulness.

Therefore more appealing even if the content is repetitive or bullshit

Simplicity feels like an easy walk. Complexity feels like a mental marathon.

“The moral of this is not that ignorance is an advantage. But some of us are too much attracted by the thought of rare things and forget the law of averages in diagnosis.”

What have you experienced that I haven’t that makes you believe what you do? And would I think about the world like you do if I experienced what you have?

Frederick Lewis Allen quotes a Fortune magazine article written in 1936: The present-day college generation is fatalistic . . . it will not stick its neck out. It keeps its pants buttoned, its chin up, and its mouth shut. If we take the mean average to be the truth, it is a cautious, subdued, unadventurous generation.

Disagreement has less to do with what people know and more to do with what they’ve experienced.

a list of questions, all related to the chapters you just read, to ask yourself. Who has the right answers but I ignore because they’re not articulate? 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 is a problem that I think applies only to other countries/industries/careers that will eventually hit me? 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? Am I prepared to handle risks I can’t even envision? Which of my current views would change if my incentives were different? What are we ignoring today that will seem shockingly obvious in the future? What events very nearly happened that would have fundamentally changed the world I know if they had occurred? 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 crazy genius that I aspire to emulate is actually just crazy? What strong belief do I hold that’s most likely to change? What’s always been true? What’s the same as ever?