Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

by Morgan Housel

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.”

You compare yourself to your peers through a curated highlight reel of their lives, where positives are embellished and negatives are hidden from view. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt says people don’t really communicate on social media so much as they perform for one another.

One day, I realized with all these people I was jealous of, I couldn’t just choose little aspects of their life. I couldn’t say I want his body, I want her money, I want his personality. You have to be that person. Do you want to actually be that person with all of their reactions, their desires, their family, their happiness level, their outlook on life, their self-image? 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.

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.

Or take the stock market. The valuation of every company is simply a number from today multiplied by a story about tomorrow.

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

General Westmoreland, who commanded U.S. forces, told Senator Fritz Hollings, “We’re killing these people at a rate of ten to one.” Hollings replied, “The American people don’t care about the ten. They care about the one.”

Historian Stephen Ambrose notes that Eisenhower and General Omar Bradley got all the war-planning reasoning and logic right in late 1944, except for one detail—the extent to which Hitler had lost his mind.

Minsky’s seminal theory was called the financial instability hypothesis. The idea isn’t heavy on math and formulas. It describes a psychological process that basically goes like this: • When an economy is stable, people get optimistic. • When people get optimistic, they go into debt. • When they go into debt, the economy becomes unstable.

So record rain directly led to record fires. There’s a long history of this, verified by looking at tree rings, which inscribe both heavy rainfall and subsequent fire scars. The two go hand in hand. “A wet year reduces fires while increasing vegetation growth, but then the increased vegetation dries out in subsequent dry years, thereby increasing the fire fuel,” the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration wrote. That’s hardly intuitive, but here again—calm plants the seeds of crazy.

Warren Buffett once joked that you can’t make a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant.

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 was a most convenient size for Starbucks—there is for all businesses. Push past it and you realize that revenue might scale but disappointed customers scale faster,

The number of rural American homes with electricity rose from less than 10 percent in 1935 to nearly 50 percent by 1945.

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

The idea of “complex to make, simple to break” is everywhere. Construction requires skilled engineers; demolition requires only a sledgehammer.

There is no perfect species, one adapted to everything at all times. The best any species can do is to be good at some things until the things it’s not good at suddenly matter more. And then it dies.

I guarantee workers at the competitor find flaws in the way their company operates, because they know about their company what my friend knows about his: how the sausage is made. All the messy personalities and difficult decisions that you see only when you’re inside, in the trenches. “All businesses are loosely functioning disasters,” Brent Beshore says. But a business is like an iceberg; only a fraction is visible.

Doing long-term thinking well requires identifying when you’re being patient versus just stubborn. Not an easy thing to do. The only solution is knowing the very few things in your industry that will never change and putting everything else in a bucket that’s in constant need of updating and adapting. The few (very few) things that never change are candidates for long-term thinking. Everything else has a shelf life.

The point, then, isn’t that you should read less news and more books. It’s that if you read good books you’ll have an easier time understanding what you should or shouldn’t pay attention to in the news.