Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

by Morgan Housel

Change captures our attention because it’s surprising and exciting. But the behaviors that never change are history’s most powerful lessons, because they preview what to expect in the future.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos once said that he’s often asked what’s going to change in the next ten years. “I almost never get the question: ‘What’s not going to change in the next ten years?’ ” he said. “And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two.”

Philosophers have spent centuries discussing the idea that there are an infinite number of ways your life could play out, and you just happen to be living in this specific version. It’s a wild thing to contemplate, and it leads to the question: What would be true in every imaginable version of your life, not just this one?

Ski resorts are pretty good at protecting customers from avalanches by closing off the most dangerous slopes and using explosives to intentionally set off avalanches late at night, before customers arrive in the morning.

Every event creates its own offspring, which impact the world in their own special ways. It makes prediction exceedingly hard.

Asking what the biggest risks are is like asking what you expect to be surprised about. If you knew what the biggest risk was you would do something about it, and doing something about it would make it less risky. What your imagination can’t fathom is the dangerous stuff, and it’s why risk can never be mastered.

The biggest risk and the most important news story of the next ten years will be something nobody is talking about today. No matter what year you’re reading this book, that truth will remain.

Nassim Taleb says, “Invest in preparedness, not in prediction.” That gets to the heart of it.

1950s are so often remembered as the golden age of middle-class prosperity. Ask Americans when the country was at its greatest and the 1950s is usually near the top. Compared to today? Different worlds, no comparison. The overwhelming feeling is: It was better then.

Today’s economy is good at generating three things: wealth, the ability to show off wealth, and great envy for other people’s wealth.

Imagine a life where almost everything gets better but you never appreciate it because your expectations rise as fast as your circumstances. It’s terrifying, and almost as bad as a world where nothing gets better.

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.

about 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.

wealth and happiness is a two-part equation: what you have and what you expect/need. When you realize that each part is equally important, you see that the overwhelming attention we pay to getting more and the negligible attention we put on managing expectations makes little sense, especially because the expectations side can be so much more in your control.

how the expectation game is played. It’s a mental game, and it’s often crazy and agonizing, but it’s a game that everyone is forced to play, so you should be aware of the rules and strategies.

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. And the expectation side of that equation is not only important,...

Mark Twain was perhaps the best storyteller of modern times. When editing his writing, he would read aloud to his wife and kids. When a passage caused them to look bored, he would cut it. When their eyes widened, when they sat forward or furrowed their brow, he knew he was onto something, and he doubled down.

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

Charles Darwin was not the first to discover evolution; he just wrote the first and most compelling book about it.

Perhaps no one has mastered the art of storytelling better than comedians. They are the best thought leaders because they understand how the world works, but they want to make you laugh rather than make themselves feel smart. They take insights from psychology, sociology, politics, and every other dry field and squeeze out amazing stories. That’s why they can sell out arenas while an academic researcher who discovers a great insight about social behavior can go unnoticed.

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.”

Great athletes are more likely to have stronger hearts than a couch potato. But the correlation between cardiovascular capacity and athletic performance is far from perfect, which is why competitive races like marathons and Olympic sprints are exciting. Sometimes great athletes choke. Sometimes dark horses win.

The danger, one you see often in investing, is when people become too McNamara-like—so obsessed with data and so confident in their models that they leave no room for error or surprise. No room for things to be crazy, dumb, unexplainable, and to remain that way for a long time. Always asking “Why is this happening?” and expecting there to be a rational answer. Or worse, always mistaking what happened for what you think should have happened.

Author Robert Greene once wrote, “The need for certainty is the greatest disease the mind faces.” It’s what causes us to overlook that the world is not one big spreadsheet whose outputs can be computed.

accepting that what’s rational to one person can be crazy to another. Everything would compute if everyone had the same time horizon, goals, ambitions, and risk tolerances. But they don’t. Panic-selling stocks after they’ve declined 5 percent is a terrible idea if you’re a long-term investor, and a career imperative if you’re a professional trader.

understanding the power of incentives. A financial bubble might seem irrational, but the people who work in industries that are in bubbles—mortgage brokers in 2004 or stockbrokers in 1999—make so much money from them that there’s a powerful incentive to keep the music playing. They delude not only their customers but themselves.