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You’d find people seeking the secret to a happy life and trying to find certainty when none exists in ways that are entirely relatable.
Things that never change are important because you can put so much confidence into knowing how they’ll shape the future.
Entrepreneur and investor Naval Ravikant put it this way: “In 1,000 parallel universes, you want to be wealthy in 999 of them. You don’t want to be wealthy in the fifty of them where you got lucky, so we want to factor luck out of it. . . . I want to live in a way that if my life played out 1,000 times, Naval is successful 999 times.”
thoughtless bit of dumb luck that became the most important decision of my life—far more important than every intentional decision I’ve ever made—or ever will make.
We are very good at predicting the future, except for the surprises—which tend to be all that matter.
“Risk is what’s left over after you think you’ve thought of everything.”
Risk is what you don’t see.
Here we are today, blessed with hindsight, knowing the crash after the Roaring Twenties was obvious and inevitable. But for those who lived through it—people for whom the 1930s was a yet-to-be-discovered future—it was anything but.
The biggest risk and the most important news story of the next ten years will be something nobody is talking about today.
Think of a content child, blissfully playing with toys and smiling as the sun hits their face. In their mind, everything is great. Their world begins and ends with their immediate surroundings—Mom is here, Dad is there, toys are nearby, food is in my stomach. As far as they’re concerned, life is perfect. They have all the information they need.
“Invest in preparedness, not in prediction.”
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.
in a world that tends to get better for most people most of the time, an important life skill is getting the goalpost to stop moving.
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.” John
luxuries become necessities in a remarkably short period of time when the people around you become better off.
Charlie Munger once noted that the world isn’t driven by greed; it’s driven by envy.
The homeownership rate was 12 percentage points lower in 1950 than it is today.
Workplace deaths were three times higher than today.
Subconsciously or not, everyone looks around and says, “What do other people like me have? What do they do? Because that’s what I should have and do as well.”
So the comparatively lower wages than those of today felt great because everyone else earned a lower wage
The smaller homes felt nice because everyone else lived in smaller homes too.
The glorious lifestyles of the few inflated the aspirations of the many.
But social media today adds a new element, in which everyone in the world can see the lifestyles—often inflated, faked, and airbrushed—of other people.
We might have higher incomes, more wealth, and bigger homes—but it’s all so quickly smothered by inflated expectations.
A little success was a win; a big success felt like a miracle.
The real value of things like our eyesight or relationships or freedom can be hidden to us, because money is not changing hands.
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.
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.
I think it’s often hard to distinguish high expectations from motivation. And low expectations feels like giving up and minimizing your potential.
One is the constant reminder that 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.
People who think about the world in unique ways you like also think about the world in unique ways you won’t like.
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.
Was Newton a genius in spite of being addicted to magic, or was being curious about things that seemed impossible part of what made him so successful?
But the idea that crazy geniuses sometimes just look straight-up crazy is nearly unavoidable.
Something I’ve long thought true, and which shows up constantly when you look for it, is that people who are abnormally good at one thing tend to be abnormally bad at something else.
The kind of person who promises to solve the water problems in Flint, Michigan, within days of trying to save a Thai children’s soccer team stuck in a cave, within days of rebuilding the Tesla Model 3 assembly line in a tent, is not the kind of person who views his lawyers signing off as a critical step.
“History reveals no instances of a conqueror being surfeited by conquests,”
But what a perfect example of how hard it is for people to think about probability and uncertainty. To help his students think about this, Stanford professor Ronald Howard asked them to write a percentage representing the likelihood that they had responded correctly next to each answer on the tests he gave. If you said you were 100 percent confident that your answer was correct and it turned out to be wrong, you failed the entire test. If you said you were zero percent confident and your answer happened to be correct, you got no credit. Everything in between gave you a confidence-adjusted
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The core here is that people think they want an accurate view of the future, but what they really crave is certainty. It’s
So if an event has a one-in-a-million chance of occurring every day, it should happen to eight thousand people a day, or 2.9 million times a year, and maybe a quarter of a billion times during your lifetime. Even a one-in-a-billion event will become the fate of hundreds of thousands of people during your lifetime.
information was local because life was local.
When you realize that making people feel better is more appealing than giving people useful figures, you start to see why thinking in probabilities is rare.
The brain of man is programmed with a tendency to quickly remove doubt by reaching some decision.
most people couldn’t get out of bed in the morning if they were honest about how uncertain the future is.
Great ideas explained poorly can go nowhere, while old or wrong ideas told compellingly can ignite a revolution.
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 right answer, you may or may not get ahead. 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. That’s always been true, always will be true, and it shows up in so many areas of history.
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.
There is a saying that people don’t remember books; they remember sentences.
In a perfect world, the importance of information wouldn’t rely on its author’s eloquence.
