Same as Ever: Timeless Lessons on Risk, Opportunity and Living a Good Life

by Morgan Housel

But in 1990 Ken Burns’s The Civil War documentary became an instant phenomenon, with forty million viewers and winning forty major television and film awards.

Burns says that when writing a documentary script he will literally extend a sentence so that it lines up with a certain beat in the background music; he will cut a sentence to do the same. “Music is God,” he says. “It’s not just the icing on the cake. It’s the fudge, baked right in there.”

Author Bill Bryson is the same. His books fly off the shelves, which can drive the little-known academics who uncovered the things he writes about crazy.

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

Professor John Burr Williams had more profound insight on the topic of valuing stocks than Benjamin Graham. But Graham knew how to write a good paragraph, so he became the legend and sold millions of books.

Everyone knows the story of the sinking of the Titanic, which claimed fifteen hundred lives. But almost no one ever mentions a word about the 1948 sinking of the Chinese ferryboat SS Kiangya, which claimed nearly four thousand lives.

The influence of a good story drives you crazy if you assume the world is swayed by facts and objectivity—if you assume the best idea or the largest numbers or the correct answer wins. There’s a devoted group of Harari critics obsessed with showing how unoriginal his work is; Musk is viewed with the same mix of confusion and contempt.

information is exchanged—wherever there are products, companies, careers, politics, knowledge, education, and culture—the best story wins.

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

The most persuasive stories are about what you want to believe is true, or are an extension of what you’ve experienced firsthand.

Some of the most important questions to ask yourself are: Who has the right answer, but I ignore because they’re inarticulate? And what do I believe is true but is actually just good marketing?

answer. But if you’re honest with yourself you’ll see how many people, and how many beliefs, fall into these buckets. And then you’ll see the truth—that the best story wins.

The opposite is true: Some of the most important forces in the world—particularly those regarding people’s personalities and mindsets—are nearly impossible to measure and impossible to predict.

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. An aide to Bradley mentioned during the war:

Hill’s early work was based on the idea that maximum running performance is a function of an athlete’s muscles—overwhelmingly their heart. If my heart can pump more blood to my running muscles than yours, I can run faster. It was something you could cleanly measure, and Hill won the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1922 for some of his work in understanding body mechanics.

GameStop was the opposite. It looked like it was on the edge of going out of business in 2020. Then it became a cultural obsession on Reddit, the stock surged, the company raised a ton of money, and at one point in 2021 it was worth $11 billion.

Same thing here: The most important variable was the stories people told themselves. And that was the only thing you couldn’t measure and couldn’t predict with foresight. That’s why the results don’t compute.

The next is 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.

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.

You would buy as many stocks as you possibly could. You would mortgage your house and buy more. You’d consider selling a kidney and buy more still. That would be the reasonable thing to do! And in the process, the price of stocks would get bid up. Their valuations would become ever more expensive. They would get so expensive that their future return prospects would decline close to zero.

there was nothing unusual about finding yourself threatened by contagious disease. Mumps, measles, chicken pox, and German measles swept through entire schools and towns; I had all four. Polio took a heavy annual toll, leaving thousands of people (mostly children) paralyzed or dead. There were no vaccines. Growing up meant running an unavoidable gauntlet of infectious disease.

Jung had a theory called enantiodromia. It’s the idea that an excess of something gives rise to its opposite. Let me give you an example from Mother Nature. California was hit with an epic drought in the mid-2010s. Then 2017 came, dropping a preposterous amount of moisture. Parts of Lake Tahoe received—I’m not making this up—more than sixty-five feet of snow in a few months. The six-year drought was declared over. You’d think that would be great. But it backfired in an unexpected way.

dry 2018 meant all that vegetation died and became dry kindling. That led to some of the biggest wildfires California had ever seen. 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

Every few years there seems to be a declaration that markets don’t work anymore—that they’re all speculation or detached from fundamentals. But it’s always been that way. People haven’t lost their minds; they’re just searching for the boundaries of what other investors are willing to believe.

Maybe there’s more potential out there, but it’s fine to say, “You know what, I’m pretty happy with this level of risk and I’m fine just watching this game play out.” Not everyone can do it—and markets on average can never do it—but more of us should try.

A pituitary gland abnormality bombarded Wadlow’s body with growth hormone, leading to staggering size. He was six feet tall at age seven, seven feet tall by age eleven, and when he died at twenty-two stood an inch shy of nine feet, weighed five hundred pounds, and wore size 37 shoes. His hand was a foot wide.

Starbucks had 425 stores in 1994, its twenty-third year in existence. In 1999 it opened 625 new stores. By 2007 it was opening 2,500 stores per year—a new coffee shop every four hours. One thing led to another. The need to hit growth targets eventually elbowed out rational analysis. Examples of Starbucks saturation became a joke. Same-store sales growth fell by half as the rest of the economy boomed. Howard Schultz wrote to senior management in 2007: “In order to go from less than 1,000 stores to 13,000 stores we have had to make a series of decisions that, in retrospect, have led to the watering down of the Starbucks experience.” Starbucks closed six hundred stores in 2008 and laid off twelve thousand employees. Its stock fell 73 percent, which was dreadful even by 2008 standards.