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Kindle Notes & Highlights
The premise of this book is that doing well with money has a little to do with how smart you are and a lot to do with how you behave. And behavior is hard to teach, even to really smart people.
A genius who loses control of their emotions can be a financial disaster. The opposite is also true. Ordinary folks with no financial education can be wealthy if they have a handful of behavioral skills that have nothing to do with formal measures of intelligence.
One, financial outcomes are driven by luck, independent of intelligence and effort. That’s true to some extent, and this book will discuss it in further detail. Or, two (and I think more common), that financial success is not a hard science. It’s a soft skill, where how you behave is more important than what you know.
“History never repeats itself; man always does.” It applies so well to how we behave with money.
Your personal experiences with money make up maybe 0.00000001% of what’s happened in the world, but maybe 80% of how you think the world works.
We all think we know how the world works. But we’ve all only experienced a tiny sliver of it.
But realize that not all success is due to hard work, and not all poverty is due to laziness. Keep this in mind when judging people, including yourself.
$81.5 billion of Warren Buffett’s $84.5 billion net worth came after his 65th birthday.
Over the course of your lifetime as an investor the decisions that you make today or tomorrow or next week will not matter nearly as much as what you do during the small number of days—likely 1% of the time or less—when everyone else around you is going crazy.
THE HIGHEST FORM of wealth is the ability to wake up every morning and say, “I can do whatever I want today.”
Having a strong sense of controlling one’s life is a more dependable predictor of positive feelings of wellbeing than any of the objective conditions of life we have considered.
“Your kids don’t want your money (or what your money buys) anywhere near as much as they want you. Specifically, they want you with them,”
Take it from those who have lived through everything: Controlling your time is the highest dividend money pays.
The correct lesson to learn from surprises is that the world is surprising.
Investors often innocently take cues from other investors who are playing a different game than they are.
Bubbles do their damage when long-term investors playing one game start taking their cues from those short-term traders playing another.
Saving money is the gap between your ego and your income, and wealth is what you don’t see.
Become OK with a lot of things going wrong. You can be wrong half the time and still make a fortune, because a small minority of things account for the majority of outcomes.
