Same as Ever Quotes

“Evolution is ruthless and unforgiving. It doesn't teach by showing you what works but by destroying what doesn't. One takeaway is that you should never be surprised when something that dominates one era dies off in the next.”
― Morgan Housel, SAME AS EVER: Timeless Lessons on Risk, Opportunity and Living a Good Life

“Five big things tend to eat away at advantages:
1. Being right instills confidence that you can't be wrong, which is a devastating characteristic where being an outlier of success has a target on it's back.

2. Success tends to lead to growth usually by design. But a big organization is a different animal than a small one and strategies that lead to success at one size can be impossible at another.

3. Hard work is in pursuit a goal and once that goal is met, the relaxation that feels so justified removes paranoia. This allows competitors in a changing world to creep in unnoticed.

4. A skill that is valuable in one era may not extend to the next. You can work as hard and be as paranoid as you've always been, but if the world no longer values your skill is loss. Being a one trick pony is common, because people in large companies that are very good at one specific thing tend to be the highest paid during the boom.

5. Some success is owed to being in the right place at the right time.”
― Morgan Housel, SAME AS EVER: Timeless Lessons on Risk, Opportunity and Living a Good Life

“Going public is a sign a company has found enough competitive advantages to scale into a large corporation. But almost 40% of all public companies lost all their value from 1980-2014. A list of top ten fortune 500 companies that went bankrupts includes: General Motors, Crysler, Kodak and Sears. General Electric, Time Warner, AIG and Motorola. Countries follow similar fates. At various points in the past, the world scientific and economic progress has been dominate by Asia, Europe and the Middle East. Whenever a once-powerful thing loses an advantage, it's tempting to ridicule the mistakes of it's leaders but it's easy to overlook how many forces pull you away from a competitive advantage simply BECAUSE you have one. Success has it's own gravity. The higher the monkey climbs a tree, the easier to see it's ass.”
― Morgan Housel, SAME AS EVER: Timeless Lessons on Risk, Opportunity and Living a Good Life

“Every industry and career is different but there's universal value in accepting the hassle when reality demands it. Volatility, people having bad days, office politics, difficult personality, bureaucracy. All of them are bad but have to be endured if you want to get anything done. Many managers have little tolerance for non-sense ... but it's just unrealistic... Sitting through periods of insanity is not a defect, it's accepting an optimal level of hassle. Same in business.”
― Morgan Housel, SAME AS EVER: Timeless Lessons on Risk, Opportunity and Living a Good Life

“A thing that's easy to overlook in life is that there's a certain level of inefficiency in life that's inevitable but ideal.”
― Morgan Housel, SAME AS EVER: Timeless Lessons on Risk, Opportunity and Living a Good Life

“Everything comes with overhead, that's reality. Everything comes with pieces you don't like. You could be a supreme court justice and there's still going to be pieces of your job you don't like. You can be a university professor and you still have to go to committee meetings. Every job comes with pieces you don't like. And we need to say: That's part of it. That's part of everything.

Nothing worth pursuing is free. The price is usually proportionate to the rewards. But there's rarely a price tag and you don't pay the price with cash. Most things worth pursuing is paid for in stress, uncertainty, dealing with quirky people, bureaucracy, other people's conflicting incentives, hassle, nonsense, long hours and constant doubt. That's the overhead costs of getting ahead. You have to realize that it's a price that has to be paid, there are few coupons and sales are rare.”
― Morgan Housel, SAME AS EVER: Timeless Lessons on Risk, Opportunity and Living a Good Life

“Cash is an inefficient drag during bull markets and as valuable as oxygen during bear markets. Leverage is the most efficient way to maximize your balance sheet and the easiest way to lose everything. Concentration is the best way to maximize returns but diversification is the best way to increase the odds of owning a company capable of delivering returns. If you're honest with yourself, you'll see a little inefficiency is the best spot to be in. Same with analysis. You'll see it's better to be approximately right than to be precisely wrong.”
― Morgan Housel, SAME AS EVER: Timeless Lessons on Risk, Opportunity and Living a Good Life

“If you understand the math behind compounding, you realize the most important question is not how can I earn the highest returns; it's what are the best returns I can sustain for the longest period of time. little changes compounded for a long time create extraordinary changes. Same as ever.”
― Morgan Housel, SAME AS EVER: Timeless Lessons on Risk, Opportunity and Living a Good Life

“Take minuscule changes and combine them by 3.8 billion years and you get results that are indistinguishable from magic. That's the real lesson from evolution. If you have a big number in the exponent slot, you do not need extraordinary change to have extraordinary results.”
― Morgan Housel, SAME AS EVER: Timeless Lessons on Risk, Opportunity and Living a Good Life

“An important thing about "making a splash" is that most things in life from love, to careers, to investing gain their value from two things: patience and scarcity. Patience to let something grow and scarcity to admire what it goes into. But what are the two most common tactics when people decide to pursue something great? Trying to make it faster and bigger. It's always been a problem and always will be. Same as ever.”
― Morgan Housel, SAME AS EVER: Timeless Lessons on Risk, Opportunity and Living a Good Life

“New ways of looking at things create much greater innovation than new ways of doing them." You'll get discourage if you think every new book has to be about an original idea, or that every new company has to sell a brand new invention. There is so much more opportunity if you see the world like Yuval Noah Harari, that's it's now what you say or what you do but it's HOW you say it and how you present it. 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 because it's just good marketing?”
― Morgan Housel, SAME AS EVER: Timeless Lessons on Risk, Opportunity and Living a Good Life

“Humor is a way to show your smart without bragging. A few things about good stories worth remembering: When a topic is complex, stories are like leverage. Leverage squeezes the full potential out of something with less effort. Stories leverage ideas in the same way that debt leverages assets. If you can explain things like how fire works with a story about balls rolling down hills and running into one another, that's what physicists what Richard Feynmen used to do, you can explain something complex in seconds, without much effort.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“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.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“Stress focuses your attention in ways good times can’t. It kills procrastination and indecision, taking what you need to get done and shoving it so close to your face that you have no choice but to pursue it, right now and to the best of your ability.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“The second is realizing the power of enough. Being more like Seinfeld.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“What calm planting the seeds of crazy does is important: It makes us fundamentally underestimate the odds of things going wrong, and the consequences of something going wrong. Things can become the most dangerous when people perceive them to be the safest.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“When everything is great—when wealth is flush, when the outlook is bright, when responsibility is low, and threats appear gone—you get some of the worst, dumbest, least-productive human behavior.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: Timeless Lessons on Risk, Opportunity and Living a Good Life

“When everything is great - when wealth is flush, when the outlook is bright, when responsibility is low, and threats appear gone - you get some of the worst, dumbest, least-productive human behavior.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“A species that evolves to become very good at one thing tends to become vulnerable at another. A bigger lion can kill more prey, but it’s also a larger target for hunters to shoot at. A taller tree captures more sunlight, but becomes vulnerable to wind damage. There is always some inefficiency.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: Timeless Lessons on Risk, Opportunity and Living a Good Life

“The trick in any field—from finance to careers to relationships—is being able to survive the short-run problems so you can stick around long enough to enjoy the long-term growth.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: Timeless Lessons on Risk, Opportunity and Living a Good Life

“When a topic is complex, stories are like leverage.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“Great ideas explained poorly can go nowhere, while old or wrong ideas told compellingly can ignite a revolution.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“The best story wins. Not the best idea, or the right idea, or the most rational idea. Just whoever tells a story that catches people’s attention and gets them to nod their heads is the one who tends to be rewarded.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“A carefree and stress-free life sounds wonderful only until you recognize the motivation and progress it prevents. No one cheers for hardship—nor should they—but we should recognize that it’s the most potent fuel of problem-solving, serving as both the root of what we enjoy today and the seed of opportunity for what we’ll enjoy tomorrow.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“The generation who lived through the Great Depression never viewed money the same afterward. They saved more money, took on less debt, and were wary of risk—for the rest of their lives.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“A mind that is stretched by new experience can never go back to its old dimensions,” - Oliver Wendell Holmes.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“Time is compounding’s magic, and its importance can’t be minimized. But the odds of success fall deepest in your favor when you mix a long time horizon with a flexible end date—or an indefinite horizon.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“The world changes, which makes changing your mind not just helpful, but crucial. But changing your mind is hard because fooling yourself into believing a falsehood is so much easier than admitting a mistake.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“The reason customers flee is often because investors have done such a poor job communicating how investing works, what their strategy is, what they should expect as an investor, and how to deal with inevitable volatility and cyclicality.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“Your belief in the long run isn’t enough. Your partners, coworkers, spouses, and friends have to sign up for the ride. An investment manager who loses 40 percent can tell his investors, “It’s okay, we’re in this for the long run” and believe it. But the investors may not believe it.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes