Same as Ever Quotes

“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. Minsky’s big idea was that stability is destabilizing.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“Calm Plants the Seeds of Crazy”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“Author Robert Greene once wrote, “The need for certainty is the greatest disease the mind faces.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“The world is driven by forces that cannot be measured.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“Mark Twain said, “Humor is a way to show you’re smart without bragging.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“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. Or the 1987 sinking of the ferryboat MV Dona Paz, which killed 4,345 people. Or the capsizing of the MV Le Joola, which claimed 1,863 lives off the coast of Gambia in 2002. Perhaps the Titanic sticks out because of its story potential: the famous and wealthy passengers, the firsthand accounts from survivors, and, of course, the eventual blockbuster movie.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“Stories are always more powerful than statistics.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“Professor Philip Tetlock has spent most of his career studying experts, self-proclaimed or otherwise. A big takeaway from his research is how awful so many experts are at predicting politics and the economy. Given that track record, will people ever choose to ignore the experts? “No way,” Tetlock once said. “We need to believe we live in a predictable, controllable world, so we turn to authoritative-sounding people who promise to satisfy that need.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“The decline of local news has all kinds of implications. One that doesn’t get much attention is that the wider the news becomes the more likely it is to be pessimistic. Two things make that so: • Bad news gets more attention than good news because pessimism is seductive and feels more urgent than optimism. • The odds of a bad news story—a fraud, a corruption, a disaster—occurring in your local town at any given moment is low. When you expand your attention nationally, the odds increase. When they expand globally, the odds of something terrible happening in any given moment are 100 percent.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“The core here is that people think they want an accurate view of the future, but what they really crave is certainty.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“People who think about the world in unique ways you like also think about the world in unique ways you won’t like.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“When asked, “You seem extremely happy and content. What’s your secret to living a happy life?” ninety-eight-year-old Charlie Munger replied: 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.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“We spend so much effort trying to improve our income, skills, and ability to forecast the future—all good stuff worthy of our attention. 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.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“It also highlights just how important managing expectations can be if you want to live a happy life.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“It’s become so much easier in recent decades to look around and say, “I may have more than I used to. But relative to that person over there, I don’t feel like I’m doing that great.” Part of that envy is useful, because saying “I want what they have” is such a powerful motivator of progress. Yet the point stands: We might have higher incomes, more wealth, and bigger homes—but it’s all so quickly smothered by inflated expectations.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“At the time, Kremen was forty-three years old and worth $10 million. That put him in the top half of 1 percent of people in the country, and probably the top one thousandth of 1 percent of people in the world. In Silicon Valley, however, it made him just another guy. “You’re nobody here at $10 million,” he said. The Times wrote: “He logs 60- to 80-hour workweeks because he does not think he has nearly enough money to ease up.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“John D. Rockefeller never had penicillin, sunscreen, or Advil. But you can’t say a low-income American with Advil and sunscreen today should feel better off than Rockefeller, because that’s not how people’s heads work. People gauge their well-being relative to those around them, and luxuries become necessities in a remarkably short period of time when the people around you become better off. Investor Charlie Munger once noted that the world isn’t driven by greed; it’s driven by envy.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“The first rule of happiness is low expectations.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“Psychologist Daniel Kahneman says, “The idea that what you don’t see might refute everything you believe just doesn’t occur to us.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“I can promise you that will be the case going forward. The biggest risk and the most important news story of the next ten years will be something nobody is talking about today.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“Put another way: There is rarely more or less economic uncertainty; just changes in how ignorant people are to potential risks. Asking what the biggest risks are is like asking what you expect to be surprised about.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“As financial advisor Carl Richards says, “Risk is what’s left over after you think you’ve thought of everything.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“Novelist Stefan Zweig said, “History reveals no instances of a conqueror being surfeited by conquests,” meaning no conqueror gets what they wish and then retires.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: Timeless Lessons on Risk, Opportunity and Living a Good Life

“Zangara fired five shots. One of them hit Chicago mayor Anton Cermak, who was shaking hands with Zangara’s intended target. Cermak died. The target, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was sworn in as president two weeks later. Within months of his inauguration Roosevelt transformed the U.S. economy through the New Deal. John Nance Garner—who would have become president had Zangara hit his target—opposed most of the New Deal’s deficit spending. He almost certainly wouldn’t have enacted many of the same policies, some of which still shape today’s economy.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“All the British had to do was sail up the East River and Washington’s cornered troops would have been wiped out. But it never happened, because the wind wasn’t blowing in the right direction and sailing up the river became impossible. Historian David McCullough once told interviewer Charlie Rose that “if the wind had been in the other direction on the night of August twenty-eighth [1776], I think it would have all been over.” “No United States of America if that had happened?” Rose asked. “I don’t think so,” said McCullough. “Just because of the wind, history was changed?” asked Rose. “Absolutely,” said McCullough.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“Abig lesson from history is realizing how much of the world hangs by a thread. Some of the biggest and most consequential changes in history happened because of a random, unforeseeable, thoughtless encounter or decision that led to magic or mayhem.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“Nassim Taleb says, “My only measure”: Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes (New York: Random House, 2010), 37.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“But in 1990 Ken Burns’s: Ken Burns, The Civil War (Walpole, NH, and Arlington, VA: Florentine Films in association with WETA, 1990). GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“Invest in preparedness”: Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (New York: Random House, 2014).”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“What do I think is true but is actually just good marketing? What haven’t I experienced firsthand that leaves me naive about how something works? What looks unsustainable but is actually a new trend we haven’t accepted yet? Who do I think is smart but is actually full of it? Am I prepared to handle risks I can’t even envision? Which of my current views would change if my incentives were different?”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes