Same as Ever Quotes

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

“The typical attempt to clear up an uncertain future is to gaze further and squint harder—to forecast with more precision, more data, and more intelligence. Far more effective is to do the opposite: Look backward, and be broad. Rather than attempting to figure out little ways the future might change, study the big things the past has never avoided.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“The night before the D-Day invasion, Franklin Roosevelt asked his wife, Eleanor, how she felt about not knowing what would happen next. “To be nearly sixty and still rebel at uncertainty is ridiculous isn’t it?” she said.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“And, importantly, the more those who didn’t experience that big event will struggle to understand your point of view. The oldest story is that of two sides who don’t agree with each other. The question “Why don’t you agree with me?” can have infinite answers. Sometimes one side is selfish, or stupid, or blind, or uninformed. But usually a better question is, “What have you experienced that I haven’t that makes you believe what you do? And would I think about the world like you do if I experienced what you have?” It’s the question that contains the most answers about why people don’t agree with one another. But it’s such a hard question to ask.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“Different conditions productive of extreme excitation often lead to profound and prolonged loss of balance in nervous and psychic activity . . . neuroses and psychoses may develop as a result of extreme danger to oneself or to near friends, or even the spectacle of some frightful event not affecting one directly. People tend to have short memories. Most of the time they can forget about bad experiences and fail to heed lessons previously learned. But hard-core stress leaves a scar.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“They had learned from bitter experience to crave security. This, again, was written in the 1950s, when the U.S. economy was roaring and the unemployment rate was near a record low of less than 3 percent. It is too easy to examine history and say, “Look, if you just held on and took a long-term view, things recovered and life went on,” without realizing that mindsets are harder to repair than buildings and cash flows. We can see and measure just about everything in the world except people’s moods, fears, hopes, grudges, goals, triggers, and expectations. That’s partly why history is such a continuous chain of baffling events, and always will be.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“That’s in spite of the fact, he says, that getting people to quit smoking can make a bigger impact in the war on cancer than anything he, as a biologist, can do in his lifetime. It’s astounding, isn’t it? Here you have one of the top cancer researchers in the world, and he’s saying he could make a bigger impact on cancer if he focused on getting people to quit smoking—but that’s not intellectually stimulating enough for him. Or for many scientists, for that matter. Now, I don’t blame him—and Weinberg has added enormous value to the war on cancer. But here we have an example of complexity being favored for its excitement, when simplicity may actually do a better job. And that, I’ll tell you, is a big lesson that applies to many things.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“The purpose of the margin of safety is to render the forecast unnecessary.” The more flexibility you have, the less you need to know what happens next. And never forget John Maynard Keynes: “In the long run we’re all dead.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“Comedian Trevor Noah once discussed apartheid in his native South Africa, noting: “If you find the right balance between desperation and fear, you can make people do anything.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“The next generation never learns anything from the previous one until it’s brought home with a hammer. . . . I’ve wondered why the next generation can’t profit from the generation before, but they never do until they get knocked in the head by experience.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“A lot of bankers screwed up during the 2008 financial crisis. But too many of us underestimate how we ourselves would have acted if someone dangled enormous rewards in our face. Most people are blind to their own faults. To paraphrase Ben Franklin: Vice knows it’s ugly, so it hides behind a mask.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive. An artist is a sort of emotional historian.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“The Post editors asked: “Is the age of invention passing?” Edison answered: “Passing?” he repeated, in apparent astonishment that such a question should be asked. “Why, it hasn’t started yet. That ought to answer your question. Do you want anything else?” “You believe, then, that the next 50 years will see as great a mechanical and scientific development as the past half century?” the Post queried Edison. “Greater. Much greater,” he replied. “Along what lines do you expect this development?” they asked him. “Along all lines.” This wasn’t blind optimism. Edison understood the process of scientific discovery. Big innovations don’t come at once, but rather are built up slowly when several small innovations are combined over time. Edison wasn’t a grand planner. He was a prolific tinkerer, combining parts in ways he didn’t quite understand, confident that little discoveries along the way would be combined and leveraged into more meaningful inventions.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“Van Valen called it the Red Queen hypothesis of evolution. In Alice in Wonderland, Alice meets the Red Queen in a land where you have to run just to stay in place: However fast they went, they never seemed to pass anything. “I wonder if all the things move along with us?” thought poor puzzled Alice. And the Queen seemed to guess her thoughts, for she cried, “Faster! Don’t try to talk! Keep running!” “Keep running” just to stay in place is how evolution works. And isn’t this how most things in modern life work? Business? Products? Careers? Countries?”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: Timeless Lessons on Risk, Opportunity and Living a Good Life

“Athletic performance isn’t just what you’re physically capable of. It’s what you’re capable of within the context of what your brain is willing to endure for the risk and reward in a given moment.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“Franklin Roosevelt—the most powerful man in the world, whose paralysis meant his aides often had to carry him to the bathroom—once said, “If you can’t use your legs and they bring you milk when you wanted orange juice, you learn to say ‘that’s all right,’ and drink it.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“But when Van Valen plotted extinctions by a species’ age, the trend looked more like a straight line. Some species survived a long time. But among groups of species, the probability of extinction was roughly the same whether it was 10,000 years old or 10 million years old. In a 1973 paper titled “A New Evolutionary Law,” Van Valen wrote that “the probability of extinction of a taxon is effectively independent of its age.” If you take a thousand marbles and remove 2 percent of them each year, some marbles will remain in the jar after twenty years. But the odds of being picked out are the same every year (2 percent). Marbles don’t get better at staying in the jar.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“Whenever a once powerful thing loses an advantage, it is tempting to ridicule the mistakes of its leaders. But it’s easy to overlook how many forces pull you away from a competitive advantage once you have one, specifically because you have one. Success has its own gravity. “The higher the monkey climbs a tree, the more you can see his ass,” oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens used to say. Five big things tend to eat away at competitive advantages. One is that being right instills confidence that you can’t be wrong, which is a devastating characteristic in a world where outlier success has a target on its back, with competitors in tow. Size is associated with success, success is associated with hubris, and hubris is the beginning of the end of success.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“It is so easy to discount how much progress is achievable. If I were to say, “What are the odds the average American will be twice as rich fifty years from now?” it sounds preposterous. The odds seem very low. Twice as rich as they are today? Doubling what we already have? It seems too ambitious. But then if I said, “What are the odds we can achieve 1.4 percent average annual growth for the next fifty years?” I almost sound like a pessimist. One percent? That’s it? But those numbers, of course, are the same. It’s always been like that, and always will be.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“Amazon founder Jeff Bezos once said that he’s often asked what’s going to change in the next ten years. “I almost never get the question: ‘What’s not going to change in the next ten years?’ ” he said. “And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“Franklin Roosevelt - the most powerful man in the world, whose paralysis meant his aides often had to carry him to the bathroom - once said, "If you can't use your legs and they bring you milk when you wanted orange juice, you learn to say 'that's all right,' and drink it.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“Part of what made Albert Einstein so talented was his imagination and ability to distill complexity into a simple scene in his head. When he was sixteen he started imagining what it would be like to ride on a beam of light, holding on to the sides like a flying carpet and thinking through how it would travel and bend. Soon after, he began imagining what your body would feel like if you were in an enclosed elevator riding through space. He contemplated gravity by imagining bowling balls and billiard balls competing for space on a trampoline surface. He could process a textbook of information with the effort of a daydream.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“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. One of his books—The Body: A Guide for Occupants—is basically an anatomy textbook. It has no new information, no discoveries. But it’s so well written—he tells such a good story—that it became an instant New York Times bestseller and The Washington Post’s Book of the Year.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“As many Americans watched Ken Burns’s The Civil War in 1990 as watched the Super Bowl that year. And all Burns did—not to minimize it, because it’s such a feat—is take 130-year-old existing information and weave it into a (very) good story. Burns once described perhaps the most important part of his storytelling process—the music that accompanies images in his documentaries: I went into old hymnals and old song books and I had someone plunk them out on the piano. And whenever something hit me I’d go, “That one!” And then we’d go into a studio with a session musician and probably do thirty different recordings. 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.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“The brain of man is programmed with a tendency to quickly remove doubt by reaching some decision. It is easy to see how evolution would make animals, over the eons, drift toward such quick elimination of doubt. After all, the one thing that is surely counterproductive for a prey animal that is threatened by a predator is to take a long time in deciding what to do.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“There is so much we don’t know. And not just about the future, but the past. History knows three things: 1) what’s been photographed, 2) what someone wrote down or recorded, and 3) the words spoken by people whom historians and journalists wanted to interview and who agreed to be interviewed. What percentage of everything important that’s ever happened falls into one of those three categories? No one knows. But it’s tiny.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“Every current event—big or small—has parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, siblings, and cousins. Ignoring that family tree can muddy your understanding of events, giving a false impression of why things happened, how long they might last, and under what circumstances they might occur again. Viewing events in isolation, without an appreciation of their long roots, helps explain everything from why forecasting is hard to why politics is nasty.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“That’s what this book is about: In a thousand parallel universes, what would be true in every single one?”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes