Same as Ever Quotes

“Disagreement has less to do with what people know and more to do with what they’ve experienced. And since experiences will always be different, disagreement will be constant.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“So they’re all a little imperfect. Nature’s answer is a lot of good enough, below-potential traits across all species.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“An important thing about this topic is that most great 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 grows into. But what are two of the most common tactics when people pursue something great? Trying to make it faster and bigger. It’s always been a problem, and always will be. Same as ever. In”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“Invest in preparedness, not in prediction.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“Expiring knowledge catches more attention than it should for two reasons: one, there's a lot it. Eager to keep our short attention spans occupied. Two, we chase it down. Anxious to squeeze insight out of it before it loses relevance. Permanent information is harder to notice because it's buried in books rather than blasted in headlines. But it's benefit is huge. It's not just hat permanent information never expires, letting you accumulate it, it also compounds over it, leveraging off what you've already learned. Expiring information tells you what happened. Permanent information tells you WHY something happened and is likely to happen again. That WHY can translate into stuff you know about other topics, which is where the compounding comes in. I read newspapers and books everyday. I cannot recall one damn thing I read in a newspaper from say 2011, but I can tell you in great detail about books I read in 2011 and how they changed the way I think.”
― Morgan Housel, SAME AS EVER: Timeless Lessons on Risk, Opportunity and Living a Good Life

“The long run is just a collection of short runs you have to put up with. Saying you have a ten year time horizon doesn't exempt you from al the non-sense that happens in the next ten years. Everyone has to experience the recessions, the bear markets, the meltdowns, the surprises and the memes. So rather than assume long term thinkers don't have to deal with short-notice nonsense, ask the question: how can I endure a never-ending parade of nonsense?”
― Morgan Housel, SAME AS EVER: Timeless Lessons on Risk, Opportunity and Living a Good Life

“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.” The inability to forecast the past has no impact on our desire to forecast the future. Certainty is so valuable that we’ll never give up the quest for it, and most people couldn’t get out of bed in the morning if they were honest about how uncertain the future is.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“In finance, spending less than you make, saving the difference, and being patient is perhaps 90 percent of what you need to know to do well.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“The grass is always greener on the side that’s fertilized with bullshit,”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“A one-hundred-year event doesn’t mean it happens every one hundred years. It means there’s about a 1 percent chance of it occurring in any given year.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“America of the 1920s had the same real per-capita GDP as Turkmenistan does today.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“Stress focuses your attention in ways that good times can’t.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“An important component of human behavior is that people who’ve had different experiences than you will think differently than you do. They’ll have different goals, outlooks, wishes, and values. So most debates are not actual disagreements; they’re people with different experiences talking over each other.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“Simplicity is the hallmark of truth—we should know better, but complexity continues to have a morbid attraction. When you give an academic audience a lecture that is crystal clear from alpha to omega, your audience feels cheated. . . . The sore truth is that complexity sells better.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“So rather than assuming long-term thinkers don’t have to deal with short-term nonsense, ask the question, “How can I endure a never-ending parade of nonsense?” Long-term thinking can be a deceptive safety blanket that people assume lets them bypass the painful and unpredictable short run. But it never does. It might be the opposite: The longer your time horizon, the more calamities and disasters you’ll experience. Baseball player Dan Quisenberry once said, “The future is much like the present, only longer.” Dealing with that reality requires a certain kind of alignment that’s easy to overlook.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“Or take Varlam Shalamov, a poet who spent fifteen years imprisoned in a gulag. He once wrote how quickly normal people can crack under stress and uncertainty. Take a good, honest, loving person and strip them of basic necessities and you’ll soon get an unrecognizable monster who’ll do anything to survive. Under high stress, “a man becomes a beast in three weeks,” Shalamov wrote.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“Seinfeld asked if McKinsey is funny. No, the magazine said. “Then I don’t need them,” he said. “If you’re efficient, you’re doing it the wrong way. The right way is the hard way. The show was successful because I micromanaged it—every word, every line, every take, every edit, every casting.” If you’re efficient, you’re doing it the wrong way. That is so counterintuitive. But I think it perfectly highlights the danger of shortcuts.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“A good question to ask is, “Which of my current views would change if my incentives were different?”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“The best financial plan is to save like a pessimist and invest like an optimist. That idea—the belief that things will get better mixed with the reality that the path between now and then will be a continuous chain of setback, disappointment, surprise, and shock—shows up all over history, in all areas of life.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: Timeless Lessons on Risk, Opportunity and Living a Good Life

“The ones who thrive long term are those who understand the real world is a never-ending chain of absurdity, confusion, messy relationships, and imperfect people.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“A decade ago I made a goal to read more history and fewer forecasts. It was one of the most enlightening changes of my life. And the irony is that the more history I read, the more comfortable I became with the future. When you focus on what never changes, you stop trying to predict uncertain events and spend more time understanding timeless behavior. Hopefully this book nudged you down that path.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“author Yuval Noah Harari writes: “To enjoy peace, we need almost everyone to make good choices. By contrast, a poor choice by just one side can lead to war.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“You want to feel a gap between what you expected and what actually happened. And the expectation side of that equation is not only important, but it’s often more in your control than managing your circumstances.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“your happiness completely relies on expectations.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“Someone somewhere right now is inventing or discovering something that will utterly change the future.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“Investor Howard Marks once talked about an investor whose annual results were never ranked in the top quartile, but over a fourteen-year period he was in the top 4 percent of all investors. If he keeps those mediocre returns up for another ten years he may be in the top 1 percent of his peers—one of the greatest of his generation despite being unremarkable in any given year…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.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“Investor Howard Marks once talked about an investor whose annual results were never ranked in the top quartile, but over a fourteen-year period he was in the top 4 percent of all investors. If he keeps those mediocre returns up for another ten years he may be in the top 1 percent of his peers—one of the greatest of his generation despite being unremarkable in any given year…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?”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“When someone is viewed as more extraordinary than they are, you're more likely to overvalue their opinion on things they have no special talent in. Like a successful hedge fund manager's political views, or a politician's investment advice.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“The safest way to try to get what you want is to try to deserve what you want.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“Same in investing. Cash is an inefficient drag during bull markets and as valuable as oxygen during bear markets”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes