Same as Ever Quotes

“Nothing can become truly resilient when everything goes right,” Shopify founder Toby Lütke said. “The excess energy released from overreaction to setbacks is what innovates!” wrote Nassim Taleb.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“Investor Jim Grant once said: To suppose that the value of a common stock is determined purely by a corporation’s earnings discounted by the relevant interest rates and adjusted for the marginal tax rate is to forget that people have burned witches, gone to war on a whim, risen to the defense of Joseph Stalin and believed Orson Welles when he told them over the radio that the Martians had landed.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“But we shouldn’t be surprised that the world feels historically broken in recent years and will continue that way going forward. It’s not—we just see more of the bad stuff that’s always happened than we ever saw before.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“It's uncomfortable to think that what yuo haven't experienced might chang what you believe, because it's admitting your own ignorance. It's much easier to assume that those who disagree with you aren't thinking as hard as you are.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“A good rule of thumb for a lot of things is to identify the price and be willing to pay for it. The price, for so many things, is putting up with an optimal amount of hassle.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“If you can get your work life to where you enjoy half of it, that is amazing. Very few people ever achieve that. Because the truth is, everything comes with overhead. That's reality. Everything comes with pieces that you don't like. Every job comes with pieces you don't like. And we need to say: That's part of it.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“This is one of the most useful life skills - enduring the pain when necessary rather than assuming there is a hack, or a shortcut, around it.

Charlie Munger once noted: "The safest way to try to get what you want is to try to deserve what you want. It is such a simple idea. It is the golden rule. You want to deliver the world what you would buy if you were on the other end.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“Everything has a price, and the price is usually proportionate to the potential rewards. But there’s rarely a price tag. And you don’t pay the price with cash. Most things worth pursuing charge their fee in the form of stress, uncertainty, dealing with quirky people, bureaucracy, other peoples’ conflicting incentives, hassle, nonsense, long hours, and constant doubt. That’s the overhead cost of getting ahead.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“The most important things come from compounding. But compounding takes awhile, so it’s easy to ignore.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“La estabilidad es desestabilizadora. O, dicho de otra forma, la calma planta la semilla de la locura. Siempre ha sido así y siempre lo será.”
― Morgan Housel, Lo que nunca cambia: 23 lecciones atemporales para nuestra vida personal y financiera

“The question then is: Why? Why are complexity and length so appealing when simplicity and brevity will do? A few reasons: Complexity gives a comforting impression of control, while simplicity is hard to distinguish from cluelessness.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“We should be planning like a pessimist and dreaming like an optimist.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“There is no such thing as objective wealth—everything is relative, and mostly relative to those around you. It’s the path of least resistance to determining what life owes you and what you should expect. Everyone does it. Subconsciously or not, everyone looks around and says, “What do other people like me have? What do they do? Because that’s what I should have and do as well.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“Food consumed 29 percent of an average household’s budget in 1950 versus 13 percent today.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“Because what makes life mean something is purpose. A goal. The battle, the struggle—even if you don’t win it.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“It’s uncomfortable to think that what you haven’t experienced might change what you believe, because it’s admitting your own ignorance. It’s much easier to assume that those who disagree with you aren’t thinking as hard as you are.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“After the war, John Maynard Keynes predicted countries wrecked by war would go on to have a “craving for social and personal security.” Which is what happened. Historian Tony Judt notes that the state of affairs was so bad in postwar Europe that only the state could offer hope of salvation to the masses of displaced people. So it did. Everything from generous unemployment insurance to universal health care became common after the war in ways that never caught on in America.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“Ever the curious scientist, Pavlov spent months studying how the flood changed his dogs’ behavior. Many were never the same—they had completely different personalities after the flood, and learned behavior that was previously ingrained vanished. He summed up what happened, and how it applies to humans: 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

“Expiring knowledge catches more attention than it should, for two reasons. One, there’s a lot of 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 its benefit is huge. It’s not just that permanent information never expires, letting you accumulate it. It also compounds over time, leveraging off what you’ve already learned.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“People mock how much short-term thinking there is in the financial industry, and they should. But I also get it: The reason so many financial professionals stray toward short-termism is because it’s the only way to run a viable business when customers flee at the first sign of trouble. But 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. Eventually being right is one thing. But can you eventually be right and convince those around you? That’s completely different, and easy to overlook.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“If I, today, imagine how I’d respond to stocks falling 30 percent, I picture a world where everything is like it is today except stock valuations, which are 30 percent cheaper. But that’s not how the world works. Downturns don’t happen in isolation. The reason stocks might fall 30 percent is because big groups of people, companies, and politicians screwed something up, and their screwups might sap my confidence in our ability to recover.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“I understand it, but I don’t see how it’s useful. • I see how it could be fun for rich people, but not me. • I use it, but it’s just a toy. • It’s becoming more useful for me. • I use it all the time. • I could not imagine life without it. • Seriously, people lived without it? • It’s too powerful and needs to be regulated. It happens over and over again.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“Species are the same. Some happen to live a long time, but the odds of surviving don’t improve over time. Van Valen argued that’s the case mainly because competition isn’t like a football game that ends with a winner who can then take a break. Competition never stops. A species that gains an advantage over a competitor instantly incentivizes the competitor to improve. It’s an arms race.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“Body size in biology is like leverage in investing: It accentuates the gains but amplifies the losses. It works well for a while and then backfires spectacularly at the point where the benefits are nice but the losses are lethal.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“Entrepreneur and investor Naval Ravikant put it this way: “In 1,000 parallel universes, you want to be wealthy in 999 of them. You don’t want to be wealthy in the fifty of them where you got lucky, so we want to factor luck out of it. . . . I want to live in a way that if my life played out 1,000 times, Naval is successful 999 times.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“How do I know if I’m being patient (a skill) or stubborn (a flaw)?”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“Expiring information tells you what happened; permanent information tells you why something happened and is likely to happen again.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“Where there’s pain there’s profit,” he often reminds people. There’s an optimal level of hassle to accept, even embrace.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“Charlie Munger once noted: “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

“I like studying the investing behaviors that never change, and I’d never have the time to do that if I spent my day predicting what the economy will do next quarter. The same is true in virtually every field. The more precise you try to be, the less time you have to focus on big-picture rules that are probably more important. It’s less about admitting that we can’t forecast, and more about acknowledging that if your forecast is merely good enough, you can invest your time and resources more efficiently elsewhere. Just like evolution, the key is realizing that the more perfect you try to become, the more vulnerable you generally are.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes