Same as Ever Quotes

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

“It’s a natural part of how the world works, driven by the fact that good news comes from compounding, which always takes time, but bad news comes from a loss in confidence or a catastrophic error that can occur in the blink of an eye.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“There’s an obvious limit to stress-induced innovation. There’s a delicate balance between helpful stress and crippling disaster. The latter prevents innovation as resources are sapped and people turn their attention from getting out of a crisis to merely surviving it.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“World War II began on horseback in 1939 and ended with nuclear fission in 1945.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“The same people with the same intelligence have wildly different potential under different circumstances. And the circumstances that tend to produce the biggest innovations are those that cause people to be worried, scared, and eager to move quickly because their future depends on it. “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. Stress focuses your attention in ways good times can’t. It kills procrastination and indecision,”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“Who has the right answers but I ignore because they’re not articulate? Which of my current views would I disagree with if I were born in a different country or generation? What do I desperately want to be true so much that I think it’s true when it’s clearly not? What is a problem that I think applies only to other countries/industries/careers that will eventually hit me? What do I think is true but is actually just good marketing?”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“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

“Here’s a common theme in the way people think: Wounds heal, but scars last.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“There are two types of information: permanent and expiring. Permanent information is: “How do people behave when they encounter a risk they hadn’t fathomed?” Expiring information is: “How much profit did Microsoft earn in the second quarter of 2005?”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“Benjamin Graham said, “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

“There’s an important difference between someone whose specific talent should be celebrated versus someone whose ideas should never be questioned. Eat the orange, throw away the peel.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“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. It’s one of the most common stories in history. Few companies, products, musicians, cities, or authors remain relevant for more than a few decades, tops. The ones that have (the Beatles, Levi’s, Snickers, New York City) are rare exceptions.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“Black rhinos survived for 8 million years before being killed off by poachers. Lehman Brothers adapted and prospered for 150 years and 33 recessions before it met its match in mortgage-backed securities. Poof, gone.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“Some things evolve but never actually become better adapted, because threats are always changing.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“I describe my forecasting model as “good enough.” I’m confident people will solve problems and become more productive over time. I’m confident markets will allocate the rewards of that productivity to investors over time. I’m confident in other people’s overconfidence, so I know there will be mistakes and accidents and booms and busts along the way. It’s not detailed, but it’s good enough.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“If you’re honest with yourself, you’ll see that a little inefficiency is the ideal spot to be in. Same with analysis. There’s an investing quip that it’s better to be approximately right than precisely wrong. But where does the intellectual effort go in the investment industry? Toward the pursuit of precisions—decimal-point exactness that deludes people into thinking they’re not leaving opportunity on the table, when more often they are leaving no room for error for their analysis to be wrong.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“I wrote in my book The Psychology of Money: “More than I want big returns, I want to be financially unbreakable. And if I’m unbreakable I actually think I’ll get the biggest returns, because I’ll be able to stick around long enough for compounding to work wonders.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“So much focus in investing is on what people can do right now, this year, maybe next year. “What are the best returns I can earn?” seems like such an intuitive question to ask. But like evolution, that’s not where the magic happens. 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: A Guide to What Never Changes

“It’s good to always assume the world will break about once per decade, because historically it has. The breakages feel like low-probability events, so it’s common to think they won’t keep happening. But they do, again and again, because they’re actually just smaller high-probability events compounding off one another. That isn’t intuitive, so we’ll discount big risks like we always have. And of course, the same thing happens in the other direction.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

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

“The irony is that growth and progress are way more powerful than setbacks. But setbacks will always get more attention because of how fast they occur. So slow progress amid a drumbeat of bad news is the normal state of affairs. It’s not an easy thing to get used to, but it’ll always be with us.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“How would you react if you saw a news headline that read, “Heart Disease Deaths Decline 1.5% Last Year.” You’d yawn and move on. So that’s what we’ve done. We do it all the time. 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

“Growth is good, if only because runts eventually get eaten. But forced growth, accelerated growth, artificial growth—that tends to backfire.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“Markets, desperate to know the limits of what other investors can endure, do the same thing. Always been the case, always will be. There are two things you can do about it. One is accepting that crazy doesn’t mean broken. Crazy is normal; beyond the point of crazy is normal.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“Are stocks overvalued? What is bitcoin worth? How high can Tesla go? You can’t answer those questions with a formula. They’re driven by whatever someone else is willing to pay for them in any given moment—how they feel, what they want to believe, and how persuasive the storytellers are. And the stories change all the time. They can’t be predicted any more than you can predict what kind of mood you’ll be in three years from now.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“Surprise has six common characteristics: • Incomplete information • Uncertainty • Randomness • Chance • Unfortunate timing • Poor incentives”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“Last is the power of stories over statistics. “Housing prices in relation to median incomes are now above their historic average and typically mean revert” is a statistic. “Jim just made $500,000 flipping homes and can now retire early and his wife thinks he’s amazing” is a story. And it’s way more persuasive in the moment. It’s hard to compute, but it’s how the world works. In the next chapter, we’ll look at life’s guaranteed ability to swing from one absurdity to the next.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“Third is understanding the power of incentives. A financial bubble might seem irrational, but the people who work in industries that are in bubbles—mortgage brokers in 2004 or stockbrokers in 1999—make so much money from them that there’s a powerful incentive to keep the music playing. They delude not only their customers but themselves.”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“The next is accepting that what’s rational to one person can be crazy to another”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

“The first step toward accepting that some things don’t compute is realizing that the reason we have innovation and advancement is because we are fortunate to have people in this world whose minds work differently from ours. It”
― Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes