Same as Ever - A guide to what never changes - Morgan Housel
Summary
- He focuses on things that never change throughout history, in an effort to be prepared for what the future holds.
How I discovered it
- I really really enjoyed his previous book on personal finance. It was one of the first books I read on personal finance and one of the best I have read.
Details
- Edit your work - cut the bad bits out mercilessly
- A good story is always the most powerful way of conveying ideas
- Some things cannot be speeded up beyond a natural limit
- Growth has a natural rate that is optimum for the organism
- Building takes time and skill, breaking takes moments
- Being financially unbreakable is more important than big returns
- Leave time and space in your schedule for doing nothing
- Our forecast of the future just needs to be good enough for us to prepare - we dont need very detailed forecasts
- Work hard to produce things that people want to use
- Permanent information is buried in books instead of headlines
- Work to understand the core principles of a field
- Try and consider why a person thinks differently from us rather than why he doesnt think like us
- Success seeds failure, which in turn sows the seeds for success
Quotes
- Invest in preparedness, not in prediction - Nassim Taleb
- If you only wished to be happy, this could be easily accomplished; but we wish to be happier than other people, and this is always difficult - Montesquieu
- The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt - Bertrand Russell
- The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function - Albert Bartlett
- The thing I have noticed is when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right - Jeff Bezos
- Save like a pessimist and invest like an optimist. Plan like a pessimist and dream like an optimist - Morgan Housel
- The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours - Amos Tversky
- Deserve what you want - Charlie Munger
- If you would persuade, appeal to interest and not to reason - Ben Franklin
- A mind that is stretched by new experience can never go back to its old dimensions - Oliver Wendell Holmes