Morgan Housel

Albert Einstein put it this way: I take time to go for long walks on the beach so that I can listen to what is going on inside my head. If my work isn’t going well, I lie down in the middle of a workday and gaze at the ceiling while I listen and visualize what goes on in my imagination. Mozart felt the same way: When I am traveling in a carriage or walking after a good meal or during the night when I cannot sleep — it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly.

The line between “inspiringly bold” and “foolishly reckless” can be a millimeter thick and only visible with hindsight.

The New York Times wrote in 1955 about the growing desire, but continued inability, to retire: “To rephrase an old saying: everyone talks about retirement, but apparently very few do anything about it.”6 It was not until the 1980s that the idea that everyone deserves, and should have, a dignified retirement took hold. And the way to get that dignified retirement ever since has been an expectation that everyone will save and invest their own money. Let me reiterate how new this idea is: The 401(k) — the backbone savings vehicle of American retirement — did not exist until 1978. The Roth IRA was not born until 1998.

You are one person in a game with seven billion other people and infinite moving parts. The accidental impact of actions outside of your control can be more consequential than the ones you consciously take.

But the truth is that wealth is what you don’t see. Wealth is the nice cars not purchased. The diamonds not bought. The watches not worn, the clothes forgone and the first-class upgrade declined. Wealth is financial assets that haven’t yet been converted into the stuff you see.

There is an iron law in economics: extremely good and extremely bad circumstances rarely stay that way for long because supply and demand adapt in hard-to-predict ways.

If you give luck and risk their proper respect, you realize that when judging people’s financial success — both your own and others’ — it’s never as good or as bad as it seems.

Realizing the future might not look anything like the past is a special kind of skill that is not generally looked highly upon by the financial forecasting community.

we tell ourselves stories to fill in the gaps of what are effectively blind spots.

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.

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 there’s only one way to stay wealthy: some combination of frugality and paranoia.

It goes like this: You think you want progress, both for yourself and for the world. But most of the time that’s not actually what you want. 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.

Money's greatest intrinsic value - and this can't be overstated - is its ability to give you control over your time . To obtain ,bit by bit, a level of independence and autonomy that comes from upspent assets that give you greater control over what you can do and when you can do it .

Half of all U.S. mutual fund portfolio managers do not invest a cent of their own money in their funds, according to Morningstar.69 This might seem atrocious, and surely the statistic uncovers some hypocrisy.