Morgan Housel Quotes

one of the most powerful ways to increase your savings isn’t to raise your income. It’s to raise your humility.

Risk is what’s left over when you think you’ve thought of everything.

Before we go further we should define what optimism is. Real optimists don’t believe that everything will be great. That’s complacency. Optimism is a belief that the odds of a good outcome are in your favor over time, even when there will be setbacks along the way.

This is true in personal finance, where you’re told to have a six-month emergency fund and save 10% of your salary.

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?

True success is exiting some rat race to modulate one’s activities for peace of mind.” I like that.

What kind of person makes their way to the top of a successful company, or a big country? Someone who is determined, optimistic, doesn’t take no for an answer, and is relentlessly confident in their own abilities. What kind of person is likely to go overboard, bite off more than they can chew, and discount risks that are blindingly obvious to others? Someone who is determined, optimistic, doesn’t take no for an answer, and is relentlessly confident in their own abilities.

Richard Feynman, the great physicist, once said, “Imagine how much harder physics would be if electrons had feelings.” Well, investors have feelings

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.

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

More than 2,000 books are dedicated to how Warren Buffett built his fortune. Many of them are wonderful. But few pay enough attention to the simplest fact: Buffett’s fortune isn’t due to just being a good investor, but being a good investor since he was literally a child. As I write this Warren Buffett’s net worth is $84.5 billion. Of that, $84.2 billion was accumulated after his 50th birthday. $81.5 billion came after he qualified for Social Security, in his mid-60s. Warren Buffett is a phenomenal investor. But you miss a key point if you attach all of his success to investing acumen. The real key to his success is that he’s been a phenomenal investor for three quarters of a century. Had he started investing in his 30s and retired in his 60s, few people would have ever heard of him. Consider a little thought experiment. Buffett began serious investing when he was 10 years old. By the time he was 30 he had a net worth of $1 million, or $9.3 million adjusted for inflation.16 What if he was a more normal person, spending his teens and 20s exploring the world and finding his passion, and by age 30 his net worth was, say, $25,000? And let’s say he still went on to earn the extraordinary annual investment returns he’s been able to generate (22% annually), but quit investing and retired at age 60 to play golf and spend time with his grandkids. What would a rough estimate of his net worth be today? Not $84.5 billion. $11.9 million. 99.9% less than his actual net worth. Effectively all of Warren Buffett’s financial success can be tied to the financial base he built in his pubescent years and the longevity he maintained in his geriatric years. His skill is investing, but his secret is time. That’s how compounding works. Think of this another way. Buffett is the richest investor of all time. But he’s not actually the greatest — at least not when measured by average annual returns.

A genius is the man who can do the average thing when
everyone else around him is losing his mind.

Use money to gain control over your time, because not having control of your time is such a powerful and universal drag on happiness. The ability to do what you want, when you want, with who you want, for as long as you want to, pays the highest dividend that exists in finance.

Doing well with money has a little to do with how smart you are and a lot to do with how you behave.

Modern capitalism is a pro at two things: generating wealth and generating envy. Perhaps they go hand in hand; wanting to surpass your peers can be the fuel of hard work. But life isn’t any fun without a sense of enough. Happiness, as it’s said, is just results minus expectations.