Morgan Housel Quotes

An important thing about this topic is that 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 what are two of the most common tactics when people pursue something great? Trying to make it faster and bigger. It’s always been a problem, and always will be. Same as ever.

Money buys happiness in the same way drugs bring pleasure: incredible if done right, dangerous if used to mask a weakness, and disastrous when no amount is enough.

The safest way to try to get what you want is to try to deserve what you want.

Tell a five-year-old boy he should be a lawyer instead of a tractor driver and he will disagree with every cell in his body.

Disagreement has less to do with what people know and more to do with what they’ve experienced. And since experiences will always be different, disagreement will be constant.

A decade ago I made a goal to read more history and fewer forecasts. It was one of the most enlightening changes of my life. And the irony is that the more history I read, the more comfortable I became with the future. When you focus on what never changes, you stop trying to predict uncertain events and spend more time understanding timeless behavior. Hopefully this book nudged you down that path.

The more you want something to be true, the more likely you are to believe a story that overestimates the odds of it being true.

At some point you have to choose between being happy or being “right.

Great books are wine,” Twain said, “but my books are water. But everybody drinks water.

Same in investing. Cash is an inefficient drag during bull markets and as valuable as oxygen during bear markets

But doing something you love on a schedule you can’t control can feel the same as doing something you hate. There is a name for this feeling. Psychologists call it reactance. Jonah Berger, a marketing professor at the University of Pennsylvania, summed it up well: People like to feel like they’re in control — in the drivers’ seat. When we try to get them to do something, they feel disempowered. Rather than feeling like they made the choice, they feel like we made it for them. So they say no or do something else, even when they might have originally been happy to go along.

Buying a lottery ticket is the only time in our lives we can hold a tangible dream of getting the good stuff that you already have and take for granted. We are paying for a dream, and you may not understand that because you are already living a dream. That’s why we buy more tickets than you do.

Here’s the most important part of this story: The Russell 3000 has increased more than 73-fold since 1980. That is a spectacular return. That is success. Forty percent of the companies in the index were effectively failures. But the 7% of components that performed extremely well were more than enough to offset the duds.

So they’re all a little imperfect. Nature’s answer is a lot of good enough, below-potential traits across all species.

some lessons have to be experienced before they can be understood.