Morgan Housel Quotes

you need short-term paranoia to keep you alive long enough to exploit long-term optimism.

Technology does not drive change. It is our collective response to the options and opportunities presented by technology that drives change.

The trick when dealing with failure is arranging your financial life in a way that a bad investment here and a missed financial goal there won’t wipe you out so you can keep playing until the odds fall in your favor. But more important is that as much as we recognize the role of luck in success, the role of risk means we should forgive ourselves and leave room for understanding when judging failures.

Predicting what the world will look like fifty years from now is impossible. But predicting that people will still respond to greed, fear, opportunity, exploitation, risk, uncertainty, tribal affiliations, and social persuasion in the same way is a bet I’d take.

Just like evolution, the key is realizing that the more perfect you try to become, the more vulnerable you generally are.

A plan is only useful if it can survive reality. And a future filled with unknowns is everyone’s reality.

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

But do you know what happened during this period? Where do we begin ... 1.3 million Americans died while fighting nine major wars. Roughly 99.9% of all companies that were created went out of business. Four U.S. presidents were assassinated. 675,000 Americans died in a single year from a flu pandemic. 30 separate natural disasters killed at least 400 Americans each. 33 recessions lasted a cumulative 48 years. The number of forecasters who predicted any of those recessions rounds to zero. The stock market fell more than 10% from a recent high at least 102 times. Stocks lost a third of their value at least 12 times. Annual inflation exceeded 7% in 20 separate years. The words “economic pessimism” appeared in newspapers at least 29,000 times, according to Google.

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.

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt says people don’t really communicate on social media so much as they perform for one another.

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.

Some of the most important questions to ask yourself are: Who has the right answer, but I ignore because they’re inarticulate? And what do I believe is true but is actually just good marketing?

All of us,” he said, “are walking around with an illusion — an illusion that history, our personal history, has just come to an end, that we have just recently become the people that we were always meant to be and will be for the rest of our lives.” We tend to never learn this lesson.

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.

Having a gap between what you can technically endure versus what’s emotionally possible is an overlooked version of room for error.