There are two types of information: permanent and expiring. Permanent information is: “How do people behave when they encounter a risk they hadn’t fa… - Morgan Housel

Expiring knowledge catches more attention than it should for two reasons: one, there's a lot it. Eager to keep our short attention spans occupied. Two, we chase it down. Anxious to squeeze insight out of it before it loses relevance. Permanent information is harder to notice because it's buried in books rather than blasted in headlines. But it's benefit is huge. It's not just hat permanent information never expires, letting you accumulate it, it also compounds over it, leveraging off what you've already learned. Expiring information tells you what happened. Permanent information tells you WHY something happened and is likely to happen again. That WHY can translate into stuff you know about other topics, which is where the compounding comes in. I read newspapers and books everyday. I cannot recall one damn thing I read in a newspaper from say 2011, but I can tell you in great detail about books I read in 2011 and how they changed the way I think.

doing something you love on a schedule you can’t control can feel the same as doing something you hate.

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.

We are very good at predicting the future, except for the surprises — which tend to be all that matter.