I visualized my grief if the stock market went way up and I wasn’t in it — or if it went way down and I was completely in it. My intention was to min… - Morgan Housel

In theory people should make investment decisions based on their goals and the characteristics of the investment options available to them at the time. But that’s not what people do.

When asked about his silence during meetings, Rockefeller often recited a poem: A wise old owl lived in an oak,
The more he saw the less he spoke,
The less he spoke, the more he heard,
Why aren’t we all like that wise old bird? Rockefeller was a strange guy. But he figured out something that now applies to tens of millions of workers. Rockefeller’s job wasn’t to drill wells, load trains, or move barrels. It was to think and make good decisions. Rockefeller’s product — his deliverable — wasn’t what he did with his hands, or even his words. It was what he figured out inside his head. So that’s where

Daniel Kahneman once told me about the stories people tell themselves to make sense of the past. He said: Hindsight, the ability to explain the past, gives us the illusion that the world is understandable. It gives us the illusion that the world makes sense, even when it doesn’t make sense. That’s a big deal in producing mistakes in many fields.