A one-hundred-year event doesn’t mean it happens every one hundred years. It means there’s about a 1 percent chance of it occurring in any given year. - Morgan Housel

don’t get it,” he says. “I’ve seen the cities. I’ve looked at the factories. You guys have the same knowledge, the same tools, the same ideas. Nothing has changed! Why are you poorer? Why are you more pessimistic?” There was one change the alien couldn’t see between 2007 and 2009: The stories we told ourselves about the economy.

Plan to survive reality. Future filled with unknown is everyone’s reality.

Mark Twain once said he knew he was a successful author when Kaiser Wilhelm II said he’d read every Twain book, and later that day a porter at his hotel said the same. “Great books are wine,” Twain said, “but my books are water. But everybody drinks water.” He found the universal emotions that influence everyone, regardless of who they were or where they were from, and got them to nod their heads in the same direction. It’s nearly magic. Guiding people’s attention to a single point is one of the most powerful life skills.