750 Best The Psychology of Money Quotes By Morgan Housel
1. “If you give luck and risk their proper respect, you realize that when judging people’s financial success—both your own and others’—it’s never as good or as bad as it seems.”
2. “Stanford professor Scott Sagan once said something everyone who follows the economy or investment markets should hang on their wall: “Things that have never happened before happen all the time.”
3. “Doing well with money has a little to do with how smart you are and a lot to do with how you behave.”
4. “If you want to do better as an investor, the single most powerful thing you can do is increase your time horizon. Time is the most powerful force in investing.”
5. The highest form of wealth is the ability to wake up every morning and say, “I can do whatever I want today.” -Morgan Housel
6. “But every financial decision a person makes, makes sense to them in that moment and checks the boxes they need to check. They tell themselves a story about what they’re doing and why they’re doing it, and that story has been shaped by their own unique experiences.”
7. “Be careful when reading about how stupid investors can be and not realize you're reading about yourself.”
8. “What do you want to know about investing that we can’t know?” “The exact role of luck in successful outcomes,”
9. “Even though she knows little, she doesn’t realize it, because she tells herself a coherent story about what’s going on based on the little she does know.”
10. “Maintaining a lifestyle below what you can afford is avoiding the psychological treadmill of keeping up with the Joneses.” (Note: See voluntary simplicity)
11. “Most things are harder in practice than they are in theory.”
12. “History never repeats itself; man always does.”
13. “Use money to gain control over your time, because
14. “The correct lesson to learn from surprises is that the world is surprising”
15. “The more the Internet exposes people to new points of view, the angrier people get that different views exist.”
16. “A mindset that can be paranoid and optimistic at the same time is hard to maintain, because seeing things as black or white takes less effort than accepting nuance. But you need short-term paranoia to keep you alive long enough to exploit long-term optimism.”
17. “To make money they didn’t have and didn’t need, they risked what they did have and did need. And that’s foolish. It is just plain foolish. If you risk something that is important to you for something that is unimportant to you, it just does not make any sense.”
18. Getting Wealthy vs. Staying Wealthy
19. “Go out of your way to find humility when things are going right and forgiveness / compassion when they go wrong. Because it’s never as good or as bad as it looks.“
20. “we all make decisions based on our own unique experiences that seem to make sense to us in a given moment.”
21. I love Voltaire’s observation that “History never repeats itself; man always does.” It applies so well to how we behave with money. -Morgan Housel
22. Money is everywhere, it affects all of us, and confuses most of us. -Morgan Housel
23. “It’s hard to grasp that other investors have different goals than we do, because an anchor of psychology is not realizing that rational people can see the world through a different lens than your own.”
24. “some lessons have to be experienced before they can be understood.” We are all victims, in different ways, to that truth.”
25. “History is mostly the study of surprising events. But it is often used by investors and economists as an unassailable guide to the future.
26. “Happiness is a complicated subject because everyone's different. But if there's a common denominator in happiness - a universal fuel of joy - it's that people want to control their lives.”
27. “The more you learn about the economy, the more you realize you have no idea what's going on.”
28. “The line between “inspiringly bold” and “foolishly reckless” can be a millimeter thick and only visible with hindsight.”
29. “Pessimism just sounds smarter and more plausible than optimism.”
30. “there’s the saying, “History is just one damn thing after another.”
31. “Threats incentivize solutions in equal magnitude. That’s a common plot of economic history that is too easily forgotten by pessimists who forecast in straight lines.”
32. “We all think we know how the world works. But we’ve all only experienced a tiny sliver of it.”
33. “the intangible benefits of money can be far more valuable and capable of increasing your happiness than the tangible things that are obvious targets of our savings.”
34. “Napoleon’s definition of a military genius was, “The man who can do the average thing when all those around him are going crazy.”
35. “The most important driver of anything tied to money is the stories people tell themselves and the preferences they have for goods and services. Those things don’t tend to sit still. They change with culture and generation. They’re always changing and always will.”
36. “They both happen because the world is too complex to allow 100% of your actions to dictate 100% of your outcomes.”
37. “Most people’s biggest expense is interest, which comes from living beyond your means, and buying things they think will impress others, which comes from insecurity. Avoid these two and you’ll grow richer than most of your peers.” – Morgan Housel, Psychology Of Money
38. “Sunk costs—anchoring decisions to past efforts that can’t be refunded—are a devil in a world where people change over time. They make our future selves prisoners to our past, different, selves. It’s the equivalent of a stranger making major life decisions for you.”
39. “Money’s greatest intrinsic value—and this can’t be overstated—is its ability to give you control over your time. To obtain, bit by bit, a level of independence and autonomy that comes from unspent assets that give you greater control over what you can do and when you can do it.”
40. “You might think you want an expensive car, a fancy watch, and a huge house. But I’m telling you, you don’t. What you want is respect and admiration from other people, and you think having expensive stuff will bring it. It almost never does—especially from the people you want to respect and admire you.”
41. “Failure can be a lousy teacher, because it seduces smart people into thinking their decisions were terrible when sometimes they just reflect the unforgiving realities of risk. The”
42. “You’ll believe just about anything when the stakes are that high.”
43. “The 401(k)—the backbone savings vehicle of American retirement—did not exist until 1978. The Roth IRA was not born until 1998. If it were a person it would be barely old enough to drink.”
44. “History never repeats itself. Man always does”
45. Luck and risk are siblings, They are both the reality that every outcome in life is guided by forces other than individual effort. -Morgan Housel
46. “The further back in history you look, the more general your takeaways should be. Historians are not prophets.”
47. “Holding 60% of your assets in stocks and 40% in bonds isn't perfect for everyone; but I can think of a thousand worse strategies.”
48. “His skill is investing, but his secret is time. That’s how compounding works.”
49. “third is that progress happens too slowly to notice, but setbacks happen too quickly to ignore.”
50. “We should also come to accept the reality of changing our minds.”
51. “Good decisions aren’t always rational.”
52. “The correct lesson to learn from surprises is that the world is surprising.”
53. “Control over doing what you want, when you want to, with the people you want to, is the broadest lifestyle variable that makes people happy.”
54. “Be careful who you praise and admire.
55. “Long-term planning is harder than it seems because people’s goals and desires change over time.”
56. “Controlling your time is the highest dividend money pays.”
57. “The trick is convincing yourself that the market’s fee is worth it. That’s the only way to properly deal with volatility and uncertainty—not just putting up with it, but realizing that it’s an admission fee worth paying. There’s no guarantee that it will be.”
58. “Enough” is realizing that the opposite—an insatiable appetite for more—will push you to the point of regret.
59. “Every job looks easy when you’re not the one doing it.”
60. “Pessimists often extrapolate present trends without accounting for how markets adapt.”
61. “In fact, the most important part of every plan is planning on your plan not going according to plan. Now, let me show you how this applies to you.”
62. “But, in fact, what you should learn when you make a mistake because you did not anticipate something is that the world is difficult to anticipate. That’s the correct lesson to learn from surprises: that the world is surprising.”
63. “The best (and worst) managers drive their employees as hard as they”
64. “people tend to want wealth to signal to others that they should be liked and admired. But in reality those other people often bypass admiring you, not because they don’t think wealth is admirable, but because they use your wealth as a benchmark for their own desire to be liked and admired.”
65. “We assume that tomorrow won’t be like yesterday. We can’t afford to rest on our laurels. We can’t be complacent. We can’t assume that yesterday’s success translates into tomorrow’s good fortune.”
66. “The advisor responded: “Was it really necessary to tell her that if you spend money on things, you will end up with the things and not the money?”
67. “The customer is always right” and “customers don’t know what they want” are both accepted business wisdom. The line between “inspiringly bold” and “foolishly reckless” can be a millimeter thick and only visible with hindsight.”
68. “Many bets fail not because they were wrong, but because they were mostly right in a situation that required things to be exactly right.”
69. “Your circle of competence is probably 90% smaller than you think it is.”
70. “Taking responsibility means not blaming yourself. Anything that takes away your power or your pleasure makes you a victim. Dont make yourself a victim of yourself!”
71. Spending money to show people how much money you have is the fastest way to have less money. -Morgan Housel
72. “There is no reason to risk what you have and need for what you don’t have and don’t need.”
73. “When asked about his silence during meetings, Rockefeller often recited a poem: A wise old owl lived in an oak,
74. “For reasons I have never understood, people like to hear that the world is going to hell.”—Historian Deirdre McCloskey
75. “Having a strong sense of controlling one’s life is a more dependable predictor of positive feelings of wellbeing than any of the objective conditions of life we have considered.”
76. “The historical odds of making money in U.S. markets are 50/50 over one-day periods, 68% in one-year periods, 88% in 10-year periods, and (so far) 100% in 20-year periods.”
77. “Warren Buffett’s net worth is $84.5 billion. Of that, $84.2 billion was accumulated after his 50th birthday.”
78. “Few people make financial decisions purely with a spreadsheet. They make them at the dinner table, or in a company meeting. Places where personal history, your own unique view of the world, ego, pride, marketing, and odd incentives are scrambled together into a narrative that works for you.”
79. “My investing strategy doesn't rely on picking the right sector, or timing the next recession. It relies on a high savings rate, patience, optimism that the global economy will create value over the next several decases.”
80. “Savings can be created by spending less.
81. “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.”
82. “If you happened to grow up when the stock market was strong, you invested more of your money in stocks later in life compared to those who grew up when stocks were weak.”
83. ...but wealth is hidden. It’s income not spent.
84. “keeping money requires the opposite of taking risk. It requires humility, and fear that what you’ve made can be taken away from you just as fast
85. “Getting money requires taking risks, being optimistic, and putting yourself out there.
86. “Beware taking financial cues from people playing a different game than you are.” – Morgan Housel, Psychology Of Money
87. “people criticize Yahoo! with as much passion for turning down its own big buyout offer from Microsoft”
88. “Good decisions aren’t always rational. At some point you have to choose between being happy or being “right.”
89. “During the last 100 years, there have been more 10% market pullbacks than Christmases. Everyone knows Christmas will come; think of volatility the same way.” – Morgan Housel, Psychology Of Money
90. “Physics isn’t controversial. It’s guided by laws. Finance is different. It’s guided by people’s behaviors.”
91. “The man who can do the average thing when all those around him are going crazy.”
92. “An underpinning of psychology is that people are poor forecasters of their future selves.”
93. “It is not intuitive that an investor can be wrong half the time and still make a fortune. It means we underestimate how normal it is for a lot of things to fail. Which causes us to overreact when they do.”
94. “investor Michael Batnick says, “some lessons have to be experienced before they can be understood.” We are all victims, in different ways, to that truth.”
95. “Every five to seven years, people forget that recessions occur every five to seven years.”
96. “Even if “wealthy” is not a word you’d apply to yourself, the lessons from that observation apply to everyone, at all income levels. Getting money is one thing. Keeping it is another.”
97. “The customer is always right” and “customers don’t know what they want” are both accepted business wisdom.
98. “The premise of this book is that doing well with money has a little to do with how smart you are and a lot to do with how you behave. And behavior is hard to teach, even to really smart people.”
99. “At some point you have to choose between being happy or being “right.”
100. “A lot of things in business and investing work this way. Long tails—the farthest ends of a distribution of outcomes—have tremendous influence in finance, where a small number of events can account for the majority of outcomes.”
101. “A good rule of thumb for a lot of things in life is that everything that can break will eventually break. So if many things rely on one thing working, and that thing breaks, you are counting the days to catastrophe. That’s a single point of failure.”
102. “Saving is a hedge against life’s inevitable ability to surprise the hell out of you at the worst possible moment.”
103. “investor, the single most powerful thing you can do is increase your time horizon. Time is the most powerful force in investing. It makes little things grow big and big mistakes fade away.”
104. “Money's greatest intrinsic value - and this can't be overstated - is its ability to give you control over your time . To obtain ,bit by bit, a level of independence and autonomy that comes from upspent assets that give you greater control over what you can do and when you can do it .”
105. “You're twice as gullible as you think you are.”
106. “Richard Feynman, the great physicist, once said, “Imagine how much harder physics would be if electrons had feelings.” Well, investors have feelings” – Morgan Housel, Psychology Of Money
107. “His skill is investing, but his secret is time.”
108. “Warren Buffett later put it: To make money they didn’t have and didn’t need, they risked what they did have and did need. And that’s foolish. It is just plain foolish. If you risk something that is important to you for something that is unimportant to you, it just does not make any sense.”
109. “Independence, at any income level, is driven by your savings rate.” (Note: See FIRE (Financial Independence Retire Early))
110. “The End of History Illusion is what psychologists call the tendency for people to be keenly aware of how much they’ve changed in the past, but to underestimate how much their personalities, desires, and goals are likely to change in the future.”
111. “The accidental impact of actions outside of your control can be more consequential than the ones you consciously take.”
112. “don’t know what to make of this. Part of me wants to argue, fiercely. Part of me wants to understand. But mostly it’s an example of how different experiences can lead to vastly different views within topics that one side intuitively thinks should be black and white.”
113. “They are driven by the same thing: You are one person in a game with seven billion other people and infinite moving parts. The accidental impact of actions outside of your control can be more consequential than the ones you consciously take.”
114. “Another is that pessimists often extrapolate present trends without accounting for how markets adapt.”
115. That figure has been fairly stable for generations.
116. “doing something you love on a schedule you can’t control can feel the same as doing something you hate.”
117. “Getting money requires taking risks, being optimistic, and putting yourself out there. But keeping money requires the opposite of taking risk. It requires humility, and fear that what you’ve made can be taken away from you just as fast.”
118. “The first idea—simple, but easy to overlook—is that building wealth has little to do with your income or investment returns, and lots to do with your savings rate.”
119. “The independent feeling I get from owning our house outright far exceeds the known financial gain I’d get from leveraging our assets with a cheap mortgage.
120. “NYU professor Scott Galloway has a related idea that is so important to remember when judging success—both your own and others’: “Nothing is as good or as bad as it seems.”
121. “Wealth is the nice cars not purchased.”
122. “Wealth is hidden. It’s income not spent. Wealth is an option not yet taken to buy something later. Its value lies in offering you options, flexibility, and growth to one day purchase more stuff than you could right now.”
123. “In fact, the most important part of every plan is planning on your plan not going according to plan.”
124. “Not intelligence, or education, or sophistication. Just the dumb luck of when and where you were born.”
125. “financial outcomes are driven by luck, independent of intelligence and effort”
126. “investing is not a hard science. It’s a massive group of people making imperfect decisions with limited information about things that will have a massive impact on their wellbeing,”
127. “Respect the role luck has played on some of your role models.”
128. “If you give luck and risk their proper respect, you realize that when judging people’s financial success—both your own and others’—it’s never as good or as bad as it seems.” – Morgan Housel, Psychology Of Money
129. “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 minimize my future regret. So I split my contributions 50/50 between bonds and equities.”
130. “Maintaining a lifestyle below what you can afford is avoiding the psychological treadmill of keeping up with the Joneses.”
131. “But life isn't fun without a sense of enough. Happiness, as it's said, is just results minus expectations”
132. “When thinking about room for error in a forecast it is tempting to think that potential outcomes range from you being just right enough to you being very, very right.”
133. “But there’s only one way to stay wealthy: some combination of frugality and paranoia.”
134. “Everything in finance is data within the context of expectations.”
135. “Most things are harder in practice than they are in theory. Sometimes this is because we’re overconfident. More often it’s because we’re not good at identifying what the price of success is, which prevents us from being able to pay it.”
136. “Read more books and fewer articles.”
137. “Most people's biggest expense is interest, which comes from living beyond your means, and buying things they think will impress others, which comes from insecurity. Avoid these two and you'll grow richer than most of your peers.”
138. “Getting money requires taking risks, being optimistic, and putting yourself out there. But keeping money requires the opposite of taking risk. It requires humility, and fear that what you’ve made can be taken away from you just as fast.” – Morgan Housel, Psychology Of Money
139. “But investing is not a hard science. It's a massive group of people making imperfect decisions with limited information about things that will have a massive impact on their wellbeing, which can make even smart people nervous, greedy and paranoid.”
140. “The idea is that you have to take risk to get ahead, but no risk that can wipe you out is ever worth taking. The odds are in your favor when playing Russian roulette. But the downside is not worth the potential upside.”
141. “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.”
142. “Investor Bill Mann once wrote: “There is no faster way to feel rich than to spend lots of money on really nice things. But the way to be rich is to spend money you have, and to not spend money you don’t have. It’s really that simple.”
143. “When you define savings as the gap between your ego and your income you realize why many people with decent incomes save so little.”
144. “Every job looks easy when you’re not the one doing it because the challenges faced by someone in the arena are often invisible to those in the crowd.”
145. “A takeaway here is that few things matter more with money than understanding your own time horizon and not being persuaded by the actions and behaviors of people playing different games than you are. The main thing I can recommend is going out of your way to identify what game you’re playing.”
146. “History is the study of change, ironically used as a map of the future.”
147. “Spreadsheets are good at telling you when the numbers do or don’t add up. They’re not good at modeling how you’ll feel when you tuck your kids in at night”
148. “We all think we know how the world works. But we’ve all only experienced a tiny sliver of it.” – Morgan Housel, Psychology Of Money
149. “Enough” is realizing that the opposite—an insatiable appetite for more—will push you to the point of regret.”
150. “In a world where intelligence is hyper-competitive and many previous technical skills have become automated, competitive advantages tilt toward nuanced and soft skills—like communication, empathy, and, perhaps most of all, flexibility.”
151. “The answer to the question, “What are all these GIs going to do after the war?” was now obvious. They were going to buy stuff, with money earned from their jobs making new stuff, helped by cheap borrowed money to buy even more stuff.”
152. “The line between ‘inspiringly bold’ and ‘foolishly reckless’ can be a millimeter thick and only visible with hindsight. Risk and luck are doppelgängers.”
153. “Luck and risk are siblings. They are both the reality that every outcome in life is guided by forces other than individual effort.”
154. “The reasonable investors who love their technically imperfect strategies have an edge, because they’re more likely to stick with those strategies.”
155. “Reaching for yield to increase your income is often like sticking your hands in a fire to warm them up — good in theory, disastrous in practice.”
156. “Ignore people who refuse to change their minds when the facts change.” – Morgan Housel, Psychology Of Money
157. “A trap many investors fall into is what I call “historians as prophets” fallacy: An overreliance on past data as a signal to future conditions in a field where innovation and change are the lifeblood of progress.”
158. “Money is everywhere, it affects all of us, and confuses most of us. Everyone thinks about it a little differently.”
159. “Investors were probably better informed 20 years ago when there was 90% less financial news.” – Morgan Housel, Psychology Of Money
160. “Every five to seven years, people forget that recessions occur every five to seven years.” – Morgan Housel, Psychology Of Money
161. “Few topics offer a more powerful magnifying glass that helps explain why people behave the way they do than money.”
162. “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.”
163. “Google’s hiring acceptance rate is 0.2%.22 Facebook’s is 0.1%.23 Apple’s is about 2%.24 So the people working on these tail projects that drive tail returns have tail careers.”
164. “You can probably afford not to be a great investor -- you probably can't afford to be a bad one.”
165. “If I had to summarize money success in a single word it would be ‘survival.'”
166. “It requires frugality and an acceptance that at least some of what you’ve made is attributable to luck, so past success can’t be relied upon to repeat indefinitely.”
167. “Modern capitalism is a pro at two things: generating wealth and generating envy. Perhaps they go hand in hand; wanting to surpass your peers can be the fuel of hard work. But life isn’t any fun without a sense of enough. Happiness, as it’s said, is just results minus expectations.”
168. “After spending years around investors and business leaders I’ve come to realize that someone else’s failure is usually attributed to bad decisions, while your own failures are usually chalked up to the dark side of risk.”
169. “The ability to stick around for a long time, without wiping out or being forced to give up, is what makes the biggest difference. This should be the cornerstone of your strategy, whether it’s in investing or your career or a business you own.”
170. “An important cousin of room for error is what I call optimism bias in risk-taking, or “Russian roulette should statistically work” syndrome: An attachment to favorable odds when the downside is unacceptable in any circumstances.”
171. “Do not aim to be coldly rational when making financial decisions. Aim to just be pretty reasonable. Reasonable is more realistic and you have a better chance of sticking with it for the long run, which is what matters most when managing money.”
172. “You shouldn't feel strongly about any investment you haven't spent at least a week thinking about.”
173. “All have dreamed of a new life with more money. Having no roots or families, people were brought together by money making. Networking and famous connections were often ultimately business based.”
174. Planning is important, but the most important part of every plan is to plan on the plan not going according to plan.
175. “A good plan doesn’t pretend this weren’t true; it embraces it and emphasizes room for error.”
176. “When planning we focus on what we want to do and can do, neglecting the plans and skills of others whose decisions might affect our outcomes.”
177. “Reaching for yield to increase your income is often like sticking your hands in a fire to warm them up — good in theory, disastrous in practice.” – Morgan Housel, Psychology Of Money
178. “The idea that a few things account for most results is not just true for companies in your investment portfolio. It’s also an important part of your own behavior as an investor.”
179. “Richard Feynman, the great physicist, once said, “Imagine how much harder physics would be if electrons had feelings.” Well, investors have feelings”
180. “some lessons have to be experienced before they can be understood.”
181. “Tell someone that everything will be great and they’re likely to either shrug you off or offer a skeptical eye. Tell someone they’re in danger and you have their undivided attention.”
182. “Money is everywhere, it affects all of us, and confuses most of us.” – Morgan Housel, Psychology Of Money
183. “The only way to be wealthy is to not spend the money that you do have. It's not just the only way to accumulate wealth; it's the very definition of wealth.”
184. “Napoleon’s definition of a military genius was, “The man who can do the average thing when all those around him are going crazy.” It’s the same in investing.”
185. “What you’re doing seems crazy but I kind of understand why you’re doing it.”—uncovers the root of many of our financial decisions.”
186. “The market is rational but investors play different games and those games look irrational to people playing a different game.”
187. “The world isn't that kind to anyone - not consistently, anyways.”
188. “What can you do with 5 good minutes?
189. “Dollar-cost average for your entire life and you'll beat almost everyone who doesn't.”
190. “The only way to win in a Las Vegas casino is to exit as soon as you enter.”
191. “The main thing I can recommend is going out of your way to identify what game you’re playing.”
192. “Sixteen million Americans—11% of the population—served in the war. About eight million were overseas at the end. Their average age was 23.”
193. “Where the head goes, the body follow. Perception precedes action. Right action follows the right perspective.”
194. “There is never a moment when you’re so right that you can bet every chip in front of you. The world isn’t that kind to anyone—not consistently, anyways. You have to give yourself room for error. You have to plan on your plan not going according to plan.“
195. “Learn more from your bad investments than your good ones.”
196. “Your personal experiences with money make up maybe 0.00000001% of what’s happened in the world, but maybe 80% of how you think the world works.”
197. “I love Voltaire’s observation that “History never repeats itself; man always does.”
198. “King Alyattes of Lydia, now part of Turkey, is thought to have created the first official currency in 600 BC.”
199. “Reputation is invaluable. Freedom and independence are invaluable. Family and friends are invaluable. Being loved by those who you want to love you is invaluable. Happiness is invaluable.”
200. “The great art dealers operated like index funds. They bought everything they could. And they bought it in portfolios, not individual pieces they happened to like. Then they sat and waited for a few winners to emerge. That’s all that happens.”
201. “The cover of Forbes magazine does not celebrate poor investors who made good decisions but happened to experience the unfortunate side of risk.”
202. “Economic forecasters predict things with precise figures; rarely broad probabilities. The pundit who speaks in unshakable certainties will gain a larger following than the one who says “We can’t know for sure,” and speaks in probabilities.42”
203. “For every Bill Gates there is a Kent Evans who was just as skilled and driven but ended up on the other side of life roulette.”
204. “The pessimistic view is that we now have fewer recessions, but when they occur they are more powerful than before.”
205. A genius who loses control of their emotions can be a financial disaster. -Morgan Housel
206. “The only way to be wealthy is to not spend the money that you do have. It’s not just the only way to accumulate wealth; it’s the very definition of wealth.”
207. “Every group of people I ask thinks the world is more frightening, more violent, and more hopeless—in short, more dramatic—than it really is,” Hans Rosling wrote in his book Factfulness.”
208. “The best way to achieve felicity is to aim low,” says Charlie Munger (felicity = happiness, bliss). Wonderful.
209. “This underscores an important point made previously in this book: In investing you must identify the price of success— volatility and loss amid the long backdrop of growth—and be willing to pay it.”
210. “When things are going extremely well, realize it’s not as good as you think. You are not invincible, and if you acknowledge that luck brought you success then you have to believe in luck’s cousin, risk, which can turn your story around just as quickly.” – Morgan Housel, Psychology Of Money
211. “every outcome in life is guided by forces other than individual effort..
212. “Plan to survive reality. Future filled with unknown is everyone’s reality.” – Morgan Housel, Psychology Of Money
213. “The cornerstone of economics is that things change over time, because the invisible hand hates anything staying too good or too bad indefinitely”
214. “Just as you should dress appropriately for your age, you should spend appropriately for your income, and not a penny more.”
215. “Physics isn’t controversial. It’s guided by laws. Finance is different. It’s guided by people’s behaviors.“
216. “Humility, kindness, and empathy will bring you more respect than horsepower ever will.”
217. “It’s that knowing what to do tells you nothing about what happens in your head when you try to do it.”
218. “The bigger the gap between what you want to be true and what you need to be true to have an acceptable outcome, the more you are protecting yourself from falling victim to an appealing financial fiction.”
219. “Assuming that something is ugly will stay ugly is an easy forecast to make. And it's persuasive, because it doesn't require imagining the world changing.”
220. “The ability to do what you want, when you want, with who you want, for as long as you want, is priceless. It is the highest dividend money pays.” – Morgan Housel, Psychology Of Money
221. “The problem with economic forecasting is that the things you can predict tend to not matter and the things you can't predict make all the difference in the world.”
222. “If everyone were a driven leader, there would be no one left to be led. If everyone were an enthusiastic entertainer, there would be no one to amuse. And if everyone were a detail-oriented perfectionist, there wouldn’t be anything to keep in order.”
223. “we underestimate how normal it is for a lot of things to fail. Which causes us to overreact when they do.”
224. “Happiness, as it’s said, is just results minus expectations.”
225. “Independence, to me, doesn’t mean you’ll stop working. It means you only do the work you like with people you like at the times you want for as long as you want.”
226. “The great art dealers operated like index funds. They bought everything they could. And they bought it in portfolios, not individual pieces they happened to like. Then they sat and waited for a few winners to emerge.”
227. “Wealth is just the accumulated leftovers after you spend what you take in. And since you can build wealth without a high income, but have no chance of building wealth without a high savings rate, it’s clear which one matters more.”
228. “Humility, kindness, and empathy will bring you more respect”
229. “Read last year’s market predictions and you’ll never again take this year’s predictions seriously.” – Morgan Housel, Psychology Of Money
230. “When you accept the End of History Illusion, you realize that the odds of picking a job when you’re not old enough to drink that you will still enjoy when you’re old enough to qualify for Social Security are low.”
231. “Ignore people who refuse to change their minds when the facts change.”
232. “I did not intend to get rich, I just wanted to be independent.” – Charlie Munger
233. “Modern capitalism makes helping people fake it until they make it a cherished industry.”
234. “I love Voltaire’s observation that “History never repeats itself; man always does.” It applies so well to how we behave with money.”
235. “La lección acertada que hay que aprender de las sorpresas es que el mundo está lleno de sorpresas. No que deberíamos usar las sorpresas pasadas como guía de los límites del futuro, sino que las sorpresas pasadas deberían llevarnos a admitir que no tenemos ni idea de lo que podría ocurrir en el futuro.”
236. “Ordinary folks with no financial education can be wealthy if they have a handful of behavioral skills that have nothing to do with formal measures of intelligence.”
237. “Their view of money was formed in different worlds. And when that’s the case, a view about money that one group of people thinks is outrageous can make perfect sense to another.”
238. “financial success is not a hard science. It’s a soft skill, where how you behave is more important than what you know.”
239. “Risk is what’s left over when you think you’ve thought of everything.” – Morgan Housel, Psychology Of Money
240. “The ability to do what you want, when you want, with who you want, for as long as you want, is priceless. It is the highest divident money pays.”
241. “Ahorrar dinero es la diferencia entre tu ego y tus ingresos, y la riqueza es lo que no ves.”
242. “Be careful when reading about how stupid investors can be and not realize you’re reading about yourself.” – Morgan Housel, Psychology Of Money
243. 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.
244. “Embracing the idea that financial goals made when you were a different person should be abandoned without mercy versus put on life support and dragged on can be a good strategy to minimize future regret. The quicker it’s done, the sooner you can get back to compounding.”
245. 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.
246. “During the last 100 years, there have been more 10% market pullbacks than Christmases. Everyone knows Christmas will come; think of volatility the same way.”
247. “Singer Rihanna nearly went bankrupt after overspending and sued her financial advisor. The advisor responded: “Was it really necessary to tell her that if you spend money on things, you will end up with the things and not the money?”30”
248. “money has a little to do with how smart you are and a lot to do with how you behave. And behavior is hard to teach, even to really smart people.”
249. “Spending money to show people how much money you have is the fastest way to have less money.
250. “Part of what’s happened here is that we’ve used our greater wealth to buy bigger and better stuff. But we’ve simultaneously given up more control over our time. At best, those things cancel each other out.”
251. “Getting money requires taking risks, being optimistic, and putting yourself out there. But keeping money requires the opposite of taking risk. It requires humility, and fear that what you’ve made can be taken away from you just as fast.
252. “Room for error—often called margin of safety—is one of the most underappreciated forces in finance. It comes in many forms: A frugal budget, flexible thinking, and a loose timeline—anything that lets you live happily with a range of outcomes.”
253. “The economists wrote: “Our findings suggest that individual investors’ willingness to bear risk depends on personal history.” Not intelligence, or education, or sophistication. Just the dumb luck of when and where you were born.”
254. “Just like my daughter, I don’t know what I don’t know. So I am just as susceptible to explaining the world through the limited set of mental models I have at my disposal.”
255. “There are lots of overnight tragedies. There are rarely overnight miracles.”
256. “Optimism sounds like a sales pitch. Pessimism sounds like someone trying to help you.”
257. “An idea exists in finance that seems innocent but has done incalculable damage. It’s the notion that assets have one rational price in a world where investors have different goals and time horizons.”
258. “The lowest-income households in the U.S. on average spend $412 a year on lotto tickets, four times the amount of those in the highest income groups. Forty percent of Americans cannot come up with $400 in an emergency.”
259. “To grasp why people bury themselves in debt you don’t need to study interest rates; you need to study the history of greed, insecurity, and optimism. To get why investors sell out at the bottom of a bear market you”
260. “I don’t know what I don’t know. So I am just as susceptible to explaining the world through the limited set of mental models I have at my disposal.”
261. “You're twice as biased as you think you are (four times if you disagree with that statement).”
262. “As investor Michael Batnick says, “some lessons have to be experienced before they can be understood.”
263. “Richard Feynman, the great physicist, once said, “Imagine how much harder physics would be if electrons had feelings.” Well, investors have feelings. That’s why it’s hard to predict what they’ll do next based solely on what they did in the past.”
264. “getting money and keeping money are two different skills.”
265. “Risk is what’s left over when you think you’ve thought of everything.”
266. “Your personal experiences with money make up maybe 0.00000001% of what’s happened in the world, but maybe 80% of how you think the world works.” – Morgan Housel, Psychology Of Money
267. “You never get accustomed to how quickly things can grow.”
268. “Every decision people make with money is justified by taking the information they have at the moment and plugging it into their unique mental model of how the world works.”
269. “Sunk costs—anchoring decisions to past efforts that can’t be refunded—are a devil in a world where people change over time. They make our future selves prisoners to our past, different, selves.”
270. “Bubbles aren’t so much about valuations rising. That’s just a symptom of something else: time horizons shrinking as more short-term traders enter the playing field.”
271. “People are good at learning by imitation. But the hidden nature of wealth makes it hard to imitate others and learn from their ways.”
272. “Modern capitalism is a pro at two things: generating wealth and generating envy.”
273. “The highest form of wealth is the ability to wake up every morning and say, “I can do whatever I want today.”” – Morgan Housel, Psychology Of Money
274. “A genius is the man who can do the average thing when everyone else around him is losing his mind.” —Napoleon”
275. “People do some crazy things with money. But no one is crazy.” – Morgan Housel, Psychology Of Money
276. “Spreadsheets can model the historic frequency of big stock market declines. But they can’t model the feeling of coming home, looking at your kids, and wondering if you’ve made a mistake that will impact their lives.”
277. “They are driven by the same thing: You are one person in a game with seven billion other people and infinite moving parts. The accidental impact of actions outside of your control can be more consequential than the ones you consciously take.“
278. “Plan to survive reality. Future filled with unknown is everyone’s reality.”
279. “The most important part of every plan is to plan on the plan not going according to plan.”
280. “The hardest thing about this was that I loved the work. And I wanted to work hard. But doing something you love on a schedule you can’t control can feel the same as doing something you hate.”
281. “One of my deeply held investing beliefs is that there is little correlation between investment effort and investment results.
282. “Don't attempt to keep up with the Joneses without realizing the Joneses aren't any happier than you are.”
283. “Michael Batnick says, “some lessons have to be experienced before they can be understood.” We are all”
284. “The more extreme the outcome, the less likely you can apply its lessons to your own life, because the more likely the outcome was influenced by extreme ends of luck or risk.”
285. “Planning is important, but the most important part of every plan is to plan on the plan not going according to plan.”
286. “Goldsmiths were the first bankers. They soon learnt to become fractional reserve banks in that they kept only a proportion of the gold deposits with them and invested the rest.”
287. “You can spend less if you desire less. And you will desire less if you care less about what others think of you. As I argue often in this book, money relies more on psychology than finance.”
288. “Optimism is usually defined as a belief that things will go well. But that’s incomplete. Sensible optimism is a belief that the odds are in your favor, and over time things will balance out to a good outcome even if what happens in between is filled with misery.”
289. “Respect the mess. Smart, informed, and reasonable people can disagree in finance, because people have vastly different goals and desires. There is no single right answer; just the answer that works for you.”
290. ...few things matter more with money than understanding your own time horizon and not being persuaded by the actions and behaviors of people playing different games than you are.
291. “Holding 60% of your assets in stocks and 40% in bonds isn’t perfect for everyone; but I can think of a thousand worse strategies.” – Morgan Housel, Psychology Of Money
292. “Pessimism isn’t just more common than optimism. It also sounds smarter. It’s intellectually captivating, and it’s paid more attention than optimism, which is often viewed as being oblivious to risk.”
293. “Money's greatest intrinsic value - and this can't be overstated - is its ability to give you control over your time . To obtain ,bit by bit, a level of independence and autonomy that comes from unspent assets that give you greater control over what you can do and when you can do it .”
294. “There is never a moment when you’re so right that you can bet every chip in front of you. The world isn’t that kind to anyone— not consistently, anyways. You have to give yourself room for error. You have to plan on your plan not going according to plan.”
295. “Every job looks easy when you’re not the one doing it.” Every job looks easy when you’re not the one doing it because the challenges faced by someone in the arena are often invisible to those in the crowd.”
296. “Optimism sounds like a sales pitch. Pessimism sounds like someone trying to help you.” – Morgan Housel, Psychology Of Money
297. “not all success is due to hard work, and not all poverty is due to laziness. keep this in mind when judging people, including yourself.”
298. “Getting money is one thing. Keeping it is another.” – Morgan Housel, Psychology Of Money
299. “Money’s greatest intrinsic value—and this can’t be overstated—is its ability to give you control over your time.”
300. “The cheque (or check in US) arose about 300 years ago directly out of the use of exchanged receipts or promissory notes and was illegal to being with and certainly regarded as highly immoral.”
301. “Read last year's market predictions and you'll never again take this year's predictions seriously.”
302. “If you don’t own the goal and it doesn’t come from your dream, then you won’t have the toughness to persevere when the going gets tough. Everyone who wins must push through obstacles, lots of them. Big goals require big backbone. Wimps need not apply.”
303. “Time is the most powerful force in investing.”
304. “Before we go further we should define what optimism is. Real optimists don’t believe that everything will be great. That’s complacency. Optimism is a belief that the odds of a good outcome are in your favor over time, even when there will be setbacks along the way.”
305. “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.”
306. “Judge investors by the quality of their arguments, not the performance of their last trade.”
307. There are many things never worth risking, no matter the potential gain
308. “Assume the worst, hope for the best, accept reality.”
309. “To grasp why people bury themselves in debt you don’t need to study interest rates; you need to study the history of greed, insecurity, and optimism.”
310. “progress happens too slowly to notice, but setbacks happen too quickly to ignore.”
311. “Savings in the bank that earn 0% interest might actually generate an extraordinary return if they give you the flexibility to take a job with a lower salary but more purpose, or wait for investment opportunities that come when those without flexibility turn desperate.”
312. “And I wanted to work hard. But doing something you love on a schedule you can’t control can feel the same as doing something you hate.”
313. “have no idea what I’ll use the savings for in the future. Few financial plans that only prepare for known risks have enough margin of safety to survive the real world.”
314. “Optimism is a belief that the odds of a good outcome are in your favor over time, even when there will be setbacks along the way.”
315. The hardest financial skill is getting the goalpost to stop moving.
316. “where intelligence is no longer a sustainable advantage. Having more control over your time and options is becoming one of the most valuable currencies in the world.”
317. “Life isn’t any fun without a sense of enough. Happiness, as it’s said, is just results minus expectations.”
318. “And since you can build wealth without a high income, but have no chance of building wealth without a high savings rate, it’s clear which one matters more.” – Morgan Housel, Psychology Of Money
319. “And short-term traders operate in an area where the rules governing long-term investing—particularly around valuation—are ignored, because they’re irrelevant to the game being played.”
320. “I have no sunk costs.’”49 Sunk costs—anchoring decisions to past efforts that can’t be refunded—are a devil in a world where people change over time. They make our future selves prisoners to our past, different, selves. It’s the equivalent of a stranger making major life decisions for you.”
321. Saving is the gap between your ego and your income.
322. “The challenge for us is that no amount of studying or open-mindedness can genuinely recreate the power of fear and uncertainty.”
323. “When you accept that tails drive everything in business, investing, and finance you realize that it’s normal for lots of things to go wrong, break, fail, and fall.”
324. “It gets dangerous when the taste of having more—more money, more power, more prestige— increases ambition faster than satisfaction.”
325. “money relies more on psychology than finance.”
326. ...the economists found that people’s lifetime investment decisions are heavily anchored to the experiences those investors had in their own generation - especially experiences early in their adult life.
327. “Independence, at any income level, is driven by your savings rate.”
328. “The highest form of wealth is the ability to wake up every morning and say, "I can do whatever I want today.”
329. “You don’t need a specific reason to save … You can save just for saving’s sake. And indeed you should. Everyone should.”
330. “barbelled personality—optimistic about the future, but paranoid about what will prevent you from getting to the future—is vital.”
331. “Low interest rates and the intentional birth of the American consumer.”
332. “It’s a soft skill, where how you behave is more important than what you know.”
333. “Economist Bhashkar Mazumder has shown that incomes among brothers are more correlated than height or weight. If you are rich and tall, your brother is more likely to also be rich than he is tall.”
334. “The price of investing success is not immediately obvious. It’s not a price tag you can see, so when the bill comes due it doesn’t feel like a fee for getting something good. It feels like a fine for doing something wrong.”
335. “Lindgreen (1991) has pointed out that psychologists have not studied money-related behaviors as such because they assume that anything involving money lies within the domain of economics.”
336. “You can be wrong half the time and still make a fortune.”
337. “Pessimism: everything will be bad.
338. “History can be a misleading guide to the future of the economy and stock market because it doesn’t account for structural changes that are relevant to today’s world.”
339. “Reputation is invaluable. Freedom and independence are invaluable. Family and friends are invaluable. Being loved by those who you want to love you is invaluable.”
340. “Save for your own retirement; assume Social Security and private pensions won’t be around (even though they probably will).” – Morgan Housel, Psychology Of Money
341. “Savings can be created by spending less. You can spend less if you desire less. And you will desire less if you care less about what others think of you.”
342. “Dollar-cost average for your entire life and you'll beat almost everyone who doesn't.”CLICK TO TWEET
343. “The lowest-income households in the U.S. on average spend $412 a year on lotto tickets, four times the amount of those in the highest income groups.”
344. “Big risks will always be disregarded; small risks always blown out of proportion.” – Morgan Housel, Psychology Of Money
345. “We call everyone investing money “investors” like they’re basketball players, all playing the same game with the same rules. When you realize how wrong that notion is you see how vital it is to simply identify what game you’re playing.”
346. “Psychologist Philip Tetlock once wrote: “We need to believe we live in a predictable, controllable world, so we turn to authoritative-sounding people who promise to satisfy that need.”
347. “At Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting in 2013 Warren Buffett said he's own 400 to 500 stocks during his life and made most of his money on 10 of them. Charlie Munger followed up: "If you remove just a few of Berkshire's top investments, its long-term track record is pretty average.”
348. “It is not intuitive that an investor can be wrong half the time and still make a fortune. It means we underestimate how normal it is for a lot of things to fail.”
349. “Embracing the idea that financial goals made when you were a different person should be abandoned without mercy versus put on life support and dragged on can be a good strategy to minimize future regret.”
350. “not all success is due to hard work, and not all poverty is due to laziness. Keep this in mind when judging people, including yourself. Therefore, focus less on specific individuals and case studies and more on broad patterns.”
351. “Everything has a price, and the key to a lot of things with money is just figuring out what that price is and being willing to pay it. The problem is that the price of a lot of things is not obvious until you’ve experienced them firsthand, when the bill is overdue.”
352. “Realizing the future might not look anything like the past is a special kind of skill that is not generally looked highly upon by the financial forecasting community.”
353. “Incentives are a powerful motivator, and we should always remember how they influence our own financial goals and outlooks. It can’t be overstated: there is no greater force in finance than room for error, and the higher the stakes, the wider it should be.”
354. “To get why investors sell out at the bottom of a bear market you don’t need to study the math of expected future returns; you need to think about the agony of looking at your family and wondering if your investments are imperiling their future.”
355. “Read more books and fewer articles.” – Morgan Housel, Psychology Of Money
356. “small starting base can lead to results so extraordinary they seem to defy logic. It can be so logic-defying that you underestimate what’s possible, where growth comes from, and what it can lead to. And so it is with money.”
357. “Aligning money towards a life that lets you do what you want, when you want, with who you want, where you want, for as long as you want, has incredible return.”
358. “What changed was: Competition grew as opportunities became well known; technology made information more accessible; and industries changed as the economy shifted from industrial to technology sectors, which have different business cycles and capital uses. Things changed.”
359. “Imagine how much stuff you'd have to make up if you were forced to talk 24/7. Remember this when watching financial news on TV.”
360. “It’s easier to create a narrative around pessimism because the story pieces tend to be fresher and more recent.
361. “You can probably afford not to be a great investor — you probably can’t afford to be a bad one.” – Morgan Housel, Psychology Of Money
362. “When you have no money, and your son is sick, you’ll believe anything.”
363. “Emotional intelligence is more important than book intelligence.” – Morgan Housel, Psychology Of Money
364. “Take it from those who have lived through everything: Controlling your time is the highest dividend money pays.”
365. “Luck and risk are both real and hard to identify. Do so when judging both yourself and others.”
366. “The hardest financial skill is getting the goalpost to stop moving.”
367. “The line between “inspiringly bold” and “foolishly reckless” can be a millimeter thick and only visible with hindsight. Risk and luck are doppelgangers.”
368. “Read more history and fewer forecasts.”
369. “Bill Gates once said, “Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.”
370. “Market returns are never free and never will be. They demand you pay a price, like any other product.”
371. “Sunk costs---anchoring decisions to past efforts that can't be refunded--are the devil in a world where people change over time. They make our future selves prisoners to our past, different, selves. It's the equivalent of a stranger making major life decisions for you.”
372. “But until you've lived through it and personally felt its consequences, you may not understand it enough to change your behavior.”
373. “Six months’ emergency expenses means not being terrified of your boss, because you know you won’t be ruined if you have to take some time off to find a new job.”
374. “Think of it like this, and one of the most powerful ways to increase your savings isn’t to raise your income. It’s to raise your humility.”
375. “Learning to be happy with less money creates a gap between what you have and what you want.”
376. “Years ago I asked economist Robert Shiller, who won the Nobel Prize in economics, “What do you want to know about investing that we can’t know?” “The exact role of luck in successful outcomes,” he answered.”
377. “The correct lesson to learn from surprises is that the world is surprising. Not that we should use past surprises as a guide to future boundaries; that we should use past surprises as an admission that we have no idea what might happen next.”
378. “A gap between what could happen in the future and what you need to happen in the future in order to do well is what gives you endurance, and endurance is what makes compounding magic over time.”
379. “The formation of bubbles isn’t so much about people irrationally participating in long-term investing. They’re about people somewhat rationally moving toward short-term trading to capture momentum that had been feeding on itself.”
380. “That flexibility and control over your time is an unseen return on wealth.”
381. “Investors often innocently take cues from other investors who are playing a different game than they are.”
382. “The person who grew up in poverty thinks about risk and reward in ways the child of a wealthy banker cannot fathom if he tried.”
383. “A good rule of thumb for a lot of things in life is that everything that can break will eventually break.”
384. “People tend to want wealth to signal to others that they should be liked and admired.
385. “There is no single right answer; just the answer that works for you.”
386. “You have to plan on your plan not going according to plan.”
387. “Having a strong sense of controlling one’s life is a more dependable predictor of positive feelings of wellbeing than any of the objective conditions of life we have considered”
388. “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.”
389. “Wanting to believe we are in control is an emotional itch that needs to be scratched, rather than an analytical problem to be calculated and solved. The illusion of control is more persuasive than the reality of uncertainty. So we cling to stories about outcomes being in our control.”
390. “True success is exiting some rat race to modulate one’s activities for peace of mind.” I like that.”
391. “A lot of things in business and investing work this way. Long tails—the farthest ends of a distribution of outcomes—have tremendous influence in finance, where a small number of events can account for the majority of outcomes.“
392. “just be careful when assuming that 100% of outcomes can be attributed to effort and decisions.”
393. “The common answer here is that people are greedy, and greed is an indelible feature of human nature.”
394. “He neither looked back nor forwards, lest the length of the field he had to dig should discourage him. All he saw was the place where he had to push in his hoe.”
395. “The big takeaway from ice ages is that you don't need
396. “More than your salary. More than the size of your house. More than the prestige of your job. Control over doing what you want, when you want to, with the people you want to, is the broadest lifestyle variable that makes people happy.“
397. “Part of why this isn’t intuitive is because in most fields we only see the finished product, not the losses incurred that led to the tail-success product.”
398. “To grasp why people bury themselves in debt, you don’t need to study interest rate: you need to sturdy the history of greed , insecurity and optimism.”
399. “plan is only useful if it can survive reality. And a future filled with unknowns is everyone’s reality.”
400. “But two things can point you in a better direction. Be careful who you praise and admire. Be careful who you look down upon and wish to avoid becoming.”
401. “Those things don’t tend to sit still. They change with culture and generation. They’re always changing and always will.”
402. “There is a paradox here: people tend to want wealth to signal to others that they should be liked and admired.
403. “The truth is that wealth is what you don’t see. Wealth is the nice cars not purchased. The diamonds not bought. The watches not worn, the clothes forgone and the first-class upgrade declined. Wealth is financial assets that haven’t yet been converted into the stuff you see.”
404. “A friend of mine makes an annual pilgrimage to Las Vegas. One year he asked a dealer: What games do you play, and what casinos do you play in? The dealer, stone-cold serious, replied: “The only way to win in a Las Vegas casino is to exit as soon as you enter.”
405. “I can do whatever I want today.” People want to become wealthier to make them happier. Happiness is a complicated subject because everyone’s different. But if there’s a common denominator in happiness—a universal fuel of joy—it’s that people want to control their lives.”
406. “You have to survive to succeed. To repeat a point we’ve made a few times in this book: The ability to do what you want, when you want, for as long as you want, has an infinite ROI.”
407. “You can go to the local county fair where tickets might be $10, or stay home for free. You might still have a good time. But you’ll usually get what you pay for.”
408. “Corroborado, pues, por aquellos que lo han vivido todo: controlar tu tiempo es el mayor dividendo que reporta el dinero.”
409. “The ceiling of social comparison is so high that virtually no one will ever hit.”
410. “Stocks rising 1% might be briefly mentioned in the evening news. But a 1% fall will be reported in bold, all-caps letters usually written in blood red. The asymmetry is hard to avoid.”
411. “The point is that the ceiling of social comparison is so high that virtually no one will ever hit it. Which means it’s a battle that can never be won, or that the only way to win is to not fight to begin with—to accept that you might have enough, even if it’s less than those around you.”
412. “Spending money to show people how much money you have is the fastest way to have less money.” – Morgan Housel, Psychology Of Money
413. “Aiming to be mostly reasonable works better than trying to be coldly rational.”
414. “Emotional intelligence is more important than book intelligence.”
415. “The most powerful way to grow your money is learning to live with less, since you have complete control over it.”
416. “Big risks will always be disregarded; small risks always blown out of proportion.”
417. “In a connected system where one person’s decisions can affect everyone else, it’s understandable why financial risks gain a spotlight and capture attention in a way few other topics can.”
418. “Savings can be created by spending less. You can spend less if you desire less. And you will desire less if you care less about what others think of you. As I argue often in this book, money relies more on psychology than finance. And you don’t need a specific reason to save.”
419. “We think about and are taught about money in ways that are too much like physics (with rules and laws) and not enough like psychology (with emotions and nuance).”
420. “For most people, the biggest thing that they think is holding them back is their financial ability. In reality, the biggest thing that is holding them back is the way that they think.”
421. “This is true in personal finance, where you’re told to have a six-month emergency fund and save 10% of your salary.”
422. “you need short-term paranoia to keep you alive long enough to exploit long-term optimism.”
423. “When you see someone driving a nice car, you rarely think, “Wow, the guy driving that car is cool.” Instead, you think, “Wow, if I had that car people would think I’m cool.” Subconscious or not, this is how people think.”
424. “1. The hardest financial skill is getting the goalpost to stop moving.”
425. “That flexibility and control over your time is an unseen return on wealth. What is the return on cash in the bank that gives you the option of changing careers, or retiring early, or freedom from worry? I’d say it’s incalculable.”
426. “that financial success is not a hard science. It’s a soft skill, where how you behave is more important than what you know.”
427. “when you consider our tendency to change who we are over time, balance at every point in your life becomes a strategy to avoid future regret and encourage endurance.”
428. “3. A barbelled personality—optimistic about the future, but paranoid about what will prevent you from getting to the future—is vital.”
429. “Thirty-eight percent of jobs are now designated as “managers, officials, and professionals.” These are decision-making jobs. Another 41% are service jobs that often rely on your thoughts as much as your actions.”
430. “More than your salary. More than the size of your house. More than the prestige of your job. Control over doing what you want, when you want to, with the people you want to, is the broadest lifestyle variable that makes people happy.”
431. “Unknowns”—are an ever-present part of life. The only way to deal with them is by increasing the gap between what you think will happen and what can happen while still leaving you capable of fighting another day.
432. “Capitalism is hard. But part of the reason this happens is because getting money and keeping money are two different skills.”
433. “NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft passed by Pluto two years ago. It was a three-billion mile trip that took nine and a half years. According to NASA, the trip “took about one minute less than predicted when the craft was launched in January 2006.”
434. “Bubbles do their damage when long-term investors playing one game start taking their cues from those short-term traders playing another.”
435. “Less ego, more wealth. Saving money is the gap between your ego and your income, and wealth is what you don’t see.”
436. “Be careful who you praise and admire. Be careful who you look down upon and wish to avoid becoming.” – Morgan Housel, Psychology Of Money
437. “ages. John Stuart Mill wrote in the 1840s: “I have observed that not the man who hopes when others despair, but the man who despairs when others hope, is admired by a large class of persons as a sage.”
438. “2. Planning is important, but the most important part of every plan is to plan on the plan not going according to plan.”
439. “Go out of your way to find humility when things are going right and forgiveness/compassion when they go wrong.
440. “The trick is to accept the reality of change and move on as soon as possible.”
441. “poverty will not make you feel the pain.”
442. “We all do crazy stuff with money, because we’re all relatively new to this game and what looks crazy to you might make sense to me. But no one is crazy—we all make decisions based on our own unique experiences that seem to make sense to us in a given moment.”
443. “A trap many investors fall into is what I call ‘historians as prophets’ fallacy: An overreliance on past data as a signal to future conditions in a field where innovation and change are the lifeblood of progress.”
444. “one of the most powerful ways to increase your savings isn’t to raise your income. It’s to raise your humility.”
445. “A third is that progress happens too slowly to notice, but setbacks happen too quickly to ignore.”
446. “When most people say they want to be a millionaire, what they might actually mean is "I'd like to spend a million dollar" And that is literally the opposite of being a millionaire.”
447. “Bubbles form when the momentum of short-term returns attracts enough money that the makeup of investors shifts from mostly long term to mostly short term.”
448. “Michael Batnick says, “some lessons have to be experienced before they can be understood.”
449. “History is littered with good ideas taken too far, which are indistinguishable from bad ideas.”
450. “Margin of safety—you can also call it room for error or redundancy—is the only effective way to safely navigate a world that is governed by odds, not certainties. And almost everything related to money exists in that kind of world.”
451. “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.”
452. “want you to be successful, and I want you to earn it. But realize that not all success is due to hard work, and not all poverty is due to laziness. Keep this in mind when judging people, including yourself.”
453. “Getting money is one thing. Keeping it is another.”
454. History can be a misleading guide to the future of the economy and stock market because it doesn’t account for structural changes that are relevant to today’s world.
455. “No one is impressed with your possessions as much as you are.”
456. “Nassim Taleb put it this way: “Having an ‘edge’ and surviving are two different things: the first requires the second. You need to avoid ruin. At all costs.”
457. “The most important finance topics don't require details. Most can be, and should be, summarized in a sentence or two.”
458. “Luck and risk are both the reality that every outcome in life is guided by forces other than individual effort. They are so similar that you can’t believe in one without equally respecting the other.”
459. “There are books on economic cycles, trading strategies, and sector bets. But the most powerful and important book should be called Shut Up And Wait. It’s just one page with a long-term chart of economic growth.”
460. “The line between ‘inspiringly bold’ and ‘foolishly reckless’ can be a millimeter thick and only visible with hindsight. Risk and luck are doppelgangers.”
461. “some lessons have to be experienced before they can be understood”
462. “True success is exiting some rat race to modulate one’s activities for peace of mind.”
463. “You have to give yourself room for error. You have to plan on your plan not going according to plan.”
464. “Good investing is not necessarily about making good decisions. It’s about consistently not screwing up.“
465. “Forty percent of all Russell 3000 stock components lost at least 70% of their value and never recovered over this period. Effectively all of the index’s overall returns came from 7% of component companies that outperformed by at least two standard deviations.”
466. “focus less on specific individuals and case studies and more on broad patterns.”
467. “A genius who loses control of their emotions can be a financial disaster. The opposite is also true. Ordinary folks with no financial education can be wealthy if they have a handful of behavioral skills that have nothing to do with formal measures of intelligence.”
468. “When judging others, attributing success to luck makes you look jealous and mean, even if we know it exists. And when judging yourself, attributing success to luck can be too demoralizing to accept.”
469. “We all do crazy stuff with money, because we’re all relatively new to this game and what looks crazy to you might make sense to me. But no one is crazy—we all make decisions based on our own unique experiences that seem to make sense to us in a given moment.” – Morgan Housel, Psychology Of Money
470. “But realize that not all success is due to hard work, and not all poverty is due to laziness. Keep this in mind when judging people, including yourself.”
471. “2. Everyone has an incomplete view of the world. But we form a complete narrative to fill in the gaps.”
472. “Good decisions aren’t always rational.
473. “1. 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.”
474. “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.” –Daniel Kahneman
475. “To grasp why people bury themselves in debt you don’t need to study interest rates; you need to study the history of greed, insecurity, and optimism.” – Morgan Housel, Psychology Of Money
476. “When things are going extremely well, realize it’s not as good as you think. You are not invincible, and if you acknowledge that luck brought you success then you have to believe in luck’s cousin, risk, which can turn your story around just as quickly.”
477. “Medicine predates useful medicine by thousands of years.”
478. “That can be hard to deal with, even if you understand the math. It is not intuitive that an investor can be wrong half the time and still make a fortune. It means we underestimate how normal it is for a lot of things to fail. Which causes us to overreact when they do.”
479. “But wealth is hidden. It’s income not spent. Wealth is an option not yet taken to buy something later. Its value lies in offering you options, flexibility, and growth to one day purchase more stuff than you could right now.”
480. “The only way to be wealthy is to not spend the money that you do have. It’s not just the only way to accumulate wealth; it’s the very definition of wealth.” – Morgan Housel, Psychology Of Money
481. “The more you learn about the economy, the more you realize you have no idea what’s going on.” – Morgan Housel, Psychology Of Money
482. “Not taking advantage of an employer match on your 401(k) is no different than declining a raise.”
483. “There is no reason to risk what you have and need for what you don’t have and don’t need.” – Morgan Housel, Psychology Of Money
484. “There will never be a story of a janitor outperforming the world’s top nuclear engineers.”
485. “It’s easier to create a narrative around pessimism because the story pieces tend to be fresher and more recent. Optimistic narratives require looking at a long stretch of history and developments, which people tend to forget and take more effort to piece together.”
486. “The world is filled with people who look modest but are actually wealthy and people who look rich who live at the razor’s edge of insolvency. Keep this in mind when quickly judging others’ success and setting your own goals.”
487. “If I had to summarize money success in a single word it would be “survival.”
488. When things are going extremely well, realize it’s not as good as you think. -Morgan Housel
489. “There's a strong negative correlation between flaunting money and being rich.”
490. “There is no faster way to feel rich than to spend lots of money on really nice things. But the way to be rich is to spend money you have, and to not spend money you don’t have. It’s really that simple.”
491. “We didn’t pay that much attention to the productivity boom in the ’30s, because everyone was focused on how bad the economy was. We didn’t”
492. “A genius is the man who can do the average thing when
493. “Use money to gain control over your time, because not having control of your time is such a powerful and universal drag on happiness. The ability to do what you want, when you want, with who you want, for as long as you want to, pays the highest dividend that exists in finance”
494. “I have observed that not the man who hopes when others despair, but the man who despairs when others hope, is admired by a large class of persons as a sage.”
495. “Be nicer and less flashy. No one is impressed with your possessions as much as you are. You might think you want a fancy car or a nice watch. But what you probably want is respect and admiration. And you’re more likely to gain those things through kindness and humility than horsepower and chrome.”
496. “Studying a specific person can be dangerous because we tend to study extreme examples – the billionaires, the CEOs, or the massive failures that dominate the news – the extreme examples are often the least applicable to other situations, given their complexity.”
497. “But my favorite summary of the theory came when he mentioned in an interview that “the purpose of the margin”
498. “The premise of this book is that doing well with money has a little to do with how smart you are and a lot to do with how you behave.”
499. “You have no obligation to have an opinion about anything.”
500. “Change your mind as often as the facts change.”
501. “There is the old pilot quip that their jobs are “hours and hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.”
502. “The best part of being a valet is getting to drive some of the coolest cars ever to touch pavement. Guests came in driving Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Rolls-Royces--the whole aristocratic fleet.
503. “You are one person in a game with seven billion other people and infinite moving parts. The accidental impact of actions outside of your control can be more consequential than the ones you consciously take.”
504. “financial outcomes are driven by luck, independent of intelligence and effort.”
505. “expectations rise with results there is no logic in striving for more because you’ll feel the same after putting in extra effort.”
506. “The functions of money are well known. Money is a medium of exchange: white paper and plastic money is intrinsically worthless, they are guarantees of value that can be used in exchange for foods and services.”
507. “It’s not that any of these things are bad or wrong. It’s that knowing what to do tells you nothing about what happens in your head when you try to do it.”
508. “Nassim Taleb explained: “True success is exiting some rat race to modulate one’s activities for peace of mind.”
509. “Define the game you’re playing, and make sure your actions are not being influenced by people playing a different game.”
510. “Luck and risk are both the reality that every outcome in life is guided by forces other than individual effort.”
511. “Like everything else worthwhile, successful investing demands a price. But its currency is not dollars and cents. It’s volatility, fear, doubt, uncertainty, and regret—all of which are easy to overlook until you’re dealing with them in real time.”
512. “John Templeton’s view that “The four most dangerous words in investing are, ‘it’s different this time.”
513. “Academic success depends on research and publications.”
514. “The cash ratios, or the amount of actual cash, kept by banks is about 6-10 per cent of all the money deposited with them. Another 20-5 per cent of deposits are kept as ‘near money’, which are investments that can be turned back into cash almost immediately.”
515. “When I asked Danny how he could start again as if we had never written an earlier draft,” Zweig continued, “he said the words I’ve never forgotten: ‘I have no sunk costs.’”49”
516. “The ability to do what you want, when you want, with who you want, for as long as you want, is priceless. It is the highest dividend money pays. Angus”
517. “The formula for how to do well with money is simple. The behaviors you battle while implementing that formula are hard.”
518. “activities for peace of mind.” I like that.”
519. Everything has a price, but not all prices appear on labels.
520. “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.”
521. “Your devotion to a political party or economic philosophy is directly proportional to your tendency to think irrationally about how politics affects your investments.”
522. “The intellectual allure of pessimism has been known for ages. John Stuart Mill wrote in the 1840s: “I have observed that not the man who hopes when others despair, but the man who despairs when others hope, is admired by a large class of persons as a sage.”
523. “I did not intend to get rich. I just wanted to get independent.” Charlie Munger.
524. “Two topics impact everyone, whether you are interested in them or not: health and money.”
525. “Money is ubiquitous, so something bad happening tends to affect everyone and captures everyone’s attention.”
526. “Everyone has an incomplete view of the world. But we form a complete narrative to fill in the gaps.”
527. “If there’s one way to guard against their damage, it’s avoiding single points of failure”
528. “Enough is not too little … Enough is realizing that the opposite — an insatiable appetite for more — will push you to the point of regret.”
529. “A plan is only useful if it can survive reality. And a future filled with unknowns is everyone’s reality.”
530. “We are all victims, in different ways, to that truth.”
531. “The idea is that you have to take risk to get ahead, but no risk that can wipe you out is ever worth taking.”
532. A barbelled personality—optimistic about the future, but paranoid about what will prevent you from getting to the future—is vital.
533. “It’s not whether you’re right or wrong that’s important,” George Soros once said, “but how much money you make when you’re right and how much you lose when you’re wrong.” You can be wrong half the time and still make a fortune.”
534. “Many finance and investment decisions are rooted in watching what other people do and either copying them or betting against them.”
535. “The biggest single point of failure with money is a sole reliance on a paycheck to fund short-term spending needs, with no savings to create a gap between what you think your expenses are and what they might be in the future.”
536. “Charlie Munger once said “I did not intend to get rich. I just wanted to get independent.” We can leave aside rich, but independence has always been my personal financial goal.”
537. “Compounding doesn’t rely on earning big returns. Merely good returns sustained uninterrupted for the longest period of time—especially in times of chaos and havoc—will always win.”
538. “Netflix stock returned more than 35,000% from 2002 to 2018, but traded below its previous all-time high on 94% of days.”
539. “If something compounds—if a little growth serves as the fuel for future growth—a small starting base can lead to results so extraordinary they seem to defy logic. It can be so logic-defying that you underestimate what’s possible, where growth comes from, and what it can lead to.”
540. “The formation of bubbles isn't so much about people irrationally participating in long-term investing. They're about people somewhat rationally moving toward short-term trading to capture momentum that had been feeding on itself.”
541. “Expecting things to be bad is the best way to be pleasantly surprised when they’re not. Which, ironically, is something to be optimistic about. Now, a short story about stories.”
542. “To repeat a point we’ve made a few times in this book: The ability to do what you want, when you want, for as long as you want, has an infinite ROI.”
543. “Luck and risk are siblings. They are both the reality that every outcome in life is guided by forces other than individual effort.” – Morgan Housel, Psychology Of Money
544. “Good investing isn’t necessarily about earning the highest returns, because the highest returns tend to be one-off hits that can’t be repeated. It’s about earning pretty good returns that you can stick with and which can be repeated for the longest period of time. That’s when compounding runs wild.”
545. “A barbelled personality—optimistic about the future, but paranoid about what will prevent you from getting to the future—is vital.”
546. “Imagine how much stuff you’d have to make up if you were forced to talk 24/7. Remember this when watching financial news on TV.” – Morgan Housel, Psychology Of Money
547. “Hindsight, the ability to explain the past, gives us the
548. “Judge investors by the quality of their arguments, not the performance of their last trade.” – Morgan Housel, Psychology Of Money
549. “Risk and luck are doppelgangers.”
550. “So equally smart people can disagree about how and why recessions happen, how you should invest your money, what you should prioritize, how much risk you should take, and so on.”
551. “The four most dangerous words in investing are, ‘it’s different this time.”
552. “Just as you should dress appropriately for your age, you should spend appropriately for your income, and not a penny more.” – Morgan Housel, Psychology Of Money
553. “Studying history makes you feel like you understand something. But until you’ve lived through it and personally felt its consequences, you may not understand it enough to change your behavior.”
554. “You should like risk because it pays off over time. But you should be paranoid of ruinous risk because it prevents you from taking future risks that will pay off over time.”
555. “Few things matter more with money than understanding your own time horizon and not being persuaded by the actions and behaviors of people playing different games than you are.”
556. “On January 5th, 1889, the Detroit Free Press pushed back against the long-held dream that man could one day fly like a bird. Airplanes, the paper wrote, “appear impossible”:”
557. “It’s different from being conservative. Conservative is avoiding a certain level of risk. Margin of safety is raising the odds of success at a given level of risk by increasing your chances of survival.”
558. “Nothing is as good or as bad as it seems.”
559. “Un genio que pierde el control de sus emociones puede ser un desastre financiero.”
560. “A small amount of wealth means the ability to take a few days off work when you’re sick without breaking the bank.”
561. “Admit when you are wrong.” – Morgan Housel, Psychology Of Money
562. “At every stage of our lives, we make decisions that will
563. “Like everything else worthwhile, successful investing demands a price. But its currency is not dollars and cents. It’s volatility, fear, doubt, uncertainty, and regret – all of which are easy to overlook until you’re dealing with them in real time.”
564. “Don’t attempt to keep up with the Joneses without realizing the Joneses aren’t any happier than you are.” – Morgan Housel, Psychology Of Money
565. “The Intelligent Investor is one of the greatest investing books of all time. But I don’t know a single investor”
566. “Having a gap between what you can technically endure versus what’s emotionally possible is an overlooked version of room for error.”
567. “Personal savings and frugality—finance’s conservation and efficiency—are parts of the money equation that are more in your control and have a 100% chance of being as effective in the future as they are today.”
568. “Progress happens too slowly to notice, but setbacks happen too quickly to ignore. There are lots of overnight tragedies. There are rarely overnight miracles.”
569. “How to Get Rich (without getting lucky)” by Naval Ravikant (Summary & Infographic)
570. “Financial success is not a hard science. It’s a soft skill, where how you behave is more important than what you know. I call this soft skill the psychology of money.”
571. “Only saving for a specific goal makes sense in a predictable world. But ours isn’t. Saving is a hedge against life’s inevitable ability to surprise the hell out of you at the worst possible moment.”
572. “There are a million ways to get wealthy … but there’s only one way to stay wealthy: some combination of frugality and paranoia.”
573. “History never repeats itself; man always does.” It applies so well to how we behave with money.”
574. “Medicine is a complex profession and the interactions between physicians and patients are also complex.” You know what profession is the same? Financial advice.”
575. “I’ve been banging away at this thing for 30 years. I think the simple math is, some projects work and some don’t. There’s no reason to belabor either one. Just get on to the next.”
576. “Save for your own retirement; assume Social Security and private pensions won't be around (even though they probably will).”
577. “What seems crazy to you might make sense to me.”
578. “Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Rolls-Royces—the whole aristocratic fleet.”
579. “Scott Galloway has a related idea that is so important to remember when judging success—both your own and others’: “Nothing is as good or as bad as it seems.”
580. “Optimism sounds like a sales pitch. Pessimism sounds like someone trying to help you.”CLICK TO TWEET
581. “But my favorite summary of the theory came when he mentioned in an interview that “the purpose of the margin of safety is to render the forecast unnecessary.”
582. “Leverage is the devil here. Leverage—taking on debt to make your money go further—pushes routine risks into something capable of producing ruin.”
583. “When most people say they want to be a millionaire, what they might actually mean is “I’d like to spend a million dollars.” And that is literally the opposite of being a millionaire.”
584. “Dollar-cost average for your entire life and you’ll beat almost everyone who doesn’t.” – Morgan Housel, Psychology Of Money
585. Rich is the current income. Wealth is income not spent. Wealth is hard because it requires self-control.
586. “To make money they didn’t have and didn’t need, they risked what they did have and did need. And that’s foolish. It is just plain foolish. If you risk something that is important to you for something that is unimportant to you, it just does not make any sense.” – Morgan Housel, Psychology Of Money
587. “Spending money to show people how much money you have is the fastest way to have less money.”
588. “The line between bold and reckless can be thin. When we don’t give risk and luck their proper billing it’s often invisible.”
589. “Something I’ve learned from both investors and entrepreneurs is that no one makes good decisions all the time. The most impressive people are packed full of horrendous ideas that are often acted upon.”
590. “The first rule of compounding is to never interrupt it unnecessarily.”
591. “Richard Feynman, the great physicist, once said, “Imagine how much harder physics would be if electrons had feelings.”
592. “Getting money requires taking risks, being optimistic, and putting yourself out there.”
593. “we tell ourselves stories to fill in the gaps of what are effectively blind spots.”
594. “Beware taking financial cues from people playing a different game than you are.”
595. ...the 401k - the backbone savings vehicle of American retirement - did not exist until 1978. The Roth IRA was not born until 1998. If it were a person it would be barely old enough to drink.
596. “The aim of this book is to use short stories to convince you that soft skills are more important than the technical side of money.”
597. “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.” – Morgan Housel, Psychology Of Money
598. “Doing well with money is not about what you know, it’s not about where you went to school or how smart you are, it’s how you behave.” – Morgan Housel, Psychology Of Money
599. “Worship room for error. A gap between what could happen in the future and what you need to happen in the future in order to do well is what gives you endurance, and endurance is what makes compounding magic over time.”
600. “Screwing up is easy and being a genius is hard so your financial situation can improve a lot by avoiding dumb stuff versus spending all your effort looking for upside.”
601. “Bartering, which still goes on today for those who have no cash or wish to avoid taxation, has obvious drawbacks. These include” the necessity of the double coincidence of wants - both parties in the exchange must want exactly what the other has.”
602. “I did not intend to get rich. I just wanted to get independent.”
603. “Growth is driven by compounding, which always takes time. Destruction is driven by single points of failure, which can happen in seconds, and loss of confidence, which can happen in an instant.”
604. “Expecting things to be bad is the best way to be pleasantly surprised when they’re not. Which, ironically, is something to be optimistic about.”
605. “A plan is only useful if it can survive reality.”
606. “Imagining a goal is easy and fun. Imagining a goal in the context of the realistic life stresses that grow with competitive pursuits is something entirely different.”
607. “Saving is the gap between your ego and your income.”
608. “Destruction in the face of progress is not only possible, but an efficient way to get rid of excess.”
609. “Charlie Munger says the first rule of compounding is to never interrupt it unnecessarily.”
610. “It is smart to have a deep appreciation for economic and investing history. History helps us calibrate our expectations, study where people tend to go wrong, and offers a rough guide of what tends to work. But it is not, in any way, a map of the future.“
611. “The highest form of wealth is the ability to wake up every morning and say, ‘I can do whatever I want today.”
612. “What’s often overlooked in finance is that something can be technically true but contextually nonsense.”
613. “There is, and always will be, more money to be made providing investment advice than receiving it.”
614. “The highest form of wealth is the ability to wake up every morning and say, “I can do whatever I want today.”
615. “Assuming that something ugly will stay ugly is an easy forecast to make.”
616. “Smart, informed, and reasonable people can disagree in finance, because people have vastly different goals and desires. There is no single right answer; just the answer that works for you.“
617. “Everything has a price, but not all prices appear on labels.”
618. “Someone driving a $100,000 car might be wealthy. But the only data point you have about their wealth is that they have $100,000 less than they did before they bought the car (or $100,000 more in debt). That's all you know about them.
619. “it’s a battle that can never be won, or that the only way to win is to not fight to begin with—to accept that you might have enough, even if it’s less than those around you.”
620. “It’s possible to statistically measure whether some decisions were wise. But in the real world, day to day, we simply don’t. It’s too hard. We prefer simple stories, which are easy but often devilishly misleading.”
621. “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.”
622. There is no reason to risk what you have and need for what you don’t have and don’t need. -Morgan Housel
623. “I love Voltaire’s observation that “History never repeats itself; man always does.”” – Morgan Housel, Psychology Of Money
624. “A good definition of an investing genius is the man or woman who can do the average thing when all those around them are going crazy.”
625. “Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.”
626. “1. 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.”
627. “doing well with money has a little to do with how smart you are and a lot to do with how you behave”
628. “I am a passive investor optimistic in the world’s ability to generate real economic growth and I’m confident that over the next 30 years that growth will accrue to my investments.”
629. “2. Planning is important, but the most important part of every plan is to plan on the plan not going according to plan. What’s the saying? You plan, God laughs.”
630. “Use money to gain control over your time,”
631. “A refinery worker who occasionally had Rockefeller’s ear once remarked: “He lets everybody else talk, while he sits back and says nothing.” When asked about his silence during meetings, Rockefeller often recited a poem: A wise old owl lived in an oak,
632. “there are many things never worth risking, no matter the potential gain.”
633. “doing well with money has a little to do with how smart you are and a lot to do with how you behave. And behavior is hard to teach, even to really smart people.”
634. “A good definition of an investing genius is the man or woman who can do the average thing when all those around them are going crazy. Tails drive everything.”
635. “Building wealth has little to do with your income or investment returns, and lots to do with your savings rate.”
636. “It’s not whether you’re right or wrong that’s important,” George Soros once said, “but how much money you make when you’re right and how much you lose when you’re wrong.” You can be wrong half the time and still make a fortune.
637. “a world driven by a few outlier tail events.”
638. “One of my deeply held investing beliefs is that there is little correlation between investment effort and investment results.”
639. “The illusion of control is more persuasive than the reality of uncertainty. So we cling to stories about outcomes being in our control.”
640. “Use money to gain control over your time, because not having control of your time is such a powerful and universal drag on happiness. The ability to do what you want, when you want, with who you want, for as long as you want to, pays the highest dividend that exists in finance.”
641. “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.”
642. “Things that have never happened before happen all the time.”
643. “History is mostly the study of surprising events. But it is often used by investors and economists as an unassailable guide to the future.”
644. “You have a strict obligation to not have an opinion about things you don't understand.”
645. “It examines such diverse and compelling subjects as: money and power, gender differences, morality and tax, the very rich, the poor, lottery and pools winners.”
646. “Using your money to buy time and options has a lifestyle benefit few luxury goods can compete with.”
647. “Avoid the extreme ends of financial decisions. Everyone’s goals and desires will change over time, and the more extreme your past decisions were the more you may regret them as you evolve.”
648. “Investor Bill Mann once wrote: “There is no faster way to feel rich than to spend lots of money on really nice things. But the way to be rich is to spend money you have, and to not spend money you don’t have. It’s really that simple.”31”
649. “There will never be a story of a janitor outperforming the world’s top nuclear engineers. But these stories do happen in investing.”
650. “An appealing fiction happens when you are smart, you want to find solutions, but face a combination of limited control and high stakes. They are extremely powerful. They can make you believe just about anything.”
651. Social comparison is the problem here.
652. “the purpose of the margin of safety is to render the forecast unnecessary.”
653. “There are a million ways to get wealthy, and plenty of books on how to do so. But there’s only one way to stay wealthy: some combination of frugality and paranoia.”
654. “If respect and admiration are your goal, be careful how you seek it. Humility, kindness, and empathy will bring you more respect than horsepower ever will.”
655. “Be careful who you praise and admire. Be careful who you look down upon and wish to avoid becoming. Or, just be careful when assuming that 100% of outcomes can be attributed to effort and decisions.”
656. “Your success as an investor will be determined by how you respond to punctuated moments of terror, not the years spent on cruise control.”
657. “Every job looks easy when you’re not the one doing it.” General Electric’s CEO in 2011, Jeff Immelt said.
658. “$81.5 billion of Warren Buffett’s $84.5 billion net worth came after his 65th birthday. Our minds are not built to handle such absurdities.”
659. “Save. Just save. You don’t need a specific reason to save.”
660. “It examines how possessions and wealth affect self-image and esteem, why some people become misers and others gamblers, spendthrifts and tycoons, and why some people gain more pleasure from giving away money than from retaining it.”
661. “People do some crazy things with money. But no one is crazy.
662. “odds of a good outcome are in your favor over time, even when there will be setbacks along the way.”
663. “One is that money is ubiquitous, so something bad happening tends to affect everyone and captures everyone’s attention.”
664. “Having more control over your time and options is becoming one of the most valuable currencies in the world.”
665. “Yes, but I have something he will never have... enough”
666. We all think we know how the world works, But we’ve all only experienced a tiny sliver of it. -Morgan Housel
667. “Go out of your way to find humility when things are
668. “someone else’s failure is usually attributed to bad decisions, while your own failures are usually chalked up to the dark side of risk.”
669. “Every bit of savings is like taking a point in the future that would have been owned by someone else and giving it back to yourself.”
670. “John Stuart Mill wrote in the 1840s: “I have observed that not the man who hopes when others despair, but the man who despairs when others hope, is admired by a large class of persons as a sage.”
671. “Having a strong sense of controlling one’s life is a more dependable predictor of positive feelings of wellbeing than any objective conditions of life we have considered.” Source: The Sense of Wellbeing in America by Angus Campbell.
672. “The idea is that you have to take risk to get ahead, but no risk that can wipe you out is ever worth taking. The odds are in your favor when playing Russian roulette. But the downside is not worth the potential upside. There is no margin of safety that can compensate for the risk.”
673. “Economist Bhashkar Mazumder has shown that incomes among brothers are more correlated than height or weight. If you are rich and tall, your brother is more likely to also be rich than he is tall. I”
674. “The most powerful way to grow your money is learning to live with less, since you have complete control over it.” – Morgan Housel, Psychology Of Money
675. “people who have control over their time tend to be happier in life is a broad and common enough observation that you can do something with it.”
676. “Wanting to believe that we are in control is an emotional itch that needs to be scratched, rather than an analytical problem to be calculated and solved. The illusion of control is more persuasive than the reality of uncertainty. So we cling to stories about outcomes being in our control.“
677. “Both in explaining the past and in predicting the future, we focus on the causal role of skill and neglect the role of luck.”
678. “First, it was seen mainly as a military weapon. Then a rich person’s toy. Then, perhaps, used to transport a few people.”
679. “If expectations rise with results there is no logic in striving for more because you’ll feel the same after putting in extra effort.”
680. “Good investing is not necessarily about making good decisions. It’s about consistently not screwing up.”
681. Be careful who you praise and admire. Be careful who you look down upon and wish to avoid becoming.
682. “Money’s greatest intrinsic value—and this can’t be overstated— is its ability to give you control over your time.”
683. “$81.5 billion of Warren Buffett's $84.5 billion net worth came after his 65th birthday.”
684. “If you view “do what you love” as a guide to a happier life, it sounds like empty fortune cookie advice. If you view it as the thing providing the endurance necessary to put the quantifiable odds of success in your favor, you realize it should be the most important part of any financial strategy.”
685. “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.”
686. “Money is everywhere, it affects all of us, and confuses most of us.”
687. “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.”
688. “‘Enough’ is not too little … ‘Enough’ is realizing that the opposite—an insatiable appetite for more—will push you to the point of regret.”
689. “My favorite Wikipedia entry begins: “Ronald James Read was an American philanthropist, investor, janitor, and gas station attendant.”
690. “Start saving for college before your kid is born, and start saving for your retirement before you graduate college. You'll feel silly when you start and like a genius when you finish.”
691. “When you don’t have control over your time, you’re forced to accept whatever bad luck is thrown your way. But if you have flexibility you have the time to wait for no-brainer opportunities to fall in your lap. This is a hidden return on your savings.”
692. “You’re not a spreadsheet. You’re a person. A screwed up, emotional person.”
693. “You have to survive to succeed. To repeat a point we’ve made a few times in this book: The ability to do what you want, when you want, for as long as you want, has an infinite ROI. Room for error does more than just widen the target around what you think might happen.”
694. “When in doubt, choose the investment with the lowest fee.”
695. “Intelligence is not a reliable advantage in a world that’s become as connected as ours has. But flexibility is.”
696. “The Washington Post wrote in 1909: “There will never be such a thing as commercial aerial freighters. Freight will continue to drag its slow weight across the patient earth.” The first cargo plane took off five months later.”
697. “Define the cost of success and be ready to pay for it. Because nothing worthwhile is free.”
698. “Investors were probably better informed 20 years ago when there was 90% less financial news.”
699. “Be careful who you praise and admire. Be careful who you look down upon and wish to avoid becoming.”
700. “As investor Michael Batnick says, “some lessons have to be experienced before they can be understood.” We are all victims, in different ways, to that truth.”
701. “But doing something you love on a schedule you can’t control can feel the same as doing something you hate.”
702. “We should avoid the extreme ends of financial planning. Assuming you’ll be happy with a very low income, or choosing to work endless hours in pursuit of a high one, increases the odds that you’ll one day find yourself at a point of regret.”
703. “I grew up with a friend who came from neither privilege nor natural intellect, but was the hardest-working guy I knew. These people have a lot to teach because they have an unfiltered understanding of every inch of the road to success.
704. “Conservative is avoiding a certain level of risk. Margin of safety is raising the odds of success at a given level of risk by increasing your chances of survival. Its magic is that the higher your margin of safety, the smaller your edge needs to be to have a favorable outcome.”
705. “Independence is the best financial goal.
706. “Long tails – the farthest ends of a distribution of outcomes – have tremendous influence in finance, where a small number of events can account for the majority of outcomes.”
707. “The ability to do what you want, when you want, with who you want, for as long as you want, is priceless. It is the highest dividend money pays.”
708. “Enough" is realizing that the opposite--an insatiable
709. “nature means we won’t be prepared for them, which is part”
710. “The most important part of every plan is planning on your plan not going according to plan.”
711. “The formation of bubbles isn’t so much about people irrationally participating in long-term investing. They’re about people somewhat rationally moving toward short-term trading to capture momentum that had been feeding on itself.“
712. “stories are, by far, the most powerful force in the economy. They are the fuel that can let the tangible parts of the economy work, or the brake that holds our capabilities back.”
713. Doing well with money has a little to do with how smart you are and a lot to do with how you behave. -Morgan Housel
714. “A genius who loses control of their emotions can be a financial disaster.”
715. “It sounds trivial, but thinking of market volatility as a fee rather than a fine is an important part of developing the kind of mindset that lets you stick around long enough for investing gains to work in your favor.”
716. “The ability to do what you want, when you want, with who you want, for as long as you want, is priceless. It is the highest dividend money pays.“
717. “My own view is that people are neither rational nor irrational. We are human. We don’t like to think harder than we need to, and we have unceasing demands on our attention.”
718. “But you need short-term paranoia to keep you alive long enough to exploit long-term optimism.”
719. “The world grew its “energy wealth” not by increasing the energy it had, but by decreasing the energy it needed.”
720. “The big takeaway from ice ages is that you don’t need tremendous force to create tremendous results.”
721. “And since you can build wealth without a high income, but have no chance of building wealth without a high savings rate, it’s clear which one matters more.”
722. “The hardest thing about this was that I loved the work… But doing something you love on a schedule you can’t control can feel the same as doing something you hate.”
723. “Growth is driven by compounding, which always takes time. Destruction is driven by single points of failure, which can happen in seconds, and loss of confidence”
724. “Carl Richards writes: “Risk is what’s left over when you think you’ve thought of everything.”
725. Everyone has an incomplete view of the world. But we form a complete narrative to fill in the gaps.
726. “People with enduring personal finance success—not necessarily those with high incomes—tend to have a propensity to not give a damn what others think about them.”
727. “Charlie Munger once said “I did not intend to get rich. I just wanted to get independent.”
728. “Scott Sagan once said something everyone who follows the economy or investment markets should hang on their wall: “Things that have never happened before happen all the time.”
729. “And in stock markets, where a 40% decline that takes place in six months will draw congressional investigations, but a 140% gain that takes place over six years can go virtually unnoticed. And in careers, where reputations take a lifetime to build and a single email to destroy.”
730. “Therefore, focus less on specific individuals and case studies and more on broad patterns.”
731. “Rising prices persuade all investors in ways the best marketers envy. They are a drug that can turn value-conscious investors into dewy-eyed optimists, detached from their own reality by the actions of someone playing a different game than they are.”
732. “Consider that 85% of active mutual funds underperformed their benchmark over the 10 years ending 2018.65 That figure has been fairly stable for generations”
733. “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.”
734. “The ability to do what you want, when you want, for as long as you want, has an infinite ROI.”
735. “Failure can be a lousy teacher, because it seduces smart people into thinking their decisions were terrible when sometimes they just reflect the unforgiving realities of risk.”
736. “One of the most neglected topics in the whole discipline of psychology, which prides itself in the definition of the science of human behaviour, is the psychology of money.”
737. “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.”
738. “Assume the worst, hope for the best, accept reality.” – Morgan Housel, Psychology Of Money
739. “highest returns tend to be one-off hits that can’t be repeated. It’s about earning pretty good returns that you can stick with and which can be repeated for the longest period of time. That’s when compounding runs wild.”
740. “The biggest single point of failure with money is a sole reliance on a paycheck to fund short-term spending needs, with no savings to create a gap between what you think your expenses are and what they might be in the future”
741. “Predictions, opinions, and forecasts should be discounted by the number of times the person making them is on TV each week.”
742. “A good definition of an investing genius is the man or woman who can do the average thing when all those around them are going crazy. Tails drive everything.“
743. “Past a certain level of income, what you need is just what sits below your ego.”
744. “The best way to achieve felicity is to aim low,” says Charlie Munger.”
745. “If you have flexibility you can wait for good opportunities, both in your career and for your investments.”
746. “Start saving for college before your kid is born, and start saving for your retirement before you graduate college. You’ll feel silly when you start and like a genius when you finish.” – Morgan Housel, Psychology Of Money
747. “We need to believe we live in a predictable, controllable world, so we turn to authoritative-sounding people who promise to satisfy that need.”
748. “unique experience with how the world works. And what you’ve experienced is more compelling than what you learn second-hand. So”
749. “what they might actually mean is “I’d like to spend a million dollars.” And that is literally the opposite of being a millionaire.”
750. “The line between inspiring bold and foolishly reckless can be a millimetre thick and only a visible with hindsight.”
751. “Money’s greatest intrinsic value – and this can’t be overstated – is its ability to give you control over your time.”
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