Warren Shea

Warren Shea’s Notes for Same as Ever by Morgan Housel (Book)

Version: 20241006 | Status: Completed October 2024

Same as Ever by Morgan Housel

Introduction: The Little Laws of Life

Hanging by a Thread: If you know where we’ve been, you realize we have no idea where we’re going.

• A ski story of an unintentional, life-changing decision.
• Small changes with massive impacts.

Risk Is What You Don’t See: We are very good at predicting the future, except for the surprises - which tend to be all that matter.

• The biggest risk is what no one sees coming because if no one sees it coming, no one’s prepared for it, and if no one’s prepared for it, its damage will be amplified when it arrives.
• Story of an astronaut who drowned.
• Risk is what’s left over after you think you’ve thought of everything.
• Risk can never be mastered.
• The biggest risk of the next 10 years is something nobody is talking about today.
• Impossible to plan for what you can’t imagine - the more you think you’ve imagined everything, the more shocked you’ll be when something happens that you haven’t considered.
• Think of risk the way California thinks of earthquakes — it knows they will happen but doesn’t know when, where, or at what magnitude.
• Invest in preparedness, not in prediction.
• In personal finance - the right amount of savings is when it feels like a little too much. Whatever debt you think you can handle, it’s probably a little less.
• Houdini could withstand any punch, but an unexpected jab killed him.

Expectations and Reality: The first rule of happiness is low expectations.

• Expectations where things get better, but happiness goes nowhere.
• The first rule of happiness is low expectations.
• We always want to be happier than other people, and this is difficult because we believe others to be happier than they actually are.
• The world isn’t driven by greed, it’s driven by envy.
• Social media shows inflated, faked, airbrushed lifestyles—comparing yourself to peers through a highlight reel of their lives.
• People don’t communicate on social media, so much as they perform for others.
• Today’s economy is good for generating three things: wealth, the ability to show off wealth, and great envy for other people’s wealth.
• We might have higher incomes, more wealth, bigger homes, but it’s all so smothered by inflated expectations.
• Peter Kaufman: “We tend to take every precaution to safeguard our material possessions because we know what they cost, but at the same time, we neglect things that are much more precious because they don’t come with price tags attached. Our eyesight, relationships, or freedom can be hidden because money is not changing hands. Same with expectations. But your happiness completely relies on expectations.”.
• Imagine a life where things get better, but your expectations rise as fast as your circumstances. It’s terrifying and almost as bad as a world where nothing gets better.
• The first rule of a happy life is low expectations. If you have unrealistic expectations, you’re going to be miserable your whole life. You want to have reasonable expectations and take life’s results, good and bad, as they happen, with a certain amount of stoicism.
• Marriage is when you both want to help your spouse and expect nothing in return. If you both do that, you’re both pleasantly surprised.
• It’s hard to distinguish high expectations from motivation, and low expectations feel like giving up and minimizing your potential.
• You think you want progress for yourself and most of the world—but that’s not what you want. You want to feel a gap between what you expected and what actually happened.

Wild Minds: People who think about the world in unique ways you like also think about the world in unique ways you won’t like.

• You like them because they do things other people wouldn’t consider or can’t even comprehend.
• People think about the world in unique ways you like, also think about the world in unique ways you won’t like.
• Some examples: John Boyd - Fighter Pilot - Aerial Attack Study, Newton (investigated magic), Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Walt Disney.
• History reveals no instances of a conqueror being surfeited by conquest.
• With all these people I was jealous of, I couldn’t just choose part of their life (e.g. his money, her mind, his body). Either you want someone’s life or you don’t. There’s no in-between.

Wild Numbers: People don’t want accuracy. They want certainty.

• Life is about managing probabilities: forcing students to realize the consequences of assuming certainty exists in a world filled with unknowns.
• Test - if you were 100% confident the answer you gave was correct and it was wrong, you failed the entire test. if you were 0% confident and correct, you got no credit. Everything in between gave a confidence-adjusted score.
• Human beings cannot comprehend very large or very small numbers.
• With a large enough sample, any outrageous thing is likely to happen and why “once-in-a-lifetime events” seem to occur so frequently.
• What is often attributed to miracles is actually just basic math.
• Local newspaper, radio, TV, internet, and social media have allowed news to spread from “your neighbourhood” to the world.
• The wider news spreads, the more likely it is to be pessimistic - bad news gets more attention than good news because pessimism is seductive and feels more urgent than optimism.
• The majority of Americans were less likely than their descendants to be dogged by that frightening sense of insecurity, which comes from being jostled by forces, economic, political, international, beyond one’s personal kin. Their horizons were close to them. In modern times cover these items all over the world.
• The brain has a tendency to remove doubt by reaching a decision. Evolution shows that the last thing prey should do regarding a predator is take a long time in deciding what to do.
• Knowing the high odds something is happening loses its meaning when that thing happening hurts.
• Avoid catastrophic risks.

Best Story Wins: Stories are always more powerful than statistics.

• Stories are more powerful than statistics - not the best idea, the right idea, or the most rational idea - but whatever gets people to nod their heads.
• Great ideas explained poorly can go nowhere, while old or wrong ideas can ignite a revolution.
• Story of Martin Luther King Jr and “tell him about the dream”.
• Even in a good story, a powerful sentence or phrase can do most of the work. People don’t remember books, they remember sentences.
• In a documentary, he’ll line up the sentence/cut it to meet the beat of the music.
• Everyone knows Titanic, which claimed X lives, but no one knows about the other ones that claimed more. Maybe it just stands out due to the story.
• The influence of a good story drives you crazy if you assume the world is swayed by facts and objectivity; if you assume the best idea, or the largest numbers, or the correct answer wins.
• No one understands storytelling as good as comedians - they understand how the world works but they wanna make you laugh, rather than make themselves feel smart. They take facts from dry fields and squeeze out amazing stories. Humour is a way to show you’re smart without bragging.
• Einstein and his imagination and taking complex ideas and making them simple in his head, like “riding a beam of light”.
• The most persuasive stories are about what you want to believe is true, or are an extension of what you’ve experienced first hand.

Does Not Compute: The world is driven by forces that cannot be measured.

• Some things are too impossible (or elusive) to quantify, but they can make all the difference in the world because their lack of quantification causes people to discount their relevance.
• Jeff Bezos - “I’ve noticed that when the anecdotes and the data disagree, it’s the anecdotes that are usually right. There’s something wrong with the way you’re measuring it.”.
• Story about Hitler being unhinged and making unexpected/irrational decisions.
• Story about runners - physical ability is not the only factor of a winner, it’s what you’re capable of within the context of what your brain is willing to endure for the risk and reward in a given moment. Your brain’s first job is to make sure you don’t die, it will shut you down if the physical limit isn’t worth the reward.
• Economies, bodies are not machines - they have souls, emotions, feelings, fears which regulate what we’re capable of.
• The concept of economic value is easy - whatever someone wants, has value, regardless of the reason.
• The ones who thrive long term are the ones who understand the real world is a never ending chain of absurdity, confusion, messy relationships and imperfect people.
• The reason we have innovation and advancement is because we are fortunate enough to have people in this world whose mind work differently than ours.

Calm Plants the Seeds of Crazy: Crazy doesn’t mean broken. Crazy is normal; beyond the point of crazy is normal.

• Common lifecycle of greed and fear: First you assume good news is permanent, then you become oblivious to bad news, then you ignore bad news, then you deny bad news, then you panic at bad news, then you panic at bad news, then you assume bad news is permanent, then you become oblivious to good news, then you ignore good news, then you deny good news, then you accept good news, then you assume good news is permanent.
• Psychological process of recession: when economy is stable, people get optimistic, when people get optimistic, they go into debt, when they go into debt, the economy becomes unstable. Stability is destabilizing.
• Surprise has 6 common characteristics: Incomplete information, uncertainty, randomness, chance, unfortunate timing, poor incentives.
• RE: Infection - what was a tragic, but expected part of life 100 years ago, is now a tragic, inconceivable part of modern life - which made COVID pandemic so shocking and overwhelming.
• The irony of good times is they breed complacency and skepticism of warning.
• Common irony: paranoia leads to success because it keeps you on your toes, but paranoia is stressful so you abandon it quickly once you achieve success - now you abandoned what made you successful and you decline, which is even more stressful.

Too Much, Too Soon, Too Fast: A good idea on steroids quickly becomes a terrible idea.

• You can’t make a baby in 1 month by making 9 women pregnant.
• When people discover something valuable, there’s a tendency to have it all, faster.
• Robert Wadlow - growth hormone abnormality, just shy of 9 feet tall.
• For every type of animal, there is a most convenient size - a state that works well, but breaks when you try to scale it to a different size or speed.
• Stocks pay a fortune in the long run - 1871 to 2018. Stock market positive on any given day is 50%. Over 3 months - 60%. 1 year - 68%. 5 Year - 80%. 10 year - 88%. 20 year - 100%. The more the time horizon compresses, the more you rely on luck and tempt ruin.
• Starbucks story of increasing too fast - “Growth is not a strategy, it’s a tactic and when undisciplined growth became a strategy, we lost our way”.
• A management style that works in a 10 person company can destroy a 1000 person company.
• 2 fish story re: cold water and then warm water -> both put to regular water. Fish first in cold water live 30% longer. Fish in warm water die 15% earlier than average.
• Growth is good if only because runts eventually get eaten, but forced/accelerated/artificial growth, that tends to backfire.
• The greatest impediment to creativity is your impatience - the inevitable desire to hurry up the process, express something, and make a splash.
• Most great things gain value from two things - patience and scarcity. Patience to let something grow, and scarcity to admire what it grows into.

When the Magic Happens: Stress focuses your attention in ways that good times can’t.

• Stress focuses your attention in ways good times can’t.
• The biggest changes and innovations don’t happen when everything is going well, they tend to occur after or during a terrible event.
• Story of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and how it changed safety for the worker.
• Militaries show up repeatedly in innovations: cars, planes, radar, atomic energy, the internet, microprocessors, jets, rockets, antibiotics, highways, helicopters, GPS, digital photography, microwave ovens, synthetic rubber.
• Militaries are home to really big problems that need to be solved ‘right now’.
• “If I don’t figure this out, I might get fired”. “If I figure this out, I might help people and make a lot of money”. But militaries deal with: “If we don’t figure this out right now, we’re all going to die”.
• Militaries occasionally deal with problems so important, so urgent, so vital - that money, and manpower are removed as obstacles and those involved collaborate in ways that are hard to do in hard times.
• Stress focuses your attention in ways good times can’t - it kills procrastination, indecision - taking what you need to get done, and shoving it so close to your face that you have no choice but to pursue it.
• 1930s had unemployment and plummeting stock market - but it was also by far the most productive and technologically progressive decade in US history.
• Limit to stress-induced innovation - balance between helpful stress and crippling disaster. The latter prevents innovation as resources are sapped and people turn their attention from getting out of a crisis to merely surviving it.
• When everything is great, responsibility is low, and threats appear gone, you get some of the worst, dumbest, least productive behaviour.
• What makes life mean something is purpose, a goal, a battle, the struggle.
• Most successful people are just a walking anxiety disorder, harnessed for productivity.

Overnight Tragedies and Long Term Miracles: Good news comes from compounding, which always takes time, but bad news comes from a loss in confidence or a catastrophic error that can occur in a blink of an eye.

• Good news comes from compounding, which always takes time - but bad news comes from a loss in confidence, or catastrophic error that can occur in the blink of an eye.
• “It takes 20 years to build a reputation, and 5 minutes to destroy one”.
• Growth always fights against competition that slows its rise, new ideas fight for attention, business models fight incumbency, skyscrapers fight gravity - but everyone gets out of the way of decline. Some might try to step in and slow the fall, but it doesn’t attract people the way progress does.
• Making a human is incredibly complex, but the death of a human is simple - not enough oxygen or blood to the right areas.
• Slow progress is the normal state of affairs.
• Progress is about what didn’t happen, and bad news is about what did occur.

Tiny and Magnificent: When little things compound into extraordinary things.

• One of the leading causes of the increase in obesity is not larger meals, it’s eating more small snacks throughout the day.
• Soviets developed super powerful bomb - but countries unlikely to use them in battle because they raised the stakes so high. So, smaller, less powerful nuclear bombs were created - we could use them without ending the world. But small nuclear bombs were more likely to be used in combat - a country might use a tiny one in battle, which would result in a bigger retaliation, and so forth. Small bombs increased the likelihood a big bomb would be used. Small risks weren’t the alternative to big risks, they were the trigger.
• The Great Depression: The stock markets fall, the boss loses his savings, lays people off, they default on their mortgage, the banks go under, people lose their savings, people stop spending, businesses fail, banks fail, etc etc.
• COVID-19 - virus transferred to humans (common), humans interacted with other people (of course), mystery for a while (understandable), bad news suppressed (bad but common), other countries thought it would be contained (standard denial), didn’t act fast enough (bureaucracy), we weren’t prepared (overoptimism) and could only respond with blunt force lockdowns (panic).
• 2 Boeings crash due to 11 small mistakes.
• Nothing in science can blow your mind like evolution - it’s cleverer than you are because if a critic says ‘evolution could never do that’, they usually just lack imagination.
• The magic of evolution is it’s been selecting traits for 3.8 billion years.
• Little changes compounded for a long time create extraordinary changes (e.g. investing).

Elation and Despair: Progress requires optimism and pessimism to coexist.

• Pessimism is more intellectually seductive than optimism, and captures more of our attention. It’s vital for survival, helping us prepare for risks before they arrive.
• Optimism is the belief things can and will be better, even when the evidence is murky.
• The best financial plan is to save like a pessimist and invest like an optimist.
• Stockdale prisoner story: Never losing faith he would come home. The optimists had the hardest time, e.g. “We’ll be home by Christmas” were the ones whose spirits were shattered when another Christmas came and went. They died of a broken heart.
• There is a balance between needing unwavering faith that things will get better, while accepting the reality of brutal facts (whatever they may be). Fight like a pessimist, dream like an optimist.
• Depressive realism - that depressed people have a more accurate view of the world because they’re more realistic about how risky and fragile life is.
• ^ the opposite is Blissfully unaware - it feels great!
• Bill Gates stories.
• You can only be an optimist in the long run if you can survive being a pessimist in the short run.
• The middle: The Rational Optimist - those who realize history is a constant change of problems and disappointments and setbacks but remain optimistic because they know setbacks don’t prevent eventual progress. They’re looking further ahead than other people.
• Save like a pessimist and invest like an optimist. Plan like a pessimist, and dream like an optimist.

Casualties of Perfection: There is a huge advantage to being a little imperfect.

• Evolution: everything dies. Everything will be extinct, there is no perfect species - one adapted to everything at all times.
• A species that evolves to be very good at one thing tends to become vulnerable at another. The tree could be taller to get more sun, but then is susceptible to wind damage.
• Not maximizing your potential is your sweet spot in a world where one skill compromises another.
• A successful person leaving free time in their calendar may feel inefficient, and it is, but if your job is to be creative and think through tough problems, then time spent wandering around the park might be your most valuable hours.
• Sometimes the most important work done is done outside of work, when they’re free to ponder.
• A lot of workers have thought jobs without much time to think. They’re always pulled into moment to moment tactical issues.
• The more perfect you try to become, the more vulnerable you are.

It’s Supposed to Be Hard: Everything worth pursuing comes with a little pain. The trick is not minding that it hurts.

• The Donner family: shortcut of 3-4 days led to month-long delay and cannibalism.
• Life skill: enduring the pain when necessary, rather than assuming there’s a hack or shortcut.
• Everyone wants a shortcut - it’s getting worse as technology inflates our benchmark for how fast things should happen.
• The safest way to try to get what you want is to try to deserve what you want - you want to deliver to the world what you would buy if you were on the other end.
• “If you can get your work life to where you enjoy half of it, that is amazing, very few people ever achieve that because everything comes with overhead, everything comes with pieces that you don’t like. Every job comes with pieces you don’t like and you need to say ‘that’s part of it’” - Jeff Bezos.
• Nothing worth pursuing is free - price is usually proportionate to the potential rewards.
• Most things worth pursuing charge their fee in the form of stress, uncertainty, dealing with quirky people, bureaucracy, other people’s conflicting incentives, hassle, nonsense, long hours, and constant debt.
• Smart people who had seen through the BS, and because of that, couldn’t function in the world. Couldn’t hold a job because they couldn’t take the BS.
• If you recognize the inefficiency, the question isn’t ‘how can I avoid all of it’, but ‘what is the optimal amount I can put up with so I can still function in a messy and imperfect world’.
• If your tolerance is zero - if you’re allergic to difference in opinion, personal incentives, emotion, inefficiencies, miscommunication, your odds of succeeding in anything that requires other people rounds to zero.
• A unique and underrated skill, is identifying the optimal amount of hassle and nonsense you should put up with to get ahead while getting along.
• Once you stop denying inefficiency, you have a clearer view of how the world works.

Keep Running: Most competitive advantages eventually die.

• Bias to animals getting larger over time.
• The tendency for evolution to create larger species is counterbalanced by the tendency of extinction to kill off larger species.
• Body size accentuates the gains but then amplifies the losses - it works for a while and then backfires spectacularly.
• Big animals are fragile, need more food, can’t hide easily, move slowly, reproduce slowly - being at the top of the food chain means they don’t need to adapt (which is unfortunate).
• Evolution encourages you to get bigger, and then punishes you for being big.
• 40% of all public companies lost their value between 1980 and 2014.
• The list of top 10 Fortune 500 companies that went bankrupt includes General Motors, Chrysler, Kodak, Sears.
• General Electric, Time Warner, AIG and Motorola are shells of their former selves.
• Forces pull you away from a competitive advantage once you have one - because you have one.
• 5 things.
  • being right instills confidence (hubris) that you can’t be wrong.
  • success tends to lead to growth but a big organization is different than a small one, and strategies that lead to success at one size can be impossible at another.
  • irony that people work hard to gain a competitive advantage for the intended purpose of not having to work so hard in the future (and removes paranoia, allowing competitors to creep in unnoticed).
  • a skill that is valuable in one era may not be valuable in the next.
  • some success is owed to being at the right place, at the right time.
• Some species live a long time, but the odds of surviving don’t improve over time because competition never stops.
• A species that gains an advantage over a competitor instantly incentivizes a competitor to improve.
• Evolution is a study of advantages, but there are no permanent advantages - everyone is scrambling all the time but no one gets so far ahead that they become extinction-proof.
• Keep running just to stay in place is how most things work - business, products, career, relationships, countries.
• Evolution is ruthless, it doesn’t teach by showing you what works but by destroying what doesn’t.
• You should never be surprised when something that dominates one era dies off in the next.

The Wonders of the Future: It always feels like we’re falling behind, and it’s easy to discount the potential of new technology.

• There’s a typical path of how people respond to what eventually becomes a world-changing new technology.
  • I’ve never heard of it.
  • I’ve heard of it but I don’t understand it.
  • I understand it but I don’t see how it’s useful.
  • I see how it could be fun for rich people, but not me.
  • I use it, but it’s just a toy.
  • It’s becoming more useful for me.
  • I use it all the time.
  • I could not imagine life without it.
  • Seriously, people lived without it?
  • It’s too powerful and needs to be regulated.
• It’s difficult to envision what one small invention could become, one day.
• Is the Age of Invention passing? It hasn’t started yet.
• You can’t tell what small discovery will lead to, somebody discovers something and a host of experimenters and inventors are playing all the variations upon it.
• Google Maps, TurboTax, Instagram wouldn’t be possible without ARPANET, 1960s Department of Defense project that was used to manage Cold War secrets.
• The value of every new technology is not just what it can do, it’s what someone else with a totally different skillset and point of view, can eventually manipulate it into.
• Easy to underestimate how two small things can compound into a large thing.

Harder than It Looks and Not as Fun as It Seems: ‘The grass is always greener on the side that’s fertilized with bullshit.’

• You think your pain and heartache are unprecedented in the history of the world but then you read and the things that torment you are the things that connect you with all the people that are alive and were ever alive.
• Most people do not disclose what torments them, what they’re scared of, what they’re insecure about, or if they’re actually happy. Rarely will they give an honest account of their flaws and failures, the window-dressed version of ourselves is by far the most common.
• It’s easiest to convince people you’re special if they don’t know you well enough to see all the ways you are not.
• Everything is sales: Everyone is trying to craft an image of who they are - image helps to sell themselves to others. Skills are advertised, flaws are hidden.
• Elon Musk and chronic stutter story - “you didn’t know I stuttered because I didn’t talk when I knew it would be difficult for me”.
• What most of us see most of the time is a fraction of what has actually happened or what is going on inside people’s heads - it’s stripped of all the hard parts.
• When you’re keenly aware of your own struggles but blind to those of others, it’s easy to assume you’re missing some skill or secret others have.
• When someone is viewed more extraordinary than they are, you’re more likely to overvalue their opinion on things, they have no special talent for.
• The best you can do in life is become an expert at some things, while remaining inept at others.

Incentives: The Most Powerful Force in the World: When the incentives are crazy, the behavior is crazy. People can be led to justify and defend nearly anything

• When the incentives are crazy, the behaviour is crazy - people can be led to justify and defend nearly anything.
• “Scamming people is easier to justify…when you’re starving”.
• People follow incentives, not advice.
• “Vice knows it’s ugly, so it hides behind a mask”.
• A lot of people can resist financial incentives. Cultural and Tribal incentives are more seductive.
• 1923 - a magazine called “Facts” that would report on things objectively true - but it was harder than you’d think. So it was called Time - to save reader’s time, was the most value a publisher could add.
• Sometimes “Do nothing” is the best answer, but “do something” is the best incentive - if an advisor tells a client “we don’t need to do anything here” but to be helpful, they’ll add complexity even when none is needed.
• A doctor says something they don’t teach in medical school is the difference between Medicine, and being a doctor. Medicine is a biological science, being a doctor is a social skill of managing expectations, understanding the insurance system, communicating effectively, etc.

Now You Get It: Nothing is more persuasive than what you’ve experienced firsthand.

• You can read and study and have empathy, but you often have no clue what you’re willing to do, what you want, and how far you’re willing to go until you’ve seen something with your own eyes.
• It’s not until your life is upended, your hopes dashed, your dreams uncertain, that people say “What was that wild idea we heard before, maybe we should give it a shot - nothing else is working, might as well try”.
• World War II Story - high inflation, Hitler comes around and people who weren’t working now had a job. When someone helps you get out of an emergency situation and into a better life, you’re going to give them your support.
• Take a good, honest, loving person and strip them of basic necessities, and you’ll get an unrecognizable monster who will do anything to survive.
• In war, training could teach you how to fire a gun and follow orders, but it could not teach combat. No one could understand it until they experienced it.
• Chris Rock joked about who actually teaches kids in school - Teachers do half, bullies another half and learning how to deal with bullies is the half you actually use as a grownup.
• Life problems and supersede any joy that comes from material success - future fortunes are imagined in a vacuum but reality is always lived with the good and bad taken together, competing for attention.

Time Horizons: Saying ‘I’m in it for the Long run’ is a bit like standing at the base of Mount Everest, pointing to the top, and saying, ‘That’s where I’m heading.’ Well, that’s nice. Now comes the test.

• Long term thinking is easier to believe in than to accomplish - most people know it’s the right strategy for anything that compounds.
• Long term harder than most people imagine, which is why it’s more lucrative than many people assume.
• Common outcomes of being in for the long run, but your spouse or boss doesn’t see it that way - a lot of it comes from the gap between what you believe, and what you can convince other people of.
• Being eventually right is one thing, but can you be eventually be right AND convince people around you, that’s another.
• Patience is often stubbornness in disguise - the world changes so changing your mind is helpful and crucial - but changing your mind is hard because fooling yourself into believing a falsehood is so much easier than admitting a mistake.
• Long term thinking can be a crutch for those who are wrong, but don’t want to change their mind.
• Doing long term thinking well is identifying when you’re being patience vs. stubborn.
• The few things that never change are candidates for long term thinking - everything else has a shelf-life.
• A long time horizon with a firm end date can be as reliant on chance as short time horizon - far superior is flexibility. The odds of success fall deepest in your favor when you mix a long time horizon with a flexible end date, or an indefinite horizon.
• The purpose of a margin of safety is to render the forecast unnecessary - the more flexibility you have, the less you need to know what happens next.
• When reading, there’s permanent and expiring information - permanent information compounds over time, leveraging off what you’ve already learned. Expiring information is “what” happened, permanent is “why” something happened and is likely to happen again.
• If you read good books, you’ll have an easier time understanding what you should or shouldn’t pay attention to in the news.

Trying Too Hard: There are no points awarded for difficulty.

• Cancer - focus too much on treatment, and not prevention. Prevention is boring compared to treatment, it’s hard for smart people to take it seriously.
• Top cancer researcher - getting people to quit smoking can have a bigger impact on cancer than anything he could do as a biologist.
• Complexity being favored for its excitement, when simplicity may actually do a better job.
• If you give a lecture that is crystal clear, your audience feels cheated. The sore truth is that complexity sells better.
• Evolution’s version of simplification: “Get rid of all that useless crap, just give me the few things I need and make them effective”.
• A trick to learning a complex topic is figuring out how many complex details are cousins of something simple - identify the core principles (3-12 of them) and everything else is various combinations of the core principles.
• In finance - spending less than you make, saving the difference, and being patient is 90% of what you need to know to do well.
• In health - sleep 8 hours, move a lot, eat real food but not too much - but what’s popular? supplements, and pills.
• Kids provide the most interesting information - they tell all they know and then stop. Adults lose this skill and learn how to dazzle with nonsense.
• Complexity gives a comforting impression of control, simplicity is hard to distinguish from cluelessness.
• If you don’t know about something, the odds that you’ll look uninformed are greater than if you’ll look like you mastered simplicity.
• If you say something I didn’t know, but can understand, you seem smart. If you say something I can’t understand, I think you have an ability to think about a topic I can’t. When you understand things I don’t, I have a hard time judging the limits of that field, which makes me more prone to taking your views at face value.
• Theory - length of a book indicates that the author has spent more time thinking about a topic than you have, which leads to the only data point they have data you don’t. It doesn’t mean the thinking is right.
• An effective rule of thumb doesn’t bypass complexity, it wraps things you don’t understand into things you do.
• It’s not that ignorance is an advantage, it’s that some of us are too attracted by rare things and forget the law of averages.
• It’s possible to be too attracted by complexity.

Wounds Heal, Scars Last: What have you experienced that I haven’t that makes you believe what you do? And would I think about the world like you do if I experienced what you have?

• People with different experiences will think differently, have different goals, outlooks, wishes, and values.
• Debates are people with different experiences talking over each other.
• People from the Great Depression were gnawed at by constant lurking fear or worse things yet. Learned from bitter experience to create security.
• Can measure everything in the world but people’s moods, fears, hopes, grudges, goals, triggers, expectations.
• Hardcore stress leaves a scar - previous behaviours previously engrained can be changed.
• 2 things happen after you get hit with something big and unexpected - you assume it will happen again (but with more consequence), you forecast with great conviction.
• For people where that event didn’t happen, they’ll struggle to understand your point of view.
• “What have you experienced, that I haven’t, that makes you believe about the world like you do? And would I think about the world as you do, if I experienced what you have?” - it’s why people don’t agree with each other.
• “The more the internet exposes people to new points of view, the angrier people get that different views exist. Disagreement has less to do with what people know and more to do with what they’ve experienced - and since experiences will always be different, disagreement will be constant”.

Questions

• Rather than attempting to figure out little ways the future might change, study the big things the past has never avoided.
• The more history you read, the more comfortable you are with the future.
• Who has the right answers, but I ignore because they’re not articulate?
• Which of my current views would I disagree with if I were born in a different country or generation?
• What do I desperately want to be true so much that I think it’s true when it’s clearly not?
• What is a problem that I think applies only to other countries, industries, careers, that will eventually hit me?
• What do I think is true but is just good marketing?
• What haven’t I experienced firsthand that leaves me naive about how something works?
• What looks unsustainable but is actually a new trend we haven’t accepted yet?
• Who do I think is smart, but is actually full of it?
• Am I prepared to handle risks I can’t even envision?
• Which of my current views would change if my incentives were different?
• What are we ignoring today that will seem shockingly obvious in the future?
• What events nearly happened that would have fundamentally changed the world, if they had occurred?
• How much of things outside my control have contributed to things I take credit for?
• How do I know if I’m being patient (a skill) or stubborn (a flaw)?
• Who do I look up to that is secretly miserable?
• What hassle am I trying to eliminate that is actually an unavoidable cost of success?
• What crazy genius that I aspire to emulate is just crazy?
• What strong belief do I hope that is most likely to change?
• What’s always been true?”

Credits