Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes - By Morgan Housel

Date read: 2024-01-02
How strongly I recommend it: 8/10
(See my list of 150+ books, for more.)

Go to the Amazon page for details and reviews.

Quick read filled with stories on what will remain constant in an ever-changing world. Uses examples from history including the Great Depression, WWII, and the US in the 1950's, to name a few.

My Notes

This is a book of short stories about what never changes in a changing world.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos once said that he’s often asked what’s going to change in the next ten years. “I almost never get the question: ‘What’s not going to change in the next ten years?’ ” he said. “And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two.”

Entrepreneur and investor Naval Ravikant put it this way: “In 1,000 parallel universes, you want to be wealthy in 999 of them. You don’t want to be wealthy in the fifty of them where you got lucky, so we want to factor luck out of it. . . . I want to live in a way that if my life played out 1,000 times, Naval is successful 999 times.” That’s what this book is about: In a thousand parallel universes, what would be true in every single one?

Every event creates its own offspring, which impact the world in their own special ways. It makes prediction exceedingly hard. The absurdity of past connections should humble your confidence in predicting future ones.

The other thing to keep in mind is to have a wider imagination. No matter what the world looks like today, and what seems obvious today, everything can change tomorrow because of some tiny accident no one’s thinking about. Events, like money, compound. And the central feature of compounding is that it’s never intuitive how big something can grow from a small beginning.

The biggest news, the biggest risks, the most consequential events are always what you don’t see coming.

Nassim Taleb says, “Invest in preparedness, not in prediction.”

Realize that if you’re only preparing for the risks you can envision, you’ll be unprepared for the risks you can’t see every single time. So, in personal finance, the right amount of savings is when it feels like it’s a little too much. It should feel excessive; it should make you wince a little.

Money buys happiness in the same way drugs bring pleasure: incredible if done right, dangerous if used to mask a weakness, and disastrous when no amount is enough.

Charlie Munger replied: 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.

My friend Brent has a related theory about marriage: It only works when both people want to help their spouse while expecting nothing in return. If you both do that, you’re both pleasantly surprised.

You think you want progress, both for yourself and for the world. But most of the time that’s not actually what you want. You want to feel a gap between what you expected and what actually happened. And the expectation side of that equation is not only important, but it’s often more in your control than managing your circumstances.

Unique minds have to be accepted as a full package, because the things they do well and that we admire cannot be separated from the things we wouldn’t want for ourselves or we look down upon.

People who are abnormally good at one thing tend to be abnormally bad at something else.

A common trait of human behavior is the burning desire for certainty despite living in an uncertain and probabilistic world.

The world breaks about once every ten years, on average—always has, always will. Sometimes it feels like terrible luck, or that bad news has new momentum. More often it’s just raw math at work. A zillion different things can go wrong, so at least one of them is likely to be causing havoc at any given moment. And given how connected we are, you’re going to hear about it.

Stories are always more powerful than statistics.

Ken Burns once said, “The common stories are one plus one equals two. We get it, they make sense. But the good stories are about one plus one equals three.” That’s leverage.

Some of the most important questions to ask yourself are: Who has the right answer, but I ignore because they’re inarticulate? And what do I believe is true but is actually just good marketing?

Jeff Bezos once said, “The thing I have noticed is when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. There’s something wrong with the way you are measuring it.”

The ones who thrive long term are those who understand the real world is a never-ending chain of absurdity, confusion, messy relationships, and imperfect people.

Most great things in life—from love to careers to investing—gain their value from two things: patience and scarcity. Patience to let something grow, and scarcity to admire what it grows into.

Stress, pain, discomfort, shock, and disgust—for all its tragic downsides, it’s also when the magic happens.

A carefree and stress-free life sounds wonderful only until you recognize the motivation and progress it prevents. No one cheers for hardship—nor should they—but we should recognize that it’s the most potent fuel of problem-solving, serving as both the root of what we enjoy today and the seed of opportunity for what we’ll enjoy tomorrow.

Good news takes time but bad news tends to occur instantly. Warren Buffett says it takes twenty years to build a reputation and five minutes to destroy one.

Most catastrophes come from a series of tiny risks—each of which is easy to ignore—that multiply and compound into something huge. The opposite is true: Most amazing things happen when something tiny and insignificant compounds into something extraordinary.

Progress requires optimism and pessimism to coexist. For example, the best financial plan is to save like a pessimist and invest like an optimist.

Psychologists Lauren Alloy and Lyn Yvonne Abramson have a theory I love called depressive realism. It’s the idea 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 of depressive realism is “blissfully unaware.” It’s what many of us suffer from. But we don’t actually suffer from it, because it feels great. And the fact that it feels good is the fuel we need to wake up and keep working even when the world around us can be objectively awful, and pessimism abounds.

You can only be an optimist in the long run if you’re pessimistic enough to survive the short run.

It’s not about working less. It’s the opposite: A lot of thought jobs basically never stop, and without structuring time to think and be curious, you wind up less efficient during the hours that are devoted to sitting at your desk cranking out work. This is the opposite of the concept of “hustle porn,” where people want to look busy at all times because they think it’s noble.

Enduring the pain when necessary rather than assuming there’s a hack, or a shortcut, around it.

Jeff Bezos once talked about the realities of loving your job: If you can get your work life to where you enjoy half of it, that is amazing. Very few people ever achieve that. Because the truth is, everything comes with overhead. That’s reality. Everything comes with pieces that you don’t like. You can be a Supreme Court justice and there’s still going to be pieces of your job you don’t like. You can be a university professor and you still have to go to committee meetings. Every job comes with pieces you don’t like. And we need to say: That’s part of it.

A good rule of thumb for a lot of things is to identify the price and be willing to pay it. The price, for so many things, is putting up with an optimal amount of hassle.

One takeaway is that you should never be surprised when something that dominates one era dies off in the next. It’s one of the most common stories in history. Few companies, products, musicians, cities, or authors remain relevant for more than a few decades, tops. The ones that have (the Beatles, Levi’s, Snickers, New York City) are rare exceptions.

Another takeaway is to keep running. No competitive advantage is so powerful that it can let you rest on your laurels—and in fact the ones that appear to do so tend to seed their own demise.

There’s a theory in evolutionary biology called Fisher’s Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection. It’s the idea that variance equals strength, because the more diverse a population is, the more chances it has to come up with new traits that can be selected for. No one can know what traits will be useful; that’s not how evolution works. But if you create a lot of traits, the useful one—whatever it is—will be in there somewhere.

“The grass is always greener on the side that’s fertilized with bullshit.”

It’s easiest to convince people that you’re special if they don’t know you well enough to see all the ways you’re not. Keep that in mind when comparing your career, business, and life to those of others.

When the incentives are crazy, the behavior is crazy. People can be led to justify and defend nearly anything.

Incentives are the most powerful force in the world and can get people to justify or defend almost anything.

A good question to ask is, “Which of my current views would change if my incentives were different?”

Nothing is more persuasive than what you’ve experienced firsthand.

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.

Doing long-term thinking well requires identifying when you’re being patient versus just stubborn. Not an easy thing to do. The only solution is knowing the very few things in your industry that will never change and putting everything else in a bucket that’s in constant need of updating and adapting. The few (very few) things that never change are candidates for long-term thinking. Everything else has a shelf life.

There are two types of information: permanent and expiring:

• Expiring knowledge catches more attention than it should, for two reasons. One, there’s a lot of it, eager to keep our short attention spans occupied. Two, we chase it down, anxious to squeeze insight out of it before it loses relevance.


• Permanent information is harder to notice because it’s buried in books rather than blasted in headlines. But its benefit is huge. It’s not just that permanent information never expires, letting you accumulate it. It also compounds over time, leveraging off what you’ve already learned. Expiring information tells you what happened; permanent information tells you why something happened and is likely to happen again. That “why” can translate and interact with stuff you know about other topics, which is where the compounding comes in.