Tag: Morgan Housel

Greetings,

This weekend flew by, and unfortunately, not in a good way.

Here’s my reading highlight:

Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes by Morgan Housel
5 stars

This book should be a required reading. It gave me a lot of peace, especially during this socio-political climate, and reaffirmed why I love history so much. I was surprised to learn that it was published in 2023 (I thought it was published early this year/late last year).

Housel did a fantastic job detailing lessons for understanding an ever-changing world – by focusing on what always stays the same – and how to live your best life. They were all impactful and some have changed my brain chemistry since reading the book, such as how

• Risk is what you don’t see – what’s left after you think you’ve thought of everything.  
• Stories are always more powerful than statistics. The best story always wins, which is true across all sectors, from what makes us decide to pick a product to a president.
• The world is driven by a force that cannot be measured.
• Nothing is more persuasive than what you’ve experienced firsthand. Our experiences are all different and often shape the story we tell ourselves. Hence, also why there will always be disagreements.

I recommend coming back to the book often!

Title: The Psychology of Money

Author: Morgan Housel

Genre: Non-fiction, Personal development

Pages: 252 pages; 6 hours (audiobook)

Level of difficulty: 3/5 Dictionaries

Rating: 4/5 Stars

Brief Introduction:

Doing well with money isn’t necessarily about what you know. It’s about how you behave. And behavior is hard to teach, even to really smart people. Morgan Housel shares 19 short stories exploring the strange ways people think about money and teaches you how to make better sense of one of life’s most important topics.

Review:

I really enjoyed how the lessons were conveyed through storytelling – the stories of specific individuals and companies.

Here are some lessons I learnt from the book that I would like to share:

1. Our willingness to bare risk depends on personal history (where and when you were born)
2. Luck and risk are duo forces in our lives
   • Success is what differentiates a bold decision and a foolish choice
   • Luck is the cousin of failure
3. The hardest financial skill is getting the goal post to stop moving
4. Big things can happen with small forces
   • Compound interest
5. The only way to stay wealthy is frugality and paranoia
   • Getting money and keeping money are two different skills
6. The key of a plan is planning for when the plan fails
   • Margin of safety is important
   • Ensure a room for error when estimating your future returns
7. The highest dividend that money pays is freedom / control over one’s time
8. Experience doesn’t lead to forecast abilities
9. We underestimate how much we will change in the future
10. The more you want something to be true, the more likely you are to believe a story that overestimates it

You may get the book here!