Everything is sales
Capital Thinking • Issue #1140 • View online
More people wake up every morning wanting to solve problems than wake up looking to cause harm.
But people who cause harm get the most attention. So slow progress amid a drumbeat of bad news is the normal state of affairs.
Few people spell things out better than Morgan Housel.
There is a lot here to think about. Do yourself a favor: Click the link. Read the post. Underline a few things.
It isn't a long read and will take less than 5 minutes of your time. Where else can you get that kind of deal on wisdom?
-Ed.
Little Rules About Big Things
By Morgan Housel | The Collaborative Fund Blog:
A few things I’ve come to terms with:
There is rarely more or less economic uncertainty; just changes in how ignorant people are to potential risks.
You should obsess over risks that do permanent damage and care little about risks that do temporary harm, but the opposite is more common.
The only way to build wealth is to have a gap between your ego and your income.
Everyone belongs to a tribe and underestimates how influential that tribe is on their thinking.
A lot of financial debates are just people with different time horizons talking over each other.
It’s easy to mistake “I’m good at this” with “Others are bad at this” in a way that makes you overestimate how valuable your skills are.
It’s important to know the difference between rosy optimism and periods of chaos that trend upward.
If your expectations grow faster than your income you’ll never be happy with your money no matter how much you accumulate.
The inability to forecast the past has no impact on our desire to forecast the future. Certainty is so valuable that we’ll never give up the quest for it, and most people couldn’t get out of bed in the morning if they were honest about how uncertain the future is.
Having no FOMO might be the most important investing skill.
Few things are as valuable in the modern world as a good bullshit detector.
Most of what people call “conviction” is a willful disregard for new information that might make you change your mind. That’s when beliefs turn dangerous.
People have vastly different desires, except for three things: Respect, feeling useful, and control over their time. Those are nearly universal.
The market is rational but investors play different games and those games look irrational to people playing a different game.
There’s a sweet spot where you grasp the important stuff but you’re not smart enough to be bored with it.
A big takeaway from economic history is that the past wasn’t as good as you remember, the present isn’t as bad as you think, and the future will be better than you anticipate.
Most assholes are going through something terrible in their life. People hide their skeletons, which requires blind forgiveness of their quirks and moods because you’re unaware of what they’re dealing with.
History is driven by surprising events but forecasting is driven by obvious ones.