How the World Works
Capital Thinking • Issue #690 • View online
It would have been nice to know these back in the day.
Better late than never?
A Few Rules
Morgan Housel | The Collaborative Fund Blog:
The person who tells the most compelling story wins. Not the best idea. Just the story that catches people’s attention and gets them to nod their heads.
Something can be factually true but contextually nonsense. Bad ideas often have at least some seed of truth that gives their followers confidence.
Tell people what they want to hear and you can be wrong indefinitely without penalty.
Woodrow Wilson said government “is accountable to Darwin, not to Newton.” It’s a useful idea. Everything is accountable to one of the two, and you have to know whether something adapts and changes over time or perpetually stays the same.
Behavior is hard to fix. When people say they’ve learned their lesson they underestimate how much of their previous mistake was caused by emotions that will return when faced with the same circumstances.
“Logic is an invention of man and may be ignored by the universe,” historian Will Durant says. That’s why forecasting is hard.
Being good at something doesn’t promise rewards. It doesn’t even promise a compliment. What’s rewarded in the world is scarcity, so what matters is what you can do that other people are bad at.
The world is governed by probability, but people think in black and white, right or wrong – did it happen or did it not? – because it’s easier.
Henry Luce said, “Show me a man who thinks he’s objective and I’ll show you a man who’s deceiving himself.” People see what they want to see, hear what they want to hear, and view the world through the lens of their own unique life experiences.
People learn when they’re surprised. Not when they read the right answer, or are told they’re doing it wrong, but when their jaw hits the floor.
*Featured post photo by Mark Duffel on Unsplash