Same As Ever | Morgan Housel

In the realm of financial wisdom and life’s philosophies, few voices resonate as profoundly as that of Morgan Housel. His book, “Same as Ever” is a treasure trove of insights, anecdotes, and timeless wisdom that challenges our perspectives and urges us to think deeper. This blog post aims to share some of the most impactful quotes from the book, each serving as a reminder of the enduring truths that govern our lives and the world around us. From Warren Buffett’s wisdom on the constancy of change to Jeff Bezos’ focus on the unchanging, these quotes invite us to reflect on the paradoxes that define our existence. So, let’s embark on this journey of exploration, guided by the enlightening words of Morgan Housel. Same as ever, yet always new.

Same as Ever

I once had lunch with a guy who’s close to Warren Buffett. This guy—we’ll call him Jim (not his real name)—was driving around Omaha, Nebraska, with Buffett in late 2009. The global economy was crippled at this point, and Omaha was no exception. Stores were closed, businesses were boarded up. Jim said to Warren, “It’s so bad right now. How does the economy ever bounce back from this?” Warren said, “Jim, do you know what the bestselling candy bar was in 1962?” “No,” Jim said. “Snickers,” said Warren. “And do you know what the bestselling candy bar is today?” “No,” said Jim. “Snickers,” Warren said. 
Then silence. That was the end of the conversation.        

History is filled with surprises no one could have seen coming. But it’s also filled with so much timeless wisdom.

When transported to an unfamiliar world, you’d spend a few minutes watching people behave and say, “Ah. I’ve seen this before. Same as ever.”

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.”

Things that never change are important because you can put so much confidence into knowing how they’ll shape the future. Bezos said it’s impossible to imagine a future where Amazon customers don’t want low prices and fast shipping—so he can put enormous investment into those things.

Every big story could have turned out differently if a few little puffs of nothingness went the other direction.

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.

As financial advisor Carl Richards says, “Risk is what’s left over after you think you’ve thought of everything.”

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.”

The first rule of happiness is low expectations.

Montesquieu wrote 275 years ago, “If you only wished to be happy, this could be easily accomplished; but we wish to be happier than other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are.”

Investor Charlie Munger once noted that the world isn’t driven by greed; it’s driven by envy. 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. Today’s economy is good at generating three things: wealth, the ability to show off wealth, and great envy for other people’s wealth. When asked, “You seem extremely happy and content. What’s your secret to living a happy life?” ninety-eight-year-old 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.

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

People don’t want accuracy. They want certainty.

The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. 
—Bertrand Russell

Jerry Seinfeld was once driving around in his car with Jimmy Fallon. It was an old car, built in the 1950s. “Do you worry that the car doesn’t have an airbag?” Fallon asked.  “No. And be honest,” Seinfeld said, “in your whole life how often have you needed an airbag?” It was a joke. But what a perfect example of how hard it is for people to think about probability and uncertainty.       

Stories are always more powerful than statistics. The best story wins.

Not the best idea, or the right idea, or the most rational idea. Just whoever tells a story that catches people’s attention and gets them to nod their heads is the one who tends to be rewarded.

Mark Twain said, “Humor is a way to show you’re smart without bragging.”

When a topic is complex, stories are like leverage. Leverage squeezes the full potential out of something with less effort. Stories leverage ideas in the same way that debt leverages assets.           

The most persuasive stories are about what you want to believe is true, or are an extension of what you’ve experienced firsthand.

Poet Ralph Hodgson put this well when he said, “Some things have to be believed to be seen.”

Visa founder Dee Hock once said, “New ways of looking at things create much greater innovation than new ways of doing them.”

You’ll get discouraged if you think every new book has to be about an original idea, or that every new company has to sell a brand-new invention. There is so much more opportunity if you see the world like Yuval Noah Harari—that it’s not what you say or what you do, but how you say it and how you present it. 

The world is driven by forces that cannot be measured. If the best competitive athletes merely had the strongest hearts and the greatest capacity to transport oxygen, finding and knowing who will be the best athlete would be straightforward. But it’s not.
Great athletes are more likely to have stronger hearts than a couch potato. But the correlation between cardiovascular capacity and athletic performance is far from perfect, which is why competitive races like marathons and Olympic sprints are exciting. Sometimes great athletes choke. Sometimes dark horses win.

Athletic performance isn’t just what you’re physically capable of. 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.

Stability is destabilizing.

A common irony goes like this:  
 • 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’ve abandoned what made you successful and you begin to decline—which is even more stressful.        

It happens in business, investing, careers, relationships—all over the place.          
Warren Buffett once joked that you can’t make a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant.

A constant truth you see throughout history is that the biggest changes and the most important innovations don’t happen when everyone is happy, and things are going well. They tend to occur during, and after, a terrible event.  

Stress focuses your attention on ways good times can’t. It kills procrastination and 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, right now and to the best of your ability.

What makes life mean something is purpose. A goal. The battle, the struggle—even if you don’t win it.

Entrepreneur Andrew Wilkinson echoed the same when he said, “Most successful people are just a walking anxiety disorder harnessed for productivity.”      

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.

Investor Howard Marks once talked about an investor whose annual results were never ranked in the top quartile, but over a fourteen-year period he was in the top 4 percent of all investors. If he keeps those mediocre returns up for another ten years he may be in the top 1 percent of his peers—one of the greatest of his generation despite being unremarkable in any given year.

So much focus in investing is on what people can do right now, this year, maybe next year. “What are the best returns I can earn?” seems like such an intuitive question to ask. But like evolution, that’s not where the magic happens. If you understand the math behind compounding you realize the most important question is not “How can I earn the highest returns?” It’s “What are the best returns I can sustain for the longest period of time?”

Little changes compounded for a long time create extraordinary changes.

Progress requires optimism and pessimism to coexist.

The best financial plan is to save like a pessimist and invest like an optimist. That idea—the belief that things will get better mixed with the reality that the path between now and then will be a continuous chain of setback, disappointment, surprise, and shock—shows up all over history, in all areas of life.

There is a huge advantage to being a little imperfect.

If your job is to be creative and think through tough problems, then time spent wandering around a park or aimlessly lounging on a couch might be your most valuable hours. A little inefficiency is wonderful.

Someone once asked Charlie Munger what Warren Buffett’s secret was. “I would say half of all the time he spends is sitting on his ass and reading.” He has a lot of time to think.
Charlie Munger once noted: “The safest way to try to get what you want is to try to deserve what you want. It’s such a simple idea. It’s the golden rule. You want to deliver to the world what you would buy if you were on the other end.”

Every job comes with pieces you don’t like. And we need to say: That’s part of it.

Jeff Bezos once talked about the realities of loving your job:

Most things worth pursuing charge their fee in the form of stress, uncertainty, dealing with quirky people, bureaucracy, other peoples’ conflicting incentives, hassle, nonsense, long hours, and constant doubt. That’s the overhead cost of getting ahead.

Franklin Roosevelt—the most powerful man in the world, whose paralysis meant his aides often had to carry him to the bathroom—once said, “If you can’t use your legs and they bring you milk when you wanted orange juice, you learn to say ‘that’s all right,’ and drink 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.     

Most competitive advantages eventually die. Competitive advantages don’t stick around for long.

Success has its own gravity. “The higher the monkey climbs a tree, the more you can see his ass,” oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens used to say.

No one’s ever safe. No one can ever rest.           

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

Everyone’s dealing with problems they don’t advertise, at least until you get to know them well. Keep that in mind and you become more forgiving—of yourself and others.
Jason Zweig of The Wall Street Journal says there are three ways to be a professional writer:

1. Lie to people who want to be lied to, and you’ll get rich.          
2. Tell the truth to those who want the truth, and you’ll make a living.
3. Tell the truth to those who want to be lied to, and you’ll go broke.

What a wonderful summary of the power of incentives, and an explanation for why people do some of the crazy things they do.

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

“There was no way training could prepare a man for combat,” Ambrose wrote. It could teach you how to fire a gun and follow orders. But “it could not teach men how to lie helpless under a shower of shrapnel in a field crisscrossed by machine-gun fire.” No one could understand it until they experienced it.

Chris Rock once joked about who actually teaches kids in school: “Teachers do one half, bullies do the other,” he said. “And learning how to deal with bullies is the half you’ll actually use as a grown-up.”

In finance, spending less than you make, saving the difference, and being patient is perhaps 90 percent of what you need to know to do well. But what’s taught in college? How to price derivatives and calculate net present value. In health it’s sleep eight hours, move a lot, eat real food, but not too much. But what’s popular? Supplements, hacks, and pills.

Mark Twain said kids provide the most interesting information, “for they tell all they know and then they stop.” Adults tend to lose this skill. Or they learn a new skill: how to dazzle with nonsense. Stephen King explains in his book On Writing:

This is a short book because most books about writing are filled with bullshit. I figured the shorter the book, the less bullshit.

People tend to have short memories. Most of the time they can forget about bad experiences and fail to heed lessons previously learned.

“A mind that is stretched by new experience can never go back to its old dimensions,” said Oliver Wendell Holmes.

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.

Same as it’s ever been.  

Same as it will always be.          

Same as it ever was.

Our life is indeed the same as it ever was. . . . The same physiological and psychological processes that have been man’s for hundreds of thousands of years still endure.
—Carl Jung

The wise in all ages have always said the same thing, and the fools, who at all times form the immense majority, have in their way, too, acted alike, and done just the opposite.
—Arthur Schopenhauer

History never repeats itself; man always does.
 —Voltaire

I’ve learned an important trick: to develop foresight, you need to practice hindsight.
 —Jane McGonigal

The dead outnumber the living . . . fourteen to one, and we ignore the accumulated experience of such a huge majority of mankind at our peril.
 —Niall Ferguson