Work hard. Save money. Don’t be envious of others.
Living a good life is simple but not easy. There aren’t really any secrets.
Which was why Same as Ever was such a fun book. A collection of essays on timeless principles of human behavior, Housel does a great job of framing these obvious answers in new and insightful ways.
Housel, who wrote The Psychology of Money, argues that as opposed to spending time on specific events (what will the stock market do tomorrow), we should focus on what has been and what will be true forever (bad things are always worse than you can imagine, so save more than you think you need; compounding is powerful, so invest as early as possible).
Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes by Morgan Housel (240 pages)
Below are a few of my favorite passages in the books(in italics) and my reflections on them
Envy: John D. Rockefeller never had penicillin, sunscreen, or Advil. But you can’t say a low-income American with Advil and sunscreen today should feel better off than Rockefeller, because that’s not how people’s heads work. People gauge their well-being relative to those around them, and luxuries become necessities in a remarkably short period of time when the people around you become better off. Investor Charlie Munger once noted that the world isn’t driven by greed; it’s driven by envy.
The best illustration of this is young kids.
Young kids are inequality-sensing machines: if their sibling gets an imperceptibly bigger slice of cake (or even just a different shape), they will let you know. If they think someone else’s toy is better, they will let you know. It’s not uncommon for a new toy to make kids unhappier as they struggle to share it or don’t get enough time with it.
Kids are also the best illustration of mimetic desire, or wanting something because somebody else wants it. Plenty of toys are uninteresting right until the moment that someone else plays with them.
Kids aren’t bad - they’re amazing and make life so much better. They’re just the purest distillation of human nature and psychology.
What toys are making me less happy?
The best story wins. What Sapiens does have is excellent writing. Beautiful writing. The stories are captivating, the flow is effortless. Harari took what was already known and wrote it better than anyone had done before. The result was fame greater than anyone before him could imagine. Best story wins.
The book Sapiens had no new information. Yuval Harari did no original research1.
But, as Housel writes, it’s incredibly well written.
Humans are conditioned to love interesting stories. Doesn’t matter if they’re “right” or original. Pundits are often wrong, but people like entertainment and hot takes
As a reader, I think about this a lot. Do I like a book because it’s “right” or because it’s well-written? How do I even tell?
Housel encourages us to ask, “Who has the right answers but I ignore because they’re not articulate?
On the importance of dealing with hassle: A unique skill, an underrated skill, is identifying the optimal amount of hassle and nonsense you should put up with to get ahead while getting along….Every industry and career is different, but there’s universal value in accepting hassle when reality demands it. Volatility. People having bad days. Office politics. Difficult personalities. Bureaucracy. All of them are bad. But all have to be endured to some degree if you want to get anything done. Many managers have little tolerance for nonsense. They think it’s noble. I demand excellence, they say. But it’s just unrealistic. The huge majority of them won’t thrive in their careers. Compounding is fueled by endurance, so sitting through periods of insanity is not a defect; it’s accepting an optimal level of hassle.
I call this “pain tolerance.” I appreciated this as I’ve previously wondered, “what makes people good at “getting stuff done” and Housel crystallized it well. The glamorized version of this is “grit.”
Getting things done - especially in large or complex organizations - can be painful and boring. There’s often lots of institutional inertia. You can spend hours of your day just trying to schedule meetings.
This isn’t just a business issue.
In most areas of life, there aren’t a ton of shortcuts and succeeding requires grinding.
Take writing this newsletter, for example. There is a direct relationship between the quality of my writing and how much time I spend on it. There are trade-offs between quality and efficiency.
Writing something excellent requires not only writing, but spending hours editing and re-editing a piece to make it better. Some of the best insights might not come until the second or third draft.
On successful people: Of course they have abnormal characteristics. That’s why they’re successful! And there is no world in which we should assume that all those abnormal characteristics are positive, polite, endearing, or appealing.
You see this in the workplace with high performers.
Many high performers have traits which aren’t “good”:
Fear of failure and of disappointing people
Needing to win
Perfectionism and unrealistically high standard
I used to wonder if there was a way to excel without the bad stuff - e.g., holding yourself to an unreasonably high bar, hating the feeling of potentially being wrong.
I’m not sure there is.
Elsewhere in the book, there’s the quote that “Most successful people are just a walking anxiety disorder harnessed for productivity.”
Interesting questions. My favorite part of the book, though, was the last chapter, where Housel poses some questions for us to think about. A few of my favorites:
Who has the right answers but I ignore because they’re not articulate?
What do I desperately want to be true so much that I think it’s true when it’s clearly not?
Am I prepared to handle risks I can’t even envision?
How do I know if I’m being patient (a skill) or stubborn (a flaw)?
Who do I look up to that is secretly miserable?
What hassle am I trying to eliminate that’s actually an unavoidable cost of success?
And when I read Jared Diamond’s 1991 book The Third Chimpanzee, my first reaction was, “huh. This was a lot like Sapiens.”