Insight
Housel: Prolonged Market 'Irrationality' Is Just Normal Human Behavior
“If something has been irrational for a long period of time, I think what you're actually just observing is the normal craziness of human behavior.”
Insight
Housel: 24/7 financial TV makes things up to fill airtime
“The only way to fill the time is just kind of by making shit up sometimes.”
Insight
Housel: Eliminating internal insecurity leads to destructive ego and failure
“I'd say if you don't have that insecurity, the absence of that insecurity is probably the definition of ego. And like, I think you want that insecurity. You shouldn't try to get rid of that. Once you get rid of it, that's when you're screwed.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Housel: The biggest economic stories of the next decade are currently unmentioned
“I guarantee you the biggest economic news story over the next 12 months is something that no one on Twitter or anywhere else is talking about. And the biggest story of the next decade is something that no one is talking about.”
Insight
Housel: Human psychology is 100% of what matters in startups and markets
“How people think is a hundred percent of what matters in startups and in venture capital and in the stock market and whatnot.”
Insight
Housel: You can be an amazing economist without studying economics
“You can be an amazing economist if you don't really have any economics background, but you're, but you really understand psychology. You really understand politics. You really understand sociology. You really understand, like all these things, all these differ…”
Insight
Housel: Experiencing both poverty and wealth in childhood provides rare perspective
“I think seeing both sides of that is important because I feel like most people growing up only see one side of it. Maybe they grow up poor, maybe they grow up very wealthy, and it's relatively the same throughout their childhood.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Housel: COVID will produce completely unforeseeable downstream breakthroughs within a decade
“There's going to be things 10 years from now that would be so absurd that you and I 10 years from now will be like, hey, because of COVID, we have the X, whatever it might be, and connecting those dots is going to be like the craziest thing you've ever imagine…”
Insight
Housel: Prioritizing Durability Over Forecasting Lets Investors Capture Positive Surprises
“So to me, one of the most important things here when you have humility and forecasting is such a preference for survivorship and endurance and durability so that you can stick around long enough for those positive surprises to actually pay off.”
Insight
Housel: Financial independence removes anxiety rather than creating happiness
“Like, it's not that independence makes me happy. It's that it removes an anxiety that used to be there, which is great. That's a benefit, but it's very different from happiness.”
Insight
Housel: Preparing for unforeseen risks requires seemingly excessive financial cushions
“What that really means is having a layer of cushion in your finances that doesn't make sense. A layer of conservatism that Seems like it's excessive. Because the only way that you're going to prepare for the events that you cannot imagine, that you cannot fore…”
Insight
Morgan Housel advises investors to save like pessimists and invest like optimists
“Save like a pessimist and invest like an optimist. Like if you can save like a pessimist with the idea that all of history is a continuous chain of surprises and setbacks and disappointments and pandemics and all these things that like suck. And all of history…”
Insight
Housel: Global crises happen once a decade and drive step-function innovation
“The world breaks once per decade, on average. It always has. I think it always will. And during those breakages, that's where you get these step function innovations.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Housel: Common modern medical treatments will look foolish in 100 years
“And so, you know, there's gonna be something like that a hundred years from now, that there's gonna be some medical treatment that you and I are doing today. That we're going to look back and be like, how could we be so dumb?”
Insight
Housel: Online reach amplifies both novel ideas and the risk of cancellation
“It's easier to get your crazy ideas attention. And it's also easier for your crazy ideas to ruin your life.”
Insight
Housel: Social media trolling has zero downside and huge viral upside
“Not only are you not going to get punched in the face, you're probably going to get a thousand retweets, which you like. Like not only do you have no downside, you have all, you have huge upside by being a troll.”
Insight
Housel: As social media follower counts grow, creators take fewer risks
“If I were to go back and look at my tweets from five years ago, I would probably took way more risk Than I do today because the downside as your following grows increases as well.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Housel: Apologizing kindly in DMs de-escalates online trolls every time
“If someone says something really terrible about me on Twitter, just really like, not just casual trolling, but just really mean. I will, I mean, 99% of the time I ignore that, but once in a while I've DM that person and I've said, Hey, I'm really sorry I offen…”
Insight
Housel: Reading non-financial history books provides insights into investing
“The most consistent is probably history books. That's probably the, like takes up the lion's share. They have absolutely nothing to do with investing or the economy most of the time, but they're just, I just think they're insights into how people think. And if…”
Assertion Supported
Morgan Housel entered college with only an eighth-grade education
“I have no high school education. I didn't have, I basically have an eighth grade education. And then I went to college after that”
Insight
Housel: Social media causes road-rage-style dehumanization when facing handles instead of people
“Once you're not talking to a person, you're talking to a handle, then all, all humanity goes out the window. And it's just like in road rage, it's easy to like flip someone off and scream at them. But if you actually get out of your car and see the person, you…”
Insight
Housel: Parents must love the child they have, not the child they want
“Love the kid that you have, not the kid that you want. That is a little bit of preparation to say that your child is going to be hard in unique ways. Every child is hard in their unique ways, and every child is going to do things that you didn't expect and tha…”
Assertion Supported
Housel: Two friends died in Lake Tahoe avalanche when he was 17
“Two of my friends growing up with, that we were skiing together all that, that day, and they did an extra run where I wasn't with them. I was going to go pick them up at this out-of-bounds area where we would ski, and they were killed in an avalanche during th…”
Disclosure
Housel: Breaking his back skiing prompted him to abandon racing career
“And then two months after my friends died, I broke my back skiing. So between those moments, it was like, okay, it's time for me to go do something else. It's time for me to kind of hang it up and figure out what's next.”
