Morgan Housel Quotes

“A barbelled personality—optimistic about the future, but paranoid about what will prevent you from getting to the future—is vital.”

“A good rule of thumb for a lot of things in life is that everything that can break will eventually break. So if many things rely on one thing working, and that thing breaks, you are counting the days to catastrophe. That’s a single point of failure.”

“Aligning money towards a life that lets you do what you want, when you want, with who you want, where you want, for as long as you want, has incredible return.”

“An underpinning of psychology is that people are poor forecasters of their future selves.”

“Beware taking financial cues from people playing a different game than you are.”

“Bubbles form when the momentum of short-term returns attracts enough money that the makeup of investors shifts from mostly long term to mostly short term.”

“Building wealth has little to do with your income or investment returns, and lots to do with your savings rate.”

“Control over doing what you want, when you want to, with the people you want to, is the broadest lifestyle variable that makes people happy.”

“Define the cost of success and be ready to pay for it. Because nothing worthwhile is free.”

“Enough is not too little … Enough is realizing that the opposite — an insatiable appetite for more — will push you to the point of regret.”

“Everything has a price, but not all prices appear on labels.”

“Getting money requires taking risks, being optimistic, and putting yourself out there. But keeping money requires the opposite of taking risk.

It requires humility, and fear that what you’ve made can be taken away from you just as fast. It requires frugality and an acceptance that at least some of what you’ve made is attributable to luck, so past success can’t be relied upon to repeat indefinitely.”

“Good investing is not necessarily about making good decisions. It’s about consistently not screwing up.”

“Having more control over your time and options is becoming one of the most valuable currencies in the world.”

“History is mostly the study of surprising events. But it is often used by investors and economists as an unassailable guide to the future.

Do you see the irony?

Do you see the problem?”

“History is the study of change, ironically used as a map of the future.”

“Humility, kindness, and empathy will bring you more respect than horsepower ever will.”

“If something compounds—if a little growth serves as the fuel for future growth—a small starting base can lead to results so extraordinary they seem to defy logic. It can be so logic-defying that you underestimate what’s possible, where growth comes from, and what it can lead to.”

“If you have flexibility you can wait for good opportunities, both in your career and for your investments.”

“Independence, at any income level, is driven by your savings rate.”

“It’s hard to grasp that other investors have different goals than we do, because an anchor of psychology is not realizing that rational people can see the world through a different lens than your own.”

“Learning to be happy with less money creates a gap between what you have and what you want.”

“Life isn’t any fun without a sense of enough. Happiness, as it’s said, is just results minus expectations.”

“Long-term planning is harder than it seems because people’s goals and desires change over time.”

“Luck and risk are both the reality that every outcome in life is guided by forces other than individual effort.”

“Maintaining a lifestyle below what you can afford is avoiding the psychological treadmill of keeping up with the Joneses.”

“Money’s greatest intrinsic value—and this can’t be overstated—is its ability to give you control over your time.”

“Most things are harder in practice than they are in theory.”

“No one is impressed with your possessions as much as you are.”

“Optimism is a belief that the odds of a good outcome are in your favor over time, even when there will be setbacks along the way.”