Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

Today’s economy is good at generating three things: wealth, the ability to show off wealth, and great envy for other people’s wealth.

The first rule of happiness is low expectations

We are very good at predicting the future, except for the surprises—which tend to be all that matter.

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.

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt says people don’t really communicate on social media so much as they perform for one another.

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. Same as ever.

Some of the most important questions to ask yourself are: Who has the right answer, but I ignore because they’re inarticulate? And what do I believe is true but is actually just good marketing?

Physicist Freeman Dyson once explained that what’s often attributed to the supernatural, or magic, or miracles, is actually just basic math. In any normal person’s life, miracles should occur at the rate of roughly one per month: The proof of the law is simple. During the time that we are awake and actively engaged in living our lives, roughly for eight hours each day, we see and hear things happening at a rate of one per second. So the total number of events that happen to us is about 30,000 per day, or about a million per month. If the chance of a “miracle” is one in a million, we should therefore experience one per month, on average.

The best financial plan is to save like a pessimist and invest like an optimist.

Just like evolution, the key is realizing that the more perfect you try to become, the more vulnerable you generally are.

Predicting what the world will look like fifty years from now is impossible. But predicting that people will still respond to greed, fear, opportunity, exploitation, risk, uncertainty, tribal affiliations, and social persuasion in the same way is a bet I’d take.

Nassim Taleb says, “Invest in preparedness, not in prediction.” That gets to the heart of it.

Everything worth pursuing comes with a little pain. The trick is not minding that it hurts.

The biggest risk and the most important news story of the next ten years will be something nobody is talking about today

Nassim Taleb says he’s a libertarian at the federal level, a Republican at the state level, a Democrat at the local level, and a socialist at the family level. People handle risk and responsibility in totally different ways when a group scales from 4 people to 100 to 100,000 to 100 million.

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

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.

Albert Einstein put it this way: I take time to go for long walks on the beach so that I can listen to what is going on inside my head. If my work isn’t going well, I lie down in the middle of a workday and gaze at the ceiling while I listen and visualize what goes on in my imagination. Mozart felt the same way: When I am traveling in a carriage or walking after a good meal or during the night when I cannot sleep—it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly.

So species rarely evolve to become perfect at anything, because perfecting one skill comes at the expense of another skill that will eventually be critical to survival.

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

most great things in life—from love to careers to investing—gain their value from two things: patience and scarcity. Patience to let something grow, and scarcity to admire what it grows into.

What kind of person makes their way to the top of a successful company, or a big country? Someone who is determined, optimistic, doesn’t take no for an answer, and is relentlessly confident in their own abilities. What kind of person is likely to go overboard, bite off more than they can chew, and discount risks that are blindingly obvious to others? Someone who is determined, optimistic, doesn’t take no for an answer, and is relentlessly confident in their own abilities.

Biologist Leslie Orgel used to say, “Evolution is cleverer than you are,” because whenever a critic says, “Evolution could never do that,” they usually just lacked imagination. It’s also easy to underestimate because of basic math. Evolution’s superpower is not just selecting favorable traits. That part is so tedious, and if it’s all you focus on you’ll be skeptical and confused. Most species’ change in any millennia is so trivial it’s unnoticeable. The real magic of evolution is that it’s been selecting traits for 3.8 billion years. The time, not the little changes, is what moves the needle.

Mark Twain once said he knew he was a successful author when Kaiser Wilhelm II said he’d read every Twain book, and later that day a porter at his hotel said the same. “Great books are wine,” Twain said, “but my books are water. But everybody drinks water.” He found the universal emotions that influence everyone, regardless of who they were or where they were from, and got them to nod their heads in the same direction. It’s nearly magic. Guiding people’s attention to a single point is one of the most powerful life skills.

Even within a good story, a powerful phrase or sentence can do most of the work. There is a saying that people don’t remember books; they remember sentences.

It goes like this: You think you want progress, both for yourself and for the world. But most of the time that’s not actually what you want. You want to feel a gap between what you expected and what actually happened. And the expectation side of that equation is not only important, but it’s often more in your control than managing your circumstances.

During World War II an unnamed U.S. soldier was interviewed by a newspaper. Asked what he was thinking during combat, the soldier replied: “I was hoping to remember to stay afraid because that is the best way to stay alive and not make careless mistakes.