Same As Ever by Morgan Housel — My Key Takeaways

The future is bad in the short-term, and very good in the long-term.

This book is about things that never change.

It has some great ideas. But my main gripe with it is that it doesn’t draw out the key themes common to the 23 different ideas discussed.

So, before sharing my key takeaways from each chapter, I’ll summarise the key themes I see.

Also, Morgan Housel’s first book, The Psychology of Money was very, very good. You can read my takeaways from the Psychology of Money here.

The 3 Key Themes In Same As Ever

Using powerful stories, Housel’s book describes the fundamental properties of three things:

1.The Future: The future is uncertain, volatile and surprising.

It’s generally bad in the short-term and great in the long-term (though in the really long term we are all dead). Most future gains come from surviving the short-term to benefit from compounding in the long-term.

2. Human Psychology: We crave certainty and are attracted to complexity. Good stories persuade us far more than facts. We are idiosyncratic, deeply irrational and biased towards ideas from our own experience. Our expectations…