Book 1: Same as Ever by Morgan Housel

I knew, I'd become a Morgan Housel fanboy when I started visiting the Collaborative fund blog again and again, simply because I'm not a blog person, I prefer condensed information put together in one piece, a book.

I always like to say Morgan Housel writes in a way that's always didactic without seeming to be but written intentionally to achieve that, he tells stories with fact, and you can't argue against them, making him look like an old man (same way I felt about Malcolm Gladwell) who has seen the future and telling you kids what will be and how to navigate it.

That is the theme of "same as ever" a guide to what never changes. It contains 23 chapters/stories that tell you about things that never change and how they get to shape the future.

The first chapter is about how all of life is hanging on a thread, I remember reading that chapter while walking with my friend and I kept exclaiming, explaining to him how Morgan Housel could have died as a teenager, and how he escaped death by a thread.

One of the chapters talks about Wild Minds, and it is encapsulated in these words, people who think about the world in unique ways you like also think about the world in unique ways you won’t like. I read this and started checking some of the people I look up to and truly there are things we'll never agree on, it points me to two things, we will not be on the same page all the time and that's just fine, secondly, be careful whose life you wish for, you may just not like it.

Today, a few hours before I started writing this, I'd just explained to a friend how good times often bear the seed for bad times and all the other things I tried to explain, thought about how I came up with that, knew I'd read about such in a couple of places, the chapter "Calm plants the seed of crazy" is one of it.

Now, this chapter did hit me hard and I believe it helped me slow down cause just like a lot of people, I want the good things in life, some of my desires happening tomorrow, but like Warren Buffett joked, "You can’t make a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant". A good idea on steroids quickly becomes terrible, so let's give the good we desire, time to grow and manifest.

Morgan Housel also tried to show us how important stress is in life, I know you don't like what that implies, in his words he says, "Stress focuses your attention in ways that good times can’t". 

There's another I do like where he talked about depressive realism, It’s the idea that depressed people have a more accurate view of the world because they’re more realistic about how risky and fragile life is. That may be too depressing for you, so there's one you may like the opposite of depressive realism, he says we suffer from it but don't consider it suffering, because it feels good, "blissfully unaware", it is the fuel we need to wake up and keep working even when the world around us can be objectively awful, and pessimistic. 

There's something I also realized, when I get to read a good book, stories and themes from the book always come up in my conversation, I always end up telling someone about it, so I told a friend about the power of incentives, we can do anything when the incentive is good enough and we all have something that ticks that box. People can be led to justify and defend nearly anything!

From the chapter on Time horizons, I came to realize that you can decide to invest in the long term, be patient and allow things compound, but how do you get your family, spouse or friends to see what you see, this is why it seems like everyone is search of short term gains, there's a lot of pressure and short term hurdles to conquer. So the question is can I endure a never-ending parade of short-term nonsense?

The last chapter poses a question to us all, what have you experienced that I haven’t that makes you believe what you do? And would I think about the world like you do if I experienced what you have?

Disagreement has less to do with what people know and more to do with what they’ve experienced. And since experiences will always be different, disagreement will be constant.

I enjoyed every bit of this book, it made me ponder on many choices I've made over the years and what I could do better going forward. I'd want my writing to have such an effect on people too and I'm certainly looking forward to Housel's next book. That will take a while, so I'll keep reading the many great books and soon enough write mine.