Top 80 Morgan Housel Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Daniel Kahneman once told me about the stories people tell themselves to make sense of the past. He said: Hindsight, the ability to explain the past, gives us the illusion that the world is understandable. It gives us the illusion that the world makes sense, even when it doesn’t make sense. That’s a big deal in producing mistakes in many fields.”

— Morgan Housel

52. “Aiming, at every point in your working life, to have moderate annual savings, moderate free time, no more than a moderate commute, and at least moderate time with your family, increases the odds of being able to stick with a plan and avoid regret than if any one of those things fall to the extreme sides of the spectrum.”

— Morgan Housel

53. “All of us,” he said, “are walking around with an illusion – an illusion that history, our personal history, has just come to an end, that we have just recently become the people that we were always meant to be and will be for the rest of our lives.” We tend to never learn this lesson.”

— Morgan Housel

54. “To grasp why people bury themselves in debt, you don’t need to study interest rate: you need to sturdy the history of greed, insecurity and optimism.”

— Morgan Housel

55. “Comfortably living below what you can afford, without much desire for more, removes a tremendous amount of social pressure that many people in the modern first world subject themselves to. Nassim Taleb explained: “True success is exiting some rat race to modulate one’s activities for peace of mind.” I like that.”

— Morgan Housel

56. “The trick when dealing with failure is arranging your financial life in a way that a bad investment here and a missed financial goal there won’t wipe you out so you can keep playing until the odds fall in your favor. But more important is that as much as we recognize the role of luck in success, the role of risk means we should forgive ourselves and leave room for understanding when judging failures.”

— Morgan Housel

57. “A mindset that can be paranoid and optimistic at the same time is hard to maintain, because seeing things as black or white takes less effort than accepting nuance. But you need short-term paranoia to keep you alive long enough to exploit long-term optimism. Jesse Livermore figured this out the hard way.”

— Morgan Housel

58. “Conservative is avoiding a certain level of risk. Margin of safety is raising the odds of success at a given level of risk by increasing your chances of survival. Its magic is that the higher your margin of safety, the smaller your edge needs to be to have a favorable outcome.”

— Morgan Housel

59. “Savings can be created by spending less. You can spend less if you desire less. And you will desire less if you care less about what others think of you.”

— Morgan Housel

60. “What really gives people meaning and happiness is a combination of four things: Control over what they’re doing, progress in what they’re pursuing, being connected with others, and being part of something they enjoy that’s bigger than themselves.”

— Morgan Housel

61. “Another is that pessimists often extrapolate present trends without accounting for how markets adapt.”

— Morgan Housel

62. “It’s not that any of these things are bad or wrong. It’s that knowing what to do tells you nothing about what happens in your head when you try to do it.”

— Morgan Housel

63. “Before we go further we should define what optimism is. Real optimists don’t believe that everything will be great. That’s complacency. 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.”

— Morgan Housel

64. “The intellectual allure of pessimism has been known for ages. John Stuart Mill wrote in the 1840s: “I have observed that not the man who hopes when others despair, but the man who despairs when others hope, is admired by a large class of persons as a sage.”

— Morgan Housel

65. “This is true in personal finance, where you’re told to have a six-month emergency fund and save 10% of your salary.”

— Morgan Housel

66. “1. More than I want big returns, I want to be financially unbreakable. And if I’m unbreakable I actually think I’ll get the biggest returns, because I’ll be able to stick around long enough for compounding to work wonders.”

— Morgan Housel

67. “Your personal experiences with money make up maybe 0.00000001% of what’s happened in the world, but maybe 80% of how you think the world works.”

— Morgan Housel

68. “Realizing the future might not look anything like the past is a special kind of skill that is not generally looked highly upon by the financial forecasting community.”

— Morgan Housel

69. “Modern capitalism is a pro at two things: generating wealth and generating envy.”

— Morgan Housel

70. “Forty percent of all Russell 3000 stock components lost at least 70% of their value and never recovered over this period. Effectively all of the index’s overall returns came from 7% of component companies that outperformed by at least two standard deviations.”

— Morgan Housel

71. “Bubbles aren’t so much about valuations rising. That’s just a symptom of something else: time horizons shrinking as more short-term traders enter the playing field.”

— Morgan Housel

72. “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.”

— Morgan Housel

73. “The customer is always right” and “customers don’t know what they want” are both accepted business wisdom. The line between “inspiringly bold” and “foolishly reckless” can be a millimeter thick and only visible with hindsight.”

— Morgan Housel

74. “Tell a five-year-old boy he should be a lawyer instead of a tractor driver and he will disagree with every cell in his body.”

— Morgan Housel

75. “Compounding doesn’t rely on earning big returns. Merely good returns sustained uninterrupted for the longest period of time – especially in times of chaos and havoc – will always win.”

— Morgan Housel

76. “Medicine is a complex profession and the interactions between physicians and patients are also complex.” You know what profession is the same? Financial advice.”

— Morgan Housel

77. “An appealing fiction happens when you are smart, you want to find solutions, but face a combination of limited control and high stakes. They are extremely powerful. They can make you believe just about anything.”

— Morgan Housel

78. “In theory people should make investment decisions based on their goals and the characteristics of the investment options available to them at the time. But that’s not what people do.”

— Morgan Housel

79. “Imagine how hard it would be to learn how to write if you couldn’t read the works of great authors. Who would be your inspiration? Who would you admire? Whose nuanced tricks and tips would you follow? It would make something that is already hard even harder. It’s difficult to learn from what you can’t see. Which helps explain why it’s so hard for many to build wealth.”

— Morgan Housel

80. “Having a gap between what you can technically endure versus what’s emotionally possible is an overlooked version of room for error.”

— Morgan Housel

81. “Here’s the most important part of this story: The Russell 3000 has increased more than 73-fold since 1980. That is a spectacular return. That is success. Forty percent of the companies in the index were effectively failures. But the 7% of components that performed extremely well were more than enough to offset the duds.”

— Morgan Housel

82. “When thinking about room for error in a forecast it is tempting to think that potential outcomes range from you being just right enough to you being very, very right.”

— Morgan Housel

83. “Modern capitalism is a pro at two things: generating wealth and generating envy. Perhaps they go hand in hand; wanting to surpass your peers can be the fuel of hard work. But life isn’t any fun without a sense of enough. Happiness, as it’s said, is just results minus expectations.”

— Morgan Housel

84. “Bill Gates once said, “Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.”

— Morgan Housel

85. “There is an iron law in economics: extremely good and extremely bad circumstances rarely stay that way for long because supply and demand adapt in hard-to-predict ways.”

— Morgan Housel

86. “After spending years around investors and business leaders I’ve come to realize that someone else’s failure is usually attributed to bad decisions, while your own failures are usually chalked up to the dark side of risk.”

— Morgan Housel

87. “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.”

— Morgan Housel

88. “The idea that a few things account for most results is not just true for companies in your investment portfolio. It’s also an important part of your own behavior as an investor.”

— Morgan Housel