By Morgan Housel
Timeless human behaviours that never change
Subject
Themes
Warren Buffett once answered a friend's despair about the 2009 financial crisis by asking what the bestselling candy bar was in 1962. The answer, Snickers, is the same today. While the surface of the world changes relentlessly, certain patterns of human behaviour remain stubbornly fixed. Greed, fear, jealousy, overconfidence, and tribal loyalty look the same whether you travel five hundred years into the past or the future. Focusing on what never changes, rather than trying to predict what will, is the most reliable foundation for understanding the world.
Warren Buffett once answered a friend's despair about the 2009 financial crisis by asking what the bestselling candy bar was in 1962. The answer, Snickers, is the same today. While the surface of the world changes relentlessly, certain patterns of human behaviour remain stubbornly fixed. Greed,…
Morgan Housel established himself as one of the most widely read financial writers of the 2020s with The Psychology of Money (2020), which sold over four million copies and was translated into more than fifty languages. Same as Ever, published in 2023, extends the approach that made its predecessor…
Risk operates in ways that are fundamentally counterintuitive. The biggest dangers are not the ones visible on the horizon but the ones lurking outside anyone's field of vision. Carl Richards defined risk as "what's left over after you think you've thought of everything," and history consistently…
Happiness is a two-part equation: what you have and what you expect. Most attention goes to improving the first part while the second is almost entirely ignored, yet expectations are often more within your control than circumstances. Montesquieu recognised this 275 years ago: people wish not merely…
Good news and bad news operate on fundamentally different timescales, and this asymmetry shapes nearly everything about how people perceive the world. Good news comes from compounding, which always takes time. Bad news arrives instantly. Understanding this difference is essential to making sense of…
The most powerful forces shaping human behaviour are the ones that resist quantification. Incentives drive people toward actions they know are wrong. Stories defeat data in every arena. Emotions overpower logic in markets, wars, and relationships. Together these unmeasurable forces explain more…
Evolution has spent 3.8 billion years testing a principle that humans consistently ignore: perfection at any single thing creates dangerous vulnerability elsewhere. Russian biologist Ivan Schmalhausen demonstrated that a bigger lion catches more prey but presents a larger target for hunters. A…
A teenage ski racer narrowly escapes death when his two closest friends are killed in an avalanche on an out-of-bounds run in Lake Tahoe. On February 21, 2001, the three friends skied the backside of KT-22. After a small avalanche on their first run, the narrator declined a second trip for no…
People crave certainty in an uncertain world, and that craving warps everything. Stanford professor Ronald Howard forced students to attach confidence percentages to their exam answers: total confidence on a wrong answer meant failing the entire test. In Zero Dark Thirty, the CIA director demands a…
Robert Wadlow, the largest human ever known, stood nearly nine feet tall and weighed five hundred pounds. Rather than possessing superhuman athleticism, he needed steel braces to stand and a cane to limp forward. His heart strained to pump blood through his body, causing an ulcer that killed him at…
Admiral Jim Stockdale, the highest-ranking American prisoner of war in Vietnam, was tortured routinely and once attempted suicide to protect military secrets. Yet he insisted prison life was never truly depressing because he never lost faith he would eventually be free. Asked who struggled most, his…
In 1908, The Washington Post asked Thomas Edison whether the age of invention was passing. "Passing?" he replied in astonishment. "Why, it hasn't started yet." Edison understood that innovations are not solitary breakthroughs but slow accumulations of small discoveries combined over time. He did not…
Elizabeth Taylor declared "nothing will ever separate us" five days before filing for divorce. Long-term thinking is easier to believe in than to accomplish, which is precisely why it pays more than most people assume. Four obstacles make it so difficult. First, the long run is simply a collection…
By Morgan Housel
Subject
Themes
Warren Buffett once answered a friend's despair about the 2009 financial crisis by asking what the bestselling candy bar was in 1962. The answer, Snickers, is the same today. While the surface of the world changes relentlessly, certain patterns of human behaviour remain stubbornly fixed. Greed, fear, jealousy, overconfidence, and tribal loyalty look the same whether you travel five hundred years into the past or the future. Focusing on what never changes, rather than trying to predict what will, is the most reliable foundation for understanding the world.