The Big Idea: Human psychology doesn’t change. In 50 or 500 years, people will still respond to greed, fear, opportunity, exploitation, risk, uncertainty, tribal affiliations, and social persuasion in the same way.
- Hanging by a Thread: History is shaped by unpredictable, random events. But people will still respond to greed, fear, opportunity, exploitation, risk, uncertainty, tribal affiliations, and social persuasion in the same way.
- Risk Is What You Don’t See: The most significant risks are unforeseen. Invest in preparedness, not in prediction.
- Expectations and Reality: The first rule of happiness is low expectations.
- Wild Minds: People who think about the world in unique ways you like also think about the world in unique ways you won’t like.
- Wild Numbers: People don’t want accuracy. They want certainty. People crave certainty over accuracy, leading to a preference for definitive answers even in complex, probabilistic situations.
- Best Story Wins: Stories are always more powerful than statistics. 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.
- Does Not Compute: Jeff Bezos once said,“The thing I have noticed is when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. There’s something wrong with the way you are measuring it.”
- Calm Plants the Seeds of Crazy: Stability is destabilizing. A lack of recessions actually plants the seeds of the next recession, which is why we can never get rid of them.
- Too Much, Too Soon, Too Fast: Warren Buffett once joked that you can’t make a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant. A tree that grows quickly rots quickly and therefore never has a chance to grow old.
- When the Magic Happens: Stress, pain, discomfort, shock, and disgust—for all its tragic downsides, it’s also when the magic happens. A carefree and stress-free life sounds wonderful only until you recognize the motivation and progress it prevents.
- Overnight Tragedies and Long-Term Miracles: Warren Buffett says it takes twenty years to build a reputation and five minutes to destroy one.
- Tiny and Magnificent: It’s good to always assume the world will break about once per decade, because historically it has.
- Elation and Despair: Progress requires optimism and pessimism to coexist. The best financial plan is to save like a pessimist and invest like an optimist.
- Casualties of Perfection: The most efficient calendar in the world—one where every minute is packed with productivity—comes at the expense of curious wandering and uninterrupted thinking, which eventually become the biggest contributors to success.
- It’s Supposed to Be Hard: One of the most useful life skills—enduring the pain when necessary rather than assuming there’s a hack, or a shortcut, around it.
- Keep Running: The higher the monkey climbs a tree, the more you can see his ass. No competitive advantage is so powerful that it can let you rest on your laurels.
- The Wonders of the Future:
- Harder Than It Looks and Not as Fun as It Seems: an expert is always from out of town. It’s easiest to convince people that you’re special if they don’t know you well enough to see all the ways you’re not. Keep that in mind when comparing your career, business, and life to those of others.
- Incentives, The Most Powerful Force in the World: When the incentives are crazy, the behavior is crazy. People can be led to justify and defend nearly anything.
- Now You Get It: Nothing is more persuasive than what you’ve experienced firsthand.
- Time Horizons: Long-term thinking is easier to believe in than to accomplish. The odds of success fall deepest in your favor when you mix a long time horizon with a flexible end date. If you read good books you’ll have an easier time understanding what you should or shouldn’t pay attention to in the news.
- Trying Too Hard: One of the missing pieces, he said, is that we focus too much on cancer treatment and not enough on cancer prevention. Prevention is boring. Simplicity is the hallmark of truth and understanding—we should know better, but complexity continues to have a morbid attraction. A trick to learning a complicated topic is realizing how many complex details are cousins of something simple — focus on the core principles.
- Wounds Heal, Scars Last: People who’ve had different experiences than you will think differently than you do. So most debates are not actual disagreements; they’re people with different experiences talking over each other.