Psychology of Money Notes

Morgan Housel is one of the smartest dudes out there. He’s a partner at Collaborative Fund and one of the sharpest minds in finance.

Morgan’s gift is that he can explain complicated financial lessons in a simple intuitive and highly prsonal way.

I’ve been reading his blog for years and when I saw he was putting a book out I was pretty excited. His essay on the Psychology of Money has been bookmarked in my iPad for the last few years and has become mandatory reading each time I take a long haul flight.

I’ve probably read it 10X in the last two years and ach time there is a new point that I understand better.

His book is no different.

👇 Here are my notes on it, in no particular order. 👇

The premise of this book is that doing well with money has very little to do with how smart you are and a lot to do with how you behave. And behavior is hard to teach, even to really smart people.

My favorite Wikipedia entry begins: “Ronald James Read was an American philanthropist, investor, janitor, and gas station attendant.”

Two topics impact everyone, whether you are interested in them or not: health and money.

Most of the reason why, I believe, is that we think about and are taught about money in ways that are too much like physics (with rules and laws) and not enough like psychology (with emotions and nuance).

Markets at the end of the day reflect human emotions both on the micro and macro levels. Understanding how the human brain works at a fundamental level allows you to understand market psychology a heck of a lot of a lot better than any university class. 

To grasp why people bury themselves in debt you don’t need to study interest rates; you need to study the history of greed, insecurity, and optimism.

I love Voltaire’s observation that “History never repeats itself; man always does.”

Rule #1 – None is Crazy đŸ€Ș

People do some crazy things with money. But no one is crazy.

Here’s the thing: People from different generations, raised by different parents who earned different incomes and held different values, in different parts of the world, born into different economies, experiencing different job markets with different incentives and different degrees of luck, learn very different lessons.

Our “map” of what money is and what it means differs for each person. There is no set understanding of what money actually is.

The person who grew up in poverty thinks about risk and reward in ways the child of a wealthy banker cannot fathom if he tried.

👉 Your mindmap of reality literally shapes what is possible. Money and wealth creation exist in a subjective ether that is largest decided by your mind. 

Let’s compare…

The stock broker who lost everything during the Great Depression experienced something the tech worker basking in the glory of the late 1990s can’t imagine.

You know stuff about money that I don’t, and vice versa.

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.

⭐ Remember the sample set issue. We are often confident in our understanding of the world despite having an insanely small sample of what is actually happening.  Our brains largely function as predictive engines modeling complex behaviour based off very small (and often biased) data sets. ⭐

The challenge for us is that no amount of studying or open-mindedness can genuinely recreate the power of fear and uncertainty.

Studying history makes you feel like you understand something when in reality you don’t.

Knowing the name of a thing doesn’t mean you know the thing. 

This is repeated throughout history. 

A famous report by economics in the 1970s concluded:

“Our findings suggest that individual investors’ willingness to bear risk depends on personal history.”

Not intelligence, or education, or sophistication. Just the dumb luck of when and where you were born.

Know The Map đŸ—ș 

Everyone’s view of money was formed in different worlds.

Your map and experience with money create the framework for you to understand it. 

Every decision people make with money is justified by taking the information they have at the moment and plugging it into their unique mental model of how the world works.

Information isn’t analyzed in a vacuum. It is analyzed based off your own unique history, emotions and social experiences. 

But every financial decision a person makes, makes sense to them in that moment and checks the boxes they need to check. 

They tell themselves a story about what they’re doing and why they’re doing it, and that story has been shaped by their own unique experiences.

The defining trait of humans is our ability to tell stories and band together in groups of people who believe those stories.. As it goes with money. 

Rule #2 – Risk and Luck đŸ€Ș

Two important themes in investing and money, let’s explore

It’s never as clear as you think…

If you give luck and risk their proper respect, you realize that when judging people’s financial success—both your own and others’—it’s never as good or as bad as it seems.

Countless fortunes (and failures) owe their outcome to leverage.

The line between “inspiringly bold” and “foolishly reckless” can be a millimeter thick and only visible with hindsight. Risk and luck are doppelgangers.

Be careful who you praise and admire. Be careful who you look down upon and wish to avoid becoming.

At a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island, Kurt Vonnegut informs his pal, Joseph Heller, that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from his wildly popular novel Catch-22 over its whole history.

Heller responds, “Yes, but I have something he will never have 
 enough.”

Mic dropppp đŸ€©

Having Enough

Big reframe there ❀

I was stunned by the simple eloquence of that word—stunned for two reasons: first, because I have been given so much in my own life and, second, because Joseph Heller couldn’t have been more accurate. For a critical element of our society, including many of the wealthiest and most powerful among us, there seems to be no limit today on what enough entails.

Example of not knowing when you have won the game…

The question we should ask of both Gupta and Madoff is why someone worth hundreds of millions of dollars would be so desperate for more money that they risked everything in pursuit of even more.

What Gupta and Madoff did is something different. They already had everything: unimaginable wealth, prestige, power, freedom. And they threw it all away because they wanted more.

They had no sense of enough.

🌟🌟 Important – >  There is no reason to risk what you have and need for what you don’t have and don’t need.

1. The hardest financial skill is getting the goalpost to stop moving. 🏅

If expectations rise with results there is no logic in striving for more because you’ll feel the same after putting in extra effort.

Wherever you go, there you are…

You feel as if you’re falling behind, and the only way to catch up is to take greater and greater amounts of risk.

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.

🌟🌟 Thinking Point – > How many people around you are stuck in the envy trap, where they are grinding just to catch up to others?

It’s important to avoid the material rat race as well as the mental one.

2. Social comparison is the problem here.

The point is that the ceiling of social comparison is so high that virtually no one will ever hit it.

Which means it’s a battle that can never be won, or that the only way to win is to not fight to begin with—to accept that you might have enough, even if it’s less than those around you.

3. “Enough” is not too little.

The idea of having “enough” might look like conservatism, leaving opportunity and potential on the table. I don’t think that’s right.

“Enough” is realizing that the opposite—an insatiable appetite for more—will push you to the point of regret.

Remember Naval’s idea of iterated games, one of the best ways to play games is realize when you have won the game and don’t get stuck in an infinite chase to level up till you die. 

Naval Quote number two đŸ€­

4. There are many things never worth risking, no matter the potential gain.

Reputation is invaluable. Freedom and independence are invaluable. Family and friends are invaluable. Being loved by those who you want to love you is invaluable. Happiness is invaluable.

I can’t stress the importance of freedom and independence, most of my life has been a struggle to attain that. There is no price on that. 

So what if you work for Facebook?

You still are a slave to a corporate structure. đŸ€Ą

5. Confounding Compounding 

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. And so it is with money.

⌚⌚ – > remember that reality rarely gives you the satifying experience of linear progress

The point is that what seem like small changes in growth assumptions can lead to ridiculous, impractical numbers. 

And so when we are studying why something got to become as powerful as it has—why an ice age formed, or why Warren Buffett is so rich—we often overlook the key drivers of success.

đŸ˜± đŸ˜± đŸ˜±- > Force Multipliers when operating with leverage a small change in good perception or judgement can lead to outsized returns

I have heard many people say the first time they saw a compound interest table—or one of those stories about how much more you’d have for retirement if you began saving in your 20s versus your 30s—changed their life. But it probably didn’t.

What it likely did was surprise them, because the results intuitively didn’t seem right. 

Linear thinking is so much more intuitive than exponential thinking.

The counterintuitive nature of compounding leads even the smartest of us to overlook its power. 

In 2004 Bill Gates criticized the new Gmail, wondering why anyone would need a gigabyte of storage. Author Steven Levy wrote, “Despite his currency with cutting-edge technologies, his mentality was anchored in the old paradigm of storage being a commodity that must be conserved.” 

You never get accustomed to how quickly things can grow.

The danger here is that when compounding isn’t intuitive we often ignore its potential and focus on solving problems through other means.

Linear thinking > Exponential Thinking, Thanks Brain 🧠

Source here.

It’s just hard to wrap your head around that math because it’s not intuitive.

But the most powerful and important book should be called Shut Up And Wait.

It’s just one page with a long-term chart of economic growth.

6. Stay Paranoid 

But good investing isn’t necessarily about earning the highest returns, because the highest returns tend to be one-off hits that can’t be repeated. It’s about earning pretty good returns that you can stick with and which can be repeated for the longest period of time. That’s when compounding runs wild.

There are a million ways to get wealthy, and plenty of books on how to do so. But there’s only one way to stay wealthy: some combination of frugality and paranoia.

 đŸ‘‰ Getting money is one thing. Keeping it is another.

40% of companies successful enough to become publicly traded lost effectively all of their value over time.

Getting money requires taking risks, being optimistic, and putting yourself out there. But keeping money requires the opposite of taking risk. It requires humility, and fear that what you’ve made can be taken away from you just as fast. It requires frugality and an acceptance that at least some of what you’ve made is attributable to luck, so past success can’t be relied upon to repeat indefinitely.

Question for myself – > what assumptions am I making for wealth generation? What past successes can’t be repeated so easily. 

👉 There are two reasons why a survival mentality is so key with money.

No one wants to hold cash during a bull market. They want to own assets that go up a lot. You look and feel conservative holding cash during a bull market, because you become acutely aware of how much return you’re giving up by not owning the good stuff.

But if that cash prevents you from having to sell your stocks during a bear market, the actual return you earned on that cash is not 1% a year—it could be many multiples

Planning is important, but the most important part of every plan is to plan on the plan not going according to plan.

A plan is only useful if it can survive reality. And a future filled with unknowns is everyone’s reality.

7. Room for Error 

Room for error—often called margin of safety—is one of the most underappreciated forces in finance.

It’s different from being conservative.

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.

This is a super important distinction.

I often confuse the two, thinking not investing or swinging at bat means I’m TOO conservative but often standing on the side and being careful is just as good.

There is no penalty for stepping up to the plate and not swinging

A barbelled personality—optimistic about the future, but paranoid about what will prevent you from getting to the future—is vital.

This also works as an effective investmentment style popularized by Taleb as the Barbell Approach.

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.

👉 Remember the black/white fallacy, forgetting that the work operates on a thousand shades of nuance and striving to make shortcut in your thiking and decision making for a more simplist view of reality. 

Tail You Win (Tail Probabilities Explored) đŸŽČ

Long tails—the farthest ends of a distribution of outcomes—have tremendous influence in finance, where a small number of events can account for the majority of outcomes.

Tail events, black swans and extremely low probably evens often have oversized effects on entire systems. 

Example – >  Steamboat Willie put Walt Disney on the map as an animator.

The $8 million it earned in the first six months of 1938 was an order of magnitude higher than anything the company earned previously.

It transformed Disney Studios. All company debts were paid off. Key employees got retention bonuses. The company purchased a new state-of-the-art studio in Burbank, where it remains today. An Oscar turned Walt from famous to full-blown celebrity.

Most big successes come from a Pareto like principle of return

Anything that is huge, profitable, famous, or influential is the result of a tail event—an outlying one-in-thousands or millions event.

Apple was responsible for almost 7% of most index returns in 2018. And it is driven overwhelmingly by the iPhone, which in the world of tech products is as tail-y as tails get.

And who’s working at these companies?

Google’s hiring acceptance rate is 0.2%.22 Facebook’s is 0.1%.23 Apple’s is about 2%. So the people working on these tail projects that drive tail returns have tail careers.

Pareto principle all the way down, but even more so. Tail companies drive returns. Tail employees drive innovation at those companies and tail products even more so

Source here

A % of companies with a smaller % of products and even even smaller % of product engineers. 

We are all part of the long tail of things. 

There are 100 billion planets in our galaxy and only one, as far as we know, with intelligent life. The fact that you are reading this book is the result of the longest tail you can imagine.

What is the highest form of wealth?

The highest form of wealth is the ability to wake up every morning and say, “I can do whatever I want today.”

True freedom is a balancing act between what is your bank account and what responsibilites you have to handle. 

The ability to do what you want, when you want, with who you want, for as long as you want, is priceless. It is the highest dividend money pays.

Money doesn’ t buy happiness, it buys freedom 🏅🏅

Money’s greatest intrinsic value—and this can’t be overstated—is its ability to give you control over your time.

Using your money to buy time and options has a lifestyle benefit few luxury goods can compete with.

Money is liquid optionality. 

The United States is the richest nation in the history of the world. But there is little evidence that its citizens are, on average, happier today than they were in the 1950s, when wealth and income were much lower—even at the median level and adjusted for inflation.

Part of what’s happened here is that we’ve used our greater wealth to buy bigger and better stuff. But we’ve simultaneously given up more control over our time. At best, those things cancel each other out.

It’s a trap… I see it especially with some friends who are stuck in the rat race of fixing and improving their homes/real estate and acquiring more items. 

Compared to generations prior, control over your time has diminished. And since controlling your time is such a key happiness influencer, we shouldn’t be surprised that people don’t feel much happier even though we are, on average, richer than ever.

Reflecting On Death

In his book 30 Lessons for Living, gerontologist Karl Pillemer interviewed a thousand elderly Americans looking for the most important lessons they learned from decades of life experience. 

He wrote: No one—not a single person out of a thousand—said that to be happy you should try to work as hard as you can to make money to buy the things you want. No one—not a single person—said it’s important to be at least as wealthy as the people around you, and if you have more than they do it’s real success.

No one—not a single person—said you should choose your work based on your desired future earning power.

At the end of the day when you’re lying on your deathbed these things just won’t matter. 

Wealth is What You Don’t See 💰

Money has many ironies. Here’s an important one: Wealth is what you don’t see. 🙈

We tend to judge wealth by what we see, because that’s the information we have in front of us.

This is like the tangible vs the intangible in Fooled by Randomness. We look for signals of wealth but forget that real wealth can’t be signaled that easily (at least not socially).

So we rely on outward appearances to gauge financial success. Cars. Homes. Instagram photos. Modern capitalism makes helping people fake it until they make it a cherished industry.

But one adage that I’ve always believed is…

A truly sovereign individual owns his own mind and income. 

Wealth is hidden. It’s income not spent. Wealth is an option not yet taken to buy something later. Its value lies in offering you options, flexibility, and growth to one day purchase more stuff than you could right now.

The danger here is that I think most people, deep down, want to be wealthy.

They want freedom and flexibility, which is what financial assets not yet spent can give you. But it is so ingrained in us that to have money is to spend money that we don’t get to see the restraint it takes to actually be wealthy.

Money doesn’t buy happiness… it buys freedom.

Someone on Twitter

Reasonably Rational âš–

You’re not a spreadsheet. You’re a person. A screwed up, emotional person. It took me a while to figure this out, but once it clicked I realized it’s one of the most important parts of finance.

Do not aim to be coldly rational when making financial decisions. Aim to just be pretty reasonable.

Everything human is cyclical. Remembering this can help you understand how emotions affect investor decision making. 

This same pattern is played out over and over again in most markets.

Image Source

Unreasonably Fighting the Fever

Fever is almost universally seen as a bad thing. They’re treated with drugs like Tylenol to reduce them as quickly as they appear. Despite millions of years of evolution as a defense mechanism, no parent, no patient, few doctors, and certainly no drug company views fever as anything but a misfortune that should be eliminated.

These views do not match the known science.

One study was blunt: “Treatment of fever is common in the ICU setting and likely related to standard dogma rather than evidence-based practice.” Howard Markel, director of the Center for the History of Medicine, once said of fever phobia: “These are cultural practices that spread just as widely as the infectious diseases that are behind them.”

Why does this happen? If fevers are beneficial, why do we fight them so universally? I don’t think it’s complicated: Fevers hurt. And people don’t want to hurt. That’s it.

A doctor’s goal is not just to cure disease. It’s to cure disease within the confines of what’s reasonable and tolerable to the patient. 

It may be rational to want a fever if you have an infection. But it’s not reasonable.

That philosophy—aiming to be reasonable instead of rational—is one more people should consider when making decisions with their money.

Rationality can get you into a mess when you analyze markets and forget how much emotions run the show. 

Academic finance is devoted to finding the mathematically optimal investment strategies. In the real world, people do not want the mathematically optimal strategy. They want the strategy that maximizes for how well they sleep at night.

At the end of the day
 people want security and comfort more than anything else. Even if it’s a lie. 

People are neither rational nor irrational. We are human. We don’t like to think harder than we need to, and we have unceasing demands on our attention. Seen in that light, there’s nothing surprising about the fact that the pioneer of modern portfolio theory built his initial portfolio with so little regard for his own research.

Two dangerous things happen when you rely too heavily on investment history as a guide to what’s going to happen next.

1. You’ll likely miss the outlier events that move the needle the most.

Another way to put this is that 0.00000000004% of people were responsible for perhaps the majority of the world’s direction over the last century.

Tail events run the world. This is also the problem of induction, the past grounds our beliefs in things that haven’t happened yet. 

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.

But, in fact, what you should learn when you make a mistake because you did not anticipate something is that the world is difficult to anticipate. That’s the correct lesson to learn from surprises: that the world is surprising.

This is a great reframe, instead of what did I do wrong and how can I approve (what I always do), instead… prepare for a world where surprises and tail events can do crazy things

2. History can be a misleading guide to the future of the economy and stock market because it doesn’t account for structural changes that are relevant to today’s world.

History and human progress is a dynamic process. 

The Intelligent Investor is one of the greatest investing books of all time. But I don’t know a single investor who has done well implementing Graham’s published formulas.

Margins of Safety ☔

History is littered with good ideas taken too far, which are indistinguishable from bad ideas.

The wisdom in having room for error is acknowledging that uncertainty, randomness, and chance—“unknowns”—are an ever-present part of life.

The purpose of the margin of safety is to render the forecast unnecessary.

Rarely do ppl (me included) think of margin of safety. We just make decisions without much thought of the convexity or concavity of those decisions.

The pundit who speaks in unshakable certainties will gain a larger following than the one who says “We can’t know for sure,” and speaks in probabilities.

But room for error is underappreciated and misunderstood. It’s often viewed as a conservative hedge, used by those who don’t want to take much risk or aren’t confident in their views. But when used appropriately, it’s quite the opposite.

Another way to think about this is optionality. Having a margin of error gives you optionality to use various methods to achieve your goals or avoid risk.

Room for error lets you endure a range of potential outcomes, and endurance lets you stick around long enough to let the odds of benefiting from a low-probability outcome fall in your favor.

Basically Antifragility 🙂

The biggest gains occur infrequently, either because they don’t happen often or because they take time to compound. So the person with enough room for error in part of their strategy (cash) to let them endure hardship in another (stocks) has an edge over the person who gets wiped out, game over, insert more tokens, when they’re wrong.

Those who play the game the longest… usually win 🏆

Beware of the chasm between rationality and emotions. 

There are a few specific places for investors to think about room for error. One is volatility. Can you survive your assets declining by 30%? On a spreadsheet, maybe yes—in terms of actually paying your bills and staying cash-flow positive. But what about mentally?

Spreadsheets are good at telling you when the numbers do or don’t add up. They’re not good at modeling how you’ll feel when you tuck your kids in at night wondering if the investment decisions you’ve made were a mistake that will hurt their future. Having a gap between what you can technically endure versus what’s emotionally possible is an overlooked version of room for error.

The solution is simple: Use room for error when estimating your future returns. This is more art than science. 

Leverage is the devil here. Leverage—taking on debt to make your money go further—pushes routine risks into something capable of producing ruin.

To get around this, I think of my own money as barbelled. I take risks with one portion and am terrified with the other.

Before we end this section.. Always remember Murphy’s Law. 

Introducing the End of Time Illusion

The End of History Illusion is what psychologists call the tendency for people to be keenly aware of how much they’ve changed in the past, but to underestimate how much their personalities, desires, and goals are likely to change in the future.

All of us 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 should also come to accept the reality of changing our minds. Some of the most miserable workers I’ve met are people who stay loyal to a career only because it’s the field they picked when deciding on a college major at age 18.

The trick is to accept the reality of change and move on as soon as possible.

Having no sunk costs and being non binary is a great position to be in. Reality is dynamic and having a static view of the world and yourself misaligns yourself.

Sunk costs—anchoring decisions to past efforts that can’t be refunded—are a devil in a world where people change over time.

They make our future selves prisoners to our past, different, selves.

It’s the equivalent of a stranger making major life decisions for you.

Different People, Different Games

We are all playing money games, whether we know it or not. We have a relationship with money and have narratives around it. 

Investors often innocently take cues from other investors who are playing a different game than they are.

We are all playing our own game and trying to win it. Someone working for the government or some corporate bureaucracy is trying to win/play a very different game then me

Example..bubbles

Bubbles do their damage when long-term investors playing one game start taking their cues from those short-term traders playing another.

These two investors rarely even know that each other exist. But they’re on the same field, running toward each other. When their paths blindly collide, someone gets hurt.

It’s hard to grasp that other investors have different goals than we do, because an anchor of psychology is not realizing that rational people can see the world through a different lens than your own.

The main thing I can recommend is going out of your way to identify what game you’re playing.

It’s important to remember that we take cues from those around us but these same people may have very different time horizons or goals for their investments.

We Love a Good Pessimist. AKA – Good headlines don’t sell

For reasons I have never understood, people like to hear that the world is going to hell.

Historian Deirdre McCloskey

Optimism is the best bet for most people because the world tends to get better for most people most of the time. But pessimism holds a special place in our hearts.

Pessimism isn’t just more common than optimism. It also sounds smarter.

It’s intellectually captivating, and it’s paid more attention than optimism, which is often viewed as being oblivious to risk.

This is smth I’ve struggled with over the years, thousands of hours spent watching Youtubers talk about the doom and gloom of markets. 

But remember
.Real optimists don’t believe that everything will be great. That’s complacency.

Being optimistic isn’t the same as being complacent. 

A constant drumbeat of pessimism usually drowns out any triumphalist song … If you say the world has been getting better you may get away with being called naĂŻve

We Love a Good Narrative

Narratives about why a decline occurred make them easier to talk about, worry about, and frame a story around what you think will happen next—usually, more of the same.

It’s all just noise

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

Anachronism at play. 

In 2008 environmentalist Lester Brown wrote: “By 2030 China would need 98 million barrels of oil a day. The world is currently producing 85 million barrels a day and may never produce much more than that. There go the world’s oil reserves.” He’s was right.

The world would run out of oil in that scenario. But that’s not how markets work.

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.

Assuming that something ugly will stay ugly is an easy forecast to make. And it’s persuasive, because it doesn’t require imagining the world changing.

This is a built in issue with human psychology – we see the world as a static black and white and forget that things can change rapidly.

Problems With History

But as B. H. Liddell Hart writes in the book Why Don’t We Learn From History?: [History] cannot be interpreted without the aid of imagination and intuition. The sheer quantity of evidence is so overwhelming that selection is inevitable. Where there is selection there is art. Those who read history tend to look for what proves them right and confirms their personal opinions. They defend loyalties. They read with a purpose to affirm or to attack. They resist inconvenient truth since everyone wants to be on the side of the angels. Just as we start wars to end all wars. 

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

We all want the complicated world we live in to make sense. So we tell ourselves stories to fill in the gaps of what are effectively blind spots.

“We need to believe we live in a predictable, controllable world, so we turn to authoritative-sounding people who promise to satisfy that need.”

Satisfying that need is a great way to put it. Wanting to believe we are in control is an emotional itch that needs to be scratched, rather than an analytical problem to be calculated and solved. 

👉 The illusion of control is more persuasive than the reality of uncertainty.

So we cling to stories about outcomes being in our control.

I Can’t Tell You What to Do With Money 😇

I can’t tell you what to do with your money, because I don’t know you.

I don’t know what you want. I don’t know when you want it. I don’t know why you want it.

So I’m not going to tell you what to do with your money.

Financial advisors are the same. There are universal truths in money, even if people come to different conclusions about how they want to apply those truths to their own finances.

Go out of your way to find humility when things are going right and forgiveness/compassion when they go wrong.

Less ego, more wealth.

Manage your money in a way that helps you sleep at night. = means no ICOs or too many altcoins

IMPORTANT – > If you want to do better as an investor, the single most powerful thing you can do is increase your time horizon.

Become OK with a lot of things going wrong. You can be wrong half the time and still make a fortune

And that’s it
 the psychology of money.