Lessons from: Same as Ever

Name: Same as Ever

Author(s): Housel, Morgan

Synopsis

This book is about the unchanging parts of the psychology of human nature. It identifies 23 such parts and explains them through stories and anecdotes. it invites the reader to think beyond the latest hype cycle that is constantly changing and observe the undercurrents that power them and which do not change. The author also provides, at the end of the book, a list of questions that one can ask themselves to think more critically about their life. These questions, if consistently asked and truthfully answer should reveal over time the things that one regularly gets wrong, and in this one will realise the things that do not change.

Core ideas

1. 
   Much of the world hangs by a thread: The most seminal events in history (and for that matter even the most mundane) happened because of a coming together of small, almost unimportant, components. This also means that there is nothing called certainty in this life we live. One can plan for the smallest of details and that is great, but to hope for certainty (esp. after getting some life experience) shows lack of wisdom. This is a central point and repeated thrice in the book in chapters "Hanging by a Thread", "Wild Numbers" and "Does Not Compute" in different forms. Accepting that the universe and everything in it and everything that emerges from it is subject to an inherent, source code level randomness. Nevertheless, people's desire for certainty will remain. And they will flock to the next guy who proffers it.
2. Risk cannot be contained: One can control for uncertainty by building in failsafes against the things they know can go wrong. But risk is about the unknown unknowns. The author literally defines risk as the things you cannot see coming, so the moment you account and plan for something, it ceases to be a risk. By this definition, there will always be risk in our lives. This links back to the previous point on how it takes something completely innocuous to start a chain reaction of disaster. So, one should realise that there will always be risk and while we cannot directly prepare for it, we can indirectly prepare by being a little more cautious than we feel is necessary.
3. The first rule of happiness is low expectations: For better or for worse, humans are good at adaptation. We adapt to the bad times, and we adapt especially well to the good times. There is no doubt that over the last century the standard of living for most of us has increased by many orders of magnitude. Yet our levels of happiness and contentment have not risen commensurately. That is because we have adapted to this new reality. In fact for many of us levels of happiness may have fallen as we saw people near or far (through social media) gain access to a better life than ours. So, another truth is that humans are also good at comparing. And that is something that capitalism and social media have helped in. Therefore, what will remain will be our ability to normalise our experiences and return to a baseline level of happiness. And also our tendency to gauge our well-being relative to how we are doing relative to our peer group (whatever way we define it).
4. Be careful when wishing for other people's shiny lives: The people we often look up to, Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, ___________, are/were human after all. Which means that for all their superhuman ability in one area, they were struggling in many others. Because we only ever get to see the triumphs of such people we start wishing for their life to be ours. We see the fitness influencer with his six-pack abs, or the actress with her perfect cheekbones, but do not see the hours at the gym at the cost of social life or expensive surgery.  Nevertheless, what will remain will be people's desire to wish for the (airbrushed) parts of other people's lives they see.
5. Stories are more powerful than statistics: Evolution did not program humans to be cold statistical machines. Instead we are full of emotion. And so it is no surprise that we respond better to stories. That is how it has always been, for good or bad. This has led to storytellers whether they come in the form of politicians or cult leaders or writers or military commanders or companies or film directors or whatever else to sway public opinion and get masses behind them. sometimes the influence is used for good, most of the time for not-good and selfish ends. Inability to tell good stories has seen many a powerful theory break like a wave against a wall of yawns, That is why we do not know the names of scientists who have contributed more to the enhancement of human species, yet know very well the names of actors whose contributions are much less important in comparison. What will remain is people's vulnerability to good stories irrespective of the strength of their logic.
6. Comfort plants the seeds of complacency: When things are going good, people get optimistic and take undue risks that backfire. It's human nature to somehow ignore the basic rule of the universe that "everything changes" and instead assume that the good or bad times will stay forever. So, when things are going good, that is when you need to be the most careful and paranoid because you can bet there are others who are playing risky and things can turn on a whim.
7. Things take time: This is especially true in the modern age where we are conditioned to expect things almost instantly. If something is truly worth something to you then the following things will be true about it; it will not be easy to get and it will take time to obtain. Nevertheless, what will remain will be our desire for things to be easy and quick to get.
8. Pain plants the seeds for progress: When times are good it's hard to work hard, when times are bad it's easy to work hard. No one asks for pain and challenge, no one asks for hardship but there is no doubt that it is these times where the most progress happens. On the contrary, "When everything is great—when wealth is flush, when the outlook is bright, when responsibility is low, and threats appear gone—you get some of the worst, dumbest, least-productive human behavior.". What will remain is that the constant breakdown of good times into bad (refer point 6 above) will lead to some of the most progress later on.
9. Progress happens slowly and so we miss it: While setbacks happen instantaneously and are obviously apparent. And we tend to record in memory events that are discrete and intense. That is why even during objectively good times people think that they are living through worse compared to the past.
10. Small changes add up to big results: In the context of the interconnected world there are millions of small but high probability events happening, vast majority of them being inconsequential. These small events are so small and our world so complicated that it is impossible to predict the chain of events, but when they add up across time they enable big but low probability events. According to the author these small events add up to something eventful once every ten years. But since we are unable to draw the line from the millions of small events to the big one, we think that the big event came out of the blue. I think this point and point 6 above just point to the fact that one should not get too comfortable during easy times and start thinking they will last, especially if the good times have been going on for some time. This is equally applicable to individuals, communities, societies, companies, nations and the world.
11. Life is grey, learn how to balance hope and despair: Humans like to operate at extremes because it is easier to do. But as Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. That is what is required in life, because it by design is grey, nothing is black and white. So neither should one get too optimistic nor be too pessimistic. When one operates from either extremes they tend to take bad decisions. It's better to be realistic and that requires a reasonable study of the situation without denial, judgement or emotion, and then take consistent action that is one's best bet. This is harder, but better.
12. Perfect is the enemy of the good (enough): When you leave out some margin for error you end up being more resilient in the long run. Even though the world we live in today prizes increased performance in one field, that often comes at the cost of something else. The author gives examples of how nature does not make organisms perfect but instead leaves them at "good enough". Though the reason behind this would be optimising energy:expenditure ratio, it also has the benefit of leaving room for an organism to pivot to something else if the environment around it changes (which it will eventually). The parallel to human life is that when one plans every moment of their life to maximise "productivity" they end up losing out on moments of serendipity and inspiration where breakthroughs happen.
13. Some pain is worth it: As I said in point 7 above if something is truly worth it to you then it will be hard to get (otherwise it would not be worth it, see how its circular like). Also, "technology inflates our benchmark for how fast results should happen.". Everything that is valuable will extract a cost, whether it be in money or time or effort or peace of mind or something else. It is important to figure out what costs are you willing to put up with and to what extent. having this clarity will help maintain stoicism as your plans are regularly thwarted by the seemingly random events in life.
14. Competitive advantages don’t stick around for long: Like the African proverb, no achievement accords permanent status of superiority to anyone. This is as true for individuals as it is for nation states. Therefore, celebrate if you wish to, but remember to get back in the race because what will remain is the fact that there are no permanent victors.
15. Posturing abounds: Related to point 4 above, the author reminds us that "everything is sales", "everyone is trying to craft an image of who they are" and "everyone plays the image game". We know intimately our own struggles and anxieties but (especially since they are hidden or disguised) do not know the same about others, we assume others somehow have it all sorted out. Which is not the case. All of us are afraid, some are just better at hiding it. Social media has taken this to another level. What will remain is people's desire to show a perfect image and that will throw you off-balance if you're not careful at identifying that it's just marketing.
16. People are not bad, situations are: Incentives will make good people do bad things, that is how it's always been, that is how it will always be. The incentive may be sure shot or a gamble, it may be real or imagined, it may be material (food, safety) or immaterial (social stature), but what remains is that people, humans are incentive following machines. Fear is a much stronger motivator than virtue will ever be. The author talks about Germans in 1930s and how they could support someone like Adolf Hitler, or how El Chapo was loved by local villagers, they weren't bad people, its just that their incentive to support Hitler/Chapo was so high compared to the alternative. It's easy to act virtuously with a full stomach. "Take a good, honest, loving person and strip them of basic necessities and you’ll soon get an unrecognizable monster who’ll do anything to survive."
17. Experience comes from experience: Its sad that the wisdom of ancestors is not passed down to children the same way that physical traits are. This means that we are bound to make the same mistakes as past generations (up to a a certain percentage of course, because you know, books and other recording media exists). When one has not experienced something firsthand, they will not really know how it feels. It helps to read about it, discuss it, simulate it but experience is the real deal. This means that we should take our forecasted behaviour, especially the one that we make during good times, with some margin of error.
18. Long term or short term is not as important as flexibility: People think that if they're in something for the long haul they can ignore the short term setbacks. This is a bad idea. While one should not be too worried about tactical defeats in the grand scheme of things, but not extracting the learnings that these defeats have to offer is a sure way to make your long term also suck. If you think about it, "short term" or "long term" are arbitrary, what matters is whether you are flexible in the face of evidence.
19. Going by the Pareto principle is good enough for life, adding complexity is not the same as adding value: In life aim to achieve goals through the simplest method, that is what nature does. Adding unnecessary complexity just adds more points of failure. Unfortunately in the day and age we live in, complexity seems to be rewarded. "In finance, spending less than you make, saving the difference, and being patient is perhaps 90 percent of what you need to know to do well. But what’s taught in college? How to price derivatives and calculate net present value. In health it’s sleep eight hours, move a lot, eat real food, but not too much. But what’s popular? Supplements, hacks, and pills." Somehow we want things to be complicated than they actually are. We are just not okay with things being simple. So there are two parts to this point:
1. First, in your personal life, keep things simple and know that you can get 80% of the job done through the fundamental stuff. Complicate only when you are sure it is needed. And be skeptical when you encounter complexity. Is it needed or just designed to confuse you to someone else's ends?
2. In your professional life, even when the thing you do is super simple, if you package it and sell it as complicated it will take you farther.
20. Customs and practices reveal the history of people: Hardship and stress change people, and they do not remain as they were before the event. Often they will develop some helpful and some not so helpful coping mechanisms that live on even after the event has passed in the form of customs, rituals and beliefs. Getting good at noticing these allows you to understand the values that matter to a people.

Notable quotes

• “Risk is what’s left over after you think you’ve thought of everything.”
• “If you only wished to be happy, this could be easily accomplished; but we wish to be happier than other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are.”
• luxuries become necessities in a remarkably short period of time when the people around you become better off.
• Psychologist Jonathan Haidt says people don’t really communicate on social media so much as they perform for one another.
• There is no such thing as objective wealth—everything is relative, and mostly relative to those around you.
• When you think of it like that, you realize how powerful expectations are. They can make a celebrity feel miserable and a destitute family feel amazing.
• The first rule of a happy life is low expectations. If you have unrealistic expectations you’re going to be miserable your whole life. You want to have reasonable expectations and take life’s results, good and bad, as they happen with a certain amount of stoicism.
• people who are abnormally good at one thing tend to be abnormally bad at something else.
• A common trait of human behavior is the burning desire for certainty despite living in an uncertain and probabilistic world.
• Most people get that certainty is rare, and the best you can do is make decisions in which the odds are in your favor. They understand you can be smart and end up wrong, or dumb and end up right, because that’s how luck and risk work. But few people actually use probability in the real world, especially when judging others’ success.
• The core here is that people think they want an accurate view of the future, but what they really crave is certainty.
• “Human beings cannot comprehend very large or very small numbers.
• The world breaks about once every ten years, on average—always has, always will.
• A lot of what goes on in the prediction world is an attempt to rid yourself of the painful reality of not knowing what’s going to happen next.
• The inability to forecast the past has no impact on our desire to forecast the future. Certainty is so valuable that we’ll never give up the quest for it, and most people couldn’t get out of bed in the morning if they were honest about how uncertain the future is.
• What you always want to avoid are catastrophic risks.
• If you have the right answer and you’re a good storyteller, you’ll almost certainly get ahead.
• If you’re trying to figure out where something is going next, you have to understand more than its technical possibilities. You have to understand the stories everyone tells themselves about those possibilities, because it’s such a big part of the forecasting equation.
• When a topic is complex, stories are like leverage.
• The most persuasive stories are about what you want to believe is true, or are an extension of what you’ve experienced firsthand.
• Some of the most important questions to ask yourself are: Who has the right answer, but I ignore because they’re inarticulate? And what do I believe is true but is actually just good marketing?
• “Logic is an invention of man and may be ignored by the universe.”
• The ones who thrive long term are those who understand the real world is a never-ending chain of absurdity, confusion, messy relationships, and imperfect people.
• “The need for certainty is the greatest disease the mind faces.”
• Stability is destabilising.
• “Everything feels unprecedented when you haven’t engaged with history,”
• The irony of good times is that they breed complacency and skepticism of warnings.
• a good idea sped up too fast quickly becomes a terrible idea.
• Stress focuses your attention in ways that good times can’t.
• what makes life mean something is purpose. A goal. The battle, the struggle—even if you don’t win it.
• But everyone gets out of the way of decline. Some might try to step in and slow the fall, but it doesn’t attract masses of outsiders who rush in to push back in the other direction the way progress does.
• “To enjoy peace, we need almost everyone to make good choices. By contrast, a poor choice by just one side can lead to war.”
• So species rarely evolve to become perfect at anything, because perfecting one skill comes at the expense of another skill that will eventually be critical to survival.
• Evolution has spent 3.8 billion years testing and proving the idea that some inefficiency is good.
• You waste years by not being able to waste hours.
• A unique skill, an underrated skill, is identifying the optimal amount of hassle and nonsense you should put up with to get ahead while getting along.
• Once you accept a certain level of inefficiency, you stop denying its existence and have a clearer view of how the world works.
• being right instills confidence that you can’t be wrong
• you should never be surprised when something that dominates one era dies off in the next. It’s one of the most common stories in history.
• No competitive advantage is so powerful that it can let you rest on your laurels—and in fact the ones that appear to do so tend to seed their own demise.
• Only when you get to know someone well do you realize the best you can do in life is to become an expert at some things while remaining inept at others—and that’s if you’re good.
• “If you would persuade, appeal to interest and not to reason.”
• I’ve wondered why the next generation can’t profit from the generation before, but they never do until they get knocked in the head by experience.
• “If you find the right balance between desperation and fear, you can make people do anything.”
• Simplicity is the hallmark of truth—we should know better, but complexity continues to have a morbid attraction.
• The sore truth is that complexity sells better.
• If you’ve covered the few things that matter, you’re all set. A lot of what gets added after that is unnecessary filler that is either intellectually seductive, wastes your time, or is designed to confuse or impress you.
• A trick to learning a complicated topic is realizing how many complex details are cousins of something simple.
• When you first start to study a field, it seems like you have to memorize a zillion things. You don’t. What you need is to identify the core principles—generally three to twelve of them—that govern the field. The million things you thought you had to memorize are simply various combinations of the core principles.
• There’s a long history of people adapting and rebuilding while the scars of their ordeal remain forever, changing how they think about risk, reward, opportunities, and goals for as long as they live.
• mindsets are harder to repair than buildings and cash flows.
• 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.
• The idea that what lies in front of us is a dark hole of uncertainty can be so intimidating, it’s easier to believe the opposite—that we can see the future, and that its path is logical and predictable. No belief in history is as commonly held, and no belief is as consistently wrong.

In closing

Nice, quick and easy read, this book. If you are in some sort of marketing or sales job, or run a small business the lessons in this book can be useful in driving towards more profits. Same if you're an investor. They are fairly robust since they are based on the essential evolutionary features of humans.

I noticed that a few points across chapters are essentially variations of the same underlying point: change is constant so make it your friend and don't get too comfortable/cocky (points 6, 11, 14, 18), there are too many variables interacting in ways we cannot comprehend so plan your best but don't get too attached to the results and know that things can still go wrong so keep margin for error (points 1, 2, 3, 10, 12), humans including yourself are not rational (points 4, 5, 9, 10, 15, 17)

I'd say everyone should read this book since the lessons are so universal. And the younger you are when you read it the better. Like Housel's other book, the Psychology of Money, I think this is a good book to refer back to once a year or something. Subsequent readings should get over within a day and serve as a reminder of the immutable truths of living. Beyond that, however, there isn't much need to re-read.