## Metadata - Author: [[Morgan Housel]] - Full Title: Same as Ever - Category: #books ## Highlights *** > Change captures our attention because it's surprising and exciting. But the behaviors that never change are history's most powerful lessons, because they preview what to expect in the future. Your future. Everyone's future. No matter who you are, where you're from, how old you are, or how much money you make, there are timeless lessons from human behavior that are some of the most important things you can ever learn. > > It's a simple idea, but it's so easy to overlook. And once you grasp it, you'll be able to make better sense of your own life, understand why the world is the way it is, and become more at ease with what the future has in store (Page 2) *** > The Battle of Long Island was a disaster for George Washington's army. His ten thousand troops were crushed by the British and its four-hundred-ship fleet. > > But it could have been so much worse. It could have been the end of the Revolutionary War. > > All the British had to do was sail up the East River and Washington's cornered troops would have been wiped out. > > But it never happened, because the wind wasn't blowing in the right direction and sailing up the river became impossible. > > Historian David McCullough once told interviewer Charlie Rose that “if the wind had been in the other direction on the night of August twenty-eighth [1776], I think it would have all been over." > > "No United States of America if that had happened?" Rose asked. > > "I don't think so," said McCullough. > > "Just because of the wind, history was changed?" asked Rose. > > "Absolutely,” said McCullough. (Page 11) *** > Poet Ralph Hodgson put this well when he said, "Some things have to be believed to be seen." Poor evidence can be a very compelling story if that story scratches an itch someone wants to go away, or gives context to a belief they want to be true. (Page 59) *** > Good stories create so much hidden opportunity among things you assume can't be improved. > > How many great ideas have already been discovered but could grow one hundred times or more if someone explained them better? > > How many products have found only a fraction of their potential market because the companies that made them are so bad at describing them to customers? > > So, so many. > > Visa founder Dee Hock once said, "New ways of looking at things create much greater innovation than new ways of doing them." > > You'll get discouraged if you think every new book has to be about an original idea, or that every new company has to sell a brand-new invention. There is so much more opportunity if you see the world like Yuval Noah Harari-that it's not what you say or what you do, but how you say it and how you present it. (Page 60) *** > 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? > > They are uncomfortable questions and difficult to answer. But if you're honest with yourself you'll see how many people, and how many beliefs, fall into these buckets. And then you'll see the truth-that the best story wins. (Page 60) *** > Growth always fights against competition that slows its rise. New ideas fight for attention, business models fight incumbents, skyscrapers fight gravity. There's always a headwind. 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. (Page 102) *** > A lot of progress and good news concerns things that didn't happen, whereas virtually all bad news is about what did occur. > > Good news is the deaths that didn't take place, the diseases you didn't get, the wars that never happened, the tragedies avoided, and the injustices prevented. That's hard for people to contextualize or even imagine, let alone measure. > > But bad news is visible. More than visible, it's in your face. It's the terrorist attack, the war, the car accident, the pandemic, the stock market crash, and the political battle you can't look away from. (Page 103) *** > It is so easy to discount how much progress is achievable. > > If I were to say, "What are the odds the average American will be twice as rich fifty years from now?" it sounds preposterous. The odds seem very low. Twice as rich as they are today? Doubling what we already have? It seems too ambitious. > > But then if I said, "What are the odds we can achieve 1.4 percent average annual growth for the next fifty years?" I almost sound like a pessimist. One percent? That's it? > > But those numbers, of course, are the same. > > It's always been like that, and always will be. (Page 103) *** > The Soviets once built a nuclear bomb fifteen hundred times stronger than the one dropped on Hiroshima. > > Called Tsar Bomba (king of bombs), it was ten times more powerful than every conventional bomb dropped during World War II combined. When tested in Russia, its fireball was seen six hundred miles away. Its mushroom cloud went forty-two miles into the sky. > > Historian John Lewis Gaddis wrote: > > The island over which the explosion took place was literally leveled, not only of snow but also of rocks, so that it looked like an immense skating rink. One estimate calculated... the resulting firestorm would have engulfed an area the size of the state of Maryland. > > The first nuclear bomb was developed to end World War II. > > Within a decade we had enough bombs to end the world-all of it. > > But there was a weird silver lining to how deadly these bombs were: countries were unlikely to use them in battle because they raised the stakes so high. Wipe out an enemy's capital city and they'll do the same to you sixty seconds later-so why bother? > > John F. Kennedy said neither country wanted "a war that would leave not one Rome intact but two Carthages destroyed." > > By 1960 we got around this predicament by going the other way. We built smaller, less deadly nuclear bombs. > > One, called Davy Crockett, was 650 times less powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima and could be fired from the back of a Jeep. We built nuclear landmines that could fit in a backpack, with a warhead the size of a shoebox. > > These tiny nukes felt more responsible, less risky. We could use them without ending the world. > > But they backfired. > > Small nuclear bombs were more likely to actually be used in combat. That was their whole purpose. They lowered the bar of justified use. > > It changed the game, all for the worse. > > The risk was that a country would "responsibly" use a tiny nuclear weapon in battle, starting a retaliatory escalation that opened the door to launching one of the big bombs. > > Neither country would start a war with a big bomb. But would they launch a small one? Probably. And would a small bomb justify retaliating with a big one? Yes. > > So the small bombs increased the odds of the big bombs being used. > > Small risks weren't the alternative to big risks; they were the trigger. > > Soviet missiles in Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis were four thousand times less powerful than Tsar Bomba. But if the Soviets had launched even one of them, according to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, there would have been a "99 percent probability" that America would have retaliated with its full nuclear force. > > Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who helped create the atomic bomb, was guilt-stricken about its destructiveness and pushed for smaller nukes to reduce the risk. He later admitted that was a mistake, because it increased the odds of a large nuclear attack. > > Big risks are easy to overlook because they're just a chain reaction of small events, each of which is easy to shrug off. So people always underestimate the odds of big risks. (Page 105) *** > Same thing with COVID-19. > > Its initial impact was catastrophic, seemingly out of the blue. > > But we didn't get hit with a single, one-in-billions risk. What happened--and I can say this only with hindsight-was a bunch of small risks colliding and multiplying at once. > > A new virus transferred to humans (something that has happened forever), and those humans interacted with other people (of course). It was a mystery for a while (understandable), and then bad news was likely suppressed (bad, but common). > > Other countries thought it would be contained (standard denial), and didn't act fast enough (bureaucracy). We weren't prepared (overoptimism), and could respond only with blunt-force lockdowns (panic, do what you gotta do). > > None of those on their own are surprising. But combined they turned into a disaster. > > The Tenerife airport disaster in 1977 is the deadliest aircraft accident in history. The error was stunning. One plane took off while another was still on the runway, and the two Boeing 747 collided, killing 583 people on a runway on the Spanish island. > > In the aftermath authorities wondered how such an egregious catastrophe could occur. One postmortem study explained exactly how: "Eleven separate coincidences and mistakes, most of them minor... had to fall precisely into place" for the crash to occur. Lots of tiny mistakes added up to a huge one. > > per It's good to always assume the world will break about once decade, because historically it has. The breakages feel like low-probability events, so it's common to think they won't keep happening. But they do, again and again, because they're actually just smaller high-probability events compounding off one another. > > That isn't intuitive, so we'll discount big risks like we always have. > > And of course, the same thing happens in the other direction. (Page 108) *** > A doctor once told me the biggest thing they don't teach in medical school is the difference between medicine and being a doctormedicine is a biological science, while being a doctor is often a social skill of managing expectations, understanding the insurance system, communicating effectively, and so on. (Page 154) *** > Harry Truman once said: The next generation never learns anything from the previous one until it's brought home with a hammer.... 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. (Page 156) *** > Computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra once wrote: > > Simplicity is the hallmark of truth-we should know better, but complexity continues to have a morbid attraction. When you give an academic audience a lecture that is crystal clear from alpha to omega, your audience feels cheated. . . . The sore truth is that complexity sells better. (Page 170) *** > A trick to learning a complicated topic is realizing how many complex details are cousins of something simple. John Reed wrote in his book Succeeding: > > 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 had to memorize are simply various combinations of the core principles. (Page 171)