History never repeats itself; man always does.” (View Highlight)
we’ve had different lives shaped by different and equally persuasive experiences. (View Highlight)
We see the world through a different lens. (View Highlight)
As investor Michael Batnick says, “some lessons have to be experienced before they can be understood.” (View Highlight)
no one is crazy—we all make decisions based on our own unique experiences that seem to make sense to us in a given moment. (View Highlight)
We have brains that prefer easy answers without much appetite for nuance. (View Highlight)
You’ll get closer to actionable takeaways by looking for broad patterns of success and failure. (View Highlight)
people who have control over their time tend to be happier in life is a broad and common enough observation that you can do something with it. (View Highlight)
The trick when dealing with failure is arranging your financial life in a way that a bad investment here and a missed financial goal there won’t wipe you out so you can keep playing until the odds fall in your favor. (View Highlight)
The hardest financial skill is getting the goalpost to stop moving. (View Highlight)
Enough” is realizing that the opposite—an insatiable appetite for more—will push you to the point of regret. (View Highlight)
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 (View Highlight)
Getting Wealthy vs. Staying Wealthy : Good investing is not necessarily about making good decisions. It’s about consistently not screwing up.
Getting money requires taking risks, being optimistic, and putting yourself out there. (View Highlight)
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 (View Highlight)
We can’t assume that yesterday’s success translates into tomorrow’s good fortune. (View Highlight)
Margin of safety is raising the odds of success at a given level of risk by increasing your chances of survival. (View Highlight)
seeing things as black or white takes less effort than accepting nuance. (View Highlight)
Your success as an investor will be determined by how you respond to punctuated moments of terror, not the years spent on cruise control. (View Highlight)
t’s easy to find Warren Buffett’s net worth, or his average annual returns. Or even his best, most notable investments. (View Highlight)
No one talks about the dud picks, the ugly businesses, the poor acquisitions. But they’re a big part of Buffett’s story. They are the other side of tail-driven returns. (View Highlight)
Warren Buffett said he’s owned 400 to 500 stocks during his life and made most of his money on 10 of them. (View Highlight)
You can be wrong half the time and still make a fortune. (View Highlight)
Freedom : Controlling your time is the highest dividend money pays.
The ability to do what you want, when you want, with who you want, for as long as you want, is priceless. (View Highlight)
You think, “I did the work and I now deserve to treat myself to a big meal.” (View Highlight)
Wealth is turning down that treat meal and actually burning net calories. It’s hard, and requires self-control. (View Highlight)
The world is filled with people who look modest but are actually wealthy and people who look rich who live at the razor’s edge of insolvency. (View Highlight)
building wealth has little to do with your income or investment returns, and lots to do with your savings rate. (View Highlight)
intangible benefits of money can be far more valuable and capable of increasing your happiness than the tangible things that are obvious targets of our savings. (View Highlight)
The correct lesson to learn from surprises is that the world is surprising. Not that we should use past surprises as a guide to future boundaries (View Highlight)
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. (View Highlight)
The wisdom in having room for error is acknowledging that uncertainty, randomness, and chance—“unknowns”—are an ever-present part of life. (View Highlight)
biggest gains occur infrequently, either because they don’t happen often or because they take time to compound (View Highlight)
You can’t prepare for what you can’t envision. (View Highlight)
If there’s one way to guard against their damage, it’s avoiding single points of failure. (View Highlight)
Sunk costs—anchoring decisions to past efforts that can’t be refunded—are a devil in a world where people change over time. (View Highlight)
They make our future selves prisoners to our past, different, selves. (View Highlight)
The trick is convincing yourself that the market’s fee is worth it. That’s the only way to properly deal with volatility and uncertainty—not just putting up with it, but realizing that it’s an admission fee worth paying. (View Highlight)
Note: See volatility as fee rather than fine
There are many things in life that we think are true because we desperately want them to be true. (View Highlight)
Everyone has an incomplete view of the world. But we form a complete narrative to fill in the gaps. (View Highlight)
They resist inconvenient truth since everyone wants to be on the side of the angels. Just as we start wars to end all wars. (View Highlight)