Book Review: Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
- Print length – 224 pages
- Publisher – Harriman House (India), Portfolio (US)
- First Published – November, 2023
Forecasting or finding what will be Same as Ever
How will the Indian economy fare in 2026?
Will US economy continue to grow in the coming years? Or will it see a dip?
Where will you be in 10 years?
Forecasting accurately is difficult because the important events that shape the future are unpredictable, says Morgan Housel the bestselling author of Psychology of Money. Instead, he recommends that we ask a different question – What will be the SAME 10 years from now? Or, 100 years from now? And in this question lies Housel’s genius. He focuses on what never changes in an ever-changing world.
In Same As Ever, Morgan Housel shares 24 short stories about the ways that life, behaviour, and business will always be the same. Knowledge of the things that never change is more useful and more important than an uncertain prediction of an unknowable future. Housel quotes Jeff Bezos saying that even in the future, Amazon customers will prefer fast service at low cost, so it’s better for him to work on these parameters before anything else.
Book Review: Key Learnings form Same as Ever by Morgan Housel
There are some of my key learnings from the book:
- Uncertainty is permanent. Learn to live with it. The world changes faster than we can predict. But human behavior—fear, greed, envy, ambition, stays the same. Instead of trying to eliminate uncertainty, focus on building resilience.
- Patience Beats Intelligence. History rewards those who can stay the course. Be it compounding money or building a career, persistence over decades outperforms brilliance over months.
- Good times create lazy people → lazy people create bad times → bad times lead to strong men → strong men create good times, and the cycle repeats.
- Low expectations increase happiness. We often tie success to “more”, more money, more promotions, more wins. We should rather stop comparing and aim to be “good enough” instead of seeking endless gains.
Same as Ever is a rewarding read but for someone like me who likes to reflect on what drives human behaviour over time, this was mind blowing. This book serves as both a comfort and a wake-up call, comfort in recognizing that some parts of life are constant, and a wake-up in knowing that we are surrounded by risks we would never know (precisely why they are called ‘risks’).
If you’re drawn to stories, history, psychology, and decisions big or small, Same as Ever offers a lot.
#ReadBetter #BookReview #CuriousTitans
Book#: 296
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