The Psychology of Money: Summary, Highlights & Notes
I just finished reading The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel.
This is a great book for learning about investing and, more broadly, money. And as Morgan Housel says, “Two topics impact everyone, whether you are interested in them or not: health and money.” So I’m pretty certain this book will have a positive impact on your life.
I made this summary using my favorite highlights from The Psychology of Money, adding notes with insights and stories from other authors, as well as my own reflections. I organized it into 10 key ideas:
💡 Idea 1 - Financial Success is a Soft Skill (Not a Hard Science)
💡 Idea 2 - Nothing Is As Good or As Bad As It Seems
💡 Idea 3 - Focus on Longevity
💡 Idea 4 - Sensible Optimism
💡 Idea 5 - You Can Be Wrong Half the Time and Still Make a Fortune
💡 Idea 6 - The Highest Dividend Money Pays: Freedom
💡 Idea 7 - Wealth Is What You Don’t See
💡 Idea 8 - You Don’t Need a Specific Reason to Save
💡 Idea 9 - “I Have No Sunk Costs”
💡 Idea 10 - The Price of Investing
💡 Idea 1 - Financial Success is a Soft Skill (Not a Hard Science)
🖍️ Highlight 1
My favorite Wikipedia entry begins: “Ronald James Read was an American philanthropist, investor, janitor, and gas station attendant.”
Ronald Read was born in rural Vermont. He was the first person in his family to graduate high school, made all the more impressive by the fact that he hitchhiked to campus each day.
For those who knew Ronald Read, there wasn’t much else worth mentioning. His life was about as low key as they come.
Read fixed cars at a gas station for 25 years and swept floors at JCPenney for 17 years. He bought a two-bedroom house for $12,000 at age 38 and lived there for the rest of his life. He was widowed at age 50 and never remarried. A friend recalled that his main hobby was chopping firewood.
Read died in 2014, age 92. Which is when the humble rural janitor made international headlines.
2,813,503 Americans died in 2014. Fewer than 4,000 of them had a net worth of over $8 million when they passed away. Ronald Read was one of them.
In his will the former janitor left $2 million to his stepkids and more than $6 million to his local hospital and library.
Those who knew Read were baffled. Where did he get all that money?
It turned out there was no secret. There was no lottery win and no inheritance. Read saved what little he could and invested it in blue chip stocks. Then he waited, for decades on end, as tiny savings compounded into more than $8 million.
That’s it. From janitor to philanthropist.
— Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money.
[📝 Note]
A few quotes that encapsulate this story…
Investing small amounts of money over a long time works miracles but no one wants to get rich slow.
— Kevin Kelly, Excellent Advice for Living (Resurfaced using Readwise).
In investing it is not necessary to do extraordinary things to get extraordinary results.
— Warren Buffet, Berkshire Hathaway Letters to Shareholders (year 2016).
All benefits in life come from compound interest, whether in money, relationships, love, health, activities, or habits... I only want to work on things I know have long-term payout.
— Naval Ravikant, The Almanack of Naval Ravikant.
🖍️ Highlight 2
Financial success is not a hard science. It’s a soft skill, where how you behave is more important than what you know.
…
Two topics impact everyone, whether you are interested in them or not: health and money.
— Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money.
💡 Idea 2 - Nothing Is As Good or As Bad As It Seems
🖍️ Highlight 1
The line between “inspiringly bold” and “foolishly reckless” can be a millimeter thick and only visible with hindsight. Risk and luck are doppelgangers.
…
After my son was born, I wrote him a letter that said, in part:
Some people are born into families that encourage education; others are against it. Some are born into flourishing economies encouraging of entrepreneurship; others are born into war and destitution. I want you to be successful, and I want you to earn it. But realize that not all success is due to hard work, and not all poverty is due to laziness. Keep this in mind when judging people, including yourself.
Therefore, focus less on specific individuals and case studies and more on broad patterns.
Studying a specific person can be dangerous because we tend to study extreme examples—the billionaires, the CEOs, or the massive failures that dominate the news—and extreme examples are often the least applicable to other situations, given their complexity.
— Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money.
[📝 Note]
I enjoyed the advantage of being born into an already wealthy family, and when I began my business career I was subsidized by my father.
— J. Paul Getty, As I See It. (Resurfaced using Readwise).
The filthy rich are not gods. They are men and women who put on their underwear in the morning pretty much as you do... they were lucky in the “Search” and skillful in their follow-up. Boldness helped... But, without some luck, no one can get anywhere.
— Felix Dennis, How to Get Rich. (Resurfaced using Readwise).
The graveyard of failed persons will be full of people who shared the following traits: courage, risk taking, optimism, et cetera. Just like the population of millionaires. There may be some differences in skills, but what truly separates the two is for the most part a single factor: luck. Plain luck.
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan.
🖍️ Highlight 2
Bill Gates once said, “Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.”
When things are going extremely well, realize it’s not as good as you think. You are not invincible, and if you acknowledge that luck brought you success then you have to believe in luck’s cousin, risk, which can turn your story around just as quickly.
But the same is true in the other direction. Failure can be a lousy teacher, because it seduces smart people into thinking their decisions were terrible when sometimes they just reflect the unforgiving realities of risk. 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.
But more important is that as much as we recognize the role of luck in success, the role of risk means we should forgive ourselves and leave room for understanding when judging failures. Nothing is as good or as bad as it seems.
— Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money.
[📝 Note]
Resonates with one of my all-time favorite quotes:
When wealth is lost, nothing is lost;
When health is lost, something is lost;
When character is lost, all is lost.
— Billy Graham
(P.S. I have the quote above always present in my work desk. It never fails to remind me what truly matters.)
Another great quote:
Receive wealth or prosperity without arrogance; and be ready to let it go.
— Marcus Aurelius
💡 Idea 3 - Focus on Longevity
🖍️ Highlight 1
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.
Michael Moritz, the billionaire head of Sequoia Capital, was asked by Charlie Rose why Sequoia was so successful. Moritz mentioned longevity, noting that some VC firms succeed for five or ten years, but Sequoia has prospered for four decades. Rose asked why that was:
Moritz: I think we’ve always been afraid of going out of business.
Rose: Really? So it’s fear? Only the paranoid survive?
Moritz: There’s a lot of truth to that … We assume that tomorrow won’t be like yesterday. We can’t afford to rest on our laurels. We can’t be complacent. We can’t assume that yesterday’s success translates into tomorrow’s good fortune.
— Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money.
[📝 Note]
Jensen [Huang] runs the company the way he does because he believes that Nvidia's worst enemy is not the competition, but itself — the complacency that grips any successful company.
— Tae Kim, The Nvidia Way (Resurfaced using Readwise).
Success breeds complacency.
Complacency breeds failure.
Only the paranoid survive.
— Andy Grove
🖍️ Highlight 2
We can spend years trying to figure out how Buffett achieved his investment returns: how he found the best companies, the cheapest stocks, the best managers. That’s hard. Less hard but equally important is pointing out what he didn’t do.
He didn’t get carried away with debt.
He didn’t panic and sell during the 14 recessions he’s lived through.
He didn’t sully his business reputation.
He didn’t attach himself to one strategy, one world view, or one passing trend.
He didn’t rely on others’ money (managing investments through a public company meant investors couldn’t withdraw their capital).
He didn’t burn himself out and quit or retire.
He survived. Survival gave him longevity. And longevity—investing consistently from age 10 to at least age 89—is what made compounding work wonders. That single point is what matters most when describing his success.
— Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money.
[📝 Note]
Most people focus on what to do, but a mark of wisdom is to first consider what not to do…
At the 2004 Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting, a young shareholder asked Buffett how to succeed in life. After Buffett shared his thoughts, Charlie [Munger] chimed in:
“Don’t do cocaine. Don’t race trains. And avoid AIDS situations.”
Many would dismiss his seemingly flippant answer as merely humorous (which it certainly was), but in fact it faithfully reflects both his general views on avoiding trouble in life and his particular method for avoiding missteps in investing. Often, as in this case, Charlie generally focuses first on what to avoid—that is, on what not to do—before he considers the affirmative steps he will take in a given situation. “All I want to know is where I’m going to die, so I’ll never go there” is one of his favorite quips.
…
“Quickly eliminate the big universe of what not to do; follow up with a fluent, multidisciplinary attack on what remains; then act decisively when, and only when, the right circumstances appear.” — Charlie Munger
— Peter Kaufman, Poor Charlie’s Almanack. (Resurfaced using Readwise).
💡 Idea 4 - Sensible Optimism
🖍️ Highlight
A “barbelled” personality—optimistic about the future, but paranoid about what will prevent you from getting to the future—is vital.
Optimism is usually defined as a belief that things will go well. But that’s incomplete. Sensible optimism is a belief that the odds are in your favor, and over time things will balance out to a good outcome even if what happens in between is filled with misery. And in fact you know it will be filled with misery. You can be optimistic that the long-term growth trajectory is up and to the right, but equally sure that the road between now and then is filled with landmines, and always will be. Those two things are not mutually exclusive.
The idea that something can gain over the long run while being a basketcase in the short run is not intuitive, but it’s how a lot of things work in life.
— Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money.
[📝 Note]
“Sensible optimism” applied to work:
You want to be optimistic and skeptical about two different things. You have to be optimistic about the possibility of solving the problem, but skeptical about the value of whatever solution you’ve got so far.
People who do good work often think that whatever they’re working on is no good. Others see what they’ve done and think it’s wonderful, but the creator sees nothing but flaws. This pattern is no coincidence: worry made the work good.
If you can keep hope and worry balanced, they will drive a project forward the same way your two legs drive a bicycle forward.
— Paul Graham, Hackers and Painters. (Resurfaced using Readwise).
💡 Idea 5 - You Can Be Wrong Half the Time and Still Make a Fortune
🖍️ Highlight
“It’s not whether you’re right or wrong that’s important,” George Soros once said, “but how much money you make when you’re right and how much you lose when you’re wrong.” You can be wrong half the time and still make a fortune.
— Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money.
[📝 Note]
Renowned investor Mohnish Pabrai—whom Morgan Housel mentions a few times in his book—tells a fascinating story to illustrate this:
He says that if you had invested equally in the “Nifty Fifty” (the 50 dominant American companies that became extremely popular during the late 1960s and early 1970s), 49 holdings could have gone to zero, but holding Walmart for 55 years would still have produced roughly 15% annual returns — beating the S&P500 for the same period.
That is a 98% error rate with an excellent overall result.
He then says that most stock-market returns come from a tiny minority of companies and estimates that Buffett’s hit rate is only 3–4% (Source).
Same idea applied to entrepreneurship…
“I will fail many times, and I will be really right once” is the entrepreneurs' way.
You have to give yourself a lot of chances to get lucky.
— Sam Altman, “How to Be Successful” (Resurfaced using Readwise Reader)
💡 Idea 6 - The Highest Dividend Money Pays: Freedom
🖍️ Highlight 1
The highest form of wealth is the ability to wake up every morning and say, “I can do whatever I want today.” People want to become wealthier to make them happier. Happiness is a complicated subject because everyone’s different. But if there’s a common denominator in happiness—a universal fuel of joy—it’s that people want to control their lives. 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.
…
The most powerful common denominator of happiness was simple. [Angus] Campbell summed it up:
Having a strong sense of controlling one’s life is a more dependable predictor of positive feelings of wellbeing than any of the objective conditions of life we have considered.
More than your salary. More than the size of your house. More than the prestige of your job. Control over doing what you want, when you want to, with the people you want to, is the broadest lifestyle variable that makes people happy.
— Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money.
[📝 Note]
I don’t think it’s wise to have an ambition to be President of the United States or a billionaire or something like that because the odds are too much against you. Much better to aim low.
I did not intend to get rich. I wanted to get independent, I just overshot! [laughter]
— Charlie Munger (A Conversation with Charlie Munger and Michigan Ross - 2017) (Resurfaced using Readwise Reader)
🖍️ Highlight 2
… The hardest thing about this was that I loved the work. And I wanted to work hard. But doing something you love on a schedule you can’t control can feel the same as doing something you hate. There is a name for this feeling. Psychologists call it reactance. Jonah Berger, a marketing professor at the University of Pennsylvania, summed it up well:
People like to feel like they’re in control—in the drivers’ seat. When we try to get them to do something, they feel disempowered. Rather than feeling like they made the choice, they feel like we made it for them. So they say no or do something else, even when they might have originally been happy to go along.
When you accept how true that statement is, you realize that aligning money towards a life that lets you do what you want, when you want, with who you want, where you want, for as long as you want, has incredible return. Derek Sivers, a successful entrepreneur, once wrote about a friend who asked him to tell the story about how he got rich:
I had a day job in midtown Manhattan paying $20k per year—about minimum wage ... I never ate out, and never took a taxi. My cost of living was about $1000/month, and I was earning $1800/month. I did this for two years, and saved up $12,000. I was 22 years old.
Once I had $12,000 I could quit my job and become a full-time musician. I knew I could get a few gigs per month to pay my cost of living. So I was free. I quit my job a month later, and never had a job again.
When I finished telling my friend this story, he asked for more. I said no, that was it. He said, “No, what about when you sold your company?”
I said no, that didn’t make a big difference in my life. That was just more money in the bank. The difference happened when I was 22.
— Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money.
[📝 Note]
The over-scheduled life is not worth living.
— Naval Ravikant
People who live far below their means enjoy a freedom that people busy upgrading their lifestyles can’t fathom.
— Naval Ravikant
💡 Idea 7 - Wealth Is What You Don’t See
🖍️ Highlight
Wealth is the nice cars not purchased. The diamonds not bought. The watches not worn, the clothes forgone and the first-class upgrade declined. Wealth is financial assets that haven’t yet been converted into the stuff you see.
That’s not how we think about wealth, because you can’t contextualize what you can’t see. Singer Rihanna nearly went bankrupt after overspending and sued her financial advisor. The advisor responded: “Was it really necessary to tell her that if you spend money on things, you will end up with the things and not the money?”
You can laugh, and please do. But the answer is, yes, people do need to be told that. When most people say they want to be a millionaire, what they might actually mean is “I’d like to spend a million dollars.” And that is literally the opposite of being a millionaire.
Investor Bill Mann once wrote: “There is no faster way to feel rich than to spend lots of money on really nice things. But the way to be rich is to spend money you have, and to not spend money you don’t have. It’s really that simple.”
It is excellent advice, but it may not go far enough. The only way to be wealthy is to not spend the money that you do have. It’s not just the only way to accumulate wealth; it’s the very definition of wealth.
…
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. Keep this in mind when quickly judging others’ success and setting your own goals.
— Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money.
[📝 Note]
Sam Walton is a great counter-example to Rihanna. His brother, Bud Walton, said:
People can’t understand why we’re still so conservative. They make a big deal about Sam being a billionaire and driving an old pickup truck or buying his clothes at Wal-Mart or refusing to fly first class. It’s just the way we were brought up. When a penny is lying out there on the street, how many people would go out there and pick it up? I’ll bet I would. And I know Sam would.
— Bud Walton, quoted in Sam Walton: Made in America—My Story. (Resurfaced using Readwise).
Overspending can make us miserable…
NOT LIVING BEYOND OUR MEANS
“Mozart is a good example of a life ruined by nuttiness. His achievement wasn’t diminished—he may well have had the best innate musical talent ever—but from the start, he was pretty miserable. He overspent his income his entire life—that will make you miserable.” — Charlie Munger
One of the keys to Charlie’s accumulation of wealth is that in his youth he was fanatical about not spending money. He didn’t buy his first new car until he was almost sixty, and he lived in an upper-middle-class house long after he became a multimillionaire. Every dollar saved was a dollar that could be invested. Overspending can make us miserable, but underspending and investing wisely will help speed us along the road to riches.
— David Clark, The Tao of Charlie Munger.
💡 Idea 8 - You Don’t Need a Specific Reason to Save
🖍️ Highlight
Some people save money for a downpayment on a house, or a new car, or for retirement.
That’s great, of course.
But saving does not require a goal of purchasing something specific.
You can save just for saving’s sake. And indeed you should. Everyone should.
Only saving for a specific goal makes sense in a predictable world. But ours isn’t. Saving is a hedge against life’s inevitable ability to surprise the hell out of you at the worst possible moment.
Another benefit of savings that isn’t attached to a spending goal is what we discussed in chapter 7: gaining control over your time.
Everyone knows the tangible stuff money buys. The intangible stuff is harder to wrap your head around, so it tends to go unnoticed. But the 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.
Savings without a spending goal gives you options and flexibility, the ability to wait and the opportunity to pounce. It gives you time to think. It lets you change course on your own terms.
Every bit of savings is like taking a point in the future that would have been owned by someone else and giving it back to yourself.
That flexibility and control over your time is an unseen return on wealth.
— Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money.
[📝 Note]
In his book Antifragile, Nassim Nicholas Taleb mentions that having redundancies (such as a pile of cash in your bank for no specific reason) makes one robust and “antifragile”—the exact opposite of fragile…
What makes life simple is that the robust and antifragile don’t have to have as accurate a comprehension of the world as the fragile—and they do not need forecasting. To see how redundancy is a nonpredictive, or rather a less predictive, mode of action, let us use the argument of Chapter 2: if you have extra cash in the bank (in addition to stockpiles of tradable goods such as cans of Spam and hummus and gold bars in the basement), you don’t need to know with precision which event will cause potential difficulties. It could be a war, a revolution, an earthquake, a recession, an epidemic, a terrorist attack, the secession of the state of New Jersey, anything—you do not need to predict much, unlike those who are in the opposite situation, namely, in debt. Those, because of their fragility, need to predict with more, a lot more, accuracy.
…
In spite of their bad press, some people in the nuclear industry seem to be among the rare ones to have gotten the point and taken it to its logical consequence. In the wake of the Fukushima disaster, instead of predicting failure and the probabilities of disaster, these intelligent nuclear firms are now aware that they should instead focus on exposure to failure—making the prediction or nonprediction of failure quite irrelevant. This approach leads to building small enough reactors and embedding them deep enough in the ground with enough layers of protection around them that a failure would not affect us much should it happen—costly, but still better than nothing. Another illustration, this time in economics, is the Swedish government’s focus on total fiscal responsibility after their budget troubles in 1991—it makes them much less dependent on economic forecasts. This allowed them to shrug off later crises.
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile.
💡 Idea 9 - “I Have No Sunk Costs”
🖍️ Highlight
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. When you accept the End of History Illusion*, you realize that the odds of picking a job when you’re not old enough to drink that you will still enjoy when you’re old enough to qualify for Social Security are low.
*[The End-of-History Illusion is the tendency to believe:“I have changed a lot in the past, but I am now basically the finished version of myself.”]
The trick is to accept the reality of change and move on as soon as possible.
Jason Zweig, the Wall Street Journal investment columnist, worked with psychologist Daniel Kahneman on writing Kahneman’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow. Zweig once told a story about a personality quirk of Kahneman’s that served him well: “Nothing amazed me more about Danny than his ability to detonate what we had just done,” Zweig wrote. He and Kahneman could work endlessly on a chapter, but:
The next thing you know, [Kahneman] sends a version so utterly transformed that it is unrecognizable: It begins differently, it ends differently, it incorporates anecdotes and evidence you never would have thought of, it draws on research that you’ve never heard of.
“When I asked Danny how he could start again as if we had never written an earlier draft,” Zweig continued, “he said the words I’ve never forgotten: ‘I have no sunk costs.’”
— Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money.
[📝 Note]
Sunk Cost (well defined by Chat-GPT): A sunk cost is time, money, or effort you have already spent and cannot recover. The sunk-cost fallacy is continuing with something mainly because you have already invested so much in it—even when stopping would now be the better choice.
Some people also get pretty attached to their ideas — I think mainly because they have built their identity around them… so changing an idea means changing part of their identity—and this is too hard to do for most people. But…
The greatest superpower is the ability to change yourself.
— Naval Ravikant
The ability to destroy your ideas rapidly instead of slowly when the occasion is right is one of the most valuable things. You have to work hard on it. Ask yourself what are the arguments on the other side. It’s bad to have an opinion you’re proud of if you can’t state the arguments for the other side better than your opponents. This is a great mental discipline.
— Charlie Munger, Whitney Tilson’s 2006 Wesco Annual Meeting Notes.
During his exile in Saint Helena in 1816, Napoleon said:
I had few really definite ideas, and the reason for this was that, instead of obstinately seeking to control circumstances, I obeyed them, and they forced me to change my mind all the time.
— Napoleon Bonaparte, The Mind of Napoleon: A Selection from His Written and Spoken Words, edited and translated by J. Christopher Herold.
Another reason for why is hard for people to change their mind is that changing one’s mind is perceived as a sign of weakness by most people. And it feels as if you’re admitting you were wrong, which is very painful if you have a high ego.
For many people, changing course is a sign of weakness, tantamount to admitting that you don't know what you are doing. This strikes me as particularly bizarre — personally, I think the person who can't change his or her mind is dangerous.
— Ed Catmull, Creativity, Inc. (Resurfaced using Readwise).
The best advice I follow here is:
(1) Not care what others think of me.
(2) I only care about succeeding in my mission or pursuit — so a good idea can come from anywhere and I’m willing to kill any of my ideas if I’m exposed to a better one.
“You do not want to win an argument. You want to win.”
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in The Game.
💡 Idea 10 - The Price of Investing
🖍️ Highlight
Like everything else worthwhile, successful investing demands a price. But its currency is not dollars and cents. It’s volatility, fear, doubt, uncertainty, and regret—all of which are easy to overlook until you’re dealing with them in real time.
…
It sounds trivial, but thinking of market volatility as a fee rather than a fine is an important part of developing the kind of mindset that lets you stick around long enough for investing gains to work in your favor.
Few investors have the disposition to say, “I’m actually fine if I lose 20% of my money.” This is doubly true for new investors who have never experienced a 20% decline.
But if you view volatility as a fee, things look different.
— Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money.
[📝 Note]
MARKET DECLINES
“If you’re not willing to react with equanimity to a market price decline of 50% two or three times a century you’re not fit to be a common shareholder and you deserve the mediocre result you’re going to get compared to the people who do have the temperament, who can be more philosophical about these market fluctuations.” — Charlie Munger
In the fifty years that Charlie has owned Berkshire Hathaway stock he has seen its stock price fall by 50% three separate times. If he had sold his shares during any one of those declines his net worth would be a fraction of what it is today. Charlie believes that it is the nature of long-term stock holding to occasionally experience a steep decline in a share price, which in Berkshire’s case it has always fully recovered from. But this phenomenon of decline and recovery has more to do with the economic nature of the company than the price fluctuation of the stock. Let me explain: The great stock market crashes of 1929 and 1932 devastated stock prices drastically, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average didn’t fully recover until 1954. It took twenty-five years for the DJIA to return to its precrash highs. However, companies with excellent economics working in their favor, the ones with a durable competitive advantage, such as Coca-Cola and Philip Morris, returned to their precrash highs by 1936. The mediocre companies, the ones with the poor business economics, took as long as twenty-five years before things started to look bright again. Charlie has never had to wait that long. Why? Because he invests only in companies with excellent economics working in their favor, such as the Coca-Cola Company and Berkshire Hathaway, which will quickly recover from any stock market crash.
— David Clark, The Tao of Charlie Munger. (Resurfaced using Readwise).