Morgan Housel

doing well with money has a little to do with how smart you are and a lot to do with how you behave

Ordinary folks with no financial education can be wealthy if they have a handful of behavioral skills that have nothing to do with formal measures of intelligence.

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.

One, financial outcomes are driven by luck, independent of intelligence and effort. That’s true to some extent, and this book will discuss it in further detail. Or, two (and I think more common), that financial success is not a hard science. It’s a soft skill, where how you behave is more important than what you know.

Everyone has their own unique experience with how the world works.

Your personal experiences with money make up maybe 0.00000001% of what’s happened in the world, but maybe 80% of how you think the world works

all think we know how the world works. But we’ve all only experienced a tiny sliver of it.
As investor Michael Batnick says, “some lessons have to be experienced before they can be understood.” We are all victims, in different ways, to that truth.

If you grew up when inflation was high, you invested less of your money in bonds later in life compared to those who grew up when inflation was low

Few people make financial decisions purely with a spreadsheet. They make them at the dinner table, or in a company meeting. Places where personal history, your own unique view of the world, ego, pride, marketing, and odd incentives are scrambled together into a narrative that works for you.

The accidental impact of actions outside of your control can be more consequential than the ones you consciously take