The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk
556: Morgan Housel - A Guide To Human Behavior, Telling Great Stories, Becoming a Reasonable Optimist, Writing Advice, Mr. Beast, & What Never Changes
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- "Your personal experiences make up maybe 0.00000001% of what's happened in the world but maybe 80% of how you think the world works."
- "All behaviors make sense with enough information."
- The best story wins: Good stories have an extraordinary ability to inspire and evoke positive emotions, bringing insight and attention to topics that people tend to ignore when they've previously been presented with nothing but facts.
- Stories are more powerful than statistics. And most statistics are incomplete props to justify a story. Stories are easier to remember, easier to relate to, and emotionally persuasive.
- Progress requires optimism and pessimism to coexist: A rational optimist. - Save like a pessimist and invest like an optimist. - Plan like a pessimist and dream like an optimist.
- "It's supposed to be hard." – Everything worth pursuing comes with a little pain. The trick is not minding it hurts.
- It's impossible to plan for what you can't imagine. - Invest in preparedness, not in prediction. - Realize that if you're only preparing for the risks you can envision, you'll be unprepared for the risks you can't see every single time.
- Fostering envy vs. admiration. Are you creating envy by what you post on social media?
- "People admire you when you are pursuing something, not when you have it."
- Reasonable Optimists: Once people believe in a better future – for themselves and others – they become willing to take risks, work hard, sacrifice near-term comfort, delay gratification, and cooperate with others, all of which are the raw ingredients of economic and social progress.
- A realistic optimist is someone who knows that what happens in any given day, month, or year will be surprising, disappointing, difficult, and mostly out of your control. But they know with equal confidence that what happens in any given decade or generation is likely to be pretty good, bending heavily toward progress.
- The reasonable optimist expects the world to break all the time. But they know – as a matter of faith – that if they can survive the day-to-day fractures they'll capture the up-and-to-the-right arc over time.
- Writing: I think "know your audience" can be dangerous advice for writers. Write stuff you yourself find interesting and entertaining. Writing for yourself is fun, and it shows. Writing for others is work, and it shows.
- If you're efficient, you're doing it the wrong way (Jerry Seinfeld micro-managed everything about his show). Counterintuitive. Highlights the dangers of shortcuts.
- Be careful what you wish for: A carefree and stress-free life sounds wonderful only until you recognize the motivation and progress it prevents. Hardship is the most potent fuel of problem-solving. And what makes life mean something is purpose. A goal.
- Read less news and more books. If you read good books, you'll have an easier time figuring out what you should pay attention to. (News isn't timeless. Good books are)
- Writing: People don't remember books, blogs, or articles. They remember sentences. That should be your goal: a collection of memorable sentences. One good line is infinitely more powerful than a few clumsy paragraphs.
- Mr Beast tells aspiring YouTubers to make 100 videos and he'll give them feedback and advice. 2 things happen. 98% never get close and give up. The 2% who do, no longer need his help.
- People use success as an indication of what to keep doing. But most success plants the seeds of its own demise, so what people think works and try to copy is always changing.
- Keep running - There is never a time when an investor can discover an investing strategy and be confident it will continue working indefinitely. The world changes, and competitors create their own little twist that exploits and snuffs out your niche. Same with careers, job skills, relationships, and countries. It's hard to accept that you have to put in a ton of work just to stay in one place, but that's how it works. Keep running.
- Acceptable Flaws -- Short-term thinking is the root of most of our problems in business, investing, and politics. But I get why it happens. It has to happen. Short-term thinking can be the only way you'll survive long enough to experience long-term results. It's an acceptable flaw.
- Useful Biases -- Reasonable ignorance – intentionally limiting your diligence in order to avoid decision paralysis in a world where everything, if you dig deep enough, is more complicated than it seems. (the paradox of choice).
- Progress happens too slowly for people to notice; setbacks happen too fast for people to ignore.
- "Stop telling kids they can be whatever they want to be. You can be whatever you're good at, as long as they're hiring. And even then it helps to know someone." -- Chris Rock
- A good test when reading the news is to constantly ask, "Will I still care about this story in a year? Two years? Five years?"
- "Money buys happiness in the same way drugs bring pleasure: incredible if done right, dangerous if used to mask a weakness, and disastrous when no amount is enough."
- "I'm not interested in anything that's not sustainable. Friendships, investing, careers, podcasts, reading habits, exercise habits... If I can't keep it going, I'm not interested in it."
- "I know people who have a lot of money, and they get hospital wings named after them. But the truth is nobody in the world loves them. If you get to my age and nobody thinks well of you, I don't care how big your bank account is, your life is a disaster."
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To take advantage of this, go to storyworth.com/leader and save $10 on your first purchase. That's storyworth.com/leader. Welcome to the Learning Leader Show, presented by Insight Global, I am your host, Ryan Hawk. Thank you so much for being here, text Hawk 266866 to become part of Mindful Monday. Along with tens of thousands of other learning leaders from all over the world, we'll receive a carefully curated email from me each Monday morning to help you start your week off right. You'll also receive details about how my book, The Pursuit of Excellence, will help you become a more effective leader, text Hawk 266866. Now, on to tonight's featured leader, one of my favorites, Morgan Haussel, is a partner at the Collaborative Fund. He's the author of The Psychology of Money, a book that sold over 4 million copies. In his latest book, a New York Times bestseller is called, "Same as Ever," a guide to what never changes Morgan is one of my must-read writers. When he publishes something new, I read it every time. During this conversation, we discuss how to become more self-aware and gain perspective. Then why progress requires both pessimism and optimism, as well as what it means to be a, quote, "reasonable optimist." Then Morgan shares a story from Jerry Seinfeld about why efficiency is not always a good thing. Then he talks about why the best storyteller will always win. Ladies and gentlemen, please enjoy this wide-ranging conversation from one of my favorites, it's the great Morgan Haussel. Morgan, great to have you back on The Learning Leader Show. Welcome, man. Thanks so much, Ryan. Good to be here. Nice to see you. Let's start with the question around awareness and perspective, and this is a quote, I believe it was in psychology money, but you've talked about it since then, as well. The quote is, "Your personal experiences make up maybe 0.00001% of what's happened in the world, but maybe 80% of how you think the world works." That is so true when it comes to awareness and perspective. Can you share a little bit more about what that means to you? Here's what's funny. After I wrote that in The Psychology of Money, one of the common criticisms of the book that I think is valid is people who would say, "Hey, interesting book, but it's written through the lens of a college educated white American male." And I was like, "Yes, of course it is." Like, "Hello, of course it is." And nobody can escape the lens of their own experiences in life. You can be empathetic, you can read and learn and understand about what other people have been through, but nothing is more persuasive than what you have experienced firsthand. That's true for me, it's true for you, it's true for everybody. And I think a consequence of that is that everybody thinks they are trying to make sense of the world independently, and they're just saying, "I'm going to see what's happening and then create my little model of how the world works." But since the world that I have seen is different from the world that you have seen, even if we are white men from the same country roughly the same age, we've experienced very different things. So, of course, we're not going to see the world in the same lens. My brother-in-law is a social worker, he works with very disadvantaged and abused children, and he had this quote that I love, he just knocked me off my feet. He said, "All behavior makes sense with enough information." He met it in the context of when he's dealing with a kid who has very poor behavior at school, they're disobedient, they're not studying, they're absent, whatever it is. With enough information, the behavior makes sense. If you understand what they're going through at home and their broken family life, whatever it may be, the behavior makes sense. And I think there are almost no exceptions to that. All behavior makes sense with enough information. Even the behavior that you disagree with, that you find repulsive, that you find violent and immoral, all of it makes sense with enough information. And I think understanding that is such a calming sense of making sense of the world. I'm just curious, after doing a podcast speaking with hundreds and hundreds of leaders, and I talked with Paulina Pompiano about this, she's another amazing writer, and we said the world becomes actually more gray, and you become more reasonable as you open up your eyes and see the world through others' eyes through having these deep, long-form conversations. It's one of the best benefits of having an interview style podcast is it's really opened my eyes to all the different perspectives and life experiences of people different from me. It's made me more reasonable, more realizing that the world is in black and white, it's so gray. And I think this quote really speaks to that as well, and that's why it benefits us to get out there, to talk to people, to learn the stories of others. And to make you just probably more compassionate and a more reasonable person. Yeah, I think that's so, you nailed it right on the head. And I think one way to think about this is that whenever you see someone who's doing something that you disagree with, they have a viewpoint or an action that you're like, "Ah, that's the wrong thing to do." A better question, rather than asking why did you do that, or why do you believe that? Better question is, what have you experienced that made you believe that? And if I experienced the same thing, would I believe the same thing?
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