Riku > Books: psychology‎ (35)

2. Luck & Risk is all around you. They

2. Luck & Risk is all around you. They don't fit the stories you want to tell.

3. If you can't recognize when you have enough, you will soon have nothing.

4. Warren Buffet could have been an ordinary investor if not for his longevity.
Investing - if done well - is utterly boring.
It’s because the chief ingredient in the growth of a portfolio is time.

5. More than big returns, be financially unbreakable. If you are unbreakable you actually will get the biggest returns, because will be able to stick around long enough for compounding to work wonders.

6. The tail wags the dog in Finance and Business.
Long tails—the farthest ends of a distribution of outcomes—have tremendous influence, where a small number of events can account for the majority of outcomes.

7. 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.
It is the highest dividend money pays.

8. The Man in the Fancy Car is irrelevant, because the observers are busy imagining themselves in it.

9. There is no faster way to feel rich than to spend lots of money on really nice things. There's no faster way to not be rich as well. That's the paradox of wealth.

10. One of the most powerful ways to increase your savings isn’t to raise your income. It’s to raise your humility.
Dont spend money to show you have money.
Savings = Income - Ego

11. Adopt a reasonable strategy, not an ultra rational one. The plan that you are able to stick to is better than the one that looks good on a spreadsheet.

12. "Things that have never happened before happen all the time.”
History is mostly the study of surprising events. 2020 should have taught us this, of course.

13. Margin of Safety—you can also call it room for error—is the only effective way to safely navigate a world that is governed by odds, not certainties.

14. An underpinning of psychology is that people are poor forecasters of their future selves.
Imagining a goal is easy and fun. Imagining a goal in the context of the realistic life stresses that grow with competitive pursuits is something entirely different.

15. Don't think of market losses from fluctuations as a fine, but as an admission fee. It'll help you stay in longer.

16. The financial game has one fundamental parameter - the time horizon.
Never copy someone working with a different time horizon than you.

17. Optimism is the best bet for most people because the world tends to get better for most people most of the time.
Progress happens too slowly to notice, but setbacks happen too quickly to ignore.
Pessimism sounds smarter, but optimism is the long game.

18. Trying to make sense of the world is the cause of most mistakes.
Psychologist Philip Tetlock once wrote: “We need to believe we live in a predictable, controllable world, so we turn to authoritative-sounding people who promise to satisfy that need.”
Respect the mess.

A long time ago xxx wrote that there are only four stories that are told and re-told: the siege of the city, the return home, the quest, and the (self-) sacrifice of God.

It is notable that the same story could be placed into different categories by different viewers: what is a quest/return home for Theseus is a brutal God’s sacrifice for Minotaur. Maybe there are more than just ‘four cycles’, as xxx called them, but their number is definitely finite and they are all known. We will invent nothing new. Why?

This is where we come to the third possible definition of a myth. If a mind is like a computer, perhaps myths are its shell programs: sets of rules that we follow in our world processing, mental matrices we project onto complex events to endow them with meaning. People who work in computer programming say that to write code you have to be young. It seems that the same rule applies to the cultural code. Our programs were written when the human race was young – at a stage so remote and obscure that we don’t understand the programming language any more.

Why does the Minotaur have a bull’s head? What does he think and how? Is his mind a function of his body or is his body an image in his mind? Is Theseus inside the Labyrinth? Or is the Labyrinth inside Theseus? Both? Neither?

Each answer means that you turn down a different corridor. There were many people who claimed they knew the truth. But so far nobody has returned from the Labyrinth. Have a nice walk.