Great Ideas from Morgan Housel’s The Psychology of Money

I’ve committed most of 2024 to studying one particular topic in great depth so I haven’t had a lot of time for my own reading, but when Neel Parekh cited The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel as one of his best reads in a while, I made sure to read it.

I don’t have time to do a full review at the moment, but here are some of my favorite ideas from the text:

If you can understand that the working poor look at lottery tickets the way the more financially fortunate might look at investing, their decisions to seemingly throw money away seem more coherent. “I don’t have a chance to achieve many of the dreams of the middle class and beyond, so why not take a chance on this?”

Speaking of luck, it should simply not be underestimated as a factor in success. More people need to be honest about the luck they’ve experienced personally or professionally, not to indicate to people that they need to “get lucky” to succeed, but that sometimes you can do everything right and miss that luck factor, and at other times you can be doing things wrong and still get lucky. Luck does not discriminate.

Be clear on what is enough for you. While I never thought much of John Bogle’s book on this subject, the anecdote at the beginning of the book is really all you need: do you know what is actually…