Everything feels unprecedented when you haven't engaged with history—understanding that statistically crazy events are bound to happen constantly helps you contextualize sensational news as normal variation rather than unique crisis.

Between 1980 and 2014, almost 40% of all public companies lost all of their value—they didn't merge, they went out of business—showing that being a successful public company is not sufficient protection against failure.

The famous Buffett quote 'be greedy when others are fearful and fearful when others are greedy' is much easier said than done because when stocks fall, there is usually a good reason for the fall, and the emotional context makes it psychologically difficult to act contrary to your fear.

The best way to increase your happiness is to lower your expectations—happiness is relative to expectations, not absolute conditions, making expectations management one of the highest-leverage ways to improve life satisfaction.

Warren Buffett's famous advice 'your best investment is yourself' suggests that self-improvement and education are higher-return activities than financial investing.

The biggest risks and most important news stories of the next 10 years will be something nobody is talking about today, no matter what year you're reading the book in—this truth remains constant across time.

Morgan Housel invests the vast majority of his portfolio in Vanguard index funds rather than trying to beat the market because he believes in maximizing for endurance and longevity over raw returns, and he wants to devote his bandwidth to writing rather than portfolio management.