The Psychology of Money

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. So equally smart people can disagree about how and why recessions happen, how you should invest your money, what you should prioritize, how much risk you should take, and so on.

We need to believe we live in a predictable, controllable world, so we turn to authoritative-sounding people who promise to satisfy that need.”

Satisfying that need is a great way to put it. Wanting to believe we are in control is an emotional itch that needs to be scratched, rather than an analytical problem to be calculated and solved. The illusion of control is more persuasive than the reality of uncertainty. So we cling to stories about outcomes being in our control.

1. The more you want something to be true, the more likely you are to believe a story that overestimates the odds of it being true

As for the top one percent, the really well-to-do and the rich, whom we might classify very roughly indeed as the $16,000-and-over group, their share of the total national income, after taxes, had come down by 1945 from 13 percent to 7 percent

They are surely wrong: the outcome of a start-up depends as much on the achievements of its competitors and on changes in the market as on its own efforts.

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

Be careful who you praise and admire. Be careful who you look down upon and wish to avoid becoming.

“The customer is always right” and “customers don’t know what they want” are both accepted business wisdom.

We have brains that prefer easy answers without much appetite for nuance.

The line between bold and reckless can be thin.