读书笔记：The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness

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Apr 9, 2023

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But the first thing I learned after the financial crisis was that no one could accurately explain what happened, or why it happened, let alone what should be done about it. For every good explanation there was an equally convincing rebuttal.

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It is impossible to think of a story about Ronald Read performing a heart transplant better than a Harvard-trained surgeon. Or designing a skyscraper superior to the best-trained architects. There will never be a story of a janitor outperforming the world’s top nuclear engineers. But these stories do happen in investing. 成为有钱人并不需要专业训练。

Most of the reason why, I believe, is that we think about and are taught about money in ways that are too much like physics (with rules and laws) and not enough like psychology (with emotions and nuance).

But the first thing I learned after the financial crisis was that no one could accurately explain what happened, or why it happened, let alone what should be done about it. For every good explanation there was an equally convincing rebuttal. 没有人能够精确解释到底发生了什么。

Physics isn’t controversial. It’s guided by laws. Finance is different. It’s guided by people’s behaviors. And how I behave might make sense to me but look crazy to you.

I realized that you could understand it better through the lenses of psychology and history, not finance.

optimism. To get why investors sell out at

I love Voltaire’s observation that “[[History]] never repeats itself; man always does.” It applies so well to how we behave with money.

People do some crazy things with money. But no one is crazy. 那些看上去「疯狂的举动」，在个体情景下是合理的。

Here’s the thing: People from different generations, raised by different parents who earned different incomes and held different values, in different parts of the world, born into different economies, experiencing different job markets with different incentives and different degrees of luck, learn very different lessons. 不同时代的人，由于自己的经历有着不同的金钱观。

So all of us—you, me, everyone—go through life anchored to a set of views about how money works that vary wildly from person to person. What seems crazy to you might make sense to me. 信息和经验不同，你觉得疯狂的事情，我可能会觉得有道理。

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. 个体经历的事情，只是世界发生事情中相当少的一部分。

We see the world through a different lens.

We all think we know how the world works. But we’ve all only experienced a tiny sliver of it.

In theory people should make investment decisions based on their goals and the characteristics of the investment options available to them at the time. But that’s not what people do. The economists found that people’s lifetime investment decisions are heavily anchored to the experiences those investors had in their own generation—especially experiences early in their adult life.

Forty percent of Americans cannot come up with $400 in an emergency.

We are paying for a dream, and you may not understand that because you are already living a dream. That’s why we buy more tickets than you do. 买彩票很愚蠢？但买梦想啦？

Luck and risk are both the reality that every outcome in life is guided by forces other than individual effort. 个体努力比不过运气和风险。

predominantly off luck?” You would reply, “Of

“You had a bad outcome so it must have been caused by a bad decision” is the story that makes the most sense to me. 错误归因于自己更加有效。

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

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

But realize that not all success is due to hard work, and not all poverty is due to laziness. Keep this in mind when judging people, including yourself.

Bill Gates once said, “Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.”

If you risk something that is important to you for something that is unimportant to you, it just does not make any sense. 如果你在用对你很重要的东西冒险，那么你的冒险没有意义。

The hardest financial skill is getting the goalpost to stop moving.

Modern capitalism is a pro at two things: generating wealth and generating envy.

Social comparison is the problem here.

The point is that the ceiling of social comparison is so high that virtually no one will ever hit it. Which means it’s a battle that can never be won, or that the only way to win is to not fight to begin with—to accept that you might have enough, even if it’s less than those around you. 虚荣攀比没有赢家。

The dealer, stone-cold serious, replied: “The only way to win in a Las Vegas casino is to exit as soon as you enter.”

There are many things never worth risking, no matter the potential gain. 有风险会退出游戏的冒险都不值得一试。

Don’t get too attached to anything—your reputation, your accomplishments or any of it.

It begins when a summer never gets warm enough to melt the previous winter’s snow. The leftover ice base makes it easier for snow to accumulate the following winter, which increases the odds of snow sticking around in the following summer, which attracts even more accumulation the following winter. Perpetual snow reflects more of the sun’s rays, which exacerbates cooling, which brings more snowfall, and on and on. Within a few hundred years a seasonal snowpack grows into a continental ice sheet, and you’re off to the races. 冰河时代的形成，很可能是一个夏天不够热。

The big takeaway from ice ages is that you don’t need tremendous force to create tremendous results. 你不需要一个巨大的力量来获取巨大的结果。

The practical takeaway is that the counterintuitiveness of compounding may be responsible for the majority of disappointing trades, bad strategies, and successful investing attempts.

Getting money requires taking risks, being optimistic, and putting yourself out there.

But keeping money requires the opposite of taking risk. It requires humility, and fear that what you’ve made can be taken away from you just as fast.

survival mentality is so key with money. One is the obvious: few gains are so great that they’re worth wiping yourself out over. The other, as we saw in chapter 4, is the counterintuitive math of compounding. 生存主义是财富的关键。

Nassim Taleb put it this way: “Having an ‘edge’ and surviving are two different things: the first requires the second. You need to avoid ruin. At all costs.”

More than I want big returns, I want to be financially unbreakable. And if I’m unbreakable I actually think I’ll get the biggest returns, because I’ll be able to stick around long enough for compounding to work wonders.

Planning is important, but the most important part of every [[plan]] is to plan on the plan not going according to plan.

A plan is only useful if it can survive reality. And a future filled with unknowns is everyone’s reality.

Many bets fail not because they were wrong, but because they were mostly right in a situation that required things to be exactly right.

Conservative is avoiding a certain level of risk. Margin of safety is raising the odds of success at a given level of risk by increasing your chances of survival. Its magic is that the higher your margin

Margin of safety is raising the odds of success at a given level of risk by increasing your chances of survival.

A [[barbelled personality]]—optimistic about the future, but paranoid about what will prevent you from getting to the future—is vital.

Economies, markets, and careers often follow a similar path—growth amid loss.

you need short-term paranoia to keep you alive long enough to exploit long-term optimism.

[[Long tails]]—the farthest ends of a distribution of outcomes—have tremendous influence in finance, where a small number of events can account for the majority of outcomes.

The idea that a few things account for most results is not just true for companies in your investment portfolio. It’s also an important part of your own behavior as an investor.

Napoleon’s definition of a military genius was, “The man who can do the average thing when all those around him are going crazy.” It’s

“It’s not whether you’re right or wrong that’s important,” George Soros once said, “but how much money you make when you’re right and how much you lose when you’re wrong.” You can be wrong half the time and still make a fortune.

But if there’s a common denominator in happiness—a universal fuel of joy—it’s that people want to control their lives.

But doing something you love on a schedule you can’t control can feel the same as doing something you hate.

what’s happened here is that we’ve used our greater wealth to buy bigger and better stuff. But we’ve simultaneously given up more control over our time.

A wise old [[owl]] lived in an oak, The more he saw the less he spoke, The less he spoke, the more he heard, Why aren’t we all like that wise old bird?

“Your kids don’t want your money (or what your money buys) anywhere near as much as they want you. Specifically, they want you with them,” Pillemer writes.

Controlling your [[time]] is the highest dividend money pays.

The letter I wrote after my son was born said, “You might think you want an expensive car, a fancy watch, and a huge house. But I’m telling you, you don’t. What you want is respect and admiration from other people, and you think having expensive stuff will bring it. It almost never does—especially from the people you want to respect and admire you.”

It’s difficult to learn from what you can’t see. Which helps explain why it’s so hard for many to build wealth.

The first idea—simple, but easy to overlook—is that building wealth has little to do with your income or investment returns, and lots to do with your savings rate.

It’s a daily struggle against instincts to extend your peacock feathers to their outermost limits and keep up with others doing the same.

Savings can be created by spending less. You can spend less if you desire less. And you will desire less if you care less about what others think of you.

communication, empathy, and, perhaps most of all, flexibility.

One is that “minimizing future regret” is hard to rationalize on paper but easy to justify in real life.

Let me suggest that you love your investments.

A trap many investors fall into is what I call “historians as prophets” fallacy: An overreliance on past data as a signal to future conditions in a field where innovation and change are the lifeblood of progress.

But investing is not a hard science. It’s a massive group of people making imperfect decisions with limited information about things that will have a massive impact on their wellbeing, which can make even smart people nervous, greedy and paranoid.

Experiencing specific events does not necessarily qualify you to know what will happen next. In fact it rarely does, because experience leads to overconfidence more than forecasting ability.

That’s the correct lesson to learn from [[surprise]]s: that the world is surprising.

General things like people’s relationship to greed and fear, how they behave under stress, and how they respond to incentives tend to be stable in time. The history of money is useful for that kind of stuff.

You have to give yourself room for error. You have to plan on your plan not going according to plan.

Conservative approach that I wanted to have enough

Out of 104 tanks in the unit, fewer than 20 were operable. Engineers quickly found the issue. Historian William Craig writes: “During the weeks of inactivity behind the front lines, field mice had nested inside the vehicles and eaten away insulation covering the electrical systems.” The Germans had the most sophisticated equipment in the world. Yet there they were, defeated by mice. 德国的坦克被老鼠打败

Suspension bridges can similarly lose many of their cables without falling. 吊桥很多线缆是多余的。

Only 27% of college grads have a job related to their [[major]], according to the Federal Reserve.⁴⁶

And the truth is, few of us do. It’s hard to make enduring long-term decisions when your view of what you’ll want in the

It’s hard to make enduring long-term decisions when your view of what you’ll want in the future is likely to shift.

So young people pay good money to get tattoos removed that teenagers paid good money to get. 你的目标和欲望都会变化。

Middle-aged people rushed to divorce people who young adults rushed to marry. Older adults work hard to lose what middle-aged adults worked hard to gain. 年轻人忙着结婚，中年人忙着离婚。目标变了。

Tell a five-year-old boy he should be a lawyer instead of a tractor driver and he will disagree with every cell in his body. 小孩的目标肯定会变化。

dollars—become enduring regrets. Regrets are especially painful when you abandon a previous plan and feel like you have to run in the other direction twice as fast to make up for lost time.

The trick is to accept the reality of change and move on as soon as possible.

Zweig continued, “he said the words I’ve never forgotten: ‘I have no [[sunk cost]]s.’”⁴⁹ 我没有[[沉没成本]]

“Every job looks easy when you’re not the one doing it.”

But if you view volatility as a fee, things look different. Disneyland tickets

But if you view volatility as a fee, things look different.

The trick is convincing yourself that the market’s fee is worth it. That’s the only way to properly deal with volatility and uncertainty—not just putting up with it, but realizing that it’s an admission fee worth paying.

But if you view the admission fee as a fine, you’ll never enjoy the magic. Find the price, then pay it.

Investors often innocently take cues from other investors who are playing a different game than they are.

Ask yourself: How much should you pay for Google stock today? The answer depends on who “you” are.

Do you have a 30-year time horizon? Then the smart price to pay involves a sober analysis of Google’s discounted cash flows over the next 30 years. Are you looking to cash out within 10 years? Then the price to pay can be figured out by an analysis of the tech industry’s potential over the next decade and whether Google management can execute on its vision. Are you looking to sell within a year? Then pay attention to Google’s current product sales cycles and whether we’ll have a bear market. Are you a day trader? Then the smart price to pay is “who cares?” because you’re just trying to squeeze a few bucks out of whatever happens between now and lunchtime, which can be accomplished at any price. 不同的人玩不同的游戏，跟着别人玩得想想别人的游戏是不是你的游戏。

It’s hard to grasp that other investors have different goals than we do, because an anchor of psychology is not realizing that rational people can see the world through a different lens than your own.

The main thing I can recommend is going out of your way to identify what game you’re playing.

Pessimism isn’t just more common than optimism. It also sounds smarter. 悲观主义听上去显得聪明，但不一定是对的。

Another is that pessimists often extrapolate present trends without accounting for how markets adapt.

bridging gaps between cities and rural communities; oceans and countries.

Growth is driven by compounding, which always takes time. Destruction is driven by single points of failure, which can happen in seconds, and loss of confidence, which can happen in an instant.

There was one change the alien couldn’t see between 2007 and 2009: The stories we told ourselves about the economy.

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. 自我催眠，你越想某些事情发生，你越是相信。

Ali Hajaji’s son was sick. Elders in his Yemeni village proposed a folk remedy: shove the tip of a burning stick through his son’s chest to drain the sickness from his body. After the procedure, Hajaji told The New York Times: “When you have no money, and your son is sick, you’ll believe anything.”⁶⁴

If there’s a 1% chance that someone’s prediction will come true, and it coming true will change your life, it’s not crazy to pay attention—just in case.

The bigger the gap between what you want to be true and what you need to be true to have an acceptable outcome, the more you are protecting yourself from falling victim to an appealing financial fiction.

Everyone has an incomplete view of the world. But we form a complete narrative to fill in the gaps. 我们通过“故事”自圆其说，弥补我们的无知。#Norman

Just like my daughter, I don’t know what I don’t know. So I am just as susceptible to explaining the world through the limited set of mental models I have at my disposal.

Hindsight, the ability to explain the past, gives us the illusion that the world is understandable. It gives us the illusion that the world makes sense, even when it doesn’t make sense. That’s a big deal in producing mistakes in many fields. 世界可以理解只是一个可以理解的幻觉。

We all want the complicated world we live in to make sense. So we tell ourselves stories to fill in the gaps of what are effectively blind spots.

We have to think the world we operate in makes sense based on what we happen to know. It’d be too hard to get out of bed in the morning if you felt otherwise.

Less ego, more wealth. Saving money is the gap between your ego and your income, and wealth is what you don’t see. 财富是你看不到的东西。

So wealth is created by suppressing what you could buy today in order to have more stuff or more options in the future.

[[Time]] is the most powerful force in investing. It makes little things grow big and big mistakes fade away.

Become OK with a lot of things going wrong.

Define the [[game]] you’re playing, and make sure your actions are not being influenced by people playing a different game.

Ken Murray, a professor of medicine at USC, wrote an essay in 2011 titled “How Doctors [[Die]]” that showed the degree to which doctors choose different end-of-life treatments for themselves than they recommend for their patients.⁷⁰

repressively frugal because our aspirations for more

Nassim Taleb explained: “True success is exiting some rat race to modulate one’s activities for peace of mind.” I like that. 真正的成功是退出一些激烈的竞争，以获取精神平静。

“True success is exiting some rat race to modulate one’s activities for peace of mind.” I like that.

But our goal isn’t to be coldly rational; just psychologically reasonable.

One of my deeply held investing beliefs is that there is little correlation between investment effort and investment results.

The goal here is not to describe every play; it’s to look at how one game influenced the next.

[[History]] is just one damned thing after another.