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Happy Thursday folks!

Here is my favorite passage of the week, two quotes and book of the week with two important lessons to ponder on:

Author and Neuroscientist Nicole Vignola on why learning is vital:

The book of the week is Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes by Morgan Housel.

A profoundly thoughtful and fascinating read with timeless insights, stories, and lessons. This is a book of stories about what never changes in a changing world. This book has done more to change the way I see the world now than anything I’ve read recently. I would highly recommend it to one and everyone.

The idea that what lies in front of us is a dark hole of uncertainty can be so intimidating, it’s easier to believe the opposite, that we can see the future, and that its path is logical and predictable. No belief in history is as commonly held, and no belief is as consistently wrong.

The typical attempt to clear up an uncertain future is to gaze further and squint harder to forecast with more precision, more data, and more intelligence. Far more effective is to do the opposite: Look backward and be broad. Rather than attempting to figure out little ways the future might change, study the big things the past has never avoided.

When you focus on what never changes, you stop trying to predict uncertain events and spend more time understanding timeless behavior. The book is a collection of such twenty-three short stories that never change in a changing world. Each chapter can be read independently, so there is no harm in skipping and choosing as you wish.

Here are two important lessons from the book:

Your happiness depends on your expectations more than anything else. A common storyline of history goes like this: Things get better, wealth increases, technology brings new efficiencies, and medicine saves lives. The quality of life goes up. But people’s expectations then rise by just as much, if not more, because those improvements also benefit other people, around you, whose circumstances you anchor to. Happiness is little changed despite the world improving.

If you look at the 1950s, the gap between you and most of the people around you weren’t that large. It created an era when it was easy to keep your expectations in check because few people in your social circle lived dramatically better than you did. Not only were they living comfortable lives, they were living lives that were just about as comfortable as those around them whom they compared themselves to.

But social media today adds a new element, in which everyone in the world can see the lifestyles (often inflated, faked and airbrushed) of other people. You compare yourself to your peers through a curated highlight reel of their lives, where positives are embellished, and negatives are hidden from view. Being driven by what other people have and you don’t is an unavoidable trait in most people. But it also highlights just how important managing expectations can be if you want to live a happy life.

The only way around this might be recognizing two things:

When asked, “You seem extremely happy and content. What’s your secret to living a happy life?” ninety-eight-year-old Charlie Munger replied:

The first rule of a happy life is low expectations. If you have unrealistic expectations, you’re going to be miserable your whole life. You want to have reasonable expectations and take life’s results, good and bad, as they happen with certain amount of stoicism.

Everything worth pursuing comes with a little pain. The trick is not minding that it hurts. This is one of the most useful life skills – enduring the pain when necessary rather than assuming there’s a hack, or a shortcut, around it.

A simple rule that’s obvious but easy to ignore is that nothing worth pursuing is free. How could it be otherwise? Everything has a price, and the price is usually proportionate to the potential rewards. Most things worth pursuing charge their fee in the form of stress, uncertainty, dealing with quirky people, bureaucracy, other people’s conflicting incentives, hassle, nonsense, long hours, and constant doubt. That’s the overhead cost of getting ahead. A lot of times that price is worth paying. But you have to realize that it’s a price that must be paid. There are few coupons, and sales are rare.

Every industry and career is different, but there’s universal value in accepting hassle when reality demands it. Compounding is fueled by endurance, so sitting through periods of insanity is not a defect; it’s accepting an optimal level of hassle. Another upside of this is that once you accept a certain level of inefficiency, you stop denying its existence and have a clearer view of how the world works.

Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind by Gad Saad. It shows why empathy in politics leads to civilizational collapse.

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