Financial success is not a hard science. It's a soft skill, where how you behave is more important than what you know.
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Money is everywhere, it affects all of us, and confuses most of us. Everyone thinks about it a little differently. It offers lessons on things that apply to many areas of life, like risk, confidence, and happiness. Few topics offer a more powerful magnifying glass that helps explain why people behave the way they do than money. It is one of the greatest shows on Earth.
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There are books on economic cycles, trading strategies, and sector bets. But the most powerful and important book should be called Shut Up And Wait. It's just one page with a long-term chart of economic growth.
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There is the old pilot quip that their jobs are "hours and hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror." It's the same in investing. Your success as an investor will be determined by how you respond to punctuated moments of terror, not the years spent on cruise control. A good definition of an investing genius is the man or woman who can do the average thing when all those around them are going crazy.
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The ability to do what you want, when you want, with who you want, for as long as you want, is priceless. It is the highest dividend money pays.
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Compared to generations prior, control over your time has diminished. And since controlling your time is such a key happiness influencer, we shouldn't be surprised that people don't feel much happier even though we are, on average, richer than ever.
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In his book 30 Lessons for Living, gerontologist Karl Pillemer interviewed a thousand elderly Americans looking for the most important lessons they learned from decades of life experience. He wrote: No one — not a single person out of a thousand — said that to be happy you should try to work as hard as you can to make money to buy the things you want. No one — not a single person — said it's important to be at least as wealthy as the people around you, and if you have more than they do it's real success. No one — not a single person — said you should choose your work based on your desired future earning power.
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What they did value were things like quality friendships, being part of something bigger than themselves, and spending quality, unstructured time with their children.
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You're not a spreadsheet. You're a person. A screwed up, emotional person. It took me a while to figure this out, but once it clicked I realized it's one of the most important parts of finance. With it comes something that often goes overlooked: Do not aim to be coldly rational when making financial decisions. Aim to just be pretty reasonable. Reasonable is more realistic and you have a better chance of sticking with it for the long run, which is what matters most when managing money.
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The correct lesson to learn from surprises is that the world is surprising. Not that we should use past surprises as a guide to future boundaries; that we should use past surprises as an admission that we have no idea what might happen next.