Humans love patterns. Apophenia is the common tendency to detect patterns that do not exist. Apophenia occurs when we try to make predictions or find answers based on unrelated events. This can lead to poor decision-making and mental health conditions.

Apophenia

The term was coined in 1958 by German psychiatrist Klaus Conrad during his study of schizophrenia. It is an effect of brain function that is now commonly recognised in health, not just to those with a form of psychosis. In schizophrenia, Conrad found that those who developed "apophany" started experiencing abnormal meanings in their daily life derived from unconnected events. n healthy individuals, apophenia may not lead to such alarming consequences, but can still have a significant impact on one’s decision-making processes.

The science of apophenia

Mild apophenia occurs in many domains such as finance, arts, and politics. It has the potential to lead to risky behaviours or wrong beliefs about the meaning of a pattern. Visual illusions. Some people see non-existent images in clouds such as a face as a sign of something significant, such as a message from a loved one or a sign of the future.Financial decisions. People who notice an illusory pattern may believe the outcome of an event is not determined by chance but by previous outcomes or choices. Gamblers might believe that if they make two small wins in a row, they will have a third win.

From fun imagery to financial risk

Apophenia can help you think more creatively, but big decisions should be made only when the facts are clear. To avoid the pitfalls of apophenia:<ul><li>Pay attention to any biased assumptions you make when faced with false patterns.</li><li>Work on accepting that not everything happens for a reason. You are more likely to be successful by making rational decisions based on available evidence.</li><li>Compare the so-called "signs" from the universe with your research.</li></ul>

The balance between embracing and managing apophenia

Apophenia is the tendency to detect patterns that do not exist. Also known as patternicity, apophenia occurs when we try to make predictions, or seek answers, based on unrelated events.

Stashed ideas

The dangers of apophenia: not everything happens for a reason

Accelerated work experiences or AWEs include any work format that compresses productive activity in time or space to deliver a result much faster than would otherwise be possible. 
Popular methods include pomodoros, hackathons, design sprints, Scrum sprints, rapid prototyping sessions, design thinking crash courses, and Startup Weekends, among others.

Accelerated Work Experiences

As work has become ever more digital, distributed, and asynchronous over the past few decades, we have basked in our newfound freedom. Now we can work anywhere, anytime! And thus we find ourselves working everywhere, all the time. 
The splintering of the experience of work into a million tiny pieces has made us stressed out, frazzled, and distracted. It has robbed us of many of the inherent pleasures of work: the bliss of deep concentration, the satisfaction of starting and finishing something in one sitting, and the fulfillment of working shoulder to shoulder with peers.

The Logic Of AWEs

A MESA is a 5-day, intensive work sprint delivered on behalf of a client, usually a large company or other organization. MESA Co. gathers 12-16 participants (which they have found to be just the right number) in beautiful, often exotic locations around the world, seeking to create the ideal environment to focus on and solve a complex problem that the organization is facing. 
The participants are split more or less evenly between employees of the client company, and outside experts and makers, who offer outside perspectives and hands-on skills.

The MESA Method

Here is the basic premise: the world is only getting more complex. This means there will be fewer and fewer proven solutions to problems. What we need is not a new and better solution, but a method for creating solutions quickly, in response to changing conditions.
At the same time, the most talented people are increasingly mobile, picky, and in demand. It is going to be ever more difficult to tie them down with full-time employment.

The Premise Of MESA

The only way to solve the world’s most complex challenges is by working with the best in the world. 
And the only way to do that is to keep the time commitment short, remove every obstacle to them creating value, and create an environment and a team where they can do the best work of their lives.

The Best In The World

The goal is to create a brief, but very intense working environment where a small group of carefully chosen participants can build something tangible to advance a mission or cause that they care about. 
The method takes advantage of rapid prototyping tools, software-as-a-service, and modular templates to build something real and functional that embodies the knowledge and experience of everyone at the table. This prototype is used not just to demonstrate the viability of a solution, but to build consensus around a new direction for the company.

Blending Man And Machine

The client is a “problem owner” responsible for an important challenge that they can’t solve on their own. Perhaps their main product is no longer resonating with a younger generation of consumers. 
Their marketing channels are outdated and obsolete, but they are afraid to cannibalize them with new ones. They could be tasked with revitalizing a product line in the face of major technological shifts. Or it could be a social mission, meeting the needs of an underserved population under tight budgetary constraints.

The Problem Owner: The Client

Day 1 is a “download day” dedicated to getting all the relevant information out of everyone’s heads and “out on the table.” This includes the external participants, who were chosen for their specialized expertise in the industries, markets, and technologies thought to be most relevant.On Day 2, the carefully worded “mission” is unveiled, drawing on the discoveries from the day before to frame the problem owner’s problem as an inspiring, yet feasible challenge. The second half of the day is spent generating a small set of ideas to prototype.

The Structure Of MESA: Download And Mission Day

Day 3 is for prototyping, which includes small groups writing copy, making mockups or landing pages, building demos, or producing short videos or presentations to demonstrate the viability of the ideas from the day before. 
It is on Day 3, once people have to start making real tradeoffs in the making of the product, that the real constraints arise.

Prototyping

Day 4 is focused on more advanced prototyping, taking the most viable prototypes to a basic level of functionality. The leader pushes to bring the fidelity of the prototype as close to reality as possible, including real code and functional backends whenever possible.
The further toward reality it moves, the more hidden constraints and priorities will come to the surface.

Advanced Level Prototyping

Day 5, the final day, is focused on wrapping up loose ends and preparing the final presentation. MESA Co. is adamant that the final deliverable cannot be just a presentation (or a report or briefing), but rather the presentation is a vehicle for delivering and explaining the prototype that was created. 
The presentation is ideally made to senior leaders of the company, or other stakeholders who will demand a high level of rigour. This is what creates a real sense of urgency and meaning around the deadline, and brings out the “productivity magic” of the last two days.

The Finale

Where MESA shines is not in the explicit – the rules, structures, schedule, checklists – but in the tacit, the subtle, and the sublime. 
They have found a way to use these subtle touches not just to create a memorable experience, but to produce results that more heavy-handed methods can only dream of.

The Magic Is In The Details

The table represents the intersection of pleasure and commitment. The pleasure of family and friends sitting together and sharing a meal in the evening. And the commitment of getting down to business, of giving everything you have to the task at hand.Tables and the meals we eat on them are enveloped in rituals. From the way the table is set, to how the food is served, to how people sit and prepare themselves for eating, to how the food is actually eaten. Hundreds of these small rituals give us prescribed behaviours that we know will lead to the outcome we’re after – getting fed.

The Meaning Of MESA: A Table

There is a deeper purpose to these rituals that is easy to miss: they imbue the entire experience with significance. They make the process of getting calories into our bodies much more than the sum of its parts: an affirmation of our values, a time of connection with the people we love most, a reminder of what really matters at the end of a hectic day.

The Purpose Of The Ritual

MESA seeks to reintroduce and translate some of these rituals to the world of work. But not just for nostalgic purposes. It recreates them from the ground up, focusing them like a laser on one thing: producing results. It is a reinvention of the rituals that once bound us together in a shared purpose, working toward a common cause, but adapted to the modern context.

Adopting For The World Of Work

The experience begins with the venue. MESA Co. very carefully chooses locations that support the results they are trying to produce. The venues almost always have a “wow factor” to inspire the participants with an environment that stimulates all the senses. Entering the venue as a group and seeing the meticulously laid out table gives you a sense of the gravity and importance of the mission you are about to undertake.

The Venue

The table is, of course, central. It is laid out with precise measurements down to the centimeter, in order to put people just close enough to work together, while giving them enough space to work. Each place at the table has a name on it, like a wedding where every seating assignment is carefully chosen. The setting includes just the essential materials needed for the week, often including a notebook, pen, and bag. Even the color scheme is chosen with intention, often purposefully clashing with the client’s official colors to avoid the “business as usual” attitude.

The Colours And The Shapes

Every element in the space is chosen with intention: the chairs are comfortable for long hours of sitting and working; bags are collected in a central location so they don’t get in the way; the food is prepared simply and to avoid afternoon crashes; there are no clocks, giving the experience a sense of timelessness. There is a “Leave Me Alone” wall – a grid of pockets with participants’ names on them, where everyone is asked to leave their phones to remove the temptation.

No Clocks

The real purpose of all these decisions and rituals is to change participants’ behavior, away from the counterproductive habits we’ve developed, and toward a more focused way of working that is rarely possible in a distraction-filled workplace. As you find yourself in an environment purposefully free of the usual triggers and hooks, with a full staff dedicated to protecting you from every distraction or discomfort, your creativity is unleashed. People respect rituals more than rules, because rituals give us something meaningful in return for our compliance.

Rituals Not Rules: Changing The Context

Coming back to the everyday world, I’ve begun to notice a phenomenon everywhere: as soon as one person in a group takes out their phone or computer, everyone else is much more likely to do so as well. It only takes one person to check out for the atmosphere of human presence to start being sucked out of the room, like an airplane cabin with a punctured window. And once that air is gone, it’s very hard to bring people back.A quick glance at your notifications seems so harmless, but it communicates something unmistakable to others: there is somewhere you’d rather be, mentally if not physically.

The Real World: Everyday Problems With Notifications

I believe that people naturally want to focus, but only if that focus will be protected and respected. They want to give their best, but only if that effort will be put to good use. As the idealism of wanting to do a good job collides with the fragmented reality of modern schedules, we become resigned, gradually coming to resent the environment that seemingly won’t allow us to excel. What I see among MESA participants is a sigh of relief, followed by an unbelievable explosion of creative energy.

A Place To Focus

For years I’ve written on this blog about new ways of working that allow people to bend time, space, and the human mind to their advantage. How do I have

Introducing the MESA Method: Creating the Ideal Work Experience - Forte Labs

If we put the decisions on a 2x2 based on stakes & urgency:<ul><li>Low stakes&urgency: Decide without me. Ur job is to help establish missions, not to micromanage.</li><li>Low stakes, but urgent: Inform on progress. Watching project develop without you. </li><li>High stakes, no urgency: Propose for approval. Most approvals can be addressed in our quarterly planning meetings.</li><li>High stakes&urgency: Escalate immediately. These include scenarios where there are major risks to the strategic plan, changes in governance, shifts in the market, threats to data security or physical security etc.</li></ul>

How to help your team make decisions

Interesting framework on making decisions inside of the team. 

Categorizing decisions by riskiness and urgency helps clarify when to involve higher-ups.

Work Improvements

How Effective Leaders Decide About Deciding

WILLINGNESS<ul><li>is readiness to enter and participate fully in life and living.</li></ul>WILFULNESS:<ul><li>is refusing to tolerate the moment</li><li>is refusing to make changes when needed</li><li>is giving up</li><li>is the opposite of “doing what works”</li><li>is trying to fix every situation</li><li>is insisting on being in control</li><li>is attachment to “me, me, me” and “what I want right now!”</li></ul>

WILLINGNESS & WILFULNESS

Replace willingness with wilfulness:<ol><li>OBSERVE the wilfulness. Label it. Experience it.</li><li>RADICALLY ACCEPT that at this moment you feel (and maybe acting) wilful. You cannot fight wilfulness with wilfulness.</li><li>TURN YOUR MIND towards acceptance and willingness.</li><li>TRY HALF-SMILING and a WILLING POSTURE.</li><li>When wilfulness is immovable, ASK “WHAT’S THE THREAT?”</li></ol>—What are some situations you notice willingness and wilfulness?

WILLINGNESS & WILFULNESS #2

THINKING only takes you half way, DOING takes you all the way.

THINKING & DOING

One big misconception people have about emotions is there are good and bad ones.We should not identify specific emotions as being good or bad as there is a reason why we feel what we feel.For example, people often relate envious emotion (the feeling of wanting something that someone has because we lack it) as a bad thing. Rather we need to use envy to strive for what we don't have to improve ourselves and achieve what we want in our lives.

EMOTIONS

There will be situations where you will be afraid and fear cannot be stopped. Don't fight something you cannot stop, rather learn to CONTROL YOUR RESPONSE to fear by understanding, acknowleding, perservearing through your fears.

LEARN TO BE BRAVE

Every time fear comes at you in life, you will learn to acknowledge it, control your response easier, and move on.

EXPERIENCES WITH FEAR

If you do not know how to do something, give it a go regardless. Acknowledge making mistakes is a good practice in life. We simply will never succeed by NOT failing.

MAKE MISTAKES

I have always believed it is a good thing when you fail. Failing or things not going your way is a learning lesson that builds your character in the long run.

FAILURE

Every person needs a code; a set of values and morals that you live by and CANNOT be changed by an outside threat. These morals and values shape who you are and what your purpose in life is. Codes are developed through experiences, learning, observing others ethics and you will eventually get tested where you will need to choose between your morals or outside pressure. What you do from there on will determine if these ethics are cemented in who you are.

DEVELOP A CODE AND LIVE BY THEM

There is no timeline for when you need to reach a certain milestone in your life. Everyone reaches their milestones at a different pace. Who cares when someone has achieved something quicker than you have. Take your time, do it right, because you will get there if you keeping trying. I promise.

AT WHAT AGE SHOULD I PEAK?

Your responsibility in life is to question everything that comes your way. Never take what people say definitively without questioning and research.

MY RESPONSIBILITY IN LIFE?

Find a person that provides useful insight into life. The things that person shares should be of value to your life; the mistakes your mentors made, the good decisions they made. Everything this mentor share IS a learning lesson.

FIND A MENTOR

Being brave puts you out of your comfort zone, allowing you to face new challenges, hardships, and experiences which inevitably will build your strength of character. These challenges will test your limits and help you reach new high points in life. A person that does NOT grow is a person who is static and not growing up.

COMFORT ZONE

No person in this world is independent. We all need each other to grow. Find like-minded people that want the same thing as you, and by working together, you exchange information and learn things you may not know which will help you be the best version of yourself.

YOU NEED HELP

The day we stop forgiving is the day we poision our own hearts with bitterness and spiral our relationships downward towards ongoing anger and isolation

FORGIVENESS

Some people are like clouds, once they go away the day gets brighter. Get rid of the toxic people in your life that make you feel bad about who you are. You should be able to look at your friends say to yourself, "These guys always have my back"

FRIENDSHIPS

Saying no is paramount to your mental health. Learn to assert your boundaries, value your self-respect and say no to things you don't want to do. If you see something your friends are doing and you don't want to do, learn to say no and walk away. Freinds do not peer pressure, they support your decisions. People will make fun of you, call you names. Be assertive, say no and walk away.

ASSERTIVENESS

You are young. There are things we want in life; relationships, money, a sweet car, etc.Be patient, live the process of growing up and working because you will eventually get there. As young people, you are full of energy, you want to take over, be the leader, etc. STOP, take your time and build yourself by letting those that are older with experience lead. WATCH them, ASK questions and BUILD your vocabulary from them.

BE PATIENT... RELAX

Learn to listen. As young people, you want to be the top dog, you want to lead. Learn to understand, you may not have the qualities, knowledge, skills and experience as to someone who is older and has experience. Use this time to step back, LISTEN, LEARN and GROW your skills for the future to have effective leadership skills.

LEADERSHIP

Talking excessively does not make you a leader. Telling people what to do does not make you a leader.Inspiring through your actions and taking care of those around you makes you a leader. Being silent is just as important as communicating. Leadership is about listening and formulating a strategy for your team after everyone has shared their knowledge and opinions. Leaders eat last.

YOU TALK TOO MUCH

Don't buy anything you cannot buy outright if you own a credit card. With your weekly income, designate certain percentages of your money to other causes, like paying rent or utilities. Be efficient with your funds. Avoid debt.

CAN I AFFORD IT?

Never have expectations from anyone. Do not rely on people to deliver for you. Having expectations from people to give you something will make you constantly think if they will or not deliver and may eventually will lead to disappointment when not delivered. Try to solve problems yourself as it will help you learn new ideas.

EXPECTATIONS

"Advice to Young Men" by William Cobbett. Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.

My Advice for People

Advice to Young Men

<ul><li>Doing well with money has little to do with how smart you are, and a lot to do with how you behave.</li><li>Financial success is not hard science, it’s a soft skill where how you behave is more important than what you know.</li><li>To grasp why people bury themselves in debt, you need to study the history of greed, insecurity, and optimism.</li><li>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</li></ul>

Money: The Greatest Show On Earth

<ul><li>Luck and risk are siblings, they are both the reality that every outcome in life is guided by forces other than individual effort.</li><li>The world is too complex to allow 100% of your actions to dictate 100% of your outcomes.</li><li>When judging financial success, both your own and that of others, nothing is as good or as bad as it seems.</li><li>Be careful who you praise and admire, and be careful who you look down upon.</li><li>Be careful when assuming that 100% of outcomes can be attributed to effort and decisions.</li><li>Focus less on studying specific individuals and more on studying broad patterns.</li></ul>

Luck And Risk

Success is a lousy teacher, it seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.

<ul><li>There is no reason to risk what you have and need for what you don’t have and don’t need.</li><li>The hardest financial skill is getting the goalpost to stop moving.</li><li>If expectations rise with results there is no logic in striving for more because you’ll feel the same after putting in the extra effort.</li><li>Life isn’t any fun without a sense of enough.</li><li>Happiness equals results minus expectations.</li><li>Social comparison is the problem.</li><li>Accept that you might have enough, even if it is less than those around you.</li><li>Enough is not too little.</li></ul>

Nothing is Ever Enough

<ul><li>Lessons from one field can often teach us something important about unrelated fields.</li><li>You do not need tremendous force to create tremendous results.</li><li>If something compounds, a small starting base can lead to extraordinary results.</li><li>Linear thinking is so much more intuitive than exponential thinking. You never get accustomed to how quickly things can grow with compounding.</li><li>The counterintuitiveness of compounding may be responsible for the majority of disappointing trades, bad strategies, and successful investing attempts.</li></ul>

The Compounding Of Money

<ul><li>There are a million ways to get wealthy. The only way to stay wealthy is some combination of frugality and paranoia.</li><li>To summarize money success in a single word: survival.</li><li>Getting money and keeping money are two different skills.</li><li>Getting money requires taking risks, being optimistic, and putting yourself out there.</li><li>Keeping money requires the opposite of taking risks, it requires humility and fear that what you’ve made can be taken away from you just as fast.</li><li>The ability to stick around for a long time without wiping out, or being forced to give up, is what makes the biggest difference.</li></ul>

Maintaining Your Wealth

<ul><li>Compounding doesn’t rely on earning big returns, merely good returns sustained uninterrupted for the longest period of time, will always win.</li><li>Many bets fail not because they were wrong, but because they were mostly right in a situation that required things to be exactly right.</li><li>Room for error often called the margin of safety is one of the most underappreciated forces in finance.</li><li>A mindset that can be paranoid and optimistic at the same time is hard to maintain.</li></ul>

Survival Mindset

<ul><li>It is not intuitive that an investor can be wrong half the time and still make a fortune.</li><li>Anything that is huge, profitable, famous, or influential is the result of a tail event, an outlying one-in-thousands or millions event.</li><li>Most of our attention goes to things that are huge, profitable, famous, or influential.</li><li>When you accept that tails drive everything in business, investing, and finance, you realize that it’s normal for lots of things to go wrong, break, fail, and fall.</li></ul>

Heads And Tails

<ul><li>The highest form of wealth is the ability to wake up and say “I can do whatever I want today.”</li><li>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.</li><li>Control over doing what you want, when you want to, with the people you want to, is the broadest lifestyle variable that makes people happy.</li><li>Money’s greatest intrinsic value is its ability to give you control over your time.</li></ul>

True Wealth Is Freedom

<ul><li>A small amount of wealth means the ability to take a few days off work when you are sick without breaking the bank.</li><li>To obtain bit by bit, a level of independence and autonomy that comes from unspent assets that give you greater control over what you can do and when you can do it.</li><li>Having six months of emergency expenses means not being terrified of your boss, because you know that you won’t be ruined if you have to take some time off to find a new job.</li><li>Using your money to buy time and options has a lifestyle benefit few luxury goods can compete with.</li></ul>

Having Money In The Bank Gives You Independence

<ul><li>The paradox of wealth is that people tend to want wealth to signal to others that they should be liked and admired.</li><li>You might think you want an expensive car, a fancy watch, and a huge house. What you really want is respect and admiration from other people.</li><li>You think having expensive stuff will bring it, but it almost never does, especially from the people you want to respect and admire you.</li><li>People generally aspire to be respected and admired by others, and using money to buy fancy things may bring less of it than you imagine.</li></ul>

The Paradox Of Wealth

<ul><li>Someone driving a $100,000 car might be wealthy. Or he may just be poorer by $100,000.</li><li>We tend to judge wealth by what we see because that is the information we have in front of us.</li><li>Wealth is the nice cars not purchased, the diamonds not bought, the watches not worn, and the first-class upgrade declined.</li><li>Wealth is financial assets that have not yet been converted into the stuff you see.</li></ul>The only way to be wealthy is to not spend the money that you do have. It’s not just the only way to accumulate wealth, it is the very definition of wealth.

True Wealth Is What You Don’t See

<ul><li>Rich is a current income. Someone driving a $100,000 car or living in a big house is almost certainly rich because you need a certain level of income to afford the monthly payment. It’s not hard to spot rich people. They often go out of their way to make themselves known.</li><li>Wealth is hidden, it is income not spent. Wealth is an option not yet taken to buy something later. Its value lies in offering you options, flexibility, and growth to one day purchase more stuff than you could right now.</li></ul>

Richie Rich

<ul><li>Building wealth has little to do with your income or investment returns, and lots to do with your savings rate.</li><li>If you view building wealth as something that will require more money or big investment returns, you may become too pessimistic.</li><li>You can build wealth without a high income but have no chance of building wealth without a high savings rate.</li><li>Learning to be happy with less money creates a gap between what you have and what you want.</li><li>One of the most powerful ways to increase your savings isn’t to raise your income, it is to raise your humility.</li></ul>

Facts about Saving Money

Two dangerous things happen when you rely too heavily on investment history as a guide to what’s going to happen next.<ol><li>You will likely miss the outlier events that move the needle the most.</li><li>History can be a misleading guide to the future of the economy and stock market because it doesn’t account for structural changes that are relevant to today’s world.</li></ol>Surprises:<ul><li>The most common plot of economic history is the role of surprises.</li><li>Realizing that the future might not look anything like the past is a special kind of skill.</li></ul>

The Neglected Element In Investing Money: Surprises

<ul><li>Good ideas taken too far are indistinguishable from bad ideas.</li><li>People underestimate the need for room for error in almost everything they do that involves money.</li><li>Room for error lets you endure a range of potential outcomes. Endurance lets you stick around long enough to let the odds of benefiting from a low probability outcome fall in your favour.</li><li>The biggest gains occur infrequently, either because they don’t happen often or because they take time to compound.</li></ul>

Mistakes and Errors

<ul><li>The ability to do what you want, when you want, for as long as you want has an infinite ROI.</li><li>You can’t prepare for what you can’t envision.</li><li>Avoid single points of failure. If many things rely on one thing working, and that thing breaks, you are counting the days until catastrophe.</li><li>The biggest single point of failure with money is a sole reliance on a paycheck to fund short-term spending needs.</li><li>The most important part of every plan is planning on your plan not going according to plan.</li></ul>

The Uncertain Future

<ul><li>Everything has a price and the key to a lot of things with money is figuring out what that price is and being willing to pay it.</li><li>Most things are harder in practice than they are in theory. This is often because we are not good at identifying what the price of success is, which prevents us from being able to pay it.</li><li>The price of successful investing is volatility, fear, doubt, uncertainty, and regret.</li><li>The inability to recognize that investing has a price can tempt us to try to get something for nothing.</li></ul>

Nothing Is Free

<ul><li>Short-term traders ignore the rules governing long-term investing, particularly around valuation. Because those rules are irrelevant to the game they are playing.</li><li>Bubbles do their damage when long-term investors playing one game start taking their cues from short-term traders playing another game.</li><li>It is hard to grasp that other investors have different goals than we do.</li><li>An anchor of psychology is not realizing that rational people can see the world through a different lens than their own.</li></ul>

The Psychology Of People

<ul><li>Optimism is the belief that the odds of a good outcome are in your favour over time, even when there will be setbacks along the way.</li><li>Two topics will affect your life whether you are interested in them or not, money and health.</li><li>An iron law in economics: extremely good and extremely bad circumstances rarely stay that way for long because supply and demand adapt in hard to predict ways.</li><li>Progress happens too slowly to notice, but setbacks happen too quickly to ignore.</li></ul>

Gravitating Towards a Negative Outlook

<ul><li>Stories are, by far, the most powerful force in the economy.</li><li>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.</li><li>Everyone has an incomplete view of the world, but we form a complete narrative to fill in the gaps.</li><li>Coming to terms with how much you don’t know means coming to terms with how much of what happens in the world is out of your control.</li><li>The illusion of control is more persuasive than the reality of uncertainty.</li></ul>

Believing In Narratives

<ul><li>Go out of your way to find humility when things are going right and forgiveness and compassion when things are going wrong.</li><li>Less ego equals more wealth.</li><li>Become okay with a lot of things going wrong.</li><li>Use money to gain control over your time, because not having control of your time is a surefire way to be miserable.</li><li>Be nicer and less flashy. Nobody is as impressed with your possessions as much as you are.</li><li>You are more likely to gain respect and admiration through kindness and humility than horsepower and chrome.</li></ul>

Things To Remember

Doing well with money isn’t necessarily about what you know. It’s about how you behave. And behavior is hard to teach, even to really smart people. Money—investing, personal finance, and business decisions—is typically taught as a math-based field, where data and formulas tell us exactly what to do. But in the real world people don’t make financial decisions on a spreadsheet. They make them at the dinner table, or in a meeting room, where personal history, your own unique view of the world, ego, pride, marketing, and odd incentives are scrambled together. In The Psychology of Money, award-winning author Morgan Housel shares 19 short stories exploring the strange ways people think about money and teaches you how to make better sense of one of life’s most important topics.

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