Key Insights & Memorable Quotes
Below are the most popular and impactful highlights and quotes from The Psychology of Money:
Some people are born into families that encourage education; others are against it. Some are born into flourishing economies encouraging of entrepreneurship; others are born into war and destitution. I want you to be successful, and I want you to earn it. 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.
Money’s greatest intrinsic value—and this can’t be overstated—is its ability to give you control over your time.
Spending money to show people how much money you have is the fastest way to have less money.
Use money to gain control over your time, because not having control of your time is such a powerful and universal drag on happiness. The ability to do what you want, when you want, with who you want, for as long as you want to, pays the highest dividend that exists in finance.
Things that have never happened before happen all the time.
Planning is important, but the most important part of every plan is to plan on the plan not going according to plan.
Be nicer and less flashy. No one is impressed with your possessions as much as you are. You might think you want a fancy car or a nice watch. But what you probably want is respect and admiration. And you’re more likely to gain those things through kindness and humility than horsepower and chrome.
Saving is the gap between your ego and your income.
Napoleon’s definition of a military genius was, “The man who can do the average thing when all those around him are going crazy.
Controlling your time is the highest dividend money pays.
Independence, to me, doesn’t mean you’ll stop working. It means you only do the work you like with people you like at the times you want for as long as you want.
progress happens too slowly to notice, but setbacks happen too quickly to ignore.
doing something you love on a schedule you can’t control can feel the same as doing something you hate.
I love Voltaire’s observation that “History never repeats itself; man always does.
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.
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.
Less ego, more wealth. Saving money is the gap between your ego and your income, and wealth is what you don’t see. So wealth is created by suppressing what you could buy today in order to have more stuff or more options in the future. No matter how much you earn, you will never build wealth unless you can put a lid on how much fun you can have with your money right now, today.
Luck and risk are both the reality that every outcome in life is guided by forces other than individual effort. They are so similar that you can’t believe in one without equally respecting the other. They both happen because the world is too complex to allow 100% of your actions to dictate 100% of your outcomes. They are driven by the same thing: You are one person in a game with seven billion other people and infinite moving parts. The accidental impact of actions outside of your control can be more consequential than the ones you consciously take.
Nothing is as good or as bad as it seems.
At a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island, Kurt Vonnegut informs his pal, Joseph Heller, that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from his wildly popular novel Catch-22 over its whole history. Heller responds, “Yes, but I have something he will never have … enough.” Enough. I was stunned by the simple eloquence of that word—stunned for two reasons: first, because I have been given so much in my own life and, second, because Joseph Heller couldn’t have been more accurate. For a critical element of our society, including many of the wealthiest and most powerful among us, there seems to be no limit today on what enough entails.
To grasp why people bury themselves in debt, you don’t need to study interest rate: you need to sturdy the history of greed , insecurity and optimism.
Bill Gates once said, “Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.
Risk is what’s left over when you think you’ve thought of everything.
Using your money to buy time and options has a lifestyle benefit few luxury goods can compete with.
You are one person in a game with seven billion other people and infinite moving parts. The accidental impact of actions outside of your control can be more consequential than the ones you consciously take.
Optimism sounds like a sales pitch. Pessimism sounds like someone trying to help you.
Compounding works best when you can give a plan years or decades to grow. This is true for not only savings but careers and relationships. Endurance is key. And when you consider our tendency to change who we are over time, balance at every point in your life becomes a strategy to avoid future regret and encourage endurance.
Daniel Kahneman once told me about the stories people tell themselves to make sense of the past. He said: 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.
A mindset that can be paranoid and optimistic at the same time is hard to maintain, because seeing things as black or white takes less effort than accepting nuance. But you need short-term paranoia to keep you alive long enough to exploit long-term optimism. Jesse Livermore figured this out the hard way.
Someone driving a $100,000 car might be wealthy. But the only data point you have about their wealth is that they have $100,000 less than they did before they bought the car (or $100,000 more in debt). That's all you know about them.We tend to judge wealth by what we see, because that's the (self-edit: only) information we have in front of us.
