Most catastrophes come from a series of tiny risks—each of which is easy to ignore—that multiply and compound into something huge. The opposite is true: Most amazing things happen when something tiny and insignificant compounds into something extraordinary.

He’s not wrong, but the danger is assuming that if something can’t be measured it doesn’t matter. The opposite is true: Some of the most important forces in the world—particularly those regarding people’s personalities and mindsets—are nearly impossible to measure and impossible to predict.

Investor Jim Grant once said: To suppose that the value of a common stock is determined purely by a corporation’s earnings discounted by the relevant interest rates and adjusted for the marginal tax rate is to forget that people have burned witches, gone to war on a whim, risen to the defense of Joseph Stalin and believed Orson Welles when he told

People tend to have short memories. Most of the time they can forget about bad experiences and fail to heed lessons previously learned. But hard-core stress leaves a scar.

Electrification also surged in the 1930s, particularly to rural Americans left out of the urban electrification of the 1920s.

Historian Will Durant once said, “Logic is an invention of man and may be ignored by the universe.”

But in most situations a handful of simple variables drives the majority of outcomes. If you’ve covered the few things that matter, you’re all set. A lot of what gets added after that is unnecessary filler that is either intellectually seductive, wastes your time, or is designed to confuse or impress you.

Doing long-term thinking well requires identifying when you’re being patient versus just stubborn. Not an easy thing to do. The only solution is knowing the very few things in your industry that will never change and putting everything else in a bucket that’s in constant need of updating and adapting.

One is the constant reminder that wealth and happiness is a two-part equation: what you have and what you expect/need. When you realize that each part is equally important, you see that the overwhelming attention we pay to getting more and the negligible attention we put on managing expectations makes little sense, especially because the expectatio