Same as Ever: Timeless Lessons on Risk, Opportunity and Living a Good Life

Who do I look up to that is secretly miserable?

What Sapiens does have is excellent writing. Beautiful writing. The stories are captivating, the flow is effortless. Harari took what was already known and wrote it better than anyone had done before. The result was fame greater than anyone before him could imagine. Best story wins.

would change if my incentives were different?

big gap between expectations and reality.

I understand it, but I don’t see how it’s useful. I see how it could be fun for rich people, but not me. I use it, but it’s just a toy. It’s becoming more useful for me. I use it all the time. I could not imagine life without it. Seriously, people lived without it? It’s too powerful and needs to be regulated.

Expiring knowledge catches more attention than it should, for two reasons. One, there’s a lot of it, eager to keep our short attention spans occupied. Two, we chase it down, anxious to squeeze insight out of it before it loses relevance.

Keynes, the British economist, had discovered in his work that economies are not machines. They have souls, emotions, and feelings. Keynes called them “animal spirits.”

The trick in any field—from finance to careers to relationships—is being able to survive the short-run problems so you can stick around long enough to enjoy the long-term growth.

The next is accepting that what’s rational to one person can be crazy to another. Everything would compute if everyone had the same time horizon, goals, ambitions, and risk tolerances. But they don’t.