The economists found that people’s lifetime investment decisions are heavily anchored to the experiences those investors had in their own generation—especially experiences early in their adult life.

Michael Batnick says, “some lessons have to be experienced before they can be understood.”

Your personal experiences with money make up maybe 0.00000001% of what’s happened in the world, but maybe 80% of how you think the world works.

Voltaire’s observation that “History never repeats itself; man always does.”

ways that are too much like physics (with rules and laws) and not enough like psychology (with emotions and nuance).

we think about and are taught about money in

One, financial outcomes are driven by luck, independent of intelligence and effort. That’s true to some extent, and this book will discuss it in further detail. Or, two (and I think more common), that financial success is not a hard science. It’s a soft skill, where how you behave is more important than what you know.

A constant drumbeat of pessimism usually drowns out any triumphalist song ... If you say the world has been getting better you may get away with being called naïve and insensitive. If you say the world is going to go on getting better, you are considered embarrassingly mad. If, on the other hand, you say catastrophe is imminent, you may expect a

“Fevers turn on the body’s immune system. They help the body fight infection. Normal fevers between 100° and 104° f are good for sick children.”