Insights

Prestige is especially dangerous to the ambitious. If you want to make ambitious people waste their time on errands, the way to do it is to bait the hook with prestige. That's the recipe for getting people to give talks, write forewords, serve on committees, be department heads, and so on. It might be a good rule simply to avoid any prestigious... See more

Some people hear questions as disinclinations. You say, “Why are we going?” They hear, “I don’t want to go.”

Maybe they grew up around people who are indirect, and use questions to communicate cancellation. But questioning is necessary for exploring ideas.

“Feel compliments as deeply as you feel insults.”

"The answer is, that the book is for me. I wrote it for me. I wrote Psychology of Money for me. I wrote all my blog posts for me. I call it selfish writing. An audience of one."

https://tim.blog/2023/11/02/morgan-housel-transcript/

“Give up trying to create something sophisticated,” I told myself. “Why not forget all those prescriptive ideas about ‘the novel’ and ‘literature’ and set down your feelings and thoughts as they come to you, freely, in a way that you like?”

A friend of mine who is a quite successful doctor complains constantly about her job. When people applying to medical school ask her for advice, she wants to shake them and yell "Don't do it!" (But she never does.) How did she get into this fix? In high school she already wanted to be a doctor. And she is so ambitious and determined that she... See more

When I was a kid, it seemed as if work and fun were opposites by definition. Life had two states: some of the time adults were making you do things, and that was called work; the rest of the time you could do what you wanted, and that was called playing.