The Morgan Housel Podcast Morgan Housel

Expiring skills tend to get more attention. They’re more likely to be the cool new thing, and a key driver of an industry’s short-term performance. They’re what employers value and employees flaunt.
Permanent skills are different. They’ve been around a long time, which makes them look stale and basic. They can be hard to define and quantify, which gives the impression of fortune-cookie wisdom vs. a hard skill.
But permanent skills compound over time, which gives them quiet importance. When several previous generations have worked on a skill that’s directly relevant to you, you have a deep well of relevant examples to study. And when you can spend a lifetime perfecting one skill whose importance never wanes, the payoffs can be ridiculous. Anything that compounds over decades usually is.
This episode discusses a few permanent skills that apply to many fields.

My new book, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes, is out today. 
Books are hard, a multi-year slog from start to finish. But I’m excited for you to read this. I think it’s the best writing I’ve ever done. And it was fun to write! My hope is that you enjoy reading it half as much as I enjoyed writing it. 
My first book, The Psychology of Money, was really about how you, the individual behave. Same As Ever is about how we, the collective, behave, and what we keep doing over and over. 
It’s 23 short stories about what never changes in a changing world. 
I’ve been thinking about this book for my entire career. I’ve always been skeptical of forecasts, because the world’s track record on predicting the next recession, the next election, or the next technology is so bad. That should draw you to the question: What’s never going to change?
What do we know for certain is going to be part of our future? 

All optimistic beliefs can be dangerous because they’re so comforting, so easy to accept without asking further questions. Hope often masquerades as optimism when you think things will improve only because the alternative is too scary to contemplate. 

Every optimist needs to justify exactly why they're optimistic. In this episode, I offer my own three reasons. 

Daniel Kahneman says, "The long-term success of a relationship depends far more on avoiding the negative than on seeking the positive."

It's like that in so many areas of life. 

Most people know what they're good at, or at least they think they do. Flaws, though, tend to be nuanced, and we're often blind to them. 

This episode shares dozens of little flaws I often think about -- ones that are easy to ignore, but can compound into disasters over time. 

Measuring wealth is easy. You just count it up. Measuring some of the downsides of wealth is so much harder and more nuanced. They can be so nuanced and hard to measure that many people won’t even believe they exist. A downside to wealth? How could that possibly be? 
Let me propose that the absurdity of talking about the downside of wealth is part of why wealth doesn’t tend to make people as happy as they thought it would. 
When the benefits of money are so obvious but the downsides are so subtle, the downsides you didn’t anticipate can be more jarring than the benefits you expected. 
I want more money, of course. Almost everyone does, albeit for different reasons. 
This is not an anti-wealth list -- just a collection of subtle downsides that are easy to ignore, and so common you may as well call them the only true laws of getting rich.

My new book, Same As Ever, comes out in a month. 

It's about things that never change -- what's always happened in the world, and will keep repeating again and again?

This episode shares five examples.