A 21-Tweet summary of ๐—ง๐—ต๐—ฒ ๐—ฃ๐˜€๐˜†๐—ฐ๐—ต๐—ผ๐—น๐—ผ๐—ด๐˜† ๐—ผ๐—ณ ๐— ๐—ผ๐—ป๐—ฒ๐˜†, by @morganhousel.

1/21
A genius with poor emotional control can be a financial disaster.

An ordinary person with a handful of behavioral traits can be wealthy.
2/21
Every person has unique experiences that shape their views about money.

What makes no sense to you might be completely rational for someone else.

You don't know what they know.

Don't judge their monetary decisions based on your worldview.
3/21
Not all success is due to hard work. Not all poverty is due to laziness.

Acknowledge the role of luck and risk in all outcomes.

When you're taking risks, try to protect your downside.

When you get successful, acknowledge the role of luck.
4/21
'Enough' is a decision, not an amount.

Learn when to make it, and don't fall into the trap of risking your reputation for the chance to earn more money.
5/21
To be a better investor, understand compounding, and increase your time horizon.

With compounding, a small starting base can lead to massive outcomes given enough time.

Warren Buffet has been investing since his childhood, and >95% of t's wealth came after he turned 65.
6/21
Getting rich and staying rich require two different skill sets.

To get rich, you must maximize your upside and take advantage of luck.

To stay rich, you must survive by protecting your downside.

Only the investor who survives allows his wealth to compound.
7/21
A handful of rare events will determine your long-term investing success.

To be an investing genius, learn to do average things when everyone else is going crazy.
8/21
Freedom to do what you want is the highest form of wealth.

Identify activities that make you happy. Figure out a way to maximize the time you spend on those activities.

Then, marvel at your wealth.
9/21
Nobody is as impressed with your possessions as you are.

Humility, kindness, and empathy will bring you more respect than owning a fancy car ever will.
10/21
Spending money to show people how much money you have is the fastest way to have less money.

The world is filled with wealthy people who look modest, and non-wealthy people who flaunt their possessions.

Wealth is what you don't spend.
11/21
If freedom to do what you want is the highest form of wealth, then having savings to fall back on is the best wealth creation hack there is.

Beyond a certain level of income, the only thing stopping you from saving more is your ego.
12/21
You don't need a specific reason to save.

You can just save for saving's sake.

The world is unpredictable, you never know when you'll need it.
13/21
Instead of aiming to be rational all the time, aim to be reasonable a majority of the time.

This will help you enjoy playing the game for the longest possible time.
14/21
The most important driver of anything tied to money is the stories that people tell themselves and the preferences they have for goods and services.

These things change with every culture and generation.
15/21
When you're studying history to predict the future, the further back you look, the more general your takeaways should be.

Pay attention to broad patterns, not specific details.
16/21
Maintain a margin for error while planning.

This will help you stay in the game for long enough to benefit from experiencing an improbable successful outcome.
17/21
Nothing is free. Just because something doesn't have a price tag, doesn't mean it doesn't have a price.

This is true for financial markets as well.

Volatility combined with uncertainty is the price you pay for higher returns.
18/21
In financial markets, bubbles form when the momentum of short-term returns attracts enough money that the makeup of investors shifts from mostly long term to mostly short term.

To recognize a bubble, learn to recognize the incentives of other investors.
19/21
Progress happens too slowly to notice, but setbacks happen too quickly to ignore.

This makes pessimists sound smarter than optimists, even when the optimists are likely to be right.
20/21
Stories are the most powerful force in the economy.

We all have incomplete information. We use stories in our heads to fill in the gaps.

The more we want something to be true, the more likely we are to believe it.
21/21
In sum:

Be humble.
Think long term and save more.
Prioritize the reasonable over the rational.
Use money to gain freedom over your time.
Understand risk and maintain a margin for error.
Manage your money in a way that helps you sleep at night.
That's it!

This is the first of 21 books that I'll be summarizing in 21 tweets each in 2021.

If you enjoyed the summary, I'd be grateful if you retweeted the first tweet so it reaches more people.

https://t.co/IHqsTL8V7s

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And here they are...

THE WINNERS OF THE 24 HOUR STARTUP CHALLENGE

Remember, this money is just fun. If you launched a product (or even attempted a launch) - you did something worth MUCH more than $1,000.

#24hrstartup

The winners ๐Ÿ‘‡

#10

Lattes For Change - Skip a latte and save a life.

https://t.co/M75RAirZzs

@frantzfries built a platform where you can see how skipping your morning latte could do for the world.

A great product for a great cause.

Congrats Chris on winning $250!


#9

Instaland - Create amazing landing pages for your followers.

https://t.co/5KkveJTAsy

A team project! @bpmct and @BaileyPumfleet built a tool for social media influencers to create simple "swipe up" landing pages for followers.

Really impressive for 24 hours. Congrats!


#8

SayHenlo - Chat without distractions

https://t.co/og0B7gmkW6

Built by @DaltonEdwards, it's a platform for combatting conversation overload. This product was also coded exclusively from an iPad ๐Ÿ˜ฒ

Dalton is a beast. I'm so excited he placed in the top 10.


#7

CoderStory - Learn to code from developers across the globe!

https://t.co/86Ay6nF4AY

Built by @jesswallaceuk, the project is focused on highlighting the experience of developers and people learning to code.

I wish this existed when I learned to code! Congrats on $250!!
I just finished Eric Adler's The Battle of the Classics, and wanted to say something about Joel Christiansen's review linked below. I am not sure what motivates the review (I speculate a bit below), but it gives a very misleading impression of the book. 1/x


The meat of the criticism is that the history Adler gives is insufficiently critical. Adler describes a few figures who had a great influence on how the modern US university was formed. It's certainly critical: it focuses on the social Darwinism of these figures. 2/x

Other insinuations and suggestions in the review seem wildly off the mark, distorted, or inappropriate-- for example, that the book is clickbaity (it is scholarly) or conservative (hardly) or connected to the events at the Capitol (give me a break). 3/x

The core question: in what sense is classics inherently racist? Classics is old. On Adler's account, it begins in ancient Rome and is revived in the Renaissance. Slavery (Christiansen's primary concern) is also very old. Let's say classics is an education for slaveowners. 4/x

It's worth remembering that literacy itself is elite throughout most of this history. Literacy is, then, also the education of slaveowners. We can honor oral and musical traditions without denying that literacy is, generally, good. 5/x