Mrs Calloway’s Reviews > The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness > Status Update

The first rule of compounding is to never interrupt it unnecessarily.

Sunk costs – anchoring decisions to pass efforts that can’t be refunded – or a devil in a world where people change over time. They make our future selves prisoners to our past, different, selves. It’s the equivalent of a stranger making major life decisions for you. {but can we accept that those decisions are the launching pads for different directions in our lives? They don’t have to be negative.}

The trick is to accept the reality of change and move on as soon as possible. {except when things are changing and don’t allow it to stop you from moving forward.}

You can’t prepare for what you can’t envision. {but you can prepare yourself to be ready to meet any challenge as it arises. You can’t prepare to solve every problem because not every problem is foreseeable. But you can build a foundation within yourself that allows you to overcome challenge and move through it as it arises}

The Germans had the most sophisticated equipment in the world. Yet there they were, defeated by mice. {the universe is more powerful than us}

The idea is that you have to take risk to get ahead, but no risk that can wipe you out as ever worth taking. {it’s your choice if that risk wipes you out. You may fall, but it’s your choice whether you get back up again and there is always that choice, no matter how dire the circumstances}

The biggest gains occur in frequently, either because they don’t happen often or because they take time to compound.

History is limited with good ideas taken too far, which are indistinguishable from bad ideas. The wisdom and having room for errors acknowledging that uncertainty, randomness, and chance – unknowns – are ever present part of life. The only way to deal with them is by increasing the gap between what you think will happen and what can happen. I’m still leaving you capable of fighting another day.

… Their strategy relies entirely on humility – humility that they don’t know, and cannot know exactly what’s going to happen next, so they play their hand accordingly.

The further back in history look, the more general your takeaway should be. General things like people’s relationship agreed and fear, how they behave under stress, and how they respond to incentives tend to be stable in time. The history of money is useful for that kind of stuff. {universal truths; noticing the patterns that have applied over centuries, often behavioural}