The Psychology of Money. Morgan Housel

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ became best friends in eighth grade. Evans was, by Gates’ own account, the best student in the class.

      The two talked “on the phone ridiculous amounts,” Gates recalls in the documentary Inside Bill’s Brain. “I still know Kent’s phone number,” he says. “525-7851.”

      Evans was as skilled with computers as Gates and Allen. Lakeside once struggled to manually put together the school’s class schedule—a maze of complexity to get hundreds of students the classes they need at times that don’t conflict with other courses. The school tasked Bill and Kent—children, by any measure—to build a computer program to solve the problem. It worked.

      And unlike Paul Allen, Kent shared Bill’s business mind and endless ambition. “Kent always had the big briefcase, like a lawyer’s briefcase,” Gates recalls. “We were always scheming about what we’d be doing five or six years in the future. Should we go be CEOs? What kind of impact could you have? Should we go be generals? Should we go be ambassadors?” Whatever it was, Bill and Kent knew they’d do it together.

      After reminiscing on his friendship with Kent, Gates trails off.

      “We would have kept working together. I’m sure we would have gone to college together.” Kent could have been a founding partner of Microsoft with Gates and Allen.

      But it would never happen. Kent died in a mountaineering accident before he graduated high school.

      Every year there are around three dozen mountaineering deaths in the United States.9 The odds of being killed on a mountain in high school are roughly one in a million.

      Bill Gates experienced one in a million luck by ending up at Lakeside. Kent Evans experienced one in a million risk by never getting to finish what he and Gates set out to achieve. The same force, the same magnitude, working in opposite directions.

      Luck and risk are both the reality that every outcome in life is guided by forces other than individual effort. They are so similar that you can’t believe in one without equally respecting the other. They both happen because the world is too complex to allow 100% of your actions to dictate 100% of your outcomes. They are driven by the same thing: You are one person in a game with seven billion other people and infinite moving parts. The accidental impact of actions outside of your control can be more consequential than the ones you consciously take.

      But both are so hard to measure, and hard to accept, that they too often go overlooked. For every Bill Gates there is a Kent Evans who was just as skilled and driven but ended up on the other side of life roulette.

      If you give luck and risk their proper respect, you realize that when judging people’s financial success—both your own and others’—it’s never as good or as bad as it seems.

      Years ago I asked economist Robert Shiller, who won the Nobel Prize in economics, “What do you want to know about investing that we can’t know?”

      “The exact role of luck in successful outcomes,” he answered.

      I love that response, because no one actually thinks luck doesn’t play a role in financial success. But since it’s hard to quantify luck and rude to suggest people’s success is owed to it, the default stance is often to implicitly ignore luck as a factor of success.

      If I say, “There are a billion investors in the world. By sheer chance, would you expect 10 of them to become billionaires predominantly off luck?” You would reply, “Of course.” But then if I ask you to name those investors—to their face—you will likely back down.

      When judging others, attributing success to luck makes you look jealous and mean, even if we know it exists. And when judging yourself, attributing success to luck can be too demoralizing to accept.

      Economist Bhashkar Mazumder has shown that incomes among brothers are more correlated than height or weight. If you are rich and tall, your brother is more likely to also be rich than he is tall. I think most of us intuitively know this is true—the quality of your education and the doors that open for you are heavily linked to your parents’ socioeconomic status. But find me two rich brothers and I’ll show you two men who do not think this study’s findings apply to them.

      Failure—which can be anything from bankruptcy to not meeting a personal goal—is equally abused.

      Did failed businesses not try hard enough? Were bad investments not thought through well enough? Are wayward careers due to laziness? Sometimes, yes. Of course.

      But how much? It’s so hard to know. Everything worth pursuing has less than 100% odds of succeeding, and risk is just what happens when you end up on the unfortunate side of that equation. Just as with luck, the story gets too hard, too messy, too complex if we try to pick apart how much of an outcome was a conscious decision versus a risk.

      Say I buy a stock, and five years later it’s gone nowhere. It’s possible that I made a bad decision by buying it in the first place. It’s also possible that I made a good decision that had an 80% chance of making money, and I just happened to end up on the side of the unfortunate 20%. How do I know which is which? Did I make a mistake, or did I just experience the reality of risk?

      It’s possible to statistically measure whether some decisions were wise. But in the real world, day to day, we simply don’t. It’s too hard. We prefer simple stories, which are easy but often devilishly misleading.

      After spending years around investors and business leaders I’ve come to realize that someone else’s failure is usually attributed to bad decisions, while your own failures are usually chalked up to the dark side of risk. When judging your failures I’m likely to prefer a clean and simple story of cause and effect, because I don’t know what’s going on inside your head. “You had a bad outcome so it must have been caused by a bad decision” is the story that makes the most sense to me. But when judging myself I can make up a wild narrative justifying my past decisions and attributing bad outcomes to risk.

      The cover of Forbes magazine does not celebrate poor investors who made good decisions but happened to experience the unfortunate side of risk. But it almost certainly celebrates rich investors who made OK or even reckless decisions and happened to get lucky. Both flipped the same coin that happened to land on a different side.

      The dangerous part of this is that we’re all trying to learn about what works and what doesn’t with money.

      What investing strategies work? Which ones don’t?

      What business strategies work? Which ones don’t?

      How do you get rich? How do you avoid being poor?

      We tend to seek out these lessons by observing successes and failures and saying, “Do what she did, avoid what he did.”

      If we had a magic wand we would find out exactly what proportion of these outcomes were caused by actions that are repeatable, versus the role of random risk and luck that swayed those actions one way or the other. But we don’t have a magic wand. We have brains that prefer easy answers without much appetite for nuance. So identifying the traits we should emulate or avoid can be agonizingly hard.

      Let me tell you another story of someone who, like Bill Gates, was wildly successful, but whose success is hard to pin down as being caused by luck or skill.

      Cornelius Vanderbilt had just finished a series of business deals to expand his railroad empire.

      One of his business advisors leaned СКАЧАТЬ