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Morgan Housel - The Psychology of Money

I finished reading Morgan Housel's book, "Psychology of Money," which is very good. Housel, says in a podcast with ACQ2 (Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal) that it unapologetically is a collection of blog posts between two pieces of cardboard.  There is a lot of cool stuff to discuss from the book but I am so impressed by Morgan not from his book but from a guest spot he had on ACQ2.

Here are some excerpts from the podcast.  Morgan dropping dimes.  Note that these are me listening to the podcast and transcribing what I heard.  There are likely some transcription errors so treat these statements as paraphrasing.

"Debt is a symbol that someone's owns my time in the future."

"I am happy when I have control of my time. Freedom and autonomy is being able to do what you want when you want."  

When you can control your time you have freedom and autonomy.  Otherwise, you are just a cog in the machine bound to perform your function.  

This resonates with me as I am now reaching a point where I can choose what work I wish to do. Granted that comes somewhat when I am "mature".  I put that in quotes as I really don't feel mature from the point of view of someone proper and disciplined.  I only use maturity strictly in terms of age.  I am an older mature person who enjoys saying things that are funny to me.  Whether anyone else thinks they are or not is not my problem.  I am satisfied to make myself laugh.

"I tend to view material desire as a loose proxy for the inverse of what else you have to offer the world."  

That is a statement from a podcast that ACQ2's Ben Gilbert prompts Morgan to elaborate upon.  His answer is fantastic.

"When my son was born I wrote him a blog, I told him that You might think you want a big house a fancy car, and a big watch, but you don't that not what you want.  What you want is respect and admiration.  What you want is respect and admiration from other people and you think that material things will give you that, but it almost never does.  Everyone wants respect and admiration, particularly from the people they want to have respect and admiration from.  There are a lot of ways to get this through your intelligence, wisdom, and capacity to be a friend, ... if you can't get it from these things then people seek it from the square footage of their house or the horsepower of their car.

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