I once asked a successful author how to market a book. He waved me off and said, “If the book is good you don’t need to market it. If the book is bad, no amount of marketing will help.”
He was exaggerating: I think his advice is like 80% true. But it’s definitely 80% true. And it applies to almost any product. The best marketing is a good product.
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Charlie Munger once talked about how sensational Costco founder Jim Sinegal’s career was.
Podcaster David Senra asked Munger: Why are there so few speeches or interviews with Sinegal?
“He was busy working,” said Munger.
The most impressive people don’t spend their lives on social media or managing their publicity.
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Economist Russ Roberts couldn’t figure out why so many World War II veterans hated the Red Cross.
The Red Cross? How can you hate them? But he kept hearing it over and over again.
Asked where the animosity came from, the vets kept talking about the donuts. The donuts, the donuts, the donuts.
During World War II the Red Cross set up comfort stations across Europe for Allied soldiers to get a haircut, coffee, and donuts. It was free for the Americans, but British and Canadian soldiers were charged a few cents. That created a hierarchy that hurt morale, so American generals eventually asked the Red Cross to start charging the American soldiers too.
Suddenly U.S. troops – accustomed to getting free donuts – were being charged. And they hated it, viewing the Red Cross as a greedy profiteer exploiting their hunger. The grudge remained for decades after the war.
Two lessons here: It’s almost impossible to charge for something once you’ve given it away for free, so choose your business model carefully. And people are extremely sensitive to even reasonable price changes, which is why inflation is always an emotional issue.
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Jerry Seinfeld recently said:
Audiences are now flocking to stand-up because it’s something you can’t fake. It’s like platform diving. You could say you’re a platform diver, but in two seconds we can see if you are or you aren’t. That’s what people like about stand-up. They can trust it. Everything else is fake.
His advice: Get good at something. That’s it. Everything else is baloney.
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Demographic historian T.H. Hollingsworth once published an analysis of the life expectancy of the British peerage. It showed a peculiar trend: Before the 1700s, the richest members of society had among the shortest lives – meaningfully below that of the overall population.
How could that be?
The best explanation is that the rich were the only ones who could afford all the quack medicines and sham doctors who peddled hope but increased your odds of being poisoned.
I would bet good money the same happens today with investing advice.
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If a petty criticism about you is obviously false, you tend not to care. If anything it just makes the person criticizing you look dumb.
If the criticism could be true, you might become outraged because you know it’s a genuine attack on your identity.
Talking to Tim Ferriss, Naval Ravikant once said:
If I said, “Tim Ferriss is fat,” that would just bounce right off of you. But if I said, “Tim Ferriss and Naval are fake gurus,” that might hit us, right?
I thought about this when I heard an FBI interrogator say the #1 way to spot someone covering up a lie is how angry and righteous they become when defending themselves.
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After the November, 1930 election, Republicans and Democrats held an even number of seats in the House of Representatives. A perfect tie.
By the time members were sworn in, thirteen had died, most of them Republicans. Special elections to replace them fell in Democrats’ favor, and when the Congress first met the Democrats held a comfortable majority.
Remember this the next time you hear a confident political forecast. No one knows anything, even when it looks obvious.
A similar story, from investor Howard Marks:
I tell my father’s story of the gambler who one day hears about a race with only one horse in it, so he bet the rent money. Halfway around the track the horse jumped over the fence and ran away.
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A coach once described the rule of thirds for athletes: When training, one-third of your days should feel good, one-third should feel OK, and one-third should feel terrible. That’s a good, balanced, routine. It’s when you know you’re pushing yourself, but not too hard. Taking risks, but not overdoing it. Have challenging goals, but not unrealistic ones.
I think you can apply that to businesses, careers, and relationships: If it’s always terrible, you’re doing it wrong. If it always feels great, you’re naive, oblivious, or undershooting your potential.
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Yale economist Robert Shiller won the Nobel Prize in economics in part for his work developing a nationwide index of U.S. housing prices dating back to the 1800s.
I once asked him: where did he find home price data from the 1800s?
“The library,” he said, dryly.
“It’s in a book by Grabler, Blank and Winnick, a National Bureau of Research volume in the early 1950s. They had a nice analysis; wonderful book. I could recommend you read it, but nobody reads it, nobody reads it.”
There’s a well-known idea in real estate that you earn the highest ROI on the ugliest properties no one wants to own. The same is true for so many things in life: The unexciting work, where there’s little competition, is where some of the biggest ideas are found.
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A startup founder I know was once trying to raise money from an investor. The investor told him, “I love your idea, but I think this only has a 20% chance of working.”
The founder replied: “Twenty percent? Wow, you’re an optimist. I think the odds are 10%, max.”
This was from a founder who was devoting his life to this company, with full passion and energy.
Jeff Bezos once said:
Every startup company is unlikely to work. It’s helpful to be in reality about that, but that doesn’t mean you can’t be optimistic. So you have to have this duality in your head. On the one hand, you know what the baseline statistics say about startup companies, and the other hand, you have to ignore all of that and just be 100% sure it’s going to work, and you’re doing both things at the same time. You’re holding that contradiction in your head.
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Before playing the Cleveland Cavaliers, Spurs head coach Gregg Popovich was asked by the press how his team could stop the Cav’s impressive run. “How do you feel your defense can get into passing lanes and stop it?” they asked.
Oh, we probably won’t. I can give you some baloney if you want, Popovich said.
We need more of this. There’s a fine line between motivational cheerleading and lying.
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Ronald Reagan once told this story.
There were two brothers. One was a dyed-in-the-wool pessimist. The other an incurable optimist.
The parents thought both kids were so unrealistic that they talked to a psychiatrist, who came up with an idea for Christmas: Give the pessimistic boy a roomful of the most incredible toys and tell them they’re all for him. Give the optimistic boy a roomful of horse manure and tell him that’s all he’s getting. That should cure them.
The parents did it. When they checked on their boys, the pessimist with all the toys was crying. “Someone is going to take all of these away from me,” he said.
The optimistic kid with a roomful of horse manure had never been happier. He was digging frantically. “There’s got to be a pony in here somewhere,” he said.
Optimists and pessimists don’t respond to the information they see as much as they do an interpretation of what they want to see.
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Mr. Beast – the most successful YouTube creator – said it’s easier to make one video that gets 10 million views than it is to make 100 videos that get 100,000 views. Why? Because the best content is evergreen. It will be as relevant 10 years from now as it is today – and still getting views – which is so much more powerful than trying to get people’s attention with an idea that might be relevant today but no one will care about next Tuesday.
In his 1818 poem Ozymandias, Percy Bysshe Shelley writes about coming across the rubble of a destroyed, millennia-old monument in the middle of nowhere. Nothing about the monument can be identified, except the base, with an inscription that reads:
“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; / Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
No one will remember you in 100 years, and it’s helpful to remember that when making big life decisions.
Morgan Housel
