Mastering the Art of Spending Money - Morgan Housel

You are my favorite writer.

Thank you.

You have the most insights per word of anybody that's writing stuff at the moment.

Well, thanks. That, that means a lot to me. Thank you.

You could have chosen to write about anything. Why choose to write about spending money?

Well, I'll, I'll, I'll take it back to the start of my career, which was like a lot of young men, particularly in the, in the mid-2000s, uh, the ultimate goal... Before tech really existed, the ultimate goal was be an investment banker on Wall Street. And it's hard to remember that era, 'cause now, if you're a young person at Stanford or whatever, your goal is, like, go work at Google. Go work at, uh, at, at OpenAI. Back then, it was all, "Go work at Goldman Sachs." And so what I- my, my sole kinda life aspiration when I was 20 was to be an investment banker or a hedge fund manager.

Mm.

And I knew I, I loved investing. Even at that age, I used to go to Barnes & Noble and read investing books, and I, I loved it to begin with. I just l- I was fascinated with money. And then I haphazardly got a job as a writer, because I graduated in 2008. The economy was, uh, it was a wreck, and nobody was hiring. No banks were hiring. And so the only finance job that I could find was as a writer for The Motley Fool. Didn't wanna be a writer, hated writing, was embarrassed that I had dreams to be a powerful investment banker, and now I was a journalist? I was like, I, I hated that, but I actually, like, pretty quickly fell in love with it. And what I loved about it was I loved being an outsider who was not being influenced by the incentives of that career. And so if you are a hedge fund manager, you have a lot of incentives and biases based around that. If you are a financial advisor, there's a lot of just... You have to think a certain way to fit into that profession. And I felt like as a writer-- and I'm not a journalist.

Right.

Uh, as a writer, I could just be on the outside looking in. I felt like I was just up in the bleachers looking down and be like, "Let me try to figure out what's going on down there."

Felling abuse of the players on the pitch.

Yes, and then tell a story behind it. And to me, uh, money, I, I think I, I, I got lucky, because money, I, I, I think, has more fascinating social stories in it than almost any other field, where how you spend money and how you save money and your ambitions are such a window into who you are. And of course, there's a lot of other things in life that are more important than money, family and, and purpose and whatnot, but money is a very clear window into who you are. And so that, I, I, I feel like there's just an endless well of interesting stories to tell about it.