#195 Morgan Housel: Get Rich, Stay Rich
发布时间 2024-05-28 16:00:00 来源
摘要
The skills it takes to get rich are drastically different from the skills it takes to stay rich. Few understand this phenomenon more than Morgan Housel. He's identified unique lessons about wealth, happiness, and money by studying the world's richest families and learning what they did to build their wealth and just how quickly they squandered it all.In this conversation, Shane and Housel discuss various aspects of risk-taking, wealth accumulation, and financial independence. Morgan explains the importance of understanding personal financial goals and the dangers of social comparison, lets everyone in on his personal financial “mistake” that instantly made him sleep better at night, and why the poorest people in the world disproportionately play the lottery—and why it makes sense that they do. They also touch on the influence of upbringing on financial behaviors, the difference between being rich and wealthy, and the critical role of compounding in financial success. Of course, we can’t have a writer as good as Morgan Housel on the podcast and not ask him about his process, so Housel concludes with insights into storytelling, his writing processes, and the importance of leading by example in teaching financial values to children.Morgan Housel is a partner at Collaborative Fund. Previously, he was an analyst at The Motley Fool. He is a two-time winner of the Best in Business Award from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers and was selected by the Columbia Journalism Review for the Best Business Writing anthology. He's the author of two books: The Psychology of Money and Same as Ever.Watch the episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/theknowledgeproject/videos
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(00:00) Intro
(04:46) Risk and income
(07:40) On luck and skill
(10:10) Buffett's secret strategy
(12:28) The one trait you need to build wealth
(16:20) Housel's capital allocation strategy
(16:48) Index funds, explained
(20:59) Expectations and moving goalposts
(22:17) Your house: asset or liability?
(27:39) Money lies we believe
(32:12) How to avoid status games
(35:04) Money rules from parents
(40:15) Rich vs. wealthy
(41:46) Housel's influential role models
(42:48) Why are rich people miserable?
(45:59) How success sows the seeds of average performance
(49:50) On risk
(50:59) Making money, spending money, saving money
(52:50) How the Vanderbilt's squandered their wealth
(1:04:11) How to manage your expectations
(01:06:26) How to talk to kids about money
(01:09:52) The biggest risk to capitalism
(01:13:56) The magic of compounding
(01:16:18) How Morgan reads
(01:22:42) How to tell the best story
(01:24:42) How Morgan writes
(01:35:42) Parting wisdom and thoughts on success
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中英文字稿 
Not having FOMO is the single most important financial skill. I think it's so important that you cannot ever imagine accumulating significant wealth over your lifetime if you are susceptible to FOMO. Like if there's literally one thing, like one trait that you want that's going to allow you to accumulate wealth, it's the lack of FOMO. Why do index funds work so well? Two reasons. One is it's always going to be the case that a very small number of stocks account for the majority of returns. The other is I think the. Whether it's like an investing debate or a saving or spending debate. They're not actually debating. It's people with different personalities talking over each other. And once you come to terms with that, there's not one right answer for any of this.
不怕错失恐惧（FOMO）是最重要的理财技能。我认为这非常重要，如果你容易受到FOMO的影响，你可能一辈子都无法积累大量财富。就像如果你只有一个关键特质，那就是不怕FOMO。
为什么指数基金如此有效？有两个原因。一个是，大部分收益总是由非常少的一部分股票贡献的。另一个原因是，无论是投资讨论还是储蓄或消费争论，实际上并不是在辩论，而是不同性格的人在互相争执。一旦你理解了这一点，你会明白这些都没有一个绝对正确的答案。
What's the difference between being rich and being wealthy? Rich is when you have enough money to make your mortgage payment, make your car payment, and you can pay off your credit card bill every month. Wealthy I think is when you have a degree of independence in autonomy. The weird thing here is that wealth is the money that you don't spend. Let's switch gears and talk about reading and writing. How do you select what you read? I heard this idea. I think it was from Patrick Ashonissing many years ago who said, You want a wide funnel and a tight filter. You're one of the best storytellers of our generation. Teach me how to tell a story like Morgan Hassel. I think it's two things.
富有和财富之间有什么区别？富有是指当你有足够的钱支付房贷、车贷，并且每个月都能还清信用卡账单。财富则指的是当你在某种程度上拥有独立性和自主性。奇怪的是，财富是你没有花掉的钱。
让我们转换话题，聊聊阅读和写作。你如何选择阅读内容？我听过一个想法，多年前好像是Patrick Ashonissing说的：“你需要一个宽阔的漏斗和一个紧密的过滤器。”你是我们这一代最好的讲故事的人之一。教教我怎么像Morgan Hassel那样讲故事。我认为这有两个关键点。
Welcome to the Knowledge Project, the bi-weekly podcast exploring the powerful ideas, practical methods, and mental models of others. In a world where knowledge is power, this podcast is your toolkit for mastering the best of what other people have already figured out. I'm your host, Shane Parrish. Before we dive in, I have a quick favor to ask. If you're enjoying the show and listening on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other platform, please take a moment and hit the follow button now. The more followers we have, the better guests we can bring on to share their knowledge with you. Thank you. If you want to take your learning to the next level, consider joining our membership program at fs.blog.com. As a member, you'll get my personal reflections at the end of every episode. Early access to episodes, no ads, including this, exclusive content, hand edited transcripts, and so much more. Check out the link in the show notes for more.
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Today, my guest is Morgan Hassel, the best-selling author of The Psychology of Money, and same as ever. Morgan's unique perspective on finance, human behavior, and life has transformed countless people, including myself, and how I approach life and investing. In this episode, we explore the powerful concept of positioning yourself to play the long game. Morgan shares his insights on what it means to adopt a long term mindset and the practical steps you can take to cultivate this perspective in your own life. While much of this conversation is about money, including how to make it and how to keep it, you'll discover that it's really a revealing lens for understanding psychology and human nature. We talk about how recognizing that different people are playing different games in life and how this insight can help you make better decisions.
今天，我的嘉宾是《金钱心理学》一书的畅销作者摩根·豪瑟，他一如既往地非凡。摩根对金融、人类行为和生活的独特见解改变了无数人，包括我自己，改变了我们对生活和投资的态度。在本期节目中，我们探讨了如何让自己具备长期思维的强大理念。摩根分享了他关于采纳长期心态的见解，以及在生活中培养这种思维方式的实际步骤。虽然这次对话很大一部分是关于金钱的，包括如何赚钱和如何守住财富，但你会发现，这实际上是一个揭示心理学和人性的重要视角。我们谈论了如何认识到不同的人在生活中扮演着不同的角色，以及这一见解如何能帮助你做出更好的决策。
We also talk about writing. As a writer, Morgan has mastered the art of using stories as leverage for statistics. He shares his approach to writing and how he crafts compelling narratives that make complex ideas accessible and memorable. We also explore the critical distinction between rich and wealthy and how understanding this difference can transform your relationship with not only money, but success. By listening to this episode, you'll gain a wealth of insights and practical strategies for navigating the challenges of investing, personal growth, and life itself. Morgan's wisdom will inspire you to think different, embrace the long game, and find greater meaning and joy in your journey. It's time to listen and learn.
我们也谈到了写作。身为作家的摩根，已经掌握了利用故事来支撑统计数据的艺术。他分享了自己的写作方法，以及如何编织引人入胜的故事，使复杂的概念变得易懂且令人难忘。我们还探讨了富有和财富之间的关键区别，并说明了理解这种差异如何能改变你对金钱和成功的关系。通过收听这一集，你将获得丰富的见解和实用策略，帮助你应对投资、个人成长以及生活本身的挑战。摩根的智慧将激励你用不同的方式思考，拥抱长远的目标，并在你的旅途中找到更大的意义和快乐。是时候倾听并学习了。
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I want to start with a bit of a paradox. The less money we seem to have, the more risks we're willing to take. Can you explain that to me? Daniel Kahneman said something along the lines of, when all your options are bad, your willingness to take a risk explodes because you've got nothing else to lose. And I think you see this in a lot of areas in life. One that I see it all the time in, that is a big news story in the United States. I don't know if it's the same in Canada, but in America we spend something like $100 billion a year on lottery tickets.
我想先讲一个悖论。我们钱越少，就越愿意冒险。你能解释一下为什么吗？丹尼尔·卡尼曼曾说过类似的话，当你的所有选择都是糟糕的，你的冒险意愿会急剧增加，因为你已经没有什么可以失去了。我认为这种现象在生活的许多领域都可以看到。我常见的一个例子，也是美国的一大新闻，不知道加拿大是否也一样。在美国，我们每年花大约1000亿美元买彩票。
$100 billion. It's massive that people spend on lottery tickets. And if you dig into who's buying it, it's almost exclusively poor people. They buy the vast majority of lottery tickets and the poorer you are, the more lottery tickets you buy. And these are some people for whom they literally can't buy food or they might be homeless. And whatever little money they have, they go into a 7-Eleven and buy some Scratcher tickets.
1000亿美元。人们在买彩票上花的钱非常庞大。而且如果你深入研究一下谁在买这些彩票，会发现几乎全是穷人在买。大多数彩票都是穷人买的，而且你越穷，买的彩票越多。有些人甚至连买食物的钱都没有，或者可能无家可归。但他们却把仅有的一点钱拿到7-Eleven便利店去买刮刮乐彩票。
And you might look at that and say, like, you idiot. It's like, what are you doing? This is the dumbest idea I've ever seen. And maybe that's the right answer. Like, maybe you couldn't stop there. But in Kahneman's framework, I think it starts to make a little bit more sense. If you have someone in a situation like this who, in their mind at least, they think, I can't get a raise. I can't build a career. I can't get promoted. I'm kind of stuck in minimum wage job. If that's their mindset, then buying a lottery ticket might be the only time in their life where they can say to themselves and believe, like, this is my literally ticket out of here. This is the only chance that I have to get ahead. And so it starts to make a little bit more sense in that situation.
你可能会看着那个情况说，真是个笨蛋。这到底是在干嘛？这是我见过最愚蠢的主意。也许这样的评价是对的，也许你不能就此停下来。但是在卡尼曼的框架下，这种行为开始变得有点道理了。如果某人处于这种情况，至少在他们自己心里认为：我无法加薪，我无法发展事业，我不能被晋升，我似乎被困在最低工资的工作上。如果这是他们的心态，那么买一张彩票可能是他们一生中唯一一次能够对自己说并相信这是我摆脱现状的机会。这是我唯一能够前进的机会。所以在这种情况下，这种行为开始显得更合理一些。
And maybe you contrast that with someone who has a very high net worth. They might be like, look, I could just put all my money in Treasuries and just live for the rest of my life to solve the interest. And when you have so much, you don't need to take the risk. Well, it comes down to perspective, right? So, like, if I could see what you see and feel what you feel, that decision would be rational. Yeah. There's so many things in life where you can look at other people and the decisions they make, not just in money, but for politics, their health decisions, whatever it might be. And fiercely disagree with it. But what's easy to overlook is that if I were in your shoes and had experienced what you had had the same family dynamic that you do, I mean, the same DNA that you do, I would do the exact same thing.
也许你可以和那些净资产非常高的人做个对比。他们可能会觉得，“看，我可以把所有的钱都投资在国债上，然后靠利息过完余生。”当你拥有这么多财富时，就不需要冒险。这实际上是一个视角问题，对吧？如果我能看到你看到的，感受到你感受的，那么这个决定就是合理的。生活中有很多事情，你可以看看别人做出的决定，不仅仅是关于金钱的，还包括政治、健康决策等各种事情。你可能会强烈不同意他们的决定，但容易忽视的是，如果我站在你的立场上，有你一样的经历、有你一样的家庭背景、甚至有你一样的基因，我也会做出相同的决定。
And I think that is a more important question to ask yourself. Like, what financial decisions would I make differently if I were born in a different era, born to different parents, born in a different country? And I think you can't answer that question honestly, because you don't know. But you know there would be a lot of things different that are completely outside of your control. Where and when you were born would have a massive impact. You and I should not pretend that if we were born in the 1960s in Nigeria, that we would have the same views about investing in the stock market over time that you and I do today.
我认为这是一个更重要的问题，需要你自己来问自己。比如，如果我出生在不同的时代，出生在不同的家庭，或者出生在不同的国家，我会做出什么不同的财务决策？我觉得你无法诚实地回答这个问题，因为你不知道答案。但你知道会有很多完全超出你控制范围的差异。你出生的时间和地点会有巨大的影响。你我不应该假装，如果我们是1960年代在尼日利亚出生的，我们对长期投资股票市场的看法会和今天的我们一样。
This kind of gets to the topic of luck. And a lot of people when you bring up luck, they will say something that sounds smart that I fiercely disagree with. They say like, oh, you should increase the surface area of your luck. You should like, oh the harder I work, the luckier I get. It was like some variation of that. And I'm like, no, if you can do something that changes your odds of an outcome, it's not luck by definition. Luck to me, the biggest start, where and when you were born. You can't control it. Bill Gates couldn't control it. Elon Musk couldn't control it, but it has a massive impact on where you're going to go in life.
这就牵涉到运气的话题了。很多人在谈到运气时，会说一些听起来很聪明但我强烈反对的话。他们会说诸如“你应该增加自己的运气表面积”或者“我越努力，就越幸运”之类的话。我认为，如果你能做些什么改变结果的可能性，那就不是运气。对我来说，最大的运气是你在哪里、何时出生。这是你无法控制的。比尔·盖茨也无法控制，埃隆·马斯克也不能控制，但它对你今后的人生走向有巨大的影响。
That to me is what luck is. It's what you truly have absolutely no control over. And then there's also the, not only the country you're born into, but the socioeconomic household you're born into, the schools that you go to. How much of this is nature versus nurture versus chosen nurture? The stat that I think is so astounding is that income among brothers is more correlated than height or weight. So basically that means if you have a brother who is rich and tall, you are more likely to also be rich than you are tall. It's more correlated than the literal DNA that you're sharing with each other.
对我来说，这就是运气。是那种你完全无法掌控的事情。然后，还有你出生的国家，你家庭的社会经济状况，以及你上的学校。这些因素有多少是天生的，有多少是后天培养的，还有多少是你选择的后天培养？有一个统计数据让我非常惊讶，那就是兄弟之间的收入相关性比身高或体重的相关性还要高。基本上，这意味着如果你有一个富有而高大的兄弟，那么你比他高的几率还低，但你变富的几率却更高。这种相关性甚至超过了你们共享的基因。
Look, is it a perfect correlation? No. Is it possible to be raised by a poor family and become rich? Of course. Is it possible to be raised by a rich family and end up in the streets? Of course. But there's a very strong correlation between those two. I think people get really, can get kind of testy when you talk about luck because if I say that you got lucky, I look jealous. And if I say that I got lucky, I feel diminished in what I'm doing in life. So it plays a massive role, but it's very easy to ignore the impact that it has in the world. How do we break down that contribution between luck and skill or what's repeatable on our part?
看，是不是完全相关？不是。 是否可能在贫困家庭中长大并成为富人？当然可能。 是否可能在富裕家庭中长大却沦落街头？当然也可能。不过这两者之间存在非常强的关联。我认为，当你谈到运气时，人们很容易变得敏感，因为如果我说你运气好，我显得嫉妒。而如果我说我运气好，我会觉得自己的成就被贬低。所以，运气在生活中起到了非常重要的作用，但我们很容易忽视它对世界的影响。我们该如何区分运气和技能的贡献，或者什么是我们可以重复做到的？
Rather than saying what is luck, I think it's important to say like what is repeatable? What is something that happened that I could do again? And if we look at Buffett, this guy standing behind our shoulder here, and let's look at the course of his life. I cannot. He cannot recreate the trading conditions that existed in the 1950s that allowed him to buy blue chip stocks at three times earnings, whatever it was back then that he was doing. He can't recreate that. He couldn't do it again. But could I or you or anyone else listening try to recreate his patience, his risk framework? Yes. So that's something we should pay attention to. You want to find what is repeatable and what you could do again. And those are the things that you should pay the most attention to.
与其讨论什么是运气，我认为更重要的是探讨什么是可重复的。什么是那些发生过的事情中，我可以再次做到的事？如果我们看看巴菲特，这位站在我们肩膀后的传奇人物，再看看他的一生。他无法再现上世纪50年代的交易环境，这种环境允许他以三倍市盈率购买蓝筹股，或者当时他所从事的那些操作都无法再重现。但我们是否可以尝试再现他的耐心和风险框架？答案是肯定的。因此，这是我们应该关注的地方。你要找出什么是可重复的，并且你可以再次做到的事情。那些是你应该最关注的。
I think that's fascinating, right? Because when we look at Buffett, what we want is the outcome. And what we don't think about is all the things that go into creating that outcome. So what stays the same between all these different decades where he's done this, right? So he's done it from buying net net, Ben Graham stocks, all the way to buying great businesses, all the way to the patients to do nothing. And then once every 10 years deploy a whole bunch of cash. What is consistent across that period in your mind?
我觉得这很有趣，对吧？因为当我们看巴菲特的时候，我们想要的是他的成果。但我们没有考虑到的是那些导致这些成果的所有因素。那么，在他各个不同的年代里，这些因素中有哪些是一直保持不变的呢？他从购买"净净"股票（本·格雷厄姆式股票）到购买优秀企业，再到耐心等待、十年一次投入大量现金，这些年里有哪些一贯的原则呢？
Two of the big ones, we could come up with dozens of things that are consistent with someone like Buffett. But the two big ones are endurance and maybe tied to that, capping a downside risk that allows him to stick around for longer than anyone else. There's also a psychological trait of wanting to keep going longer than anyone else. I use this stat in my book that 99% of Buffett's net worth was accumulated after his 60th birthday. Like the vast majority of people, including me and maybe you, if we became a billionaire at age 60 would be done. He moved to Florida and buy a private island and like live happily ever after. For him to be that successful and to keep going full blast for what's now another 33 years and still going stronger than ever is a very unique characteristic that plays a massive role in his success.
两点主要因素，我们可以列出许多与巴菲特类似的行为特征，但其中两点是最关键的：一是耐力，或许可以说与此相关的是他能控制住风险，从而比其他人坚持得更久。二是他有一种心理特质，渴望比任何人都坚持得更久。在我的书中，我用了一个数据：巴菲特99%的财富是在他60岁之后积累的。像绝大多数人，包括我自己，可能你也是，如果我们在60岁成为亿万富翁，就会觉得功成名就，可以搬去佛罗里达买个私人岛屿，过上幸福的退休生活。但巴菲特在60岁获得巨大成功后还能保持全速前进，现在已经又坚持了33年，仍然比以往任何时候都要强，这是一种非常独特的特质，对他的成功起到了至关重要的作用。
If Buffett had retired at age 60 or 50 like a normal person would have in that situation, you have never heard of him. The whole reason he's so successful is just the endurance. And there's a, again, there's a psychological and a financial component to that. Never getting wiped out financially and the psychology that will allow him to keep going full blast for nearly a century on end now. But that sounds academically correct, but in temperament, incredibly difficult because I see my friends getting rich off like Bitcoin or something. And that makes me want to change the patience that I have. I know how to get wealthy over time. We know historically that what's worked is saving money, being very patient, letting it compound decade after decade. And then all of a sudden you wake up with a ton of money and financial independence. But if I see my neighbor getting richer quicker than I am, it makes me want to accelerate that timeline. And my lack of patience sort of changes the outcome.
如果巴菲特在60岁或者50岁像普通人那样退休，你可能就从未听说过他了。他之所以如此成功，完全是因为他的坚持。这里面既有心理方面的因素，也有财务方面的因素。他从未在财务上被击垮过，而他的心理状态也使他能够持续高效地工作将近一个世纪。这听起来在理论上很正确，但在实际操作中却非常困难，因为我看到我身边的朋友通过比特币之类的东西变得富有，这让我想改变我对耐心的坚持。我知道如何通过时间积累财富，历史上证明有效的方法是存钱，保持非常的耐心，任其几十年如一日地复利增长。然后，突然有一天你会发现自己拥有一大笔钱，实现了财务独立。但是，如果我看到我的邻居比我更快地变富，就会让我想加速这个过程，而我缺乏耐心的结果可能会改变最终的成就。
Not having FOMO is the single most important financial skill. I think it's so important that you cannot ever imagine accumulating significant wealth over your lifetime if you are susceptible to FOMO. Like if there's literally one thing, one trait that you want that's going to allow you to accumulate wealth, it's the lack of FOMO. Particularly in modern markets, I can get so crazy with social media and Reddit and Twitter and everything. If you are susceptible to FOMO, there's no hope for you over time. I really don't think that's an exaggeration. And that being able to see your neighbor get much richer than you and not being impacted by it is so incredibly critical and easy to overlook these days. I don't have that many financial skills. I could never be a stock picker. I could never be a trader. I don't have the intellect or the horsepower to pull that off.
没有FOMO（害怕错过）是最重要的理财技能之一。我认为它非常重要，以至于如果你容易受到FOMO影响，你根本无法想象能在一生中积累大量财富。好像这就是唯一一个能助你积累财富的特质，那就是缺乏FOMO。尤其在现代市场中，社交媒体、Reddit和Twitter等让情况变得更加疯狂。如果你容易受到FOMO的影响，长期来看就没有希望了。我真的不觉得这是夸张。而且，能在看到邻居比你富有得多的情况下不受影响，这种能力在当今是非常关键且容易被忽视的。我没有多少理财技能，我不可能成为股票挑选专家，也不可能成为交易员，我没有那样的智慧和能力去做到那样的事情。
But I feel like I've never been, at least that susceptible to FOMO. It doesn't bother me and the slightest to watch other people getting rich. Brent Bishore, our mutual good friend, had a quote that I love. He said, I am perfectly happy watching you get very rich doing something that I would never want to do. And I think that's a great way to frame it. I don't get jealous or anxious to watch other people get richer than I am over time. My investing strategy is to own index funds for as long as I possibly can, to be average for an above average period of time. And I think that will actually lead to an incredible outcome. Not only will it achieve the financial goals that I have for my family, but I think over a long period of time, it will put you in the top decile at least of people who are. who are compounding money over time. I think that's really hard to appreciate that what's short-term optimal and what's long-term optimal are often two different things.
但我觉得我从未、至少并不那么容易受到错失恐惧症（FOMO）的影响。看到别人变得富有对我来说一点也不困扰。我和布伦特・比肖尔一个共同的好朋友说了一句我非常喜欢的话：我很乐意看着你通过做一些我永远不会去做的事情变得非常富有。我认为这是一种很好的心态。我不会因为看见别人比我更富有而感到嫉妒或焦虑。我的投资策略是尽可能长时间持有指数基金，实现长时间的平均表现。我认为这实际上会带来一个令人难以置信的结果。不仅能实现我为家庭设定的财务目标，而且从长远来看，这会将你至少置于在资金复利增长方面的前十分之一的人群中。我认为很难意识到，短期最优和长期最优往往是两回事。
Completely different things. Howard Marks talked about this investor that he knew who in any given year, he was never in the top half versus his peers. He was never in the top 50% of other investors. And over a 20-year period, he was in the top 4%. Because everyone else who was beating him in a given year couldn't keep it going. And so like what's your ultimate goal? So much of investing is just define the game that you're playing. And I don't look down upon or criticize people who are short-term traders. Maybe that's their game and for their investors or for their like it makes sense for them. My game is different. I think your game is different. Most people's game might be a little bit different.
完全不同的事情。霍华德·马克思谈到了一位他认识的投资者，这位投资者在任何一年里，他的表现都从未超过同行的前50%。但在长达20年的时间里，他却位列前4%。因为那些在某一年里击败他的其他投资者都无法持续保持领先地位。那么，你的终极目标是什么呢？投资的大部分内容只是定义你在玩的游戏。我并不看轻或批评那些短期交易者。也许那是他们的游戏方式，对他们的投资者或对他们自己来说是有意义的。我的游戏方式不同。我认为你的游戏方式也不同。大多数人的游戏方式可能稍微有所不同。
And what's important is that if your game is to invest for the next 20, 30, 50 years, that you're not taking your cues from people who are playing a different game of trading for the next quarter. And that's where a lot of danger and investing comes from. You've changed my capital allocation strategy. Our conversations. Our walks totally. How so? What did you used to do that you don't anymore? We used to do a lot more private investments. And now it's mostly index funds. And as things sort of roll in through dividends or whatever, it just gets reinvested in index funds. But it's our conversations that change that.
重要的是，如果你的目标是在未来的20年、30年甚至50年内进行投资，那么你不应该听取那些只为下个季度做短线交易的人的意见。这就是很多投资陷阱所在之处。我们的对话和散步彻底改变了我的资本分配策略。怎么改变的？你以前做哪些现在不做了呢？过去我们做了很多私人投资，而现在主要是投资指数基金。无论是通过分红还是其他收益，这些钱都会重新投资到指数基金中。是我们的对话促成了这种改变。
Well, great. That makes me happy and nervous that I'm having influence. One thing that some people will say when you talk about index funds is like, what is the guarantee that this is going to work for the next 50 years? Okay. I understand it works in the past 50 years. And my response is always like nothing. There's no guarantee that this is going to work. It's very possible that it doesn't work out for whatever reason. And there have been periods, you know, from the late 1920s and 1950s where the returns were terrible. Or even from 2000 to 2010, you had basically 0% real returns in index funds. So it's not perfect in the slightest. Nothing guarantees that it's going to work or be satisfactory over time.
好的，很好。这让我既开心又紧张，因为我正产生影响。关于指数基金，有些人会问，如果你谈论指数基金，那么未来50年它能成功的保证是什么？好吧，我理解它在过去50年里可能有效。但我的回答总是一样：没有任何保证。没有任何保证说这一定会成功。很有可能出于某些原因，它就不成功了。从1920年代末到1950年代，以及从2000年到2010年，指数基金的回报率非常差，几乎是0%的实际回报。所以它一点也不完美，没有任何东西能保证它会一直有效或令人满意。
But I think when you adjust it for the effort that is put in, the lack of effort that's put in basically zero effort to do this. And you adjust it for the fees, which round to zero now. When you adjust for all those things, it's a very appealing way to invest over time. If I was to look at your balance sheet, what is your capital allocation strategy? I'm trying to think of what like the percentage wise, it's probably something like 15 to 20% cash, the house that I live in, and then the rest, the rest index funds and shares a Mark L where I'm on the board of directors. And that's it. Those are those are my only assets.
但是我认为，当你考虑投入的努力时，投入几乎为零的努力来做这件事。再考虑到现在费用基本为零。当你综合考虑这些因素时，这是一种非常吸引人的长期投资方式。如果我查看你的资产负债表，你的资本分配策略是什么？我试图大致想一下，可能是15%到20%是现金，还有我住的房子，其余的就是指数基金和我担任董事会成员的Mark L公司的股票。就这些，那就是我全部的资产。
Cash, house, index funds, Mark L stock. That's it. Which index fund? Vanguard Total Stock Market Index, Vanguard Value Fund, and a little bit of an international fund. Why do index funds work so well? Two reasons. One is it's always going to be the case that a very small number of stocks account for the majority of returns. So recently it's been a fang plus Nvidia. If you didn't own those stocks, fang plus Nvidia over the last decade, your odds of outperforming are very, very low. It's not zero, but it's incredibly hard if you didn't own those few.
现金、房子、指数基金，还有Mark L的股票。就是这些。哪个指数基金呢？比如先锋全股票市场指数基金、先锋价值基金，还有一点国际基金。为什么指数基金效果这么好？有两个原因。第一，总是会有少数股票占大部分回报。最近表现好的是那些叫“FANG”的股票加上英伟达。如果你过去十年没持有这些FANG股票加英伟达，你想要超越市场的几率会非常非常低。虽然不是不可能，但如果你没有持有这些少数股票，那就非常困难。
And even if you look at an index fund that owns a thousand stocks that say, you're going to get the majority of returns from probably fewer than 20 of them. And it's always been like that. Back in the 90s, it was AOL and Cisco and Microsoft and Dell and those kind of companies. In a previous generation, it was general electric and Intel and those kind of companies. It's always the case that it's very tail driven, the distribution of returns. And owning the index just guarantees that whatever is going to be the next driver I own. Because it's extremely difficult to know what those are going to be. If you had gone back to 2004, 20 years ago and tried to predict, what are the big winners going to be over the next 20 years? Well, by the way, some of those companies didn't even exist yet. Facebook didn't even exist yet. Google was still a private company or maybe just gone public in 2004. The big winners are, I think, extremely difficult to know with any foresight what it's going to be. And if you had suggested, even three years ago, that Nvidia was going to be one of them. Like, what? And make like, what a sound an absurd. So you're guaranteeing that you're going to own the odd balls that account for the majority of the returns over time.
即使你看一个持有一千个股票的指数基金，你大部分的收益可能都来自其中不到20个股票。而且一直都是这样的。在90年代，是美国在线、思科、微软和戴尔这些公司。在更早的时代，是通用电气、英特尔这些公司。收益的分布总是高度偏斜的。而持有指数基金只是确保了你会拥有未来的那些主要驱动力，因为预测这些公司究竟哪些会成为大赢家是非常困难的。
如果你在2004年回到过去，试图预测未来20年的大赢家会是谁，就像有些公司当时甚至还不存在。比如Facebook还不存在，Google还只是私人公司或者刚刚在2004年上市。以远见提前知识大赢家是非常困难的。
如果你在三年前建议Nvidia会是其中之一，人们会觉得这听起来很荒谬。所以，持有指数基金就是确保你拥有那些长期来看贡献大部分收益的“异类”公司。
The other is, I think, the lack of effort that goes into it that is needed. Investing is one of the very few endeavors in life where the harder you try, the worse you're probably going to do. And yes, there are exceptions to that Renaissance technology. So, of course, you can name the exceptions for people who tried very hard and did very well. But for the vast majority of people, there's going to be a negative correlation between the effort you put into it and the results that you got out of it. And so the leave it alone aspect of investing, of in index funds is very important. One little stat that I love about this is that if you look at both the DAO and the S&P 500, those are not static indexes. They change over time. There are new constituents that are added. Companies go out of business or they merge. And then new companies are added to that. If you were to look at the DAO, I think one of the studies showed over the last 100 years, if rather than adding a new company, when one of the original components when at a business emerged, if you just left it alone, don't add anything else, don't take anything out, just literally take the original components and leave them alone. You would have done better than the companies that were added and removed, added and removed. Like any activity that goes into it tends to be detrimental over time. That's, I've always thought, is very fascinating. It's literally like there's very few exceptions in the index world to where the more effort you put into it, the better you're going to do over time.
另一个方面，我认为，是在投资中投入的努力往往不足。投资是生活中少数几个你越是努力，可能反而做得越差的领域之一。当然，文艺复兴科技是个例外。所以，当然你可以举出一些非常努力而且取得了好成绩的例子。但对绝大多数人来说，你付出的努力和获得的结果之间存在负相关关系。因此，投资特别是指数基金中的“放任不管”非常重要。一个我非常喜欢的小数据是，如果你看道琼斯指数和标准普尔500指数，这些指数并不是静态的，它们会随着时间变化。有新公司加入，也有公司倒闭或合并。研究表明，如果你在过去的100年里，不随着公司业务变化而调整指数成分，而是保持最初的构成不做任何更改，你的表现会比调整后的指数更好。任何涉及调整的行为随着时间的推移往往是有害的。我一直觉得这非常有趣。在指数投资领域，付出更多的努力反而会得到更好的结果的例子少之又少。
Do you think we find it boring and that's why we don't want to do it? It's a combination of boredom and just the counter intuition of the less effort the better we're going to do. Because any other endeavor in life, whether it's your physical fitness or whatever it might be, there's a positive correlation. If you want to become in better shape, you exercise, you put more effort into it. In most endeavors in life, the harder you try, the better you're going to do. And investing is just not one of those. And it's so not intuitive that people end up tripping over themselves. I would also say too, that I am not against active investing in the slightest at all. I have so much respect and admiration for the people who do it well. And the stats that get thrown around that are true, that you know, 90% or more of mutual funds will underperform the benchmark. My response to that is always like, of course, that's how it is. You should not expect to live in a world in which everyone who tries to beat the market can do it. Of course, that's how it is. And the people who can do it are enormously talented. And I have so much respect for them to have them sitting behind our shoulders here. And other people, I know people, you know people who have been and I think will continue to be successful at this. So I'm not a passive zealot in the slightest. I just think for myself and many other people, it's probably the smartest way to invest.
你觉得我们觉得这件事情无聊，所以才没兴趣去做吗？这其实是一种无聊感加上传统认知上的逆反心理使然。因为在我们生活中的其他事情，比如身体锻炼或其他领域，付出更多努力通常会带来更好的结果。想要身体更好，你就得多运动，多努力。在大多数生活中的事务中，你越努力，结果会越好。而投资却不是这样的。正因这种不符合直觉的特点，大家常常会把自己绊倒。
我还想补充一点，我并不反对积极投资。我对那些做得好的人充满敬佩。那些被广泛引用的数据，比如说90%以上的共同基金表现不如基准，我的回应总是：当然，这很正常。你不能指望生活在一个所有试图超越市场的人都能成功的世界里。能做到那些的人确实非常有才能，我对他们充满敬意。同时，我也知道一些成功的投资者，他们过去和现在都很成功，我相信他们将来也是。
所以，我并不是消极投资的盲目推崇者。我只是认为对于我自己和许多人来说，这可能是最聪明的投资方式。
How do you keep your goalposts from moving as you accumulate and compound wealth? Hey, I think everyone's including my and my wife's have not stopped moving nor should they. I don't personally aspire to live in a world where if I'm lucky enough for my net worth to go up 100% of it just a cruise to savings over time. That's not the life that I want to live. I want to have a great life with some great material possessions and travel with my kids and live well over time. If your net worth grows 10%, but your expectations grow 12%, that's when you get into trouble. It's just the gap between the two. And so, look, I'm making this up. This is not an actual analysis, but I bet over time, if my net worth has gone up by 10% per year, our goalpost has grown by 5% per year. I'm making those numbers up, but it's something like that. So, yes, my family lives a better life materially today than we did 10 years ago, but we've still saved and lots of money during that period. I think that's all that matters over time is that you know, and even Buffett and Munger, who are, you know, known for being frugal, Buffett lives in the same house. He bought when he was 26. Yes, but he also flies a private jet and had a beautiful beachfront house in Laguna Beach. These guys are not living like poppers over time.
你如何在积累和复利财富的过程中确保你的目标不发生变化？嘿，我认为每个人，包括我和我妻子的目标，都一直在变化，而且这不应该有问题。我个人并不希望生活在一个如果我够幸运让我的净资产增加了，还只是全部存起来的世界。这不是我想要的生活。我希望拥有一些不错的物质享受，与孩子一起旅行，并在这个过程中过上好日子。如果你的净资产增长了10%，但你的期望增长了12%，这时你就会遇到麻烦。这只是两者之间的差距。所以，听着，我只是随便举个例子，这不是实际的分析，但我敢打赌，随着时间的推移，如果我的净资产每年增长10%，我们的目标大概每年增加了5%。这些数字是我编的，但大概就是这个意思。所以，是的，我的家庭今天的生活比十年前物质上好得多，但在这期间我们仍然存下了大量的钱。我认为，随着时间的推移，重要的是要理解这一点。即使是巴菲特和芒格，你知道，他们以节俭著称，巴菲特仍住在他26岁时买的房子里。是的，但他也乘坐私人飞机，在拉古纳海滩有一座美丽的海滨房子。这些人并不是像穷人一样生活。
And that's what I think is really important. It's just making sure that there's a gap between your net worth and your expectations. Seems one of the things that we inherit from society is that the house you live in is your prime financial asset. Yeah. That seems really recent as well, maybe the last 30, 40 years where that's become the vast majority of wealth for Americans and Canadians. I know in the United States, real home prices for most of modern history in the 20th century were flat as a pancake. Robert Schiller of Yale did a lot of analysis on this tracking US home prices since 1800s and in real terms from probably the 1940s through the 1990s were flat as a pancake on average across the United States. And then in the last 20 years, starting with the housing bubble that started around 2003, they exploded higher. And then of course, we had the housing crash in 2008 and people thought that was the end of the bubble, but then they've exploded higher even more.
这就是我认为非常重要的一点，就是确保你的净资产和你的期望之间有一个差距。社会教给我们的其中一个观念就是，你居住的房子是你最重要的财务资产。这好像也是近30到40年来的事情，在这段时间里，房子成为了美国人和加拿大人财富的主要组成部分。我知道在美国的大部分现代历史中，20世纪的房价基本是平稳的。耶鲁大学的罗伯特·席勒对美国房价进行了大量分析，自1800年代以来的数据显示，从1940年代到1990年代，美国全国范围内房价在实际价格上几乎没什么变化。然而，在过去的20年里，尤其是从2003年开始的房地产泡沫之后，房价急剧上涨。然后在2008年，我们经历了房市崩盘，人们以为泡沫就此结束，但房价随后又涨得更高了。
And real home prices in the US, I'm sure it's the same in Canada, are much higher today than they were at the peak of the bubble in 2006 on average. Of course, there's many variables going into that of lack of building of new homes that didn't keep up with generational growth. It makes it kind of bifurcates the world in terms of if you have owned a home for any period over the last 20 years, you've probably done very well. And if you are looking for your first home today, it's harder than it's ever been, particularly now that interest rates in the US are 7 or 7.5% for 30 year fixed rate mortgage. Combine that with home prices that are just absurd, particularly in the metro areas that people want to live in. It's completely bifurcated because if you own a house for the last 10 years, you can sell that house and take the equity that has grown in that house to buy a new one to use for your down payment on the other house that's been in, whose price has been inflated. But if you're trying to break in for the first time, like it's a joke. It's a complete joke.
在美国，实际房价比2006年泡沫高峰时的平均水平要高得多，我相信加拿大也是如此。当然，这其中有很多因素，比如新房建设的不足跟不上人口增长。这使得世界变得两极分化：如果你在过去20年中拥有房产，你可能做得非常好。而如果你现在正在寻找你的第一套房子，那就比以往任何时候都更难了，尤其是现在美国的30年固定利率抵押贷款利率达到了7%或7.5%。再加上房价实在是太高了，尤其是在人们想要居住的大城市。这形成了一个完全的两极化局面：如果你在过去10年内拥有房子，你可以卖掉它，利用房子增值的部分作为新房子的首付款，但如果你是首次购房，那简直就是天方夜谭。
So that's it's a very difficult thing. I would not, I have a lot of sympathy for the first time home buyer today who is just who does not have parental support, which is the vast majority of them. It's harder than it's ever been. And there are few things that make you feel like you are stable in your adult life than owning the house that you live in. And I think it plays a huge role in a lot of things in life. A lot of people, this would have been same for my wife and I don't want to start having kids until they own their home. They want to have that sense of stability before they start having kids. So I think the lack of housing affordability has an impact on demographics and having kids over time that will echo for the next 50 or 70 years. So it plays a huge role in what's going on in society. And there's a sort of a difference between what's optimal financially and what's optimal psychologically. We've had this conversation before where you told me you paid off your mortgage. And that makes no very little financial sense because you had one of those crazy, like really low mortgages.
这确实是一个非常难的问题。我对那些没有父母支持的首次购房者抱有很大的同情，而他们是绝大多数。现在比以往任何时候都更难了。拥有自己居住的房子能让你在成年生活中感到稳定，我认为这在生活的很多方面都起着巨大的作用。很多人，比如我和我妻子，也一样，不会在拥有自己的房子之前考虑生孩子。他们希望在开始有孩子之前有那种稳定感。所以，我认为住房的高价格对人口结构和生育率有长期的影响，这种影响将在未来50到70年间持续回响。这在社会中起着至关重要的作用。财务上的最优解和心理上的最优解之间是有差异的。之前我们讨论过这个话题，你告诉我你还清了房贷。从财务角度来看，这几乎没有什么意义，因为你当时的贷款利率非常低。
Like a mortgage rate was 3.2% fixed for 30 years and we paid it off, which I'd say is very true is the worst financial decision we've ever made. But it's the best money decision we've ever made. And the difference between the two is like, look on a spreadsheet, it's terrible. I've done the math of like, what if I had just invested that money instead? How much more money would we have today? It's a lot. It's a lot of money. But nothing that we've ever done in our financial life has given us more happiness than paying that off. And a lot of that is unique, maybe to my personality. This is not advice for other people because maybe you and other people don't have that personality. I'm a worst case scenario thinker. I also have a career that can be fickle.
就像那个3.2%的房贷利率是固定30年的，我们把它还清了。坦白说，这是我们做过的最糟糕的财务决策，但却是我们做过的最棒的金钱决定。两者的区别在于，看在电子表格上的话，这个决策非常糟糕。我算过一笔账：如果我们把这笔钱拿去投资，我们今天会有多少钱？结果是，我们会有很多很多钱。然而，我们在财务生活中做过的任何事情，都没有比还清这笔房贷带给我们的幸福感更多。而且这种感觉可能对我的个性来说是独特的。这并不是给其他人的建议，因为或许你们和其他人没有这样的个性。我是一个总往最坏处想的人，我的职业也可能是变化多端的。
And so, and I'm the sole breadwinner in our household. My wife is home with our kids. So with all of those, my personality, my career and whatnot, it made perfect sense. And when we did it, I was nearly in tears with joy when we did it. Knowing full well that it was a dumb financial decision. So I think once you stop viewing money as just trying to make the spreadsheet happy and you view it as a tool to live a better life, a lot of things change. And in that situation, it was a tool that improved the quality of my life and my family's life, I think dramatically, even if it was the dumbest thing that we've ever done on a spreadsheet.
所以，我是我们家庭的唯一经济支柱。我的妻子在家照顾孩子。基于所有这些因素，我的个性、我的职业等等，这一决定完全合情合理。当我们做出这个决定时，我几乎喜极而泣，即使我明知道这在金融上是个愚蠢的决定。所以，我认为一旦你不再只是把钱看作为了让电子表格上的数字好看，而是把钱视作改善生活的工具，很多事情就会发生改变。在这种情况下，这笔钱成为了显著改善我和家人生活质量的工具，即使从电子表格的角度看，这是我们做过的最愚蠢的事情。
And a lot of people when I say this, they'll still push back and be like, well, walk me through like why it was, why is rational? I'm like, it's not rational. It's not rational at all. I can't explain to you on a spreadsheet. It was the, it was dumb to do, but it made me really happy. And like, is there any worth, is there any value to that? You know, for you, like it made me happy. We could just stop right there. I don't need to prove it anymore. But doesn't that make it rational? If you're playing a different game, right? Like if you're trying to optimize every penny over the long term, maybe that doesn't make sense. Yeah. But if you're optimizing for happiness and longevity, maybe it does make sense. Yes.
很多人听我说这话时，仍然会反驳说，让我解释一下为什么这是合理的。我会说，这根本不合理。这根本不合理。我无法在电子表格里解释给你听。这样做是很蠢的，但它让我非常开心。这对你有没有意义？对我来说，它让我开心。我们可以就此打住，我不需要再证明什么。但这难道不意味着它其实是合理的吗？如果你在玩一个不同的游戏，对吧？如果你尝试在长远的人生中最大化每一分钱，那也许不合理。但如果你在最大化幸福和长寿，那也许就合理了。
And so I think the, the, the qualitative factors of money are hard for people to wrap their head around, particularly in a field that has been taught as an analytical field. When you, if you get a degree in finance or get your CFA or whatever it be, it's purely numbers. That's, that's not totally accurate. There's some, there's some in there, but vast majority of how they teach finance is just numbers. And so it can be hard for a lot of people to wrap their head around why you would do something where the numbers don't make sense. What can money do for us and what can it do for us? What's the lie it tells us? What's the thing that we, we feel like it can do for us, that it can't?
因此，我认为钱的定性因素对很多人来说很难理解，特别是在一个被教成分析型的领域里。如果你获得了金融学位或者CFA认证之类的资格，那基本上就是在处理数字。虽然这并不完全准确，的确有一些其他内容，但他们教授金融的大部分内容确实是数字。因此，很多人很难理解为什么要做一些数字上看不通的事情。钱能为我们做什么？它不能为我们做什么？钱给我们讲了什么谎言？我们觉得钱能为我们做什么，而实际上它却做不到什么？
The lie is that a lot of people in life, if they're unsatisfied with how their life is going, it's a very quick and easy answer to say, if I had more money, things would be better. And that can be true. It can solve a lot of your problems. But I think what a lot of people want in life, not everyone, I don't want to completely generalize this, but what I want that I think is, is reasonably common for people is I want independence. And I want to spend time with the people who I love, my family and friends. And that's pretty much it. And can you use money to do that? Of course, money is, is kind of the oxygen of independence. And if you can use your money to spend more time with your friends and family, you and I went out to a lovely dinner last night with each other. That costs money.
谎言在于，很多人对自己生活不满时，会很快很容易地认为，如果有更多的钱，生活就会变好。这个想法有一定道理，钱可以解决很多问题。但我认为，很多人（当然不是所有人，我不想以偏概全）真正想要的是独立，以及与爱的人——家人和朋友，共度时光。这就是大部分人的心愿。
那么，钱能帮助实现这一心愿吗？当然可以，钱在某种程度上是独立的“氧气”。如果你能够用钱换来更多时间与亲朋好友相聚，例如昨晚你我共进了一顿美好的晚餐，那是需要花钱的。
Thank you for buying by the way. And we had a great time with each other. Now, if you and I went for a walk that would have been free, it would have been great too. But using money to spend time with whom you want, when you want, for as long as you want, waking up every morning and saying, I can do whatever I want today. Even if what I want to do is go to work and be productive is absolutely critical. And that is different from the knee jerk of just, oh, if I have more money, I can buy more things, nicer things. But what you actually want in your soul is to like, is you want independence and to spend time with people who you love. Money can do those things, but it's not as direct as people as people think.
感谢你的购置。我们相处得非常愉快。如果你我一起去散步，那完全免费，也会很棒。但是，用钱来买时间和你想在一起的人相处，无论何时、多久，每天早上醒来说：“我今天可以随心所欲地做任何事”，即便是去工作并产生生产力，这种自由是非常重要的。这和人们通常的反应——“哦，如果我有更多的钱，我可以买更多东西、更好的东西”是不同的。其实你真正渴望的，是独立和与爱的人共度时光。金钱可以实现这些，但并不像人们想象的那样直接。
One example of this is like, will having a nicer house make you happier? It might, but the reason it's going to make you happier is because it makes it easier to have friends over. It's, it's, it makes it more convenient to hang out with your kids in a big, nice, glorious living room. So it's not that the house will make you happier, but the house can make it more conducive to do things in your life that those things will make you happier. I was reading Rich Dad Poor Dad with my youngest and we come to the concept of a house. And if I get this right, it was sort of your house's liability and not an asset. So don't think of it as like a financial asset that's going to grow and acquire wealth for you. Think of it as liability. That's just a sort of table stakes for playing, playing the game if you want or living life and having stability and all these other things. And I thought it was really interesting. And as we talked about it, I was like, you know, it's just the house. What the house is effectively, it's a container. And what matters is what happens inside that container, the house in and of itself, like who cares? Yeah.
举个例子来说，拥有一栋更漂亮的房子会让你更快乐吗？可能会，但其带来的快乐是因为它让你更容易邀请朋友来家里。它更便于你在宽敞、美丽的客厅里和孩子们一起玩。所以，不是房子本身让你更快乐，而是房子让你做那些会让你快乐的事情更方便。我在和最小的孩子一起读《富爸爸穷爸爸》时，我们讨论了房子的概念。如果我理解正确，书中提到房子是负债，而不是资产。所以不要把房子视为会增加你财富的金融资产，而应视为一种负债。这只是玩游戏或生活、拥有稳定性等的基本门槛而已。我觉得这非常有趣。在我们讨论这个问题时，我说，房子实际只是一个容器，重要的是在这个容器里面发生了什么。房子本身，谁在乎呢？
Just recently, just last month, I traveled with my son to the town that I grew up in. And I stopped by the house that I grew up in for the majority of my childhood. I hadn't been there in 20 years. We pulled in the driveway. Of course, there's people who live there now. So we just sat in the car. But I sat there for 10 minutes, just kind of reminiscing about as soon as you pull in the drive, all these memories start flooding back of the things that happened in that house. Good and bad, fun and sad, like so many memories in there from my childhood. And of course, you can go on Zillow and see what that house is worth. It'll give you a very specific dollar figure for what the house is worth. But what the house is worth to me and my parents and my siblings is invaluable. You can't put a price tag on those kind of memories. And I think that's common for most people. There's a tangible financial value and there's this intangible that you can't ever put a price on. That's true for vacations. It's true for a lot of things in life that there's a financial value. If I asked you and said, what is this house worth? Again, you can go on Zillow and say, but what are the memories built inside that house worth? You can't put a price on that.
就在最近，上个月，我和我的儿子一起去了我成长的小镇。我还特意去看了一下自己童年大部分时间里住的那所房子。我已有20年没去过了。我们把车停在了车道里。现在当然是有人住在那里，所以我们只是坐在车里。我在那里坐了10分钟，脑海里全是回忆。只要一停到车道上，童年时发生在那栋房子里的一幕幕都涌上心头。那些回忆有美好的，也有悲伤的，充满了我童年的点点滴滴。
当然，你可以去Zillow网站上查到那所房子的具体市值，但对我、我的父母和我的兄弟姐妹来说，那房子的价值是无价的。那种记忆是无法用金钱衡量的，我相信大多数人都有同感。房子有一个具体的经济价值，但还有一个没法用钱衡量的无形价值。这种情况对于度假等许多事情也是一样的，虽然可以计算出经济价值，但里面的回忆却是无价的。如果我问你这所房子的价值，你可以去Zillow查询，但那些在这房子里建立起来的回忆是什么价值呢？这是无法用金钱来衡量的。
When you've reached financial independence, is that the ultimate when you're spending money, but it's not a matter of the money. You're not quantifying it and sort of a dollar figure. You're quantifying it in a feeling or. I think there's truth to that. It's when you start using it as a tool to become happier. Now, what's going to make people happy is very different. Having an incredible Ferrari collection might make you happy. So if it's not to say that the things will make you happy are not material, that you should just use this for experiences, that I think is a step too far. I think a lot of people have hobbies that cost a lot of money that are material that really make them happy. So it's like, great.
当你达到了财务独立，你花钱时已经不再在乎钱本身了。你不再用美元数字来衡量，而是用一种感觉来评价。我觉得这有一定的道理。真正的财务独立是当你把钱当作实现快乐的工具时。每个人的快乐来源会非常不同。拥有一系列令人惊叹的法拉利可能会让你开心。因此，并不是说让你快乐的东西都不能是物质的，而只能用来体验生活。那样的说法有些过分了。我认为很多人有一些昂贵的物质爱好，这些爱好确实让他们快乐。所以，这很好。
There are a lot of people out there who would say, you know, who would really promote frugality and be like, you don't need a big house. You don't need a nice car. Well, big houses and nice cars make some people really happy. Other people, they don't. It's whatever you can use money as a tool for to live a better life versus, I think, a yardstick of status and success to compare yourself against other people. That's what gets dangerous, is when you're just using it as a scorecard to compete with other people. How do we catch ourselves in a status game? We're playing a status game, but we can't see it because we're in it. It's unavoidable at the economy level, especially at the broad macro level.
很多人会说，你知道，他们会大力提倡节俭，比如说，你不需要大房子，也不需要好车。但是，大房子和好车能让有些人真的很开心，而对另一些人来说则不然。关键是你能把钱当作工具，来让生活更好，而不是作为衡量地位和成功的标准，用来跟别人比较。当你只是在用钱作为和他人竞争的得分卡时，这就变得危险了。我们怎么才能发现自己在进行这种地位游戏呢？我们在玩这种地位游戏，但因为身在其中，所以看不出来。这在经济层面，特别是在宏观层面，是不可避免的。
It makes sense from an evolutionary perspective that people compete with each other. There's limited resources. And like, if I want the food, if I want the mate, whatever it would be, I need to compete with you. That's always what it is. So it's so natural. It's never going to go away. This is truly the same as ever. People are always going to be keeping up with the Joneses. And you can imagine a world in which our kids and our grandkids are living way better lives than you and I are and living longer and have better material access you and I do.
从进化的角度来看，人们相互竞争是有道理的。因为资源是有限的。如果我想要食物、想要配偶，或者其他什么东西，我就需要和你竞争。这种竞争一直存在，所以这是很自然的事情，永远不会消失。这和过去一样，人们总是会争强好胜。你可以想象我们的子孙后代将过上比我们更好的生活，寿命更长，拥有更多的物质资源。
And they're no happier for it because they're just competing with other people who have even more than that. That's always been like that. If people 100 years ago could see how you and I are living today, they'd be completely dumbfounded with virtually everything we have in our life. But I would also wager that you and I are not that much happier than they are. There'd be some aspects of life where we don't have to wake up, you know, worry that we're going to die from the flu next week. But people just adjust their expectations to whoever is around them.
他们并不会因此更快乐，因为他们只是和那些拥有更多的人在竞争。这种情况一直都是这样的。如果100年前的人看到你我今天的生活，他们会对我们生活中的几乎一切感到震惊。但我敢说你我并不会比他们幸福太多。确实我们生活中的某些方面，比如不用担心下周会死于流感，让我们轻松一些。但人们总是会根据周围的人来调整自己的期望。
A lot of this is like a DNA thing. Some people are just way more susceptible to wanting to keep up with others and other people. You can just care less what other people think about them. There's probably six people in my life who I'd really desperately want their love and respect. My parents, my wife, my kids, a handful of friends, and everyone else. It's not that I could care less, but after those six or maybe eight people, it drops dramatically. And the vast majority of people on Twitter and whatnot, I could care less what you think about the decisions that I'm making.
这很大程度上就像是DNA决定的。有些人就是更容易受到他人影响，总想跟上别人的步伐。而另一些人则完全不在乎别人对他们的看法。在我生命中，大概有六个人是我非常渴望得到他们的爱和尊重的。我的父母，我的妻子，我的孩子，几个朋友，除此之外的其他人，也不是说我毫不在意，但在这六到八个人之后，关心度就急剧下降。对于绝大部分在推特等社交平台上的人，我完全不在乎你们对我做的决定怎么看。
So I think if you define that, it's, you know, who's love and admiration do I want in life? Defining who those people are and what do I have to do to earn their love and respect? The love and respect of my wife and my kids and my parents. And that's what I want to use money to do in my life. So like spending time with my family, taking them to cool places and whatnot. There is a financial aspect to this, but once you define that personal game you're playing, a lot of these decisions clear up.
所以我认为，如果你能明确这一点，那就是——在生活中，我希望得到谁的爱和敬佩？明确这些人是谁，以及我必须做些什么才能赢得他们的爱和尊重。比如，我希望得到妻子、孩子和父母的爱和尊重。这就是我想用金钱来实现的生活目标。所以，我愿意花时间和家人一起，带他们去一些有趣的地方等等。虽然这其中有财务方面的考虑，但一旦你明确了自己生活中的个人目标，许多决策就会变得清晰起来。
I think a lot of people don't actually think about what game they're playing. They look at other people and, you know, from my lens, you should be doing something different. But that really comes because we're optimizing for different things. Yes. I bet if you and I sat down and like deeply compared our lives, there would be things that we do very differently. Spending like you spend a lot of money on this and I don't. I spend a lot of money on this and you don't. And it's not a disagreement. We're different people. Even if you are about you and I are about the same age, same education, you know, there's probably a lot that is just like, yeah, but we're different.
我觉得很多人其实并没有真正思考自己在玩什么游戏。他们看着其他人，然后觉得，你知道，从我的角度来看，你应该做一些不同的事情。但这实际上是因为我们在追求不同的目标。是的，我打赌如果你和我坐下来深入比较我们的生活，我们会发现很多事情是非常不同的。例如，你可能会在某些方面花很多钱，而我不会。我可能会在某些方面花很多钱，而你不会。这并不是说我们有分歧，只是因为我们是不同的人。即使我们年龄相仿，受教育程度相近，但肯定会有很多方面是不一样的。
So I think most financial debates, whether it's like an investing debate or a saving or spending debate, people are not actually disagreeing with each other. They're not actually debating it. Because people with different personalities talking over each other. And once you come to terms with that, there's not one right answer for any of this. There's so many things that we inherit from our parents, like invisible rules about money or practices around money.
所以我觉得大多数关于财务的争论，无论是投资争论还是储蓄或消费的争论，人们其实并没有真正不同意对方的观点。他们实际上并没有在辩论。因为有不同性格的人在互相说话。一旦你明白这一点，就会发现这些问题没有一个标准答案。我们从父母那里继承了很多东西，比如关于金钱的无形规则或处理金钱的做法。
I remember like these moments in my childhood where, you know, my parents had to decide between fixing the roof and fixing the car and they couldn't afford to do both. And I remember they, you know, they worked for the military and the military had sent them a financial advisor. And I remember listening to the conversation they had with the financial advisor and how out of the loop, they were with what was happening with my, you know, the severance pay that my mom was getting and what was happening.
我记得在我童年的时候，有一些这样的瞬间：你知道，我的父母必须在修理屋顶和修理汽车之间做出选择，因为他们负担不起两个都修。我还记得他们在军队工作，军方派了一个财务顾问过来。我记得我听到了他们和财务顾问的对话，我还记得他们对我妈妈的遣散费和一些事情的处理情况非常不了解。
And they had new knowledge of it. And I was like, I never want to be in this position. What are the lessons that you learned from your parents that really stick with you today that sort of defined how you think about money? The two things that stick out for my parents, my parents upbringing.
他们对这件事有了新的认识。而我当时心想，我永远不想处在这样的情况。那么，从你父母那里学到的定义你今天如何看待金钱的教训中，哪些是让你印象深刻的？对于我父母来说，有两件事尤为突出：他们的教养和成长环境。
So my dad started undergraduate college when he was 30 and had three kids. On the youngest of three, he started his undergrad when I was like a month old, something like that. And he became a doctor when I was in third grade. My early childhood, my parents were very, very poor. They were students and maybe they had some like student grants that allowed us to buy groceries and live in a tiny little apartment.
我爸爸30岁的时候开始上大学，那时他已经有了三个孩子。我是三个孩子中最小的，他开始上大学的时候我大概才一个月大。等他成为医生的时候，我已经上三年级了。我小时候，我们家非常非常穷。我爸妈都是学生，可能有一些助学金，可以让我们买些杂货，在一个很小的公寓里住着。
We were very happy at a great childhood, but they were very, very poor. And then my dad became a doctor when I was in third grade and had the, so it was immediate shift towards very poor to like upper middle class, literally overnight when I was in third grade. And my sibling, my brother and sister were teenagers at that point.
我们度过了一个非常快乐的童年，但那时我们家非常非常穷。后来，在我上三年级时，我的爸爸成为了一名医生，于是我们的生活瞬间从非常贫困变成了中上阶层，真的是一夜之间的转变。当时我的兄弟姐妹已经是青少年了。
I got to see very like both sides of the spectrum. And I remember the year 1993 is the year everything changed in our family. What sticks out from that is that the frugality that was demanded of my parents when they were poor stuck with them after they started making more money. And so even after my dad became a doctor, we were very frugal. We lived a much better life than we did when we were poor because we were living in abject poverty for most of my childhood.
我看到了光谱的两端。我记得1993年是我们家庭一切都改变的一年。最让我印象深刻的是，即便我父母开始赚更多钱后，他们在贫穷时养成的节俭习惯还是保留了下来。所以即使我爸爸成为医生后，我们仍然非常节俭。虽然比起过去我们过上了更好的生活，但我童年的大部分时间都在极度贫困中度过。
But after that, it was, they had a very high savings rate. We were not spending money like my dad's coworkers were. Like you would expect a normal doctor too, it was nothing close to that. I think I looked down upon my parents for that. I was like, we could be living in an nicer house. I know how much money you make. We could be living in a better house and driving a better car, but we don't because you're cheap skates. That was my view for my teens and early twenties.
但是在那之后，他们的储蓄率非常高。我们并不像我爸爸的同事那样花钱。你会觉得一个普通医生应该花不少钱，但我们完全不是那样。我觉得我有些看不起我的父母。我会想，我们明明可以住更好的房子。我知道你们赚了多少钱。我们可以住更好的房子，开更好的车，但我们没有，因为你们太抠门了。这是我十几岁和二十岁出头时的看法。
My dad was an ER doctor, which is a very stressful field. It's literally people dying in front of you in your arms every day and working night shifts. And it's a very stressful field. So after about 20 years or so, he had just had enough. And well before I think he intended to retire, he more or less woke up one day and said, I'm done. It was a little more planned than that, but that was close to it.
我爸爸曾经是急诊室的医生，这是一个非常有压力的职业。每天都有病人在你面前或者你怀里去世，还有夜班工作。这是一个非常紧张的行业。所以大约做了20年后，他实在受不了了。其实早在他计划退休之前，他有一天早上醒来时，基本上就决定，他不干了。这比说的要稍微计划一些，但基本上就是这个意思。
And because he had saved so much, he could do that. He had the independence to wake up one day and say, I'm going to do like, I'm proud of what I did, but I'm going to go do something else now. And a lot of his peers could not do that because they spent like doctors. They lived in big houses and sent their kids to private school and drove fancy cars. So when they wanted to quit, they couldn't.
因为他存了很多钱，他能够这样做。他有足够的独立性，可以在某天早上醒来时说："我对此感到自豪，但我现在要去做点别的事情。" 他的很多同龄人却做不到，因为他们花钱大手大脚，住在大房子里，把孩子送到私立学校，还开着豪车。所以，当他们想要辞职的时候，他们做不到。
They wanted to retire. They were tired and they wanted to quit, but they couldn't do it. And that was such a profound shift in my thinking. This was not that long ago, I don't know, 12 years ago or so, of when I was like, oh, that's why you were saving so much. It wasn't because you were cheap skates. It's because you were wanting to become independent. And now you are. You want to quit so you could quit. That's why you were saving. That was a profound shift for me of like, you're not saving because you're just scared to spend. You're saving because you want something different, which is independence. And independence is going to give you so much more pleasure than the big house ever would. That really stuck with me. How did they talk to you when you said, hey, you're just being cheap skates, like, let's do this thing or let's get this bigger house or. If they heard what I just said, they would say, yes, in hindsight, that's all true, but we didn't know we were saving for independence. My parents are very interesting that they have dollar cost averaged into Vanguard index funds for more than 40 years and never sold anything ever. So they would be like literally in the top probably 2% of investors during that period without any financial education, no financial skill, like no, no nothing like that. So I think a lot of the decisions they've made have worked out well, but it hasn't really been conscious. So I think back when I said your cheap skates, I'm sure they just kind of shrugged and, you know, okay, well, this is what we're doing. But I don't think they actually had a plan for what they were doing. It was just, again, the frugality that was demanded of them.
他们想退休。他们累了，想放弃，但他们不能这样做。而这使我的思维发生了深刻的转变。这大概就是12年前的事吧，那时我才意识到，原来他们储蓄这么多不是因为吝啬，而是因为他们想要独立。现在他们确实独立了，想要放弃工作就能放弃。这就是为什么他们要储蓄。这对我来说是一个巨大的转变：不是因为害怕花钱才储蓄，而是因为想要实现某种不同的目标，那就是独立。而独立带来的快乐远超过一座大房子。这个想法深深地影响了我。
当我对他们说“你们就是吝啬鬼，咱们干点这事或者买个大房子”的时候，他们会怎么回应呢？如果听到了我刚才说的话，他们会说，是的，事后看这都是真的，但我们当时并不知道我们是在为独立而储蓄。我的父母很有意思，他们在过去40多年里按固定金额定期投资于先锋基金，从未卖出过任何东西。所以他们可能在那个时期成为了顶尖的2%的投资者之一，而没有任何金融教育或金融技能。所以很多他们做的决定都取得了很好的效果，但并不是有意识的计划。我想，当我说他们吝啬的时候，他们可能只是耸耸肩，说“好吧，这就是我们在做的事。”但我不认为他们真的有一个明确的计划，只是迫于现实的节俭生活方式。
My parents also met on a hippie commune in the 1970s, not exactly the breeding ground for like good saving skills. And so for their entire adult lives for literally decades, they were, they had zero money. They had absolutely nothing. So they learned how to be poor. And they're also very happy and have a great marriage. If you can learn how to be poor with dignity, that skill will just like stick with you forever. So when they started making money, I think it's probably true that they didn't exactly know what to do with it because they were so used to being poor. But whether it was conscious or not, it created this thing that has given them so much happiness and pleasure, which is independence. What's the difference between being rich and being wealthy? The definitions are my own. I'm just making this up. But I think rich is when you have enough money to make your mortgage payment, make your car payment. You can pay off your credit card bill every month. Like you can afford the things that you're buying technically. Wealthy, I think, is when you have a degree of independence and autonomy. The weird thing here is that wealth is the money that you don't spend. That's what wealth is like, the homes you didn't buy and the car you didn't buy. It's money that you saved and invested that is going to give you independence. And that's a hard thing for people to wrap their head around that wealth is what you don't see because I can see your house. I can see your car. I can see your clothes. But I have no idea what you're not worth this. I can't see your bank, your brokerage account. I can't see your bank account. So wealth is always hidden. And it throws a lot of people for a loop because if I was looking for a role model of physical fitness, well, I can see your fitness. I can see your weight and your muscle tone. It's all visible.
我父母在20世纪70年代的一个嬉皮士公社认识，那可不是培养良好储蓄习惯的地方。所以，他们整个成年生活里，几十年来，基本是没什么钱的。他们几乎一无所有，所以学会了如何穷困度日。但他们也很快乐，而且有一个幸福的婚姻。如果你能学会有尊严地过贫穷的日子，这种技能会伴随你一生。所以当他们开始有钱的时候，我想他们大概也不知道该怎么用，因为他们已经习惯了贫穷。但无论是有意还是无意，这种经历给了他们独立的幸福和快乐。什么是有钱和富有的区别？这些定义是我自己定义的，我在这儿随便说说。我认为有钱是指你有足够的钱支付房贷、车贷，每个月都能偿还信用卡账单，你可以负担得起你购买的东西。富有，我认为是指你有一定程度的独立性和自主权。奇怪的是，财富是你没有花掉的钱。财富就像是你没有买的房子和车，是你存下来的和投资的钱，它能给你带来独立。这点很难让人大脑转过弯来，因为财富是看不见的。我可以看到你的房子，你的车，你的衣服，但我完全不知道你银行账户上的钱或者你的证券账户里的财富。所以财富总是隐藏的。这让很多人感到困惑。因为如果我在找一个健身榜样，我可以直接看到你的身体状况、体重和肌肉线条，这些都是可见的。
But when you're looking for a financial role model, who do you look up to? And a lot of people, particularly young people, will look up to the guy in the mansion with the Ferrari. But that guy for all you know is living paycheck to paycheck. A lot of those people are. And the person who is actually wealthy and independent might be the person in the modest house driving the modest car that you would actually want to be. If you want to be wealthy instead of just rich, you want to be independent instead of just making your monthly payments. The people that you actually want to look up to are some of the hardest people to identify in society. Who do you look up to? In general, who I look up to are people who do whatever they want and people with independence. And there's a huge range of that. I think there are people whose net worth is in the low six figures who are independent. There's a guy named Mr. Money Mustache who kind of started the fire movement 10 or 15 years ago. And his story was when his net worth was $600,000, not that much money. He retired and lived a great life on it. And there's other people, obviously Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are independent, but I would venture that more than half of Elon Musk's day is doing things that he doesn't want to do. It's like piling on all these things that he's still driven to do them and get them done. And of course he could quit tomorrow, but doing things that he doesn't necessarily want to do. So anyone who can wake up every day and say, like, I can do whatever I want today. If you have independence, that's my personal goal. So the people who have that at any income level are the ones I look up to.
但是，当你寻找一个财务榜样时，你会仰望谁呢？很多人，特别是年轻人，都会仰望那个住在豪宅里开着法拉利的人。但你不知道的是，那个人可能是靠每月的工资过活的。很多这样的人其实都是如此。而那些真正富有且独立的人，可能是住在朴素的房子里，开着普通车的人，你实际上会想成为他们。如果你想要的是财富而不仅仅是有钱，如果你想要的是独立而不仅仅是支付每月的账单，你真正该仰望的人其实是社会中最难辨认的人。你仰望谁呢？总体来说，我仰望那些可以随心所欲做事并且拥有独立性的人。这类人有很多种。我认为有些人的净资产在六位数的低端，但他们是独立的。有一个叫Mr. Money Mustache的人，大概在10到15年前，他开始了FIRE（财务独立，提早退休）运动。他的故事是，当他的净资产只有60万美元时，也不算很多的钱，他就退休并过上了很棒的生活。当然，还有其他人，比如杰夫·贝索斯和伊隆·马斯克，他们也都是独立的，但我敢说伊隆·马斯克有一半以上的时间都在做他不想做的事情。他每天都有大量的任务，但他仍然坚持去完成。当然，他明天就可以辞职，但他还是会做那些他本不想做的事情。所以，任何一个每天醒来都能说“我今天可以做任何我想做的事情”的人，只要他们拥有独立性，那就是我的个人目标。所以，不论收入多少，那些拥有独立性的人，都是我所仰望的。
Why are so many people who have money? I think the answer is sort of maybe embedded in the last one. But why are so many people who actually have a lot of objective wealth or money, if you will? Unhappy. Andrew Wilkinson, our friend, had a saying where he says, like, a lot of people, I'm paraphrasing him, but a lot of people who are very successful are just walking anxiety disorders harnessed for productivity. And I think it was Patrick O'Shaughnessy who said the single word that he would use to describe a lot of very successful people is not driven. It's not passionate. It's tortured. They wake up every morning tortured about like, I'm trying to solve this problem. I have to get ahead. I have to hit this goal. And they are literally, they wake up very anxious and depressed and like, you know, just tortured about achieving their things.
为什么这么多有钱人不快乐呢？我觉得答案多少可以从之前的讨论中找到一些线索。为什么这么多实际上拥有大量财富或金钱的人，仍然不快乐呢？我们的朋友Andrew Wilkinson有一句话，我稍微改编了一下，他说很多非常成功的人其实就是为生产力而存在的“行走的焦虑症患者”。而Patrick O'Shaughnessy还说过，用来形容许多非常成功的人的不是“有动力”或“有激情”，而是“受折磨”。他们每天早上醒来都在为解决某个问题而困扰，必须要取得进展，必须要达到某个目标。他们真的是在焦虑和抑郁中醒来，满脑子都是怎么实现自己的目标，内心非常煎熬。
Elon Musk a couple months ago gave an interview where he said, you might think you want to be me as in like the richest person in the world, richest person in history. But you don't. And he was like, I think he said something like, it's a tornado up here. It's a mess inside of this head. You do not want to be inside of this head. I think that's really true. I think that's a profound truth that you might think you want that kind of life, but there is a cost to that life. And the reason he's successful is because he's probably woken up tortured for his entire adult life trying to solve these problems. I am so glad and grateful that people like himself exist because they made the world a better place, new technologies that we can all benefit from.
埃隆·马斯克几个月前接受采访时说过，你可能认为你想成为我，比如世界上最富有的人，历史上最富有的人。但其实你不想。他说，感觉就像头脑里刮着龙卷风，乱七八糟的。你真的不想待在这脑袋里。我觉得这是个很深刻的道理。你可能认为你想要那种生活，但那种生活是有代价的。他之所以成功，可能是因为他整个成年生活都在为解决这些问题而苦恼。我很高兴也很感激像他这样的人存在，因为他们让世界变得更好，带来了我们都能受益的新技术。
But there's a big difference between saying, I'm glad you exist and I would want your life. Those are two very different things. It's almost like we're looking at the outcome. We're like, I want the outcome. I don't want, I don't want all this stuff. We do this with athletes too, right? Like, I want the gold meda. I don't want the five AM practices, seven days a week. I don't want that. I think it was an evolve who said, you can't just pick and choose bits of someone's life and say, I want his physique and her net worth, and I want his house.
但是，说“我很高兴你存在”和“我想要你的生活”之间有很大的区别。这是两件完全不同的事情。这几乎就像我们在看结果一样。我们会说，我想要这个结果，但我不想要所有这些过程。我们对待运动员也是这样，对吧？我们会说，我想要金牌，但我不想要每天早上五点起床训练，也不想要每周七天的辛苦锻炼。我记得有人说过，你不能只挑选别人生活的一部分来模仿，说我想要他的身材、她的资产和他的房子。
And you have to take the whole package. And a lot of the great things in anyone's life, there's a cost that came with that, whether it's their career success that they had to put into it. You know, their story is that Bill Gates worked, I think it was 25 years without ever taking a single day off. And what's the days he's working? He would be like, he came home at midnight and crashed on the couch for four hours and went back to work. I'm so grateful that he exists, but I would not want that for myself. That's not my definition of the life that I would want.
你必须接受整个套餐。每个人生活中的很多伟大事情都是有代价的，不管是他们事业的成功还是他们为之付出的努力。比如，比尔·盖茨据说工作了25年，从未休息一天。他的工作日是怎样的呢？他可能半夜回家，在沙发上睡四个小时，然后又回去工作。我很感激他的存在，但我不想那样生活。那不是我想要的生活定义。
Our friend, David Senra, who runs the podcast, Founders, has profiled, I think now by 350 founders over time. And he says, I don't want to put words in his mouth. I'm pretty sure he said, the only founder that he has ever read their biography and thought, I want his life is Ed Thorpe. And everybody else that he reads it, I think he comes into the same conclusion that I do. I'm glad they exist. I would never want to live their life. Because there's always a hidden cost that when you dig into it, you're like, yes, he was very successful because he sacrificed a million things that would be very, very important to you and I.
我们的朋友大卫·森拉(David Senra)主持了一档名为"Founders"的播客，到目前为止，他已经介绍了大约350位创始人。他表示，不想替他说话，但我几乎可以肯定他说过，在他读过的所有创始人传记中，唯一一个让他觉得"我想要过他那种生活"的人是埃德·索普(Ed Thorpe)。至于其他创始人，我认为他的结论和我一样——我很高兴他们存在，但我绝不会想过他们的生活。因为在你深入了解后，会发现他们取得巨大成功的背后，总是隐藏着巨大的代价，那些代价是你我都认为非常重要的东西。
Well, let's talk about that a little bit. You're incredibly successful. Your books have sold well over 5 million copies now. The inbound to you for requests of your time. You're speaking your presence. Hop on the phone for 15 minutes. Must be off the charts. How do you keep your surface area small or keep doing the things that you want to do? Well, the only way to manage that is to say no to virtually everyone. And that sucks for me for two reasons. A, I don't have any assistant. I'm personally saying no to them. I don't want to off to anyone else.
好吧，让我们来聊聊这个话题。你非常成功，你的书已经卖出了超过500万本。很多人想请你拨时间给他们，比如演讲或者电话交流15分钟。这个请求的数量一定是非常多的。你是怎么控制你的时间或者只做你想做的事情呢？唯一的方法就是几乎对所有人说不。这对我来说有两个不好之处：第一，我没有助理，所以都是我亲自拒绝这些请求；第二，我也不想把这些工作交给别人。
And I don't like making making people sad when you blow someone off or even respectfully say no. They're going to be hurt a little bit. I vividly remember. I'm not going to say who, but names that you and people would know that I reached out to early in my career and said, hey, can I please pick your brain for 15 minutes? And they said no. And I was hurt. I still remember it. I still remember the emails. I remember reaching out to a couple of authors, probably 15 years ago, and saying, my name is Morgan. I'm an aspiring author. I'm trying to do this.
我不喜欢让别人伤心，当你晾着别人或者即使是有礼貌地拒绝别人时，他们都会有点受伤。我记得很清楚。我不会说是谁，但这些名字你和其他人肯定都知道。在我职业生涯早期，我曾联系过一些人，请求他们抽出15分钟时间，让我请教他们的意见。他们说不。当时我非常难过，我至今还记得那种感觉，还记得那些邮件。我记得大概15年前，我联系过几位作者，说：“我叫摩根，我是一个有抱负的作者，我正试图做这件事。”
I so admire you. Can I please ask you just 10 minutes on the phone? And some of them didn't respond. And I still remember that. So if anyone who remembers that gets in that same position themselves, they have to say no to a lot of people. It sucks. But there's no other way to handle it. There's no other way to manage it. It seems like success. And we've talked about this before, but success shows the seeds of its own destruction. How do you think about that? And what ways does it do it? The biggest is just that it allows you to become lazy.
我非常钦佩你。可以请你花10分钟在电话上聊聊吗？有些人没有回应，我至今记得。如果有经历过这种情况的人自己也处于相同的位置，他们也不得不拒绝很多人。这很糟糕，但没有其他办法。这是唯一的应对方法。成功看起来如此，但我们之前也谈过，成功本身蕴含着自我毁灭的种子。你怎么看待这个问题？成功有哪些方面会导致自我毁灭？最大的问题就是它会让人变得懒散。
And it's going to degrade the thing that made you great. What made you, what made you, like literally you, successful. It was probably like some degree of like waking up and feeling feeling inadequate. Just waking up and being like, I know I'm capable of doing more than I've achieved already and I got to go do it. And it's pretty common. Like whether that was driven by a lack of self-esteem, like whatever it was, you're waking up and you're like, I need to achieve more than I have today. And once you have achieved some level, it's easy to be like, well, I've already done that.
这会损害你曾经引以为傲的东西，让你不再那么优秀。真正使你成功的原因，实际上可能是你每天醒来时都感到自己还不够好。你会觉得自己有潜力做得更多，所以必须要去努力。无论这种动力是来自于缺乏自信还是其他原因，你每天醒来时都会感觉自己需要做得比昨天更多。然而，一旦你达到了某个成就，就很容易产生自满心理，觉得自己已经做到了足够多。
And then the thing that made you successful, that drive you had is diminished. Using some companies and in people. And the other thing that's really powerful is when you are lower on the totem pole, it's very, it's easier for everyone around you to tell you what you're doing wrong. And the higher you gain, particularly when you get up to the very high levels, no one wants to tell you doing wrong because you're probably paying those people to be surrounded, you know, to surround you with advice.
然后，曾经让你成功的动力减弱了。这种情况在一些公司和个人身上都能看到。另外一个非常显著的现象是，当你处于较低层级时，周围的人更容易告诉你哪里做得不对。而当你升到很高的位置时，几乎没有人愿意指出你的错误，因为你可能正在付钱让那些人围绕在你身边，给你提供建议。
And they don't want to tell the emperor he has no clothes. That happens to a lot, lots of people, lots of companies and whatnot. The thing that made you great is degraded the more successful that you become. And some people fight this very well, but a lot of people don't. It's a tough thing. I think the laziness aspect of it, of once you become more financially independent, you're not driven. For most of my career, I was writing because that was how I fed my children. I have to do this. Yes, I love it. Yes, I enjoy it. But I absolutely have to do this.
他们不愿意告诉皇帝他没穿衣服。很多人、许多公司等都会遇到这种情况。让你成功的东西会随着你变得更成功而退化。有些人应对得很好，但很多人并不能。这是很难的事情。我觉得这是懒惰的一方面——一旦变得财务独立，你就没有动力了。在我的大部分职业生涯中，我写作是因为这是我养活孩子的方式。我必须这样做。是的，我爱写作，是的，我享受它，但我必须这样做。
Once you get to a point where it's like, look, I still love to do this. I don't have to do it anymore. Is my motivation lower than it used to? I think the answer is yes. I don't like to admit that, but I think the answer is yes. Now, I'm still very motivated to keep writing because I love doing it. And I think there's a part of it that I enjoy more now that I'm not doing it to feed my children. I'm doing it because I just love, because I love the art of writing rather than just the business of writing. But people's motivations change over time.
一旦到了这样一个阶段：我仍然热爱做这件事，但我不再非做不可了。那我的动力有没有比以前低呢？我觉得答案是肯定的。虽然不想承认，但我认为答案是肯定的。不过，我依然非常有动力继续写作，因为我热爱这件事。我觉得有一部分原因是，现在我写作并不是为了养家糊口，而是纯粹因为热爱，爱写作这个艺术，而不仅仅是写作这个职业。但人们的动力确实会随着时间而改变。
Now, part of that is great. I don't want to be 60 years old and having to work to feed myself this week, but you shouldn't pretend that it's going to not impact the thing that made you great. I want to come to writing later on. I get a lot of questions about your process around that. But before we get there, what is risk? You can have a million different definitions of risk. I think broadly, it's anything that's going to prevent you from achieving the goals that you want. That's a very basic answer, but I think that's what it is. And the reason that's important is because take volatility in the stock market.
现在，这其中有一部分是很棒的。我不想在我60岁的时候还要工作来养活自己，但你不能假装这不会影响你曾经取得成功的因素。我稍后会讨论写作的部分，很多人对你的写作过程很感兴趣。但在我们讨论之前，什么是风险？你可以有上百万种不同的定义。我认为大体上，风险是任何会阻碍你实现目标的事情。这是一个非常基本的答案，但我认为它就是这样。重要的原因在于，看看股市的波动性。
Is that risk? Well, it could be. If you're a day trader, then yes. The market goes down tomorrow. That's a risk for you. If you're going to retire in 50 years, it's not whatsoever. So just defining it in personal terms is I think the most important. But a lot of finance is not that. They define risk as volatility, whatever it might be. Recessions, all these different things, but it's a very personal answer. What is risky for me might not be for you and vice versa. And this is what gets back to most financial debates are people with different time horizons talking over each other.
这是风险吗？嗯，可能是。如果你是个日内交易者，那么是的。市场明天下跌了，对你来说这就是风险。如果你打算在50年后退休，那完全不是风险。所以，我认为以个人角度来定义风险是最重要的。但很多金融领域并不是这样。他们将风险定义为波动性、经济衰退等等，然而这些都是非常个人化的回答。对我来说是风险的东西，对你来说可能就不是，反之亦然。这就是为什么大部分金融争论都是因为拥有不同时间视角的人在互相争论。
There's a quote that I love that is personal finance is more personal than it is finance. That is really important for everyone. You and I should not pretend that risk for Renaissance technology is going to be the same for you and I within our personal household. It's completely and utterly different. So anything that pulls you away from whatever goals you personally have is what I would define as risk. If you had to break down the skill differences between accumulating money, keeping money and spending money, how would you do that? I've often defined it as getting rich and staying rich are completely different skills.
有一句我非常喜欢的话：“个人理财更多的是个人，而不是财务。” 这对每个人都非常重要。你和我不应该假装文艺复兴科技公司的风险与你我个人家庭的风险是一样的。这完全是不同的。所以，任何让你偏离个人目标的事情，我都会定义为风险。如果要区分积累财富、保有财富和消费财富的不同技能，你会怎么做呢？我常常这样定义：致富和守富是完全不同的技能。
And there's not that many people who are equally skilled in getting rich versus staying rich. There's a sliver society that's very good at getting rich that has no ability to stay rich. And there's some people who are very good at holding on to money but much less talented at building it and growing it over time. When you have both skills combined, it's a very special thing. Buffet is obviously that Bill Gates is that there's a handful of people who are extremely good at getting rich and have stayed rich very well. The example that I always use is Bill Gates when he started Microsoft took the most audacious entrepreneurial swing that maybe anyone's ever taken of saying every desk in the world needs computer on this.
很少有人同时擅长积累财富和保持财富。有一小部分人非常擅长赚钱，但无法保住财富。而有些人则非常擅长守住钱财，但在积累和增长财富方面却不那么在行。如果一个人同时具备这两种能力，那就非常特别了。巴菲特显然是这样的人，比尔·盖茨也是。我总是拿比尔·盖茨举例：他创办微软时做出了也许是史上最大胆的创业举动，宣称每个办公桌都需要一台电脑。
And he's saying this in 1974, whatever it was, crazy amount of risk, crazy bold vision. At the same time, he said that he always wanted Microsoft to have enough cash in the bank to make payroll for one year with no revenue, which is the most conservative, pessimistic way to run a business. So he's like very risk taking and very conservative paranoid at the same time. Very good at getting rich, very good at staying rich at the same time. It's very unique to have both of those acting at the same time. And I think at the individual level, you can have it too. My net worth, you'd say, is very barbelled.
他在1974年就说过这些，无论在当时有多么大的风险，多么大胆的愿景。同时他还说，他一直希望微软账户里的现金足够支付一年的工资，即使没有任何收入，这是一种最保守、最悲观的经营方式。所以他既敢于冒险，又非常谨慎和忧虑。他不仅擅长赚钱，还擅长保住财富。这种同时具有两种特质的人非常少见。我认为作为个人，你也可以做到这一点。可以说，我的净资产也非常极端化。
Like a lot of cash, that's the paranoid conservative side and stocks that I hope to hold for 50 years. That's incredibly audacious that this is actually going to work out over the next half century. And I don't think that's any contradiction. It's just trying to get both of the skills of getting rich and staying rich work at the same time.
像大量现金，这是偏保守的一面，还有我希望持有50年的股票。这显然非常大胆，认为这在未来半个世纪内会奏效。我觉得这并不矛盾，而只是试图同时掌握致富和保持财富的技巧。
Speaking of staying rich, one of the stories we talked about last night was the Vanderbelts and how they basically blew a $400 billion fortune. What happened? If you look at all of the robber baron, very wealthy families, the Carnegie's, the JP Morgan's, the Fords, the Rockefeller's, the Vanderbelts. I think virtually all of them did well or did a decent job at managing that dynastic money except the Vanderbelts.
说到保持财富，我们昨晚谈到的一个故事是关于范德比尔特家族，他们基本上挥霍掉了一个价值4000亿美元的财富。这是怎么回事呢？如果你看看所有的强盗大亨，非常富有的家族，比如卡内基家族、摩根家族、福特家族、洛克菲勒家族和范德比尔特家族。我认为几乎所有家族都很好或比较好地管理了他们的世代财富，除了范德比尔特家族。
The Vanderbelts completely and utterly botched it. The status, you know, when Cornelius Vanderbelts died, his net worth adjusted for inflation, because he died in the 1800s, was the equivalent of $400 billion. And in three generations, there was nothing left, which is an astounding thing to think about. And in between there, sat three generations who just blew money in the dumbest ways you can imagine. And the reason you could say it was dumb is because I don't think any of them were happy. I think they were pretty much all miserable if you dig into the biographies of these three generations.
范德比尔特家族彻底搞砸了。你知道的，当科尼利厄斯·范德比尔特去世时，他的财富如果按通货膨胀调整，因为他在1800年代去世，相当于4000亿美元。而三代人之后，什么都不剩了，这真是让人惊讶。过程中，三代人就在你能想象的最愚蠢的方式上挥霍了这些钱。你可以说这很愚蠢，是因为我觉得他们没有一个是快乐的。根据这三代人的传记来看，我觉得他们都很痛苦。
A lot of the other robber baron families taught their children, taught their heirs to run the business or to become good philanthropists, whatever it was. The Vanderbelts effectively told their heirs, your job, your sole purpose on this planet is to spend more money than anyone else. And so they did it. They built the biggest houses that were so big, they didn't even want to live in them because they were too big. They threw parties that were so extravagant, they were just burdens on themselves. They were used, like their sole financial metric is, can you spend more money than the other socialite? And they were all miserable for it.
很多其他强盗贵族家庭会教导他们的孩子或继承人如何经营企业或成为出色的慈善家，不论是做哪一种。而范德比尔特家族则基本上告诉他们的继承人，你们在这个星球上的唯一任务就是比任何人花更多的钱。所以他们照做了。他们建造了最大的房子，这些房子大得他们自己都不愿意住，因为实在太大了；他们举办了极其奢侈的派对，这些派对对他们自己而言都是负担。他们唯一的财务标准就是，能否比其他的上流社会人士花更多的钱。因此，他们都因此感到非常痛苦。
And the story that a lot of people know now is that the first Vanderbelts heir to not get any money, when all the money was exhausted, the first heir, whether there's nothing left, was Anderson Cooper of CNN. His mother was a woman named Gloria Vanderbelts, she got the last trust fund in the family. And Cooper is not only the most successful Vanderbelts heir in like 180 years, he's probably the happiest. And he's talked about this, that money that you are given, that you inherit, can be a burden to your ambition, a burden to your identity of building a name for yourself.
很多人现在知道的一个故事是，第一个没有继承任何财富的范德比尔特家族后代是CNN的安德森·库珀。当所有的钱都耗尽后，安德森·库珀成为了家族中第一个没有遗产的人。他的母亲是名叫格洛丽亚·范德比尔特的女士，她得到了家族中的最后一个信托基金。库珀不仅是近180年来最成功的范德比尔特家族后代，他可能也是最幸福的。他曾谈到，被给予的财富或继承的遗产可能会成为你志向的负担，也可能会妨碍你建立自己名声的过程。
And he was kind of the first Vanderbel heir who was like relieved of the burden of having to carry on this thing of like, I'm a socialite, I'm a Vanderbelts. And he's just like, I can build my own name and my own career. And I'm sure because his mother was Gloria Vanderbelts, there were doors open to him that would not be open to anyone else. And he pretty much had to build it for himself for the first time in 150 years. Do you believe that money should be able to pass between parents and kids?
他算是第一个范德比尔特家族的继承人，不再背负着“我是上流社会的一员，我是范德比尔特家族的一员”这种包袱。他认为，自己能够建立自己的名声和事业。当然，因为他的母亲是格洛丽亚·范德比尔特，有些机会是其他人无法得到的。但他几乎是第一次在150年里靠自己打拼。你认为父母和子女之间应该能够传承财富吗？
Well, Abel, sure, it's your decision. But there are obviously downsides. And I'm sure, I hope it's a long time for now that I'll leave my kids some money, not a lot. I love the Buffett quote where he says, leave your kids enough money so that they can do anything, but not so much money that they can do nothing. And that I think is really important. I want to use whatever money I've saved to give my kids the best opportunity of building the life that they want, but not so much money that they are forced to live the life that I want for them.
好吧，Abel，当然这是你的决定。但显然有一些不利之处。我希望在很长一段时间后，我能给我的孩子们留下一些钱，不是很多。我非常喜欢巴菲特的那句话，他说：“要给孩子们足够的钱让他们可以做任何事，但不要多到让他们什么都不做。”我认为这非常重要。我希望用我存下来的钱，给我的孩子们最好的机会去建设他们自己想要的生活，而不是有太多的钱迫使他们去过我为他们设想的生活。
I've met some families who are very wealthy and wealth becomes like a personality burden of because I inherited this much money. My job is to just be an heir of my grandfather, an heir of my parents rather than finding out who I am and discovering who I am for myself. That's true. It's like the very high levels, but you don't want the wealth that you pass your kids to burden them into a lifestyle that they don't want for themselves.
我遇到过一些非常富有的家庭，他们的财富成了一种负担，仿佛因为继承了大笔钱财，我的责任就是做爷爷或父母的继承人，而不是去发现真正的自己。这确实是种现实，尤其在那些超级富有的家庭中。但我们不希望把财富传给孩子时，让他们背上不愿意的生活方式的负担。
You just want to be like, here's enough money so that you can have the leverage and the tools to find out who you want to be and live the life that you want, but not so much that it's going to burden you into forcing you into a direction that you don't want to be. It's almost like there's a geometric progression of surface area here where the more houses you acquire, the more staff you need, the more staff you need, the more managers you have, the more managers. As I was talking to Sam Zell, we were supposed to record a podcast, it never happened because he unfortunately passed away.
你只是想要提供足够的钱，让他们有资源和工具去发现自己想成为谁并过上自己想要的生活，但又不会多到让他们陷入不想去的方向。这有点像几何级数的表面积增长：你买的房子越多，需要的员工就越多；员工越多，需要的管理者也就越多。我本来要和 Sam Zell 录制一次播客，但还没来得及，他就不幸去世了。
But when I was talking to him, he just wanted two houses. He didn't want 10 houses. He didn't want all of these things. He's like, I can just rent them. I don't want to hassle. I don't want the burden that comes with that. Do you think that we lose sight of that? And then there's sort of like a natural entropy to wealth, right? Like it starts to expand. And you actually have to apply a lot of energy to keep it small. Yeah. It's obviously not the case that the more money you have, the less happy you're going to be. That's obviously wrong. But I think if you have more money, you can have more complicated life and complication can lead to a lot of unhappiness. That's definitely true.
但是当我和他谈话时，他只想要两套房子。他不想要10套房子，也不想要那些其他的东西。他说，我可以租房子，我不想要麻烦，不想要那些随之而来的负担。你觉得我们有没有忽略这一点？财富似乎有一种自然的膨胀趋势，对吧？它会慢慢扩展，而你实际上需要花费很大的力气才能让它保持小规模。拥有更多的钱并不会让你更不快乐，这显然是错误的。但是我认为，如果你拥有更多的钱，你的生活可能会变得更复杂，而这种复杂性可能会导致很多不快乐。这点是绝对正确的。
And I think this is mostly true for people who are like middle wealth. If you're like extreme upper wealth, you can just hire out every decision people can take care of for you. It's people who have enough money to buy a second home, but they have to manage it themselves. That's when things get like really complicated in your life. Many years ago, I did this consulting session with a group of NBA rookies. They were, they were to some of them, 19, 20 years old, and they're now making millions. And a lot of them grew up in like inner city poverty. They grew up very, very poor. And when they are teenagers, they signed contracts for millions of dollars.
我认为这对中等财富的人来说是基本真实的。如果你是极端富有的人，你可以雇人来处理所有的决策。对于那些有足够的钱买第二套房子，但需要自己管理的人来说，生活会变得非常复杂。多年以前，我和一群NBA新秀做了一个咨询会议。他们当时只有19、20岁，现在已经赚了几百万。很多人都在城市贫困地区长大，非常贫穷。青少年时期，他们就签了几百万美元的合同。
It's like such a stark movement for them. And the purpose of this conversation was to talk about money to try to prevent the very well known path of athletes going bankrupt. A very significant percentage of these people who make millions of dollars are bankrupt by the time they're 30. So like, how do we prevent that? And one of these athletes who was, I think it was 19. Said something that I thought was so profound and wise. He said, when you grow up in inner city poverty, and then you make millions of dollars when you're still young, that's not just your money.
这对他们来说是一个巨大的转变。这次对话的目的是讨论如何用钱，以试图防止运动员破产的普遍现象。这些赚了数百万美元的人中，有很大一部分在30岁时已经破产了。那么，我们该如何防止这种情况发生呢？其中一位运动员——我记得他当时好像只有19岁——说了一句让我觉得非常深刻和睿智的话。他说，当你在城市贫困中长大，然后在依然年轻的时候赚到数百万美元，那不仅仅是你的钱。
That is mom's money, that is brother's money, that is cousin's money, that is neighbor's money. You can't just tell everyone back at home, good luck to y'all. I got my money. I'm going to go live in the mansion. You stay in this level of, you can't do that. And he said, the reason so many athletes go bankrupt is not because they bought themselves a mansion. It's because they bought their fifth cousin a house and they felt so much pressure to do it. That they had this like social burden that came with the money. And I think at many different levels, that's an extreme example, but at a lot of levels, there is social debt that comes with money. So if you, at every level of net worth, like if your net worth grows by $1 with that comes a couple pennies maybe of like social debt, where you are like incentivized or like pushed towards to increase your lifestyle or to take care of other people in ways that might be great, but might be a burden, might be a debt that comes with it. And at some point, I think that social debt explodes.
这笔钱是妈妈的，那是哥哥的，那是表弟的，那是邻居的。你不能只回家告诉所有人“祝你们好运，我有自己的钱，我要去住豪宅了，你们就待在这儿。”你不能这样做。他说，很多运动员破产的原因，不是因为他们给自己买了豪宅，而是因为他们给远房表弟买了房子，并且他们感到巨大的压力去这么做。他们背负着一种随钱而来的社会责任。我认为，在很多层面上，这是一个极端的例子，但在许多层面上，随着金钱而来的确实存在一种社会负担。无论你的净资产达到哪个水平，每增加一美元，可能就伴随着一些社会负债，比如说你会被激励或被迫提高自己的生活水平，或者去照顾别人。这些行为可能是好的，但也可能是负担，是一种债务。最终，这种社会负债可能会爆发。
I mean, people who are worth, you know, 50 or $100 billion, we see there's not that many of them, but their social debt to use that money wisely and to donate that money wisely is off the charts. It's enormous, the pressure that they have to use that money well to not end up like the Vanderbilt's. How much pressure does Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates have to donate their money effectively? And no matter what they do, no matter what causes they give to, people are going to say, well, that's not a worthy cause. This was more worthy than that. An enormous amount of like invisible social debt that comes with that. Talk to me more about that. Like I love that concept. I don't want to talk about the extremes where like Bezos, Musk and that, but the social debt, like almost like you go to a wedding and you have to give more because you have more. Is that where you go out to if your friends know the F money, you got to dinner, you're forced to pay kind of thing or like, oh, I heard, I heard this guy just got a huge bonus last year. Let's see what he gets me for Christmas kind of thing. There's a lot of that that comes with it.
我指的是，那些身价五百亿或一千亿美元的人，我们看到他们并不多，但他们在合理使用和捐赠这些钱方面有巨大的社会压力。这种用好这些钱的责任是非常高的，压力巨大，以至于他们不能像范德比尔特家族（Vanderbilt）的结局那样。比如杰夫·贝佐斯（Jeff Bezos）和比尔·盖茨（Bill Gates）就背负着巨大的压力，他们无论怎么捐赠，不管他们支持什么样的事业，人们总会说，那不是一个值得捐助的原因，另一个原因更重要。这种无形的社会负担非常大。跟我多谈谈这个概念吧，我很感兴趣。比如，不要讨论贝佐斯、马斯克这样的极端例子，而是社会责任感的问题。就像你去参加婚礼，因为你比较有钱，所以你得给更多的礼金。或者说，如果你的朋友知道你赚了很多钱，那么一旦你们去吃饭，你就得主动买单，或者大家听说你去年拿了大笔奖金，他们就会期待你在圣诞节时送更好的礼物。这样的社会压力其实挺多的。
And of course, it's a good problem to have. You should not have sympathy for people who made so much money that they now have social debt, like boo, boo, you know, you deal with it. But it's a real thing. And a lot of it is just the incentive on yourself or within your own family to be like, oh, we have more money now. We should, I guess we should buy more stuff. It's like this pressure to do something that you may or may not actually want. One other like, like weird oddball story that I thought about here on the Amtrak train from Washington DC to Boston is where it goes. There is always a quiet car. It's, it's one section of the train where you're supposed to be completely quiet. If you want to get some work done or whatnot. And always what happens.
当然，这确实是一个“幸福的烦恼”。你不应该对那些赚了很多钱而导致需要承受“社会债务”的人感到同情，像是那种“哦，天哪，你自己解决吧”的情况。但这确实是真实存在的。很多时候就是你自己或者你的家庭觉得，哦，我们现在有更多的钱了，应该买更多东西。就像有种压力迫使你去做一些你其实可能并不想做的事情。
还有一个有点奇怪的故事让我想起，在从华盛顿特区到波士顿的 Amtrak 火车上，总会有一个“安静车厢”。这是列车中的一个部分，你应该完全保持安静，如果你想完成一些工作或者其他事情。而总是会发生的事情是……
You go there for peace and serenity. But everyone on the quiet car is so anxious and upset because on the quiet car, if someone's so much as whispers, or if your phone accidentally goes off, people lose their minds because they have this expectation that it's going to be completely quiet. And so the slightest little sound sets them off. And like the irony is you go there for serenity, but you're just so angry while you're there because of anyone's making any noise and drives you crazy.
你去那里是为了寻求平静和宁静。但在安静车厢里，每个人都异常紧张和烦躁，因为在这个车厢里，只要有人稍微小声说话，或者你的手机不小心响了，人们就会疯狂，因为他们期望这里会完全安静。所以一点点声音都会让他们发火。讽刺的是，你去那儿是为了宁静，但因为任何人制造的任何噪音会让你抓狂，所以你在那儿反而非常生气。
And it's this thing of just like, if your expectations shift, then the littlest thing can make you upset. It's like when you go to the quiet car, yes, it is quieter, but you also have this like sound debt that comes with it. You could say this invisible sound debt that is a liability now. And I think it's so true with money as well that the more money you gain, the more pressure you have to live a better life that may or may not actually make you happier.
如果你的期望改变了，那么最小的事情也能让你不开心。这就像你去乘坐安静车厢，虽然确实安静一些，但也带来了无形的"声音债务"。这就像一种负担。我认为这在金钱方面也是如此，赚的钱越多，感觉压力越大，必须过上更好的生活，但这种生活不一定会让你更幸福。
Will Smith, the actor said that when he was poor and depressed, he could tell himself, if only I had more money, all my problems would go away. Right. And then when he became rich and he was still depressed, he couldn't say that anymore. He was still depressed, but he was like, I can't say that if I had more money, I would be happier because I already have more money that I could ever spend. So he said, what happened when he became rich is it just removed the hope that he had when he was poor, he had this hope like, I got to make more money and then I'll be okay. And he's rich is like, you lost all the hope. He's still depressed.
演员威尔·史密斯说，当他贫穷和沮丧的时候，他会告诉自己，如果我有更多的钱，所有的问题都会解决，对吧。然而，当他变得富有后，却仍然感到沮丧，他再也不能这么说了。他仍然感到沮丧，但他知道不能再说"如果我有更多的钱，我会更快乐"，因为他已经有了花不完的钱。所以他说，当他变得富有后，困扰他的希望也随之消失了。以前贫穷时，他还有这样的希望：只要赚更多的钱，一切都会好起来。但是现在他富有了，这种希望却消失了，因为他仍然感到沮丧。
Like it's very inspiring to think if I have more money, my problems will go away. But then once you have that money and you realize that you still have just as many problems, maybe even more problems than you had before, that could be a tough thing for people to live in. That could be a tough thing for people to wrap their heads around. We're talking about that a little bit last night in the sense of people who have money can't really talk about money either because they have all the same problems that everybody else has, but they don't feel like they can openly converse about it.
想想如果我有更多的钱，我的问题就会消失，这种想法非常激励人心。但是，当你真的有了更多的钱，却发现问题并没有减少，可能甚至比以前更多时，这可能是一个让人很难接受的事情。这件事很难让人理解。昨晚我们稍微谈到了一些这个话题，就是有钱人也不能真正谈论钱的问题，因为他们和普通人有同样的问题，但又觉得不能公开讨论这些问题。
Yeah. Because it's like, boo-hoo. And it's true. Like they are boo-hoo problems. There are much bigger problems in the world. If you are, you know, have can't afford health insurance, you're homeless, whatever. They're much, much bigger problems. First world problems are real problems in people's heads. And you're right that they're, by and large, can't talk about them. It's very interesting when you get together a group of wealthy people into a room where they can all start.
是的。因为这就像是“呜呜呜”的抱怨。而且确实如此，这些抱怨确实很琐碎。相比之下，这个世界上有更大的问题。如果你负担不起医疗保险，或者无家可归，这些都是更严重得多的问题。发达国家的问题在很多人眼中是真的问题，但你说得对，大多数情况下大家都不会谈论这些问题。当一群有钱人聚在一起讨论这些事情时，这种场合就很有趣。
Like in that safety zone, they can talk about their problems and they all have the same problems. How do I not spoil my kids? How do I do this? Things that they can't talk about with anyone else in their life because those problems are so different from the other, like, very real material health living problems. But there are lots of things that are very difficult to figure out when you have a lot of money or even just a modest amount of money that you can't talk about even with some of your closest friends. I am sure you do have friends who have less money than you and I do.
就像在那个安全区里，他们可以谈论自己的问题，而且都面临相同的问题。比如，我该怎么不宠坏我的孩子？我该怎么做这件事？这些问题他们无法在生活中的任何其他场合谈论，因为这些问题与其他非常现实的物质健康生活问题截然不同。但有很多事情，当你拥有很多钱或者即便是适量的钱时，也很难弄明白，这些问题甚至你都无法和最亲密的朋友交流。我相信你和我一样，也有比我们经济条件差的朋友。
Yeah. And you can talk about with those friends, you can talk about anything else in life. Yeah. Problems with your marriage, problems with your health, whatever it might be. And there's all these other things that you're like, I can't talk about the things that are actually giving me anxiety right now. It seems like the meta skill to think about right now through this conversation is how do we learn to manage our expectations? This is maybe this is how we started the podcast. I don't want my expectations to never move.
是的。而且你可以和那些朋友谈谈生活中的任何事情。对，婚姻问题，健康问题，无论是什么问题。还有那些你觉得不能谈的事情，实际上那些才是真的让你焦虑的东西。通过这次谈话，现在要思考的核心技能似乎是我们如何学会管理自己的期望。也许，这就是我们开始这个播客的初衷。我并不希望我的期望一成不变。
I want them to just grow a little bit slower than my wealth over time. I want it so that in 50 years, I hope that I'm living a better material life. To some degree, I just want that level to not exceed my net worth over time. Once your aspirations exceed your the growth of your wealth, that's when people get, they take too much risk. They go into debt, whatever it might be. You hung around and spent time with a lot of wealthy families, either giving talks or individually.
我希望他们的成长速度比我的财富增长速度稍微慢一点。我希望50年后，我能过上更好的物质生活。在某种程度上，我只是希望这个生活水平不要超过我的净资产。一旦你的愿望超过了财富的增长速度，人们就会承担过大的风险，比如借债等等。我和许多富有的家庭相处过很多时间，无论是演讲还是单独交流。
The problems are the same. How do they deal with not raising spoiled children? How do they, what have you learned from that? I'd say most of them. How do they deal with not raising spoiled children is they don't deal with it. Well, it's a very hard thing to do. I had a conversation recently with a guy who was his father is a billionaire. They've lived like billionaires his entire life. He's roughly orange. He's a very down to earth grounded polite guy. I asked him, how did you grow up with private jets and mansions and not become a spoiled little prick?
问题都是一样的。他们是如何不把孩子养成被宠坏的孩子的？他们是怎么应对的？从中你学到了什么？我想大多数人。他们是如何不把孩子养成宠坏的孩子的，就是他们其实没有去处理这个问题。因为这确实是件很难做到的事情。我最近和一个人聊过，他的父亲是亿万富翁，他们一生都过着亿万富翁的生活方式。他大概三十多岁。他是一个非常脚踏实地、有礼貌的人。我问他，你是怎么在有私人飞机和大豪宅的环境中长大，却没有变成一个被宠坏的小屁孩的？
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Because he's such a nice guy. He said, despite having that much money and living like a billionaire, his parents never taught him, never told him that because we have more money, we're better than anyone else. They told him quite the opposite. He said something that was really important. He said the reason that so many kids grow up spoiled is because the parents are obsessed with money. That's why the parents are rich is because they're obsessed with money. But it naturally grows into this thing of like, you are better than other people if you have more money and if people have less money than us than we're not, they are not equal to us.
因为他是一个很好的人，他说，尽管他有那么多钱，过着亿万富翁的生活，但他的父母从未教导过他，也从未告诉他因为我们有更多的钱，所以我们比别人更好。他们告诉他的恰恰相反。他说了一件非常重要的事情。他说，许多孩子长大后被宠坏的原因是父母对钱痴迷。这也是父母致富的原因，因为他们痴迷于钱。但这种痴迷自然会衍生成这样一种想法：如果你有更多的钱，你就比别人更好，而如果别人钱比我们少，那他们就不如我们。
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It's so basic and almost cliche, but if you are very wealthy but you're still teaching your kids the good values, that will stick with them. The opposite is true too. Even if you have a lower income, but you raise them with an obsession with money, that's the scorecard of measuring other people. It's like, well, what's your net worth? What's your salary? That's why I'm going to measure you by and rank you by. That's when you get spoiled old jerks as children. How do you engraut and talk to your kids about money? Our kids are foreign aid, so not that much yet.
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虽然听起来很基本，甚至有点老套，但如果你很富有，并且仍然教导孩子们正确的价值观，这些价值观会对他们产生深远影响。反之亦然。即使你的收入较低，但如果你让孩子对金钱有执念，把金钱当作衡量他人的标准，比如净资产多少、工资多少，那么你培养出的孩子就可能变成被宠坏的老顽固。你该如何向孩子灌输和讨论金钱的意义呢？我们的孩子还小，所以还没有太多涉及这方面的话题。
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The other thing that I've noticed, I'm sure it's the same for you and other people who have multiple children is that my kids could not be more different in their personalities. And of course, they're raised by the same parents. They shared, they shared, have their DNA. It's the same house, the same rules, the same upbringing, and they're utterly different people. So you can't create one philosophy, one parenting philosophy for that. The other thing is, even if I know my children today, I don't know who they're going to be when they're adults. Does my daughter want to be a partner at Goldman Sachs? Does she want to work for Greenpeace? Does she want to be a kindergarten teacher? You have no idea what they're going to do. And the different rules are going to be different for them.
另一件我注意到的事情，相信你和其他有多个孩子的家长也有同感，就是我的孩子在性格上截然不同。当然，他们是由同样的父母抚养长大的，拥有相同的DNA，住在同一屋檐下，遵守相同的规则，接受相同的教育，但他们却是完全不同的人。所以，不能只用一个单一的育儿理念来教育他们。还有，即使我今天了解我的孩子，我也不知道他们长大后会变成什么样子。我的女儿是想成为高盛的合伙人？还是想为绿色和平组织工作？还是想当一名幼儿园老师？你完全无法预知他们将来会做什么，而不同的规则也会因人而异。
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I also think that what's true is that the more you try to tell your kids, this is what you should do. The more they're going to rebel against that, particularly when they're teenagers, but the more that you can just lead by example, like A, they are going to pick up on it. You don't need to sit your kids down and say, let me teach you about money. And in fact, if you do that, most kids are going to yawn and say, I'm not interested in this. But they are definitely paying attention to every time you say, we can't afford this. They're making a mental note of it. Every time you say, that's too expensive. Every time you say, I value this, I don't value that. They're forming a model in their head that's going to stick with them forever. And so I think just leading by example with them is what we try to do rather than trying to say, this is what I want to teach you. These are the values I want to instill.
我还认为，真相是这样的：你越是试图告诉孩子们“你应该这样做”，他们就越会反叛，尤其是在他们是青少年的时候。但你越是以身作则，比如做出榜样，他们就会自然而然地学到这些东西。你不需要把孩子们叫到一起，坐下来专门教他们关于金钱的道理。事实上，如果你这样做，大多数孩子会感到无聊，说“我对这个不感兴趣”。但是他们绝对会注意到每当你说“我们买不起这个”时。他们会在心里记下这些话语。每当你说“这太贵了”或“我重视这个，我不重视那个”时，他们都会在脑海中形成一个模型，这会影响他们一辈子。所以，我认为以身作则是我们应该做的，而不是试图去直接告诉他们“这是我要教给你的，这些是我想灌输的价值观”。
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Back to my own parents. I don't think they ever sat me or my siblings down and said, let me teach you about money. But I learned profound money lessons for them by just observing when I was eight years old. Well, let's invert it. Well, we can go from parenting and then maybe to money broader. But like what lessons don't you want your kids to learn about money? What would be the worst thing that they can take away from you about money? Don't think that all poverty is due to laziness and don't think that all wealth is due to hard work. It's not if you are just ranking people by their net worth and ranking their value by the net worth. That's probably the most dangerous thing you can do with money. It's the most profoundly wrong takeaway from money. And yes, a lot of wealthy people earned it, of course. And a lot of poor people made some very bad decisions. But once you just use it as a yardstick to measure people's value by, you're making a huge mistake. There are a lot of wealthy people who I cannot stand. And some of my best friends don't make that much money. And I think you can only have that in your life if you divorce someone's salary and net worth from their personal worth in life.
回到我自己的父母。我不认为他们曾经让我或我的兄弟姐妹坐下来，说要教我们关于金钱的知识。但我在八岁时通过观察，从他们那里学到了深刻的金钱教训。好，我们换个角度来看。我们可以从教育孩子，然后可能再谈到更广泛的金钱话题。你不希望你的孩子从你这里学到的关于金钱的什么错误观念？他们从你这里学到关于金钱的最糟糕的事情是什么？不要认为所有的贫穷都是由于懒惰，不要认为所有的财富都是通过辛勤劳动获得的。如果你只是根据净资产来排名，并以此来衡量他们的价值，这是你在金钱方面可能犯的最危险的错误。这样得出的关于金钱的结论是最严重错误的。当然，很多富人确实是通过努力赚来的财富，很多穷人确实做了一些非常糟糕的决定。但是，一旦你把净资产用作衡量人们价值的标准，你就是在犯一个巨大的错误。很多我无法忍受的富人，我最好的朋友中有很多收入并不高。而我认为，只有当你将一个人的工资和净资产与他们在生活中的个人价值分开来看，你才能在生活中拥有这种区别。
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What else? Keep going. I think what's interesting, I don't know if this is a lesson, but what's interesting is that if you ask most parents, what do you want for your kids? Almost every parent will say, I just want them to be happy. I just want to raise happy kids. And then if you said, do you want your kids to be rich and successful? Well, sure, but I just want them to be happy. So then figuring out how to use money as a tool to make you happier rather than just a tool to pile on to become wealthier is really important. And I would, you know, there are for sure people who earn 30 grand per year that are so much happier than people who earn $3 million per year. And understanding that value of money, I think, is really important. Like what can money do to make you happier? Because there's no other purpose. There's nothing else that you should even think about other than that. What do you think is the biggest risk to capitalism? I think it's always going to be the case. It is inevitable. And it is actually ideal that there is some level of inequality in the world. It's not only inevitable. It's ideal. The opposite of that is a nightmare. But it's also the case that you do not want a third of society waking up every morning and saying, this doesn't work for me. This system doesn't work for me. So once you get to some critical level, maybe it's not 30%, whatever it is. But if enough people wake up in the morning and say, this sucks, this system doesn't work, then it's going to reverse itself. And there's a very long history of that. So the balance of you want inequality because people's skills are unequal. You want that to be the case. But there is some barrier at which it starts to reverse itself. And it becomes a pitchforks in the streets kind of scenario that reverse.
还有什么呢？继续说。我觉得有趣的是——不确定这是否算是一个教训，但有趣的是，如果你问大多数父母，你希望你的孩子怎样？几乎每个父母都会说，我只希望他们快乐。我只想养育快乐的孩子。然后如果你再问他们，你希望你的孩子富有成功吗？他们会说，当然，但我更希望他们快乐。所以，弄清楚如何将金钱作为工具来让你更快乐，而不仅仅是积累财富的工具，这真的很重要。我相信，确实有每年赚3万的人比每年赚300万的人要快乐得多。理解金钱的价值真的很重要：金钱能做什么让你更快乐？除此之外，没有其他任何目的，也不应该考虑其他的东西。你认为资本主义面临的最大风险是什么？我认为这一直会存在，是不可避免的。事实上，在某种程度上的不平等其实是理想的。这不仅是不可避免的，而且是理想的。其反面是一个噩梦。但同样事实是，你不希望有三分之一的社会早上醒来时说，这个制度不适合我，这个系统对我不起作用。所以，一旦达到某个关键水平，可能不是30%，不管是多少，但如果足够多的人早上醒来说，这太糟糕了，这个系统不起作用，那么它就会自我逆转。历史上有很多这样的例子。因此，你希望不平等，因为人的能力是不平等的，你希望这是事实。但也有某个临界点，一旦达到这个点，它就会开始逆转，并变成街道上的"举着火把和干戈"的情景。
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Now, in the history of the United States, it's happened several times. The 1920s and the Great Depression, I'm thinking what we've dealt with in the last couple of years. There's always a pendulum between labor and capital, workers and investors. And it kind of swings back and forth, who's taking the lion's share of the spoils in this economy. In the 1920s, it was capital. From the 1950s to 70s, it was labor. And since then, it's been capital. And it kind of shifts back and forth. Now, just in the last three or four years, there's been a huge growth. The segment of society whose incomes have grown the most tends to be the lower incomes. We're still kind of attached to this narrative of the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. But in the last couple of years, it has kind of flipped around, at least to a degree that we haven't seen in a very long time. Is that the pendulum shifting towards another, you know, 30-year trend? Maybe. I have no idea. But that pendulum is always there to kind of keep itself in check.
在美国的历史上，这种情况已经发生了好几次。比如上世纪二十年代和大萧条时期，我想到过去几年我们所经历的情况。劳动力与资本，工人与投资者之间总是存在一种钟摆效应，在经济中来回摆动，决定谁拿走最大的收益。上世纪二十年代是资本占据主导地位；从五十年代到七十年代则是劳动力占优；而从那以后，资本再次占上风。这种局面总是在不断变化。而在最近三到四年里，社会中收入增长最快的部分往往是低收入群体。我们仍旧常常谈论富者愈富、贫者愈贫的叙述，但在过去几年的某个程度上情况出现了一些变化，达到了我们很久未见的状态。这种现象是不是意味着钟摆正在向另一个为期三十年的趋势摆动？可能吧，我也不太确定。但这种钟摆效应永远存在，以保持平衡。
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And I think if it gets too extreme, you can get very extreme outcomes. We don't remember this now. But in the 1930s, during the Great Depression, the words dictator and authoritarian and even fascism were not the dirty words that they are today. A lot of people during that era, it was very, it was not uncommon for people to say capitalism and even having a big democracy just doesn't work. The Great Depression in their minds proved that it didn't work. And people's push to say, hey, look at all these countries in Europe that are going towards fascism. Maybe we should try that because this didn't work. I think that's the danger when you get too in equal in society is that too many other people can be tempted to saying that didn't work. Let's try something even more extreme. It's almost like I feel like I don't have opportunity. Yes. And the minute I feel like I don't have opportunity, and it's almost like we want equal opportunity and we're okay with unequal outcomes. Yeah. It's a really tough thing. And I would not, I think you and I, if we felt that we were trapped, that there's no way, no matter how hard we work, if we felt, whether it's true or not, that we were trapped in a low income job, you and I would be prone to some extreme views too.
我认为，如果社会变得太过极端，就会产生非常极端的结果。我们现在不再记得，但在上世纪30年代大萧条时期，独裁者、专制主义甚至法西斯主义这些词并不像今天这样被视为贬义词。在那个时代，很多人常说资本主义和大规模的民主制度是行不通的。他们认为大萧条证明了这一点。有人建议看看欧洲那些走向法西斯主义的国家，也许我们也应该试试，因为现有的体制没奏效。我认为这是社会不平等过度时的危险：太多人会被诱惑去认为现有体制没有用，应该尝试一些更极端的东西。就像我觉得自己没有机会一样。一旦我觉得自己没有机会，就会想要平等的机会，而对于不平等的结果却可以接受。这是一个非常艰难的问题。如果我们觉得自己被困住了，无论多么努力工作都无法改变现状，无论这是否真实存在，我们都会倾向于有一些极端的观点。
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Oh, totally. There's a saying, I love that, it was from a Russian poet who spent a lot of time in the Gulag. And he says, man becomes a beast in two weeks. If you have two weeks of deprivation, two weeks without food, two weeks in solitary confinement, a refined, kind, polite person becomes an animal. So like if you put someone in an extreme scenario, they're going to be prone to extreme views, extreme outcomes. Do you think most adults understand compounding? I think it's not intuitive to virtually anyone. Michael Badnick, a good friend of mine, has a saying that's so simple, but I think sums us up the best. He said, if I asked you, what is eight plus eight plus eight plus eight? You can figure that in your head in five seconds. If I said, what is eight times eight times eight times eight times eight? Even if you're a math genius, you're like, I don't know. It's such a huge number. Like I have no idea what it is. Basic linear math is very intuitive, very easy.
哦，完全同意。有一句话我非常喜欢，是一位在古拉格（苏联集中营）里度过了很长时间的俄罗斯诗人说的。他说，人类在两周内就会变成野兽。如果你有两周的剥夺期，两周没有食物，两周被单独监禁，一个精致、善良、有礼貌的人也会变成野兽。所以，如果你让一个人处于极端的情境中，他们很可能会表现出极端的观点和行为。你觉得大多数成年人理解复利的概念吗？我认为这对几乎所有人来说都是不直观的。我的好朋友迈克尔·巴德尼克有一句非常简单但恰如其分的话。他说，如果我问你，8加8加8加8是多少？你可以在五秒钟内心算出来。如果我问你，8乘8乘8乘8乘8是多少？即使你是数学天才，你的反应也可能会是“我不知道”。这个数字太大了，我完全没概念。基本的线性数学非常直观，非常简单。
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Compounding math is just, it's so, it's so unintuitive for even people who understand it. And it's everywhere. Compounding is not just in your bank account, your brokerage account. There's compounding in nature. There's compounding for social trends. And it's easy to underestimate how big something can become because compounding is so counterintuitive. You see this with COVID, which was compound interest at its prime. Like this virus that in the early days is, you know, doubling every day, whatever it would be. And that's how you go from, oh, three people are infected in March of 2020 to today.
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数学的复利效果实在是太令人难以理解了，即使对于那些了解它的人来说也是如此。而且它无处不在。复利不仅出现在你的银行账户或经纪账户中，复利还存在于自然界中，存在于社会趋势中。因为复利的效果太不直观，所以很容易低估某些事物会变得多么庞大。新冠疫情就是一个典型例子，展现了复利的极致效果。在早期，这种病毒可能每天都在翻倍传播。这就是为什么会从2020年3月只有三个人感染发展到今天这种情况。
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Like I don't know anyone who's not had COVID. And so it goes from literally three people to the entire world in the blink of an eye when it's doubling that quickly. How would you explain it to kids or adults? Like what is the best way to teach people the power of compounding? It's like the one formula. I tell my kids this when they're in math and they're learning this in sort of grade eight, grade nine, they learn about compounding. And I'm like, your teacher's never going to tell you this, but this is the most important formula you're probably going to learn in your math class. Yeah. I don't know. I'm not going to say this up right now. I've not thought about this. I don't know how I would explain it, but just growth fuels more growth.
就像我不知道有谁没得过新冠一样。它从最初的三个人迅速传播到全世界，就像一眨眼的功夫。当传播速度这么快时，你会怎样向孩子或成年人解释呢？怎样是教人们了解复利力量的最好方法呢？复利是一个我认为最重要的公式。我告诉我的孩子们，当他们在八年级、九年级的数学课上学到复利时，他们的老师可能不会告诉他们，但这是你们在数学课上学到的最重要的公式。我不知道怎么说这个，因为我没有深入思考过。我不知道我会怎样解释，但大意就是：增长会推动更多的增长。
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It's like the more you grow, the more fuel you have for more growth. That's not a very good explanation for it. But that's the thing to wrap your head around is like it's not what you start with. It's just like how long you're doing it for. And it's not even the growth. It's the duration that others. Yes. So I said this earlier, how I think about my own investing philosophy. If I can be average for an above average period of time, that leads to a way above average result. It's not about like, what are the returns that I can earn this year? If I can earn 8% returns for 50 years, the results are ridiculous. The results are absurd. And so maximizing the variable that matters, which is time and endurance.
这就像你越成长，你获得的成长燃料就越多。虽然这不是一个很好的解释，但你需要理解的关键是，这不是关于你从哪里开始，而是你坚持了多久。甚至不是关于增长本身，而是关于持续时间。是的，所以前面我提到，我对自己投资理念的看法是，如果我能在更长的时间内保持平均水平，那最终的结果会远超平均水平。这不是关于我今年能获得多少回报。如果我能在50年内每年赚取8%的回报，结果将是惊人的。所以关键在于最大化重要的变量，也就是时间和耐力。
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You know, all compounding is effectively is returns to the power of time. And so if you understand math, the exponent there is what's doing all the heavy lifting. Like maximize for that. But where is all of the effort in the investing industry? It's in the smaller number. It's in returns. How do I increase my returns this year? But I think when you understand like, you know, all the power, all the wealth, all the leverage is in the endurance. Just focus on that before you think about anything else. That's a really powerful way to think about it. Let's switch gears and talk about reading and writing. How do you select what you read? I heard this idea. I think it was from Patrick Hashanah, many years ago who said you want a wide-fidelity and a tight filter. I will start reading any book on any topic that looks even mildly interesting to me. But I will slam it shut without mercy and move on to something else if it's not working for me.
你知道，复利实际上就是时间的幂次效应。如果你理解数学，你会知道指数是起主要作用的部分。所以要尽量最大化这个部分。然而，在投资行业中，大部分的努力都花在了较小的数值上，即收益上。大家都在想，今年如何提高收益？但我认为，当你明白所有的力量、财富、杠杆都在于持久力时，就会先专注于这一点。这是一种非常有力的思考方式。现在我们换个话题，来谈谈阅读和写作。你是如何选择阅读材料的？我听到一个想法，应该是多年前 Patrick Hashanah 提出的，他说你需要广泛的适应性和严格的筛选。我会开始阅读任何看起来稍微有趣的书籍，但如果它不适合我，我会毫不留情地合上书本，转而读其他东西。
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A lot of the reason that people don't like read, why people don't read as much as they should. Or if they say, I'm not a big reader. A lot of the reason is because they feel like morally that they need to finish every book that they start. And we realize that the majority of books, there's 4 million books for sale on Amazon. I bet 3.9 million of those are not meant for you or for me. They're meant for other people. But they just don't work for what we want out of them. And if you force yourself to finish every book, your start, of course, it's going to be a miserable experience. But when you are willing to try anything but have a filter that just has no mercy to move on if you don't like it, that's when you find the great books.
原因之一很多人不喜欢阅读，或者阅读量不足，或者说他们不是读书爱好者，是因为他们觉得自己有道德责任完成每一本开始阅读的书。但我们意识到，大多数书籍，比如亚马逊上有400万本在售书籍，我敢打赌其中的390万本并不适合你或我，而是为其他人准备的。这些书无法满足我们的需求。如果强迫自己读完每一本书，当然会觉得痛苦。但是，如果你愿意尝试各种书籍，并且毫不留情地放弃那些不喜欢的书，那么你才会找到真正优秀的书籍。
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Because if you only stick to books that you know you're going to like about topics that you're interested, you are missing so many other topics out there that you don't even know that you would like. You have to try a million different things but then cut it off very quickly if you don't like it. So that's how I try to read. If it's even slightly interesting, if someone has said, oh, this is a good, I will start reading it. By the way, Kindle samples are free. You have no excuse to not try any book. And then just mercilessly cut it off if it's not working for you.
因为如果你只读那些你知道自己会喜欢的、与你感兴趣的主题相关的书，你就会错过很多你没想到自己会喜欢的其他主题的书。你需要尝试各种各样的东西，但如果不喜欢，就要马上放弃。这就是我尝试阅读的方式。如果某本书有一点点吸引我，或是有人推荐我读这本书，我就会开始阅读。顺便说一句，Kindle 试读版是免费的，所以你没有理由不去尝试任何一本书。如果不合胃口就果断放弃。
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I find this really interesting because with my oldest who reads a ton, I just put books on his nightstand. Some of them I think he'll like, some of them I don't think he'll like. And he randomly he'll pick them up and he read like an immune system textbook last year and loved it. Yes, I think there's a lot of like that. If you ask me right now, would I like to read a book on the immune system? I say, I don't know, not really. But there are so many topics like that over the years that I never would have thought that I would like that I start reading. I'm like, this is incredible. Or it's working for me in that moment. It's a missing puzzle piece in that moment.
我觉得这真的很有趣，因为我帮我大儿子选书时，只是随便把几本书放在他的床头柜上。有些书我觉得他会喜欢，有些我觉得他可能不会喜欢，但他会随便挑书来看，比如去年他就读了一本关于免疫系统的教材，而且非常喜欢。其实，我也觉得这种现象很常见。如果你现在问我是否想读一本关于免疫系统的书，我可能会说，我不知道，不太想。但是过去几年里，有很多类似的主题，我从没想过自己会喜欢，但一旦开始阅读，就觉得这些书非常棒，或者正好在那个时刻对我有帮助，就像是解开了一块拼图。
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There are a couple books that have always been on my go-to books that I recommend to other people. Oh, this is one of my favorite books of all time. A couple of those books, I went back and reread. And I'm like, they're really not that good. But at the time that I read them, it was a missing puzzle piece that it was like perfect for me in that moment. Even if when I read it now, I'm like, this book's kind of very basic, not that well written. And so I think that missing puzzle piece is true for a lot of people. And that's why you need to read a lot of books because what other people think are good may or may not be the book that you need at that moment.
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有几本书一直是我向别人推荐的首选书籍。哦，这是我有史以来最喜欢的书之一。那些书中的几本，我回头重新阅读了一遍。我感觉，它们其实并没有那么好。但是在我当时阅读它们的时候，它们就像是一个完美的拼图碎片，正好填补了我当时的需求。即使现在再读，我会觉得这本书其实很基础，写得也不算好。因此，我认为这种拼图碎片的情况对很多人都是一样的。这就是为什么你需要读很多书，因为别人觉得好的书在那个时刻未必是你需要的。
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Are you a Kindle reader, mostly? I'd go back and forth. I'm in a Kindle kick right now. And I've been in physical books before. What I love about Kindle is so easy to highlight and go back and search. Which for me as a writer is really important. When I'm writing, I'm like, what was that quote from this book? I need to go find that really hard to do that in a physical book. Where's Kindle? It's just so easy. Do you take them out of the Kindle or just leave the highlights on the Kindle? I use the Readwise app. And so everything that I highlight, whether it's in a blog post or a Twitter or it goes all into that. David Senra is the one who said his Readwise feed of all of his highlights is his smart Twitter feed. Twitter can be filled with so much garbage and noise. But Readwise, you can flick through. I think David Senra said he has like 28,000 highlights. And he can sit there and scroll it of these like amazing quotes and anecdotes that he's highlighted over the years.
你主要是用 Kindle 阅读吗？我两者都用。我现在正迷上 Kindle 了，但以前也常读纸质书。我喜欢 Kindle 是因为它让做标记和回顾查找变得非常容易。作为一个作家，这对我来说很重要。当我写作时，如果想要找某本书里的某句引用，用纸质书很难找到，但用 Kindle 就非常轻松。你会把标记内容从 Kindle 中导出来吗，还是就留在 Kindle 里？我用一个叫 Readwise 的应用，所以我标记的所有内容，不管是博客文章、推特等，都会同步到那个应用里。David Senra 说他把所有的标记内容都存在 Readwise 里，就像一个智慧推特流。推特上可能有很多垃圾信息和噪音，但 Readwise 你可以滑动浏览。他提到自己有大约 28,000 条标记，可以在里面翻滚查阅那些年来高亮的精彩句子和轶事。
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Are there passages that stick with you or haunt you that you've read that you can't stop thinking about? It might seem a weird one, but I just, because I'm a writer too, as you are, I'm a sucker for just a well crafted phrase. But there's one, I forget who wrote this. I'm sorry, I can't tell you who wrote this, but it was a book about D-Day. And it was talking about this one group, this one company of soldiers on D-Day, of whom many of them died. And the passage was, all of them were prepared to die that day. And all of them did die that day. And that was something, it's such a beautifully crafted sentence and it's also just haunting in its own way. I'm such a sucker for that. I always say the best story wins. You could phrase that fact that they all died a million different ways, but how, whoever the author was phrased that always really stuck with me.
有没有哪些你读过的段落，会让你挥之不去、心里久久惦念的？这可能听起来有点奇怪，但因为我也是个作家，就像你一样，我对精心构思的句子总是没有抵抗力。有一句话，我忘了是谁写的，对不起，我不能告诉你是谁写的，但那是一部关于诺曼底登陆的书。它讲的是诺曼底登陆日的一支小队，其中很多人都牺牲了。书中有一段是这样写的：他们所有人都准备好了那天牺牲，结果他们也都真的牺牲了。那是一句非常精美的句子，同时也让人毛骨悚然。我对这种句子总是情有独钟。我总是说，最好的故事会胜出。你可以用成千上万种方式来说这些士兵都牺牲了这个事实，但不管那位作者是谁，他用的这种表达方式总是让我难以忘怀。
Why do you think the best story wins? What's behind that? What we're trying to do when we read a lot of times is just contextualize whatever fact or story that was within our own lives. And it's much easier to contextualize a story than a statistic, because there's a human element to a good story. And I also, it's just so much easier to remember and stick with you. I don't remember any of the formulas that I was forced to memorize in school, forced to memorize the night before the test. I remember a single one.
你为什么认为最好的故事会赢？这背后有什么原因？很多时候，我们阅读是为了把某个事实或故事放进我们自己的生活背景中。而一个好的故事比统计数据更容易让我们产生共鸣，因为故事中有人性元素。此外，故事更容易记住并留存在我们记忆中。我学校里被迫记住的所有公式，没有一个记得住。但是一个好故事，我永远记得。
But every good story that I was told, someone when I was six years old, I still remember. So because it's just so much easier to remember a story than a statistic and it's easier to contextualize it within your own life. And because there's so much emotion embedded in it, stories are like leverage for good statistics. If you decide, like there's some statistics, like I just said, if I said, first platoon of company E all died on D-Day, that's a statistic. But if you phrase that, if you put a name or a face to it, it becomes a completely different thing.
但是，每一个在我六岁时听到的好故事，我至今仍能记得。所以，因为记住一个故事比记住一个统计数据要容易得多，而且更容易将其与自己的生活联系起来。因为故事中充满了情感，故事就像是对统计数据的有力补充。如果你决定，比如有一些统计数据，就像我刚才说的，如果我说E连的第一排在诺曼底登陆日全部阵亡，这就是一个统计数据。但如果你给它加上一个名字或一张面孔，它就成了完全不同的事情。
I always use the example of Ken Burns, who makes the best documentaries about U.S. history. And the vast majority of what is in his documentaries are already known. The documentary about the Civil War or World War II, you know how it ends, you know what happened. There's not that much new in there, but he is a better storyteller than I think any historian has ever been in history. He can tell a story about the Civil War that will literally bring you to tears, even if you know what happened. You knew what happened, but when you hear the story and see the face and hear the music in the documentary, it will literally bring you to tears.
我经常用肯·伯恩斯作为例子。他制作的关于美国历史的纪录片是最好的。而且，他的纪录片中大部分内容都是众所周知的。例如讲述内战或二战的纪录片，你已经知道结局，你知道发生了什么。里面没有太多新的内容，但我认为他是有史以来最优秀的讲故事者。他能讲述一个关于内战的故事，即使你已经知道了结局，也会使你感动落泪。你知道发生了什么，但当你听到那个故事、看到影片中的人物面孔、听到背景音乐时，真的会被感动到流泪。
And Ken Burns has talked about how important music is in his documentaries, the background music. And he said that he will literally edit the script so that when the narrator says a specific emotional word, it matches up with a beat in the background music, so that the emotion and the music is literally aligned like that. No other historian is doing that. No other historian does that. And that's why he can create, he has the leverage by telling, by talking about the Civil War, that no other of the historians who are writing about the Civil War can recreate.
肯·伯恩斯曾谈到音乐在他纪录片中的重要性，特别是背景音乐。他说他会根据背景音乐的节拍调整剧本，这样当旁白说出一个特定的情感词时，它会正好与音乐的节拍一致，使情感和音乐完美融合。没有其他历史学家会这样做。这也是为什么他在讲述南北战争时，能创造出其他专注于南北战争的历史学家无法再现的效果。
Take a few seconds and think about how you would teach me to tell a better story. You're one of the best storytellers of our generation. Teach me how to tell a story like Morgan Hassel. I think it's two things. One is right for an audience of one, which is yourself. Don't think about other people. Don't think about who's going to read this. Don't think. Don't ask yourself, how is the reader going to interpret the sentence? Write a sentence that moves you. When you read it, you're like, I like that without thinking about anyone else.
花几秒钟，想想你会如何教我讲一个更好的故事。你是我们这一代最好的故事讲述者之一。教我如何像摩根·豪瑟尔那样讲故事。我认为有两点。第一点是为一个人写作，那个人就是你自己。不要去想别人，不要去想谁会读这篇文章，不要问自己读者会如何解读这句话。写一句让自己感动的话。当你读这句话时，你会觉得，这句话我喜欢，而不考虑其他人。
I think once you start thinking about who is my audience and what are they going to like, you start to pander. And you start to perform for them in a way that is very hard to create a good emotional story about, just write for yourself. The other is, don't forget how impatient everyone is. So this is a sense where maybe you are thinking about the reader, but everyone is so impatient when they're reading that you just always have to ask yourself, what is the point that I'm trying to make? Make that point and get the hell out of people's way and move on to another point.
我认为一旦你开始考虑“谁是我的观众，他们会喜欢什么”，你就开始迎合他们了。这样创作一个好的情感故事会变得非常困难，所以只是为自己写。另一个要点是，不要忘记大家都很没有耐心。所以在这一点上你或许应该考虑读者，但要记住，大家在阅读时都很急躁，你总是需要问自己：我想表达的观点是什么？明确表达出来，然后让开，继续下一个观点。
And most storytelling, you lose it once you lose the reader. Mark Twain, he said at one point that when he would edit his work, he would read it aloud to his family. He would read the story aloud. And when he saw them getting bored, he would make a note, all right, cut that part. They're clearly dozing off here. And when he would see their eyes bug up, he'd be like, oh, this is a good part. And I think Mark Twain was the one who said, leave out the parts that readers tend to skip. That's the key to good writing. Leave out the parts that people tend to skip.
大部分讲故事的时候，一旦你失去了读者的兴趣，就很难再把他们吸引回来。马克·吐温曾经说过，他在编辑自己的作品时，会把故事大声读给家人听。每当发现家人开始感到无聊时，就会做个记号，把那部分删掉，显然他们在打瞌睡。当他看到家人眼睛瞪得大大的时候，他就知道，这部分写得不错。我想，马克·吐温就是那个说“把读者易跳过的部分删掉”的人。这就是好写作的秘诀：删掉人们容易跳过的部分。
I think that's important to keep in mind too, is just write for yourself in a way that you like and get to the point and get out of people's way after that. How did you learn to write? You didn't even go to high school. Right. When I was at the Motley Fool for 10 years, that was a 10-year period where I was sometimes writing three posts per day, three articles per day, doing that every day for almost a decade. I wrote thousands and thousands of blog posts. And when you write online, people are merciless about the feedback they give you. The readers in the comment sections are on Twitter will tell you in no uncertain terms, this article was shit and you did a terrible job.
我认为很重要的一点是，要为自己写作，写出自己喜欢的方式，直奔主题，然后不要妨碍读者的思路。你是怎么学会写作的呢？你甚至没上过高中。其实，我在《愚人金刊》工作了十年，那十年间，我有时一天写三篇帖子或文章，每天都这样，差不多持续了十年。我写了成千上万的博客帖子。在线写作时，读者对你的反馈是毫不留情的。评论区或推特上的读者会毫不客气地告诉你，这篇文章写得很差，你的表现很糟。
Or they'll say, this was really good. I really enjoyed it. So having that level of constant feedback and doing that thousands of times over a decade will turn anyone into a much better writer than they were when they started. So that was really what it was for me. It's a combination of quantity and fierce, unvarnished feedback from readers. Do you test ideas? I think in some ways you test ideas in Twitter. And if they work, you can turn those ideas into a blog post. And if the blog post worked, you can turn it into a book idea or book chapter. That's kind of the natural progression for a lot of these things. And just like it's very true in comedy too. Even the best comedians, the world-class comedians don't necessarily know what's funny until they've tested it. And this is why George Carlin, Chris Rock, Jerry Seinfeld, they test their new jokes in tiny clubs. Because even Chris Rock does not know what's funny until they've tested it, until he's tested it.
或者有人会说，这真的很好，我非常喜欢。有了这种持续的反馈，并在十年里进行数以千计的练习，会让任何人成为比刚开始时更好的作家。这就是我的经历。这是数量和读者们严厉、直白反馈的结合。你会测试你的想法吗？我认为在某种程度上，你可以在推特上测试想法。如果这些想法有效，你就能把它们写成博客文章。如果博客文章也有效，你就能把它们变成一本书的想法或章节。这对于很多事情都是自然的发展过程。喜剧也有类似的道理。即使是世界级的喜剧演员也不一定知道什么是好笑的，直到他们测试过。这就是为什么乔治·卡林、克里斯·洛克、杰瑞·宋飞会在小俱乐部里测试他们的新笑话。因为即使是克里斯·洛克在测试之前也不知道什么是好笑的。
And I think it's true for writers as well. I've had a lot of experience with a writer blog post and I'm like, this is good. This is some of my best work. And it flops. No one else likes it. And the opposite is true too. The biggest, most popular blog post I've ever written were always ones where when I was writing and I was like, I don't think this is any good. This is so obvious. It's so boring. It's too personal. No one else is going to care about this that does well. So even after doing this for so many years, I don't know if my ability to find a topic and say like, that's going to turn into a good post is really that good, which is why you kind of have to do it. It's so interesting because a podcaster like that too. I'll record an episode and I'll be like, oh my God, that was mind blowing. And then three months later, I'll check at the stats and be like, what? And then I'll record a podcast. I'm like, oh, I wasn't that engaged. And I look at the stats and it's like off the charts.
我认为这对作家来说也是真的。我有很多写博客的经验，有时我觉得这篇文章很好，是我最好的作品之一。然而，它却无人问津，没人喜欢。相反的情况也常发生。我写过的一些最受欢迎的博客文章，通常是在写作时我自己觉得不怎么样的文章，我会觉得这文章太明显了、太无趣了、太私人了，没人会在意它们，结果却出乎意料地受欢迎。因此，即使我写了这么多年，我还是无法准确预测一篇文章是否会受欢迎。所以你得不断尝试。播客也是如此。我录制某一集时会觉得内容很精彩，结果三个月后查看数据发现收听率不高。反之，有时录制时觉得自己不太投入，结果数据却非常好。
Yes. The most popular blog post I've ever written by far, by like an order of magnitude, was a post in 2017 that I wrote about I grew up with and still have a stutter. And when I was a child and teenager, I could barely speak. It was a very severe stutter when I was a child. And I couldn't really overcome it to where I can talk to you like a two now until I was 30 years old. And so I wrote a post about this trial. It's called overcoming your demons. I know it's the most popular post I ever wrote. When I published it, I literally hid it from our blog feed because I was like, no one's going to be interested in this. I lose literally hidden. Like the link was out there, but it wasn't even on the feed because I was like, I'm so embarrassed about this that I would just be writing about a personal thing. No one else cares about this. And I really felt that way. And it turned into the most popular thing I ever wrote. It's hard to tell. Do you think you were scared to put it out there? Combination of scared. Also, the point of the post was overcoming your demons that I started with this like profound disability that had such a big impact on my childhood and that overcame it. And now I speak on stage and do these kind of podcasts. And I felt like it was to look at me, look at me, look at me. I didn't want that.
是的。我所写过的最受欢迎的博客文章，远远超出其他文章的受欢迎程度，是我在2017年写的一篇关于我成长过程中患有并仍然存在口吃的经历。小时候和青少年时期，我几乎无法流利地说话，口吃非常严重。直到30岁，我才真正克服了这个问题，能够像现在这样与你交谈。所以我写了一篇关于这种经历的文章，题目是《战胜心魔》。这篇文章无疑是我写过的最受欢迎的文章。当我发布它时，实际上我把它从博客的主页面隐藏了起来，因为我觉得没人会对这个话题感兴趣，所以几乎是隐藏了这个链接。链接虽然存在，但没有在主页面上显示出来，因为我对写这种个人事情感到非常尴尬，认为没人会关心。而结果却是，它成了我写过的最受欢迎的文章。很难说清楚。我想知道你当时是否害怕发布它。是害怕的一部分，同时这篇文章的重点是战胜内心的恶魔。我从一个对我童年有巨大影响的严重障碍开始，最终克服了它，现在我能在舞台上演讲并参加这种类型的播客。我觉得，好像在说“看着我，关注我”，而我并不想这样。
But I think everyone has their demons. You do. Everyone has something where they're like, I've got this problem in my life. And a lot of those are hidden. People don't talk about them because they're embarrassed. They don't want to talk about it. It's too personal. And I think when you are vulnerable and open, people love it because even if you don't stutter, you're like, oh, I have this similar. I have this issue, whatever it would be. And like, thank you for telling me that your life is not perfect. Thank you for being open about the struggles that we all have in our lives. I think people like that.
但我认为每个人都有内心的困扰。你也有。每个人都在生活中遇到一些问题。很多这样的困扰都隐藏着。人们不谈论它们，因为他们觉得尴尬，不想说出来。这太私人了。而且我认为，当你脆弱和坦诚时，人们会喜欢这种感觉，因为即使你不口吃，你也会觉得，我也有类似的问题，我也有这样的烦恼，无论那是什么。就像是，感谢你告诉我你的生活也不是完美的，感谢你公开我们生活中都可能遇到的困境。我觉得人们会喜欢这样的坦诚。
But it's a fine balance between that and being too personal, which we've all seen online, or being too braggy, egotistical about like, look how much I overcame. I'm so important. I'm so special. It's a hard, it's a balance. It's a routine. Some people use vulnerabilities strategically. Yes, you can tell. There was that viral LinkedIn post a year or two ago of it was a founder. And he said, I just had to lay off half my company. And he included a picture of him with like tears running down his face. And people are like, that's terrible. You like shame on you for just trying to like pull up the heartstrings and say like, oh, I'm so empathetic that I cry. And I feel like it's actually a hard balance between like why did my stuttering post work? But that picture was just universally panned. It's a balance. But I think it's hard to know where you crossed the line there.
但在表达这一点和变得过于个人化之间需要保持微妙的平衡，我们都在网上见过这种情况，或者过于自我吹嘘，像是“看看我克服了多少困难。我多么重要。我多么特别。”这是一个难以把握的平衡。这是一种常态。一些人会策略性地利用自己的脆弱之处。是的，你可以看出来。一两年前，有一篇在领英上疯传的帖子，作者是一位创始人。他说，我不得不解雇了公司一半的员工，并附上了他满脸泪水的照片。人们纷纷表示，这太糟糕了，你这样做只是为了博取同情，表现出“哦，我是多么有同情心，甚至哭了”。我觉得这实际上是一个很难把握的平衡，比如为什么我的口吃帖子会成功，而那张照片却遭到了一致炮轰。这是一个平衡，但很难知道在哪里跨越了界限。
I want to come back to comedians for a second. What did they know about telling stories that we should learn from that? I forget who says this. And this is not a direct quote and paraphrasing it. I'm going to do a much poor job paraphrasing it. But it's like comedy is a way to show you're smart without being arrogant. Something like that. That's not the quote. I'm doing such a bad job paraphrasing this. But I honestly think that the best comedians are the smartest people in society. They understand psychology. George Carlin understood psychology. I think better than Daniel Kahneman did. That's a bold statement. But I think that is, I think that is actually true. They are so smart at understanding how the world works.
我想再次谈谈喜剧演员。他们在讲故事方面有什么值得我们学习的地方？我忘了是谁说的了，这不是直接引用，我是在转述。这段话我转述得很不好，但大概意思是，喜剧是一种展示聪明才智而不显得自大的方式。大概是这样说的。抱歉，这不是原话，我转述得很糟糕。不过，我确实认为最好的喜剧演员是社会上最聪明的人。他们懂得心理学。乔治·卡林对心理学的理解，我认为比丹尼尔·卡尼曼还要好。这是一个大胆的说法，但我确实觉得这是真的。他们非常聪明，能够理解这个世界的运作方式。
What makes what makes people tick. How people think. But they're doing it in a way where they don't want to just impress you with their intelligence. They want to make you laugh. What could be better than that? And so I'll give you to one example. My favorite George Carlin line. He says, have you ever noticed that everyone driving slower than you as an idiot and everyone driving faster than you as a maniac? A, it's funny. But B, it's like, God, that is, if you think about that's profound. And understanding like how like relative views of other people and whatnot. And so they are, I think they're absolute geniuses, but they want to deliver it in a way rather than using big words to say like, look how smart I am. They just want to make you laugh.
是什么让人们充满动力。人们是如何思考的。但他们的方式不是为了炫耀自己的智慧，而是为了让你发笑。这能有什么比这更好的吗？让我举一个例子吧，这是我最喜欢的乔治·卡林的一句话。他说：“你有没有注意到，开得比你慢的都是笨蛋，开得比你快的都是疯子？”首先，这很幽默。但更重要的是，如果你仔细想想，这是多么深刻的见解。这体现了人们对其他人相对看法的理解。所以我认为，他们是绝对的天才，但他们希望以一种不是通过大词显摆聪明的方式来传递信息，而是只是为了让你发笑。
And they are also because particularly for like a young comic, if they are not making you laugh quickly, they're going to get booed off stage. So they are the epitome of one line or just like so succinct. So succinct in their delivery. So succinct in their writing. Because they don't have the luxury that a lot of authors do of like, let me write a 7,000-word chapter. A comedian on stage is like, if you don't make me laugh every 10 seconds, you're going to get booed off. It's interesting because you mentioned psychology there. They're keen observers of human nature and psychology. And all we've talked about today, we've talked about it through the lens of money, but it's basically psychology.
对于年轻的喜剧演员来说，如果他们不能快速逗笑观众，就会被嘘下台。所以，他们的台词简洁明了，非常精炼。不论是表演还是写作，都极其简练精准，因为他们不像许多作家可以写长达七千字的章节。台上的喜剧演员如果每十秒钟不能让观众笑一次，就会被嘘下台。你提到心理学，这很有趣。他们是人性和心理学的敏锐观察者。我们今天讨论的所有内容，虽然是从金钱的角度出发，但其实本质上都是心理学。
I think a lot of things in life fall under this umbrella of how do people make decisions around uncertainty, risk and lack of information. And that is health, that is politics, that is friendships and marriages, and it's also money. A lot of things fall under the same umbrella. There's a study of like, how do people behave? And one of the things I think is important here is that you can learn so much about money by studying and reading fields that have nothing to do with money. I think you can learn more about money by reading about politics, military history, biology, sociology, then you will by reading a finance book. Because you're just trying to figure out how do people make decisions? How do you make decisions and how do other people make decisions? And by and large, you're not going to learn that in an economics textbook, but you will learn about it by reading all of these other fields that have nothing to do with money.
我认为生活中的许多事情都可以归结为人们如何在不确定性、风险和信息不足的情况下做出决策。这包括健康、政治、友谊和婚姻，还有金钱。很多事情都在这个范畴之内。这是一种对人类行为的研究。我认为这里一个重要的观点是，通过研究和阅读与金钱无关的领域，你可以学到很多关于金钱的知识。我认为，通过阅读政治、军事历史、生物学、社会学方面的内容，你可以比读金融书籍学到更多关于金钱的知识。因为你试图弄清楚人们是如何做决定的？你自己是如何做决定的，其他人又是如何做决定的？大体上，你不太可能从经济学教科书中学到这些，但通过阅读这些与金钱无关的其他领域，你会学到很多。
What's your process for writing? I don't think this is a good advice. So if you're a writer out there, I'm not saying this is the right way to do it. But one of the things that I do that I think is not common is I write, by the time I get to the bottom of a post, it's pretty much the final draft, not because I can write a final draft in one shot. But because by and large, don't move on to the next sentence until I'm satisfied with the previous one. Most writers, most very good writers, will do the opposite. They say your first draft should just be a brain dump and then you go back and edit. For whatever reason, it's never really worked for me. So the other thing is I can't say, I think I get too anxious and jittery sitting for too long. A lot of times I'll write one sentence when I'm satisfied with it. I'll get up and go do the laundry and I'll come back and write two more sentences and then I'll go do the dishes or walk my dog or something.
你写作的过程是什么样的？我觉得这种方法不是一个好建议。所以，如果你是个写作者，我并不是说这就是正确的方法。但是，我觉得有一件事我做得不太常见，就是我写文章的时候，到文章底部时，它基本上已经是最终稿了。这并不是因为我能一气呵成地写出最终稿，而是因为我在前一句话令我满意之前，不会继续写下一句。大多数作家，特别是那些很优秀的作家，会做相反的事情。他们认为你的初稿应该只是一个大脑风暴，然后再回过头来编辑。不管出于什么原因，这种方法对我从来没有真正奏效。另外一件事是，我没法长时间坐着写作，我会感到焦虑和不安。很多时候，我会写一句满意的话，然后起来去洗衣服，再回来写两句话，然后再去洗碗或遛狗等。
So it's very sporadic like that. And I think that contrasts with a lot of writers who are like, oh, I sit down and I can dump 5,000 words on the page and then I go back and edit it. That is probably the best advice. That's what you should do. And it's for whatever reason, it's never really worked for me. I guess that's it. But most writers that I look up to, I think I'm much better writers than I do it the opposite.
所以，这种情况非常零星。我觉得这与许多作家形成了鲜明对比。他们会说，哦，我坐下来一下子就能写5000字，然后再回去修改。这可能是最好的建议，也是大家应该做的。但不知为何，这对我从来不起作用。我想就是这样。但那些我敬佩的大多数作家，他们比我优秀得多，他们也都是采用不同的方法。
How do you hook people? You're one of the best at sort of you and James Clear, the two people who, you know, the first sentence to your paragraph and sort of like the first part of your story really pulls people in. What would you say? What do you think you do differently? I think it's a constant reminder of how impatient people are. And if you don't hook them in five seconds, you're gone. And I know that because I'm a big reader. And if you don't hook me in five seconds, I'm probably gone. Unless you are like an author who I really know that I will give you a little bit more leeway to be like, okay, I don't know where your article is going, but I'm going to stick with you because I like you. If you're not that, you've got five seconds to catch your attention or else you're out of there. And I think that is easy to overlook that. That it's not just being succinct, you know, in the core of your article, but it's almost like an inverted pyramid where it's like people are most impatient in the first two sentences. You would think it'd be the other way around. They would get impatient after they've worked their way through your article and they're getting bored. Like, no, they're most impatient at the top.
你如何吸引读者？你和詹姆斯·克利尔是最擅长这方面的人之一。你们的段落第一句话以及故事的开头部分就能深深地抓住人们的注意力。你是怎么做到的呢？你觉得你有什么不同吗？
我认为关键在于不断提醒自己，人们的耐心非常有限。如果你在五秒钟内没能吸引他们，他们就走了。我深知这一点，因为我自己是个爱读书的人。如果你在五秒钟内没能吸引我，我大概也会放弃，除非你是我格外喜欢的作者，我会多给你一点机会，即使不知道你文章的方向，但会坚持下去。否则，你只有五秒钟来抓住我的注意力，不然我就走了。
很容易忽视这一点，不仅仅是文章的核心内容要简洁明了，更像是一个倒金字塔结构：读者在前两句话时最没有耐心。你可能会以为他们会在读完文章后开始失去耐心，感到无聊，但事实恰恰相反，他们在开头部分最没有耐心。
And there's a lot of data that can be very disheartening for authors. There was a mathematician who looked at Kindle Highlight data and he used highlights as a proxy for how far people make it in a book. And the assumption was when people stopped highlighting in Kindle, they probably stopped reading. And he showed that even among best selling books, the most popular books, the average reader makes it like a quarter of the way through. That's in the best sellers. That's in the good books, a quarter of the way through and they're done. And so just always reminding yourself how impatient people are is just like, what's your point? Make your point and get the hell out of people's way. I also think Twitter has made people better writers because the character count limitation has forced people to be like, you have two sentences to tell me your idea. And that's all you get. That's actually, I think that's been a great thing overall for making people more succinct.
对于作者来说，有很多数据可能让人心灰意冷。一位数学家研究了 Kindle 的高亮数据，他将这些高亮标记作为衡量读者读到哪步的一个指标。他的假设是，当人们在 Kindle 上不再做高亮标记时，他们可能就停止阅读了。他的研究表明，即使是畅销书、最受欢迎的书籍，普通读者平均只能读到四分之一就放下了。这可是畅销书、优质书籍啊，读者只看了四分之一就放弃了。所以，时刻提醒自己，人们的耐心有多么有限，这非常重要。你的观点是什么？表达出来，然后赶紧让开，让人们继续他们的生活。我还认为，Twitter 让人们成为更好的作家，因为字符限制迫使人们在两句话内表达他们的想法。仅此而已。我认为，这是一个让人们写得更简洁的好事。
What makes a good hook? It could be a lot of things. It could be funny. It could be profound. I think we were talking about this last night about, I forget who said it, that good writing fits one of the acronyms of like OMG, LOL. You know, like something like that. It should be shocking or funny or profound or scary. Something like that that's going to involve some emotion. Yeah, yeah, something like that. And with two questions. So one being, what you can leave everybody some parting wisdom on money and life. What would it be? I think the most important is to realize how personal it is. And therefore, you really got to be careful taking your cues from other people. You and I again, same age, same like going on the list. You and I are very similar people. I have very different views about what to do with money and that is fine. Just like you and I might have different views about food. You like this food. I like that. Doesn't mean that you're wrong. It's got different tastes. Whatnot. People understand that with food. But there is a common sense with money that there is one right answer for everybody. And so I think you really have to be introspective and look in the mirror and just say like what works for myself and my own family. And even if there are holes and flaws and other people disagree with that, if it works well for me, that's as good as you can do. That's an important thing.
什么是一个好的引子呢？它可以有很多种形式。可以是搞笑的，也可以是深刻的。我记得昨晚我们聊到这个话题时，有人说过，好写作要符合某些缩写词，比如OMG（哦，我的天），LOL（笑出声）。就是说，引子应该是令人震惊的、搞笑的、深刻的或者吓人的。总之，需要触动某种情感。对，对，就是这样的。
我们还提到了两个问题。第一个是，如果要给大家一些关于金钱和生活的临别忠告，那会是什么？我认为最重要的是要认识到这些是非常个人化的。因此，你真的要小心，不要盲目跟随别人的建议。你和我年纪相仿，有很多相似之处，但在如何处理金钱的问题上，我们有很不同的观点，这没有问题。这就像你和我可能对食物有不同的看法。你喜欢这种食物，我喜欢那种食物。这并不意味着你错了，只是口味不同而已。人们在食物上都能明白这一点，但在金钱上却常常认为有一个对所有人都正确的答案。所以我认为你真的需要自省，对着镜子问自己，什么对我和我的家庭有效。即使有些地方不完美，或者别人不赞同，只要对你有用，那就是最好的选择。这一点很重要。
Final question. What is success for you? I heard I think Jim O'Shaughnessy said that his goal as a parent was not to raise good kids. It was to raise good adults. He wanted to be the kind of father that when his kids became adults, they were well balanced. That's different from raising good kids. You want to raise good adults. So that would be a big, like maybe the top box to check in my life is looking back and being like my wife and I did our best to raise kids that became good, self-sufficient, well balanced, polite, happy adults.
最后一个问题。对你来说，成功是什么？我听说 Jim O'Shaughnessy 曾经说过，他作为父母的目标不是养育乖巧的孩子，而是培养成优秀的成年人。他希望在孩子长大成人后，他们能够身心平衡。这与养育乖孩子不同，你想培养的是优秀的成年人。所以，对我来说，人生最大的成功也许就是能回顾过去，看到我和妻子尽力把孩子培养成了自立自强、身心健康、有礼貌、幸福的成年人。
That's excellent. Thank you very much, Morgan. Thanks, Shane. Thanks for listening and learning with us. For a complete list of episodes, show notes, transcripts, and more go to fs.blog.com or just Google the Knowledge Project. Recently, I've started to record my reflections and thoughts about the interview after the interview. I sit down, highlight the key moments that stood out for me, and I also talk about other connections to episodes and sort of what's got me pondering that I maybe haven't quite figured out. This is available to supporting members of the Knowledge Project. You can go to fs.blog slash membership, check out the show notes for a link and you can sign up today.
那太好了。非常感谢你，摩根。谢谢，尚恩。感谢大家收听并和我们一起学习。要查看完整的集数列表、节目的笔记、文字稿等内容，可以访问 fs.blog.com，或者直接在谷歌搜索 "知识项目"（The Knowledge Project）。最近，我开始在采访后录制我的反思和想法。我会坐下来，强调一些对我来说印象深刻的关键时刻，并且谈论其他和集数有关的联系，以及一些我可能还没完全弄明白的思考。这些内容提供给 "知识项目" 的支持会员。你可以访问 fs.blog/ membership，查看节目笔记中的链接，并可以立即注册会员。
And my reflections will just be available in your private podcast feed. You'll also skip all the ads at the front of the episode. The front of the street blog is also where you can learn more about my new book, Clear Thinking, turning ordinary moments into extraordinary results. It's a transformative guide that hands you the tools to master your fate, sharpen your decision making, and set yourself up for unparalleled success. Learn more at fs.blog slash clear. Until next time.
我的反思将会在你的私人播客频道中提供。你还可以跳过每集开头的所有广告。你也可以在街头博客的主页上了解我的新书《清晰思考》，这本书告诉你如何把平凡时刻变成非凡成果。这是一个变革性的指南，为你提供掌控命运、提升决策能力和为取得无与伦比的成功做好准备的工具。你可以在fs.blog/clear了解更多信息。下次再见。