Morgan Housel
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
How many followers do I have?
How many other people do I think are looking at me?
It's a very external benchmark focused.
That's almost always the case.
The internal versus the external benchmark is everything in terms of contentment and money.
And contentment is important because the emotion that people want to chase with money is happiness.
I want to be happy.
Because as I said earlier, happiness is always fleeting.
You experience happiness and it's awesome.
But no one's happy for more than usually a couple of minutes at a time.
I use the example of happiness as like humor.
Like if I tell you the best joke in the world, or if we listen to Jimmy Carr, let's say, and it's the funniest joke, you laugh for 30 seconds.
You don't laugh for 30 years.
This is not how humor works.
And if I told you the joke every day over and over again, you're like, stop.
It's lost all value at this point.
And I think so happiness is that way.
It's great emotion.
It's fleeting.
Contentment though is permanent.