Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

Fantastic
Great read. Always relevant.

Short bursts of wisdom
I have the hardback which is 203 pages, not including credits and footnotes. The book has 24 chapters that are unnumbered, so the chapters are fairly short. The book is well-written and an easy read. Much of what never changes is human nature. The wisdom arose from my personal examination of how each of these chapters applied to me.The author starts with a personal story about snow skiing with two friends one morning and then deciding not to ski with them that afternoon. His friends were killed in a snow slide that afternoon. If he had said yes to more skiing he would have almost certainly died with them. Why did he decide not to ski? He has no idea.He takes this event and begins to look at risk. Risk is what you don’t see. The book then looks at happiness since much of risk is unpredictable. Keeping expectations low leads to more happiness in the author’s opinion. He makes a good case.The book moves from one topic to the next. It looks at the power of compounding interest and compounding decisions. Good decisions lead to good outcomes. It looks at incentives. Much human behavior can be forecast by knowing the incentives that the human actors are subject to. Sometimes it’s “follow the money” and sometimes it’s just “fitting in.” In my experience, understanding the financial incentives goes a long way to predicting the actions of the people I’m dealing with.The author ends with what I increasingly think is the most important observation – people are a product of their experienced environment. People will disagree, and they will, in many cases because their life experiences differ. What seems obvious to one is not to another because they haven’t had the same life experiences. He notes that “Wounds heal, Scars last.”The book finishes with a series of questions that the reader can ask rather than a series of the author’s conclusions. I’m trying to ask these questions of myself to better understand how to read “what never changes” so I don’t get blindsided.If the subject interests you, I highly recommend the book. It gives short bursts of wisdom that I intend to try to apply to my life.

Not What I Expected
As a business consultant focused on strategic planning, I see the world as predictable and foreseeable within the right time horizon. The reason I read this book is that 8 am always looking to learn from others experiences and interested in gaining another perspective. This book clearly failed to deliver that desired outcome. The author uses anecdotal comments based on extreme events and insights to support many of his statements. This is his quote near the end of the book which pretty well sums the books design. “A decade ago I made a goal to read more history and fewer forecasts. It was one of the most enlightening changes of my life. And the irony is that the more history I read, the more comfortable I became with the future. When you focus on what never changes, you stop trying to predict uncertain events and spend more time understanding timeless behavior. Hopefully this book nudged you down that path.”It’s not a terrible book and there are many insights that are worth being reminded of but some of the insights are not accurate but supported by extreme events. Yes, it happened but the likelihood of it occurring is around 1%.If you are interested in a light, Robert Greene like book with little actionable knowledge, heavy on psychology and light on business acumen; this book could be for you. If you are looking for how to anticipate the future, look elsewhere first.

Unobvious reminders for life
This book outlines very pertinent reminders for life that are easy to read but hard to remember. Great book and very easy to read

Well written book that you can read a story or a chunk at a time. As the book endorses (and in particular quotes Bezos about) perhaps the most important question we should ask about life is not what is going to change in the next year or the next decade, but rather the question we should ask, is what is going to stay the same, i.e., won’t change. This is valuable information to help us make better lives for ourselves in many ways.

Very well written