Page 11 - Morgan Housel - The Psychology of Money_ Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness-Harriman House Limited (2020)

One day he handed one of my colleagues several thousand dollars of cash
and said, “Go to the jewelry store down the street and get me a few $1,000
COBACOBA
gold coins.”

An hour later, gold coins in hand, the tech executive and his buddies
gathered around by a dock overlooking the Pacific Ocean. They then

proceeded to throw the coins into the sea, skipping them like rocks, cackling
as they argued whose went furthest. Just for fun.

Days later he shattered a lamp in the hotel’s restaurant. A manager told him
it was a $500 lamp and he’d have to replace it.

“You want five hundred dollars?” the executive asked incredulously, while
pulling a brick of cash from his pocket and handing it to the manager.
“Here’s five thousand dollars. Now get out of my face. And don’t ever insult
me like that again.”

You may wonder how long this behavior could last, and the answer was “not
long.” I learned years later that he went broke.

The premise of this book is that doing well with money has a little to do with
how smart you are and a lot to do with how you behave. And behavior is
hard to teach, even to really smart people.

A genius who loses control of their emotions can be a financial disaster. The

opposite is also true. Ordinary folks with no financial education can be
wealthy if they have a handful of behavioral skills that have nothing to do
with formal measures of intelligence.

My favorite Wikipedia entry begins: “Ronald James Read was an American
philanthropist, investor, janitor, and gas station attendant.”

Ronald Read was born in rural Vermont. He was the first person in his
family to graduate high school, made all the more impressive by the fact that
he hitchhiked to campus each day.