Page 112 - Morgan Housel - The Psychology of Money_ Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness-Harriman House Limited (2020)

You’re not a spreadsheet. You’re a person. A screwed up, emotional person.
COBACOBA

It took me a while to figure this out, but once it clicked I realized it’s one of
the most important parts of finance.

With it comes something that often goes overlooked: Do not aim to be
coldly rational when making financial decisions. Aim to just be pretty
reasonable. Reasonable is more realistic and you have a better chance of

sticking with it for the long run, which is what matters most when
managing money.

To show you what I mean, let me tell you the story of a guy who tried to
cure syphilis with malaria.

Julius Wagner-Jauregg was a 19th-century psychiatrist with two unique
skills: He was good at recognizing patterns, and what others saw as “crazy”
he found merely “bold.”

His specialty was patients with severe neurosyphilis—then a fatal diagnosis
with no known treatment. He began noticing a pattern: syphilis patients

tended to recover if they had the added misfortune of having prolonged
fevers from an unrelated ailment.

Wagner-Jauregg assumed this was due to a hunch that had been around for
centuries but doctors didn’t understand well: fevers play a role in helping
the body fight infection.

So he jumped to the logical conclusion.

In the early 1900s Wagner-Jauregg began injecting patients with low-end
strains of typhoid, malaria, and smallpox to trigger fevers strong enough to

kill off their syphilis. This was as dangerous as it sounds. Some of his
patients died from the treatment. He eventually settled on a weak version of