Page 88 - Morgan Housel - The Psychology of Money_ Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness-Harriman House Limited (2020)

On my first day I realized why investment bankers make a lot of money:
They work longer and more controlled hours than I knew humans could
COBACOBA
handle. Actually, most can’t handle it. Going home before midnight was

considered a luxury, and there was a saying in the office: “If you don’t
come to work on Saturday, don’t bother coming back on Sunday.” The job
was intellectually stimulating, paid well, and made me feel important. But
every waking second of my time became a slave to my boss’s demands,
which was enough to turn it into one of the most miserable experiences of
my life. It was a four-month internship. I lasted a month.

The hardest thing about this was that I loved the work. And I wanted to
work hard. But doing something you love on a schedule you can’t control

can feel the same as doing something you hate.

There is a name for this feeling. Psychologists call it reactance. Jonah
Berger, a marketing professor at the University of Pennsylvania, summed it
up well:

People like to feel like they’re in control—in the drivers’ seat. When we try
to get them to do something, they feel disempowered. Rather than feeling
like they made the choice, they feel like we made it for them. So they say
no or do something else, even when they might have originally been happy

to go along.²⁵

When you accept how true that statement is, you realize that aligning
money towards a life that lets you do what you want, when you want, with
who you want, where you want, for as long as you want, has incredible
return.

Derek Sivers, a successful entrepreneur, once wrote about a friend who
asked him to tell the story about how he got rich: