people who are under stress quickly embracing ideas and goals they never would during calm times has left its fingerprints all over history.

Reversion to the mean occurs because people persuasive enough to make something grow don’t have the kind of personalities that allow them to stop before pushing too far.

Getting something often requires risk-taking and confidence. Keeping it often requires room for error and paranoia.

Being right is the enemy of staying right because it leads you to forget the way the world works

Identifying that something is unsustainable does not provide much information on when that thing will stop. To tie this into the last lesson: Knowing there will be a reversion to the mean does not mean you know when things will revert. Unsustainable things can sustain for a long time.

most of us underestimate the extent to which we’d act similarly if we wandered into the same incentive pool.

There are so many moving parts that the easiest way to answer the question “What should I do?” is to be guided by a story that makes sense to you. Not a statistic, and not a fact. A good tale.

Growth is driven by compounding, which always takes time. Destruction is driven by single points of failure, which can happen in seconds, and loss of confidence, which can happen in an instant.

The irony is that growth – if you can stick around – is a more powerful force, because it compounds. But setbacks capture greater attention because they happen suddenly.

And in markets, where a 40% decline that takes place in six months will draw congressional investigations, but a 140% gain that takes place over six years can go virtually unnoticed.