Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news, Pay the.
Speaker 2: Rides remarks based on enough time job at the.
Speaker 1: How often have you thought about making a major change
Speaker 1: in your career. You're gonna give up time, effort, money, education,
Speaker 1: but in the end, if it pays off, it could
Speaker 1: be very worthwhile to be true to yourself. On today's
Speaker 1: at the Money, let's bring in Morgan Housel. He is
Speaker 1: the author of the Psychology of Money, a book that
Speaker 1: sold over seven million worldwide.
Speaker 2: His new book, The Art.
Speaker 1: Of Spending Money, arrived in October. So, Morgan, I know
Speaker 1: you've had a bunch of jobs and even a bunch
Speaker 1: of careers Ski Patrol valet, Like, what was the original
Speaker 1: career plan.
Speaker 3: With you when I was When I was a teenager,
Speaker 3: my first job was well, my first job was a
Speaker 3: was a host at Denny's.
Speaker 2: That was that was a glorious job.
Speaker 3: And then so I grew up as a ski racer,
Speaker 3: so then it was it was a natural flow for
Speaker 3: me to get a job in the ski industry. I
Speaker 3: worked in a in a ski rental tech place for
Speaker 3: it for a while, and and then I got my
Speaker 3: first kind of quote unquote real job was as a
Speaker 3: valet at a high end hotel that was on a
Speaker 3: ski resort, so that was cool. But all throughout my
Speaker 3: kind of like uh, late teenage college years, I really
Speaker 3: only thought I had one career path, and that was
Speaker 3: how I was going to be an investment banker, and
Speaker 3: then maybe later on that changed to I'm gonna be
Speaker 3: a hedge fund manager. I didn't really know anything about
Speaker 3: either of those careers, but nineteen year old Morgan loved
Speaker 3: the idea that they appeared to make a lot of
Speaker 3: money and have a lot of power, and so that
Speaker 3: was appealing to me because I was all that I knew.
Speaker 3: And then, haphazardly, not not on purpose, and kind of
Speaker 3: with a sense of shame, I stumbled into a job
Speaker 3: as a writer. Because I graduated college in two thousand
Speaker 3: and eight, nobody was hiring. The economy is a mess.
Speaker 3: The only job I can find that was related to
Speaker 3: investing was as a blogger for the Motley Fool. I
Speaker 3: did not want to do it. I hated writing. I
Speaker 3: had no experience doing it, but I thought I would
Speaker 3: do it for six months until I stumbled into it,
Speaker 3: but then I ended up loving it. It took a year,
Speaker 3: but it was like, actually I was like, oh, this
Speaker 3: is this is pretty fun. I actually liked doing this.
Speaker 3: And then over you know, that was, you know, seventeen
Speaker 3: years ago. And over those seventeen years, I've had several
Speaker 3: different transitions doing different things, but they've all kind of
Speaker 3: been had this common core of I just like being
Speaker 3: an observer of how people think about money and investing
Speaker 3: and I want to tell a good story about it.
Speaker 3: But there have been several different paths and transitions within that,
Speaker 3: within that core that I've gone down.
Speaker 1: A blogger for the Motley Fool. I wouldn't even call
Speaker 1: that a journalist. You're just a content producer at that point.
Speaker 1: How long did it take before you this six month?
Speaker 1: I'm going to just put up with this until I
Speaker 1: find something better. What was the transition that led you
Speaker 1: to realize, Hey, I got a knack for this, Maybe
Speaker 1: there's more to this than I realized.
Speaker 3: I think what was really good In hindsight, it felt
Speaker 3: terrible at the time, but because the job market in
Speaker 3: two thousand and eight, nine and ten was so bad,
Speaker 3: I didn't have the choice of giving up. There's no
Speaker 3: other job for me. I had a rent payment to make,
Speaker 3: so even in the first year or two that I
Speaker 3: didn't like writing at all. It was like, yeah, but
Speaker 3: that's what you're like. Sorry, Paal did deal with it.
Speaker 3: That's what you're doing. There's no other jobs out there
Speaker 3: that was really good in hindsight, because it took me
Speaker 3: a couple of years to kind of find my stride
Speaker 3: a little bit, just like anybody in any job. The
Speaker 3: other thing about writing online or doing anything online is
Speaker 3: that if your work is bad, people will tell you
Speaker 3: in no uncertain terms how bad it is and how
Speaker 3: dumb you are and how stupid you are. That is
Speaker 3: painful in the moment, but it is such a powerful
Speaker 3: feedback loop that you're able to learn very quickly if
Speaker 3: you're paying attention to that criticism. And so every blog
Speaker 3: post that I wrote, I would put it out there
Speaker 3: and people would either say this sucks and I'd say, okay,
Speaker 3: let me try to learn from that, or Hey, this
Speaker 3: is really good and let me try to learn from that.
Speaker 3: So the feedback mechanism was so powerful that after doing
Speaker 3: it for two years just to make rent, it was
Speaker 3: kind of like, oh, this is actually fun, and there's
Speaker 3: some readers out there who seem to be enjoying what
Speaker 3: I'm putting out and that's so it was good that
Speaker 3: I had that forcing function of having to do it,
Speaker 3: rather than having an exit ramp where I could have
Speaker 3: gone and done something else.
Speaker 1: So I'm curious about the transition from blogger and I
Speaker 1: have been blogging for one hundred years, so I don't
Speaker 1: use it pejoratively, but to a more formal either journalist
Speaker 1: or market commentator that was the next tier up. How
Speaker 1: did that happen.
Speaker 3: I've never considered myself a journalist. I don't think I
Speaker 3: ever will.
Speaker 1: I don't have it either, but I will accuse us
Speaker 1: of being journalist.
Speaker 3: Right, you know we are, we are journaling, but I
Speaker 3: don't consider myself a capital J journalist. But what's true
Speaker 3: is that once I realized that my audience was growing,
Speaker 3: and I realized who that audience was, there was a
Speaker 3: little bit I struggle to say, sense of duty. That
Speaker 3: that sounds like it's too much, but it was a
Speaker 3: little bit more of Hey, people are going to read
Speaker 3: this and they're going to take it seriously, so make
Speaker 3: sure that it's right, make sure that it is is
Speaker 3: not dangerous advice for them. And so I look back
Speaker 3: at some of the things that I wrote early in
Speaker 3: my career, and it's not that it was. It was reckless,
Speaker 3: but I would just I would just throw my thoughts
Speaker 3: on the table, regardless of what they were, and throw
Speaker 3: people under the bus, which I tend not to anymore.
Speaker 2: And what is this?
Speaker 1: What is this throwing people under the bus? You speak
Speaker 1: of it.
Speaker 3: You've done it once or twice, and even when they
Speaker 3: deserve it. I think there's a there's a principle. I
Speaker 3: forget who came up with this of like criticized broadly
Speaker 3: and pre individually. So it's fine to criticize an industry
Speaker 3: and say mortgage bankers in two thousand and five were reckless,
Speaker 3: if not criminal, But once you call them out by name,
Speaker 3: even if they deserve it, that's a tougher thing to do.
Speaker 3: It's usually the case that when you're criticizing somebody, at
Speaker 3: best you have half the story. Sometimes you have five
Speaker 3: percent of the story. But praising in the individual is
Speaker 3: great because you underestimate how much you can change somebody's
Speaker 3: life by praising them when they deserve it.
Speaker 1: Huh, really really insightful thought. So take us along the
Speaker 1: steps and along the aha moments where you realized, oh,
Speaker 1: this is something significant and I could build a professional
Speaker 1: career doing writing.
Speaker 3: It was interesting for me as a writer. That I
Speaker 3: think might be a little bit unique is day one
Speaker 3: that I was writing for the Mali Fool, the very
Speaker 3: first blog post I ever wrote. I was getting paid
Speaker 3: a full time salary. It was not exhorbingan but I
Speaker 3: was living off of it from day one. And ninety
Speaker 3: percent of bloggers go through years where they're not making
Speaker 3: a single cent and nobody's reading their work. And so
Speaker 3: I had made a profession out of it from day one,
Speaker 3: and there was really no ramp of let's see how
Speaker 3: I can make money from this. As the years went on,
Speaker 3: it could increase, and then I got into speaking in
Speaker 3: books and some other things.
Speaker 1: So what was next? After Motley Fool.
Speaker 3: After a Mither Fool, I joined the Collaborative Fund, which
Speaker 3: is a private equity firm. And my entire job now
Speaker 3: ten been dire for ten nine ten years. Yeah, and
Speaker 3: my entire job there is writing. It's a home for
Speaker 3: my writing. And so it's all that I've ever done,
Speaker 3: but finding unique ways to make a living out of
Speaker 3: doing it. There's several different ways you could do it.
Speaker 3: You can be a full time reporter for Reuters or
Speaker 3: for your local news or for the New York Times.
Speaker 3: That's one way to do it. You can do substack,
Speaker 3: you can try ads. There's a million different ways to
Speaker 3: do it.
Speaker 1: So let's get a little technical. Let's talk about some
Speaker 1: blocking and tackling. What sort of tools did you develop,
Speaker 1: What sort of subroutines did you learn that helped you
Speaker 1: become a better writer.
Speaker 3: Ninety nine percent of being a good writer is being
Speaker 3: a good reader. And ninety percent of your time as
Speaker 3: a writer is reading. And so the huge majority of
Speaker 3: my day, and it's been like this for almost twenty years,
Speaker 3: is very casually sitting around in my sweatpants reading reading books,
Speaker 3: reading blogs, reading reports, listening to podcasts. And it doesn't
Speaker 3: look like work, but that's the work of a writer
Speaker 3: because you do that and you start putting the pieces
Speaker 3: together of Oh, I read this chapter in this book
Speaker 3: and it reminded me of something I listened to in
Speaker 3: this podcast, which reminded me of the study that I
Speaker 3: read recently. I can tie all those together and come
Speaker 3: up with a really unique story myself that I can
Speaker 3: write about. And so that's that is what writing is
Speaker 3: is reading, and what writing is not is forcing yourself
Speaker 3: at the keyboard, forcing the sentences out. That's when you
Speaker 3: get the worst writing. You should spend all of your
Speaker 3: time reading and thinking and maybe ten percent of your
Speaker 3: time actually writing.
Speaker 1: I love that. That's really really insightful. Psychology Money came out?
Speaker 1: Was that twenty twenty twenty one September twenty twenty, all right,
Speaker 1: so twenty twenty, So that's a you know, a dozen
Speaker 1: years after you begin at the Motley Fool. What was
Speaker 1: a transition like writing a book from writing a bunch
Speaker 1: of really short blog posts?
Speaker 3: It was. It was interesting because when I started writing
Speaker 3: Psychology and Money, I was like, Hey, this is a book,
Speaker 3: this is not a blog. I need to have five
Speaker 3: thousand word chapters and they all need to be cohesive
Speaker 3: and tell a singular narrative. And that's what I set
Speaker 3: out to write. And I've told the story before. But
Speaker 3: after about three months, maybe six months, I had three
Speaker 3: really bad chapters, none of which made it in the book,
Speaker 3: because I was trying to do something that I had
Speaker 3: no experience doing. And I had to look back and say, look,
Speaker 3: for the previous twelve years, I have a skill and
Speaker 3: a muscle of writing one thousand word blog posts. I
Speaker 3: don't have a skill of writing five thousand word chapters.
Speaker 3: It's just not something that I do. And so I
Speaker 3: just kind of I threw everything out and I said, look,
Speaker 3: I need to leverage whatever little strength that I have
Speaker 3: and say I'm good at writing short form blogs that
Speaker 3: can kind of live on their own. They're not going
Speaker 3: to tie tie into the next chapter. They're all going
Speaker 3: to be kind of like standalone, live on their own.
Speaker 3: The publisher hated that, said it's not going to work.
Speaker 3: People want a cohesive book, and I said, yeah, I'm sorry,
Speaker 3: but this is all that I can do, like to
Speaker 3: deal with it, And I think it actually worked out
Speaker 3: well because it's easy to underestimate how much people's attention
Speaker 3: spans have declined in the last fifteen years, and so
Speaker 3: the attention to read a three hundred page nonfiction book
Speaker 3: that is a cohesive narrative from page one to page
Speaker 3: three hundred is very difficult.
Speaker 1: It's a big ass these days.
Speaker 3: But can you ask people to flip through short chapters
Speaker 3: that live on their own. If you don't like this chapter,
Speaker 3: just flip to the next. You can start there. That
Speaker 3: is a better ask, And everybody knows the nonfiction business
Speaker 3: book that could have been a blog post, it could
Speaker 3: have been a magazine article, but they stretched it into
Speaker 3: three hundred pages. I think the only way that you
Speaker 3: could avoid that was by writing short, standalone chapters that
Speaker 3: live on their own. Here's my point. Let me tell
Speaker 3: an interesting story, and then I'm going to move on
Speaker 3: to the next one and not waste your time.
Speaker 1: So I find it hilarious. We share the same publisher
Speaker 1: for How Not To Invest, that you wrote the forward to,
Speaker 1: and your book The Psychology of Money. This is the
Speaker 1: first time I'm hearing that they weren't enthralled with your
Speaker 1: original concept the have we crossed eight million copies yet
Speaker 1: you're like seven million on the way to eight million.
Speaker 1: I have a whole section in my book about none
Speaker 1: of the professionals know what's gonna sell. Nobody wanted to
Speaker 1: do Star Wars. They all passed on Raiders. This et
Speaker 1: movie is dumb. We have another Spaceman movie like on
Speaker 1: and on it goes John Wick, Squid Games. All the
Speaker 1: reviews of the Beatles, initially on ed Sullivan were horrible.
Speaker 1: It's I'm shocked to hear that the experts were like, eh,
Speaker 1: we're not really impressed with this concept.
Speaker 3: There's a Daniel Common quote where he said, the more
Speaker 3: outlier of the successes, the more an element of luck
Speaker 3: played a role, not that it all luck, but he
Speaker 3: phrased it as like there's no exception to that rule.
Speaker 3: The more standard deviations it is as an outlier, the
Speaker 3: more luck there was period end of story. And I
Speaker 3: think that's true for books as well. It's true for
Speaker 3: every startup. Jeff Bezos tells a story about how much
Speaker 3: he struggled to raise one million dollars to sell one
Speaker 3: third of it. I think it was of Amazon in
Speaker 3: nineteen ninety four. Could he had to take one hundred
Speaker 3: calls to get to raise one hundred to raise one
Speaker 3: million dollars for Amazon? So it's it always makes sense
Speaker 3: in hindsight, it never makes sense with foresight. I think
Speaker 3: that's true. And I think books are very much like
Speaker 3: a seed stage startup where even if you do everything right,
Speaker 3: it's probably not going to work. So don't look I
Speaker 3: don't look poorly at all or criticize the publishers who
Speaker 3: passed on a book.
Speaker 2: Huh.
Speaker 1: And our final question, what's your big takeaway about someone
Speaker 1: thinking about either exploring a career that wasn't their original intention?
Speaker 1: Or making a career shift towards something that they have
Speaker 1: a natural aspleude towards.
Speaker 3: One thing about careers is that so many of us,
Speaker 3: the careers that we have in our thirties, forties and fifties,
Speaker 3: are tied to our college major that we chose when
Speaker 3: we were seventeen or eighteen. And when you frame how
Speaker 3: absolutely absurd that is that you made a decision when
Speaker 3: you are seventeen years old that is now tying you
Speaker 3: into a career when you're forty five, it's completely insane.
Speaker 3: And so the idea that if you're truly unhappy doing it,
Speaker 3: that you should you should move on to something else.
Speaker 3: There's a great quote from Tilt where he says, if
Speaker 3: you're going to panic, panic early. And I think you
Speaker 3: can tie that to careers as well. If you really
Speaker 3: realize that this is not for you and you're unhappy,
Speaker 3: panic early, quit, move on, cut your losses, move on
Speaker 3: to something else, rather than tying it out for the
Speaker 3: next forty years of your career.
Speaker 1: So to wrap up, if you're thinking about a career change,
Speaker 1: if you have an aptitude towards a particular skill, if
Speaker 1: you want to just try something different, find a way
Speaker 1: to do that. See what you're capable of, see if
Speaker 1: you can make a go of it. But be aware
Speaker 1: merely pursuing your bliss isn't going to get you anywhere.
Speaker 1: You have to develop some tools, some skills, and some
Speaker 1: abilities in order to earn a living in your new career.
Speaker 1: I'm Barry Ridholts. You're listening to Bloomberg's At the Money