An interesting observation from Morgan Housel on the potential pitfalls of “the assumption that smart people have the right answers,”
What’s boring is often important and the smartest people are the least interested in what’s boring.
Ninety percent of personal finance is just spend less than you make, diversify, and be patient.
But if you’re very intelligent that bores you to tears and feels like a waste of your potential. You want to spend your time on the 10% that’s mentally stimulating.
Which isn’t necessarily bad. But if your focus on the exciting part of finance comes at the expense of attention to the 90% of the field that’s boring, it’s disastrous. Hedge funds blow up and Wall Street executives go bankrupt doing things a less intelligent person would never consider. A similar thing happens in medicine, a field that attracts brilliant people who may be more interested in exciting disease treatments than boring disease prevention.