'Same as ever': Lessons on wealth, greed and happiness from Morgan Housel

cnbc.com:

(Note: Morgan Housel will be on HalfTime Report today at 12:35 PM ET and on ETF Edge at 1:10 PM.  ETFedge.cnbc.com)

Morgan Housel has become the Mark Twain of financial writers: funny, pithy, folksy, occasionally sarcastic and always seeking to peel away the layers of reality to reveal a deeper truth below.

Housel is a partner at The Collaborative Fund and became a best-selling author with the 2020 publication of his book, The Psychology of Money. It explored the relationship between money and human behavior. The main thesis was to maximize what you can control: managing your own expectations, knowing when was enough, how to stop changing the goalposts.

It was a relatively brief (250 pages) book, with short chapters, laden with Housel's folksy wisdom on savings, the power of compounding interest, and plenty of stories about the role of luck and risk, and how certain key people (like Bill Gates) got lucky breaks that enabled them to go on to greater things (in Gates' case, he had attended Lakeside High School in Seattle, one of the few high schools that had a computer at the time).

The book not only caught on, it has sold roughly 4 million copies worldwide.

To give you an idea of how big that is, a typical financial book will sell roughly 5,000 copies. If you can sell 10,000 copies, you're really doing well.

Now Housel is back with a second book, "Same As Ever: Timeless Lesson on Wealth, Greed and Happiness."

It utilizes the same style that Morgan rode to success in his previous book: short chapters, paragraphs, sentences and an emphasis on storytelling to reveal deep insights into very broad topics.

Except this time Housel is going for a larger audience than those who wanted financial insights: He is going for timeless